Contextualising Joseph Kony: Convenient Political Truth Versus the experiential and existential Truth Part III
Intersubjective Communication Gaps and political and moral leadership failures in Uganda: Is Joseph Kony an “unredeemable villain” or an “existentialist hero” of Uganda’s violent political order and imprisonment of individual freedom and conscience? An existentialist response to Opiyo Oloya’s “Kony has come to the end of his tether.”
Part III
Contextualising Joseph Kony: Convenient Political Truth Versus the experiential and existential Truth
"Little attention has been paid to modern movements of social protest which fall outside the classic patterns of labor or socialist agitation, and even less to those whose political coloring is not modernist or progressive but conservative, or reactionary or, at any rate, rather inarticulate. Robin Hood is fine in the Middle Ages, but out of place in the 19th and 20th centuries. Revolutionary workers and their doctrines are familiar figures; revolutionary peasants and their heroes are only just beginning to be recognized. But peasants, shepherds, bandits, sects of illiterate laborers express their aspirations in rude and clumsy ways, in rituals and cults and acts of violence which historians tend to ignore or dismiss because they are inelegant, irrational and, often, ineffective. And yet these represent the strivings of the very kind of people whose irruption into history marks our time, whose growing political consciousness marks most of the societies of our time, whose now political significance affects the politics of our time, and whose inchoate stirrings and strivings can no longer be ignored."
Eugen Webber; Blurb; Eric J. Hobsbawm; Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Norton; 1959.
Opiyo Oloya, a native commentator, and his articulate and forceful views on the Nabanga Communiqué and the fall out from Juba, re: Kony has come to the end of his tether, The New Vision, 27 May 2008, are what we want to critically read in context and demonstrate the well-meaning but flawed framing of the justice needs, end-game, and expectations for a negotiated northern Uganda settlement largely informed by convenient political truth and half-truth.
We concur with Opiyo Oloya that there is no mortal individual or group in the diaspora powerful enough to overshadow the force of character, self-confidence and individual autonomy and self-righteousness of Joseph Kony, to be able to either change or make his mind for him; except the immortal Holy Ghost. We further share Opiyo Oloya’s view-without missing the revelation in it-that the international community made and closed its mind to punishing Kony and the LRA; but we add, without the required procedural presumption of innocence until proven guilty; a fundamental principle of criminal justice that even a vagabond on the street has been historically, morally entitled to.
It is only up to this point that we and our friend Opiyo Oloya, are fellow travellers on these contentious, practical, political, moral and philosophical conversations of our generation; on the long journey of our people from violence and injustice to peace and justice in a just society. We, unlike Opiyo, John Prendergast, Yoweri Museveni, Moreno de Ocampo, and many others, want to presume innocence until proven guilty, and keep open minds that, Kony and the LRM/A have merely been indicted, but not tried and convicted for the crimes they are alleged to have committed. Furthermore, we, unlike they, believe and suspect that , both Kony and the LRM/A and Museveni and the NRM/A, each are culpable and responsible for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in northern and eastern Uganda. In order to understand this, it is important that we do not let the arbitrary and convenient ICC time frame and accession limitations obstruct a comprehensive and panoramic view of the conflict and blot out its expansive horizon littered with infamy bearing the finger prints of all belligerents in the conflict theatre.
It is neither possible nor necessary to make a distinction between the good and bad guys. The extract below is from Amnesty International: Breaking the Circle: Protecting human rights in the northern war zones, 1999.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From the very beginning, forces led by Joseph Kony have committed serious human rights abuses against civilians. For example, in 1988 Kony's forces hacked and clubbed to death hundreds of villagers in raids in Koch Goma and many other parts of Gulu and Kitgum, including in February bed-ridden patients in a dispensary. The abduction of children and adults to be soldiers has been consistent practice, although not at the levels that began in 1995. For example, on 6 March 1989 over 300 civilians were abducted in Ngai in Apac District. Scores of villagers were killed in incidents in Kitgum District in early 1990; for example, 43 villagers were hacked to death at Alwi in Acholibur near Kitgum town. In 1991 and 1992 the group, now known as the United Democratic Christian Army (UCDA), went through a period of mutilating villagers by cutting off their hands, ears or lips or by putting out their eyes as punishment for joining or supporting vigilante groups known as "Arrow Brigades" [12].
Government soldiers were also responsible for gross human rights violations. In one of the most intense phases of the war, between October and December 1988 the NRA forcibly cleared approximately 100,000 people from their homes in and around Gulu town. Soldiers committed hundreds of extrajudicial executions as they forced people out of their homes, burning down homesteads and granaries [13]. People flocked to the town and nearby trading centres -- but nothing had been prepared to receive them. For months displaced people had inadequate shelter, sanitation and water, and insufficient supplies of food.
During 1991 the NRA mounted another major military offensive which included sealing the north from the rest of the country. Although militarily effective, it was again tarnished by significant human rights violations. For example, in April 1991 NRA soldiers are alleged to have extrajudicially executed over 30 villagers at Komyoke in Atanga Sub-County in Kitgum. In the same month soldiers at Burcoro in Paicho Sub-County in Gulu tortured 34 prisoners by confining them in a pit. Three men were reportedly beaten to death and four others suffocated [14].
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As we can see, the first 16 years of the northern conflict is as significant as the last 6 in the peace and justice discourses and the way forward in northern Uganda. It is crucial that the mistakes made in pushing the ICC as the best justice and peace mechanism for northern Uganda, be rectified. At the same time, any notion that the Ugandan high court and Acholi traditional justice system should be substituted for the ICC is a worse travesty than the ICC statutory limitations and partiality. The best case scenario should be as we have argued; to create a parallel, independent, international special tribunal for northern Uganda to deal with crimes committed in the period before the ICC came into force. For fairness, the same judges handling the LRA case would be cross-appointed to handle any cases arising from the investigations of the independent special tribunal.
Historical Reason and intersubjective communication
Our task and objectives here are neither to minimise nor dismiss Opiyo Oloya’s arguments, nor to blindly defend the choices made and actions taken by Joseph Kony in the last 22 years; but rather to contextualise the northern Uganda rebellion and highlight the third dimension missing from the celebrated picture of Joseph Kony; which is the realities of war, violence, death, rape, and sodomy that had suddenly engulfed his homeland in 1986. Our modest intention is merely to complete the picture so it can be seen in its magnificent three dimensions, hoping that it will help stimulate a more realistic and better understanding of the man and his circumstances. It is an effort to try to bridge the yawning gaps of comprehension by returning Joseph Kony, his actions and choices, to the limit situation of his existence in 1986, rather than learning about him extracted, abstracted and suspended from the realities of the conditions that imposed resistance over Acholiland and himself. This we hope, will complement Opiyo Oloya’s arguments, by adopting expository stance than the prescriptive framework, the conventional-but politicised- objectivism that favours imposing extraneous sets of so-called objective moral rules through which we must strain Joseph Kony’s choices and actions, and make judgements in the search for accountability in northern Uganda.
Rather, we want to argue on the particularities and specificities of Joseph Kony and Acholiland of his times of decision and actions. We should undoubtedly encounter a man flung into his world by history and unique circumstances that neither Opiyo Oloya nor we can assume to understand better than Joseph Kony and other fellow resisters in 1986; who alone, isolated, with infinite aspirations but limited possibilities, out of which they had to make themselves and meaning of their existences. It is this context and sympathetic willingness to understand Kony the man, the victim and villain and his world of 1980s Acholiland and Uganda, that we can be better equipped to render valid judgements on the events and personalities and ascribe meanings to the northern Uganda war. It is through what Dilthey termed as historical reason, that we can better navigate the muddled and muddy waters of the two tributaries of evil and righteousness in northern Uganda. Once we put the two worlds, their choices and actions in perspectives, we should come closer to narrowing the mutual gap of what von Schelling termed as intersubjective communications, between the antagonists and protagonists and their proponents in the Ugandan conflict, debate and search for peace. In doing so, we urge our readers to bear in mind a critical observation from Amnesty International, Report AFR/59/001/1999,entitled: Breaking the Circle: Protecting human rights in the northern war zones:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It is easy and perhaps inevitable for allegations and counter-allegations about which side has done what to whom to become part of the propaganda of war. Each incident is used as evidence of the evil of the enemy. The fact that the LRA has carried out many more unlawful killings than the UPDF is used by some government supporters to exonerate the state. On the other hand, some LRA supporters, especially those in exile thousands of miles from northern Uganda, claim that it is the UPDF that abducts children [5].
The aim of reporting human rights abuses is not to argue over which side has the moral high ground but to identify what is happening in order that appropriate measures to improve the situation can be introduced. Whatever the level of abuses by the LRA, under international law the government has the main legal responsibility to ensure the protection of human rights”.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In that respect, it is safe for us to assert that , rather than Kony’s actions alone, it is the lack of ( intersubjective) communication between the dichotomous, conflicting worlds in Acholiland or Uganda, and reliance on objective reason alone, in trying to understand Joseph Kony, that have undermined the authenticity of the actors and process in the overall search for justice and peace for northern Uganda, especially through the Juba Peace process.
Von Schelling’s conception of intersubjectivity talks of what is innate to our existence. It is those things, the bases on which two people meaningfully relate to each other personally, and how an alienated individual who cannot meaningfully communicate with others relate with the impersonal mass of people outside himself. Intersubjective communication gap occurs when the individual and the others inhabit two separate, impermeable worlds specific to themselves, with no attempt to acknowledge and understand, imagine, or put themselves in or sympathise with the particularities of the other’s situations of existence. We believe this is the impervious wall that separates the world inhabited by Kony from the conventional world of reason, rationality, and common sense of the other, exemplified by the intellectual idealism and objectivism of Opiyo Oloya and others, whose arguments and positions advertently or inadvertently, fall into the traps of vindictive contentions and parochial self-righteousness of Museveni’s triumphalism, incumbency and its benefactors abroad.
We believe, maintaining one’s personal freedom and resisting an all-consuming, pervasive and dominating clutches of the NRM system and its international barnacles, as Joseph Kony has been able to do, is no mean feat. Many greater Ugandan intellects- professional soldiers, experienced politicians, statesmen and tacticians- than the illiterate rustic from Odek, Awere, have fallen by the wayside; to the attraction of office, status, monetary gains and creature comforts traded for their consciences. Unlike political and military leaders of other insurgent uprisings against Museveni, such as the UPDM/A, NALU, UPA, and WNBF, who could be dismissed as men and women who had lost positions, status and privileges in previous regimes and armies, Joseph Kony was an unemployed village boy, who like Alice Lakwena, picked up arms as a result of the bewilderment wrought by the material, spiritual, and moral destruction of Acholiland, as the NRM/A and Museveni resorted to gratuitous violence as a means to expanding and consolidating social, political and ideological control over Uganda.
Contrary to the broad brush lore of resistance to Museveni being mounted by former rapacious national armies dislodged from privileges and power, Kony had no previous office to fight for; he had no privileges and status to regain, but the intuitive, reflex defence of personal existence and freedom of an Acholi peasant whose world suddenly fell apart around him. In the heat of such tumult, he had to make a personal choice, and by all accounts, contrary to the popular myths and sensationalism, and reasoned, objective scientism of my friend Opiyo Oloya and others, the choice Joseph Kony made to resist and postpone his death in 1986, was an authentic one.
We are almost certain that, without resistance in 1986, it is doubtful whether Col. Walter Ochora, Brig. Otema Awany, Maj. Obwoya Fearless and other former UNLA officers and men from Acholi, would be alive today. Let us bear in mind that, by 1985, Walter Ochora was a lowly 2nd Lt. in the UNLA. Few senior former UNLA officers and men, who surrendered to Museveni in Kampala or in northern Uganda before the outbreak of rebellion, are alive today. How could it be possible that a whole national army, staffed with generals and such, could only be survived by 2nd lieutenants and non-commissioned officers, and the only generals who survived are non-Acholi from southern Uganda? We need no reminding that scores were summarily executed or taken to labour camps in the south of the country, allegedly for re-education, but to date have never returned. It was partly because of this that, people took up arms in Acholi in the first place; because it was not only former soldiers being picked up and never being seen again, but all able-bodied youths and men.
The accounts of the situation by Heike Behrend in her Alice Lakwena and Robert Gersony in his The Anguish of northern Uganda, told of circumstances of great uncertainties in Acholi where reason seemed stood on its head, as people came face to face with the realities of their existence and death as a great possibility of their everyday life. They had neither the luxury of time to rationalise, nor many choices with safe and secure outcomes, but self-preservation through resistance, even with greater risks of death as possibility. Therefore, we cannot understand Joseph Kony well, or judge him fairly, unless we bring ourselves to understand, imagine and place ourselves in his place, to appreciate the prevailing situations that determined his choices and controlled his actions.
What would we have done in his place, were history and fate to deal us the cards of his choices and possibilities in 1986?
See Part IV
Part III
Contextualising Joseph Kony: Convenient Political Truth Versus the experiential and existential Truth
"Little attention has been paid to modern movements of social protest which fall outside the classic patterns of labor or socialist agitation, and even less to those whose political coloring is not modernist or progressive but conservative, or reactionary or, at any rate, rather inarticulate. Robin Hood is fine in the Middle Ages, but out of place in the 19th and 20th centuries. Revolutionary workers and their doctrines are familiar figures; revolutionary peasants and their heroes are only just beginning to be recognized. But peasants, shepherds, bandits, sects of illiterate laborers express their aspirations in rude and clumsy ways, in rituals and cults and acts of violence which historians tend to ignore or dismiss because they are inelegant, irrational and, often, ineffective. And yet these represent the strivings of the very kind of people whose irruption into history marks our time, whose growing political consciousness marks most of the societies of our time, whose now political significance affects the politics of our time, and whose inchoate stirrings and strivings can no longer be ignored."
Eugen Webber; Blurb; Eric J. Hobsbawm; Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Norton; 1959.
Opiyo Oloya, a native commentator, and his articulate and forceful views on the Nabanga Communiqué and the fall out from Juba, re: Kony has come to the end of his tether, The New Vision, 27 May 2008, are what we want to critically read in context and demonstrate the well-meaning but flawed framing of the justice needs, end-game, and expectations for a negotiated northern Uganda settlement largely informed by convenient political truth and half-truth.
We concur with Opiyo Oloya that there is no mortal individual or group in the diaspora powerful enough to overshadow the force of character, self-confidence and individual autonomy and self-righteousness of Joseph Kony, to be able to either change or make his mind for him; except the immortal Holy Ghost. We further share Opiyo Oloya’s view-without missing the revelation in it-that the international community made and closed its mind to punishing Kony and the LRA; but we add, without the required procedural presumption of innocence until proven guilty; a fundamental principle of criminal justice that even a vagabond on the street has been historically, morally entitled to.
It is only up to this point that we and our friend Opiyo Oloya, are fellow travellers on these contentious, practical, political, moral and philosophical conversations of our generation; on the long journey of our people from violence and injustice to peace and justice in a just society. We, unlike Opiyo, John Prendergast, Yoweri Museveni, Moreno de Ocampo, and many others, want to presume innocence until proven guilty, and keep open minds that, Kony and the LRM/A have merely been indicted, but not tried and convicted for the crimes they are alleged to have committed. Furthermore, we, unlike they, believe and suspect that , both Kony and the LRM/A and Museveni and the NRM/A, each are culpable and responsible for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in northern and eastern Uganda. In order to understand this, it is important that we do not let the arbitrary and convenient ICC time frame and accession limitations obstruct a comprehensive and panoramic view of the conflict and blot out its expansive horizon littered with infamy bearing the finger prints of all belligerents in the conflict theatre.
It is neither possible nor necessary to make a distinction between the good and bad guys. The extract below is from Amnesty International: Breaking the Circle: Protecting human rights in the northern war zones, 1999.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From the very beginning, forces led by Joseph Kony have committed serious human rights abuses against civilians. For example, in 1988 Kony's forces hacked and clubbed to death hundreds of villagers in raids in Koch Goma and many other parts of Gulu and Kitgum, including in February bed-ridden patients in a dispensary. The abduction of children and adults to be soldiers has been consistent practice, although not at the levels that began in 1995. For example, on 6 March 1989 over 300 civilians were abducted in Ngai in Apac District. Scores of villagers were killed in incidents in Kitgum District in early 1990; for example, 43 villagers were hacked to death at Alwi in Acholibur near Kitgum town. In 1991 and 1992 the group, now known as the United Democratic Christian Army (UCDA), went through a period of mutilating villagers by cutting off their hands, ears or lips or by putting out their eyes as punishment for joining or supporting vigilante groups known as "Arrow Brigades" [12].
Government soldiers were also responsible for gross human rights violations. In one of the most intense phases of the war, between October and December 1988 the NRA forcibly cleared approximately 100,000 people from their homes in and around Gulu town. Soldiers committed hundreds of extrajudicial executions as they forced people out of their homes, burning down homesteads and granaries [13]. People flocked to the town and nearby trading centres -- but nothing had been prepared to receive them. For months displaced people had inadequate shelter, sanitation and water, and insufficient supplies of food.
During 1991 the NRA mounted another major military offensive which included sealing the north from the rest of the country. Although militarily effective, it was again tarnished by significant human rights violations. For example, in April 1991 NRA soldiers are alleged to have extrajudicially executed over 30 villagers at Komyoke in Atanga Sub-County in Kitgum. In the same month soldiers at Burcoro in Paicho Sub-County in Gulu tortured 34 prisoners by confining them in a pit. Three men were reportedly beaten to death and four others suffocated [14].
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As we can see, the first 16 years of the northern conflict is as significant as the last 6 in the peace and justice discourses and the way forward in northern Uganda. It is crucial that the mistakes made in pushing the ICC as the best justice and peace mechanism for northern Uganda, be rectified. At the same time, any notion that the Ugandan high court and Acholi traditional justice system should be substituted for the ICC is a worse travesty than the ICC statutory limitations and partiality. The best case scenario should be as we have argued; to create a parallel, independent, international special tribunal for northern Uganda to deal with crimes committed in the period before the ICC came into force. For fairness, the same judges handling the LRA case would be cross-appointed to handle any cases arising from the investigations of the independent special tribunal.
Historical Reason and intersubjective communication
Our task and objectives here are neither to minimise nor dismiss Opiyo Oloya’s arguments, nor to blindly defend the choices made and actions taken by Joseph Kony in the last 22 years; but rather to contextualise the northern Uganda rebellion and highlight the third dimension missing from the celebrated picture of Joseph Kony; which is the realities of war, violence, death, rape, and sodomy that had suddenly engulfed his homeland in 1986. Our modest intention is merely to complete the picture so it can be seen in its magnificent three dimensions, hoping that it will help stimulate a more realistic and better understanding of the man and his circumstances. It is an effort to try to bridge the yawning gaps of comprehension by returning Joseph Kony, his actions and choices, to the limit situation of his existence in 1986, rather than learning about him extracted, abstracted and suspended from the realities of the conditions that imposed resistance over Acholiland and himself. This we hope, will complement Opiyo Oloya’s arguments, by adopting expository stance than the prescriptive framework, the conventional-but politicised- objectivism that favours imposing extraneous sets of so-called objective moral rules through which we must strain Joseph Kony’s choices and actions, and make judgements in the search for accountability in northern Uganda.
Rather, we want to argue on the particularities and specificities of Joseph Kony and Acholiland of his times of decision and actions. We should undoubtedly encounter a man flung into his world by history and unique circumstances that neither Opiyo Oloya nor we can assume to understand better than Joseph Kony and other fellow resisters in 1986; who alone, isolated, with infinite aspirations but limited possibilities, out of which they had to make themselves and meaning of their existences. It is this context and sympathetic willingness to understand Kony the man, the victim and villain and his world of 1980s Acholiland and Uganda, that we can be better equipped to render valid judgements on the events and personalities and ascribe meanings to the northern Uganda war. It is through what Dilthey termed as historical reason, that we can better navigate the muddled and muddy waters of the two tributaries of evil and righteousness in northern Uganda. Once we put the two worlds, their choices and actions in perspectives, we should come closer to narrowing the mutual gap of what von Schelling termed as intersubjective communications, between the antagonists and protagonists and their proponents in the Ugandan conflict, debate and search for peace. In doing so, we urge our readers to bear in mind a critical observation from Amnesty International, Report AFR/59/001/1999,entitled: Breaking the Circle: Protecting human rights in the northern war zones:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It is easy and perhaps inevitable for allegations and counter-allegations about which side has done what to whom to become part of the propaganda of war. Each incident is used as evidence of the evil of the enemy. The fact that the LRA has carried out many more unlawful killings than the UPDF is used by some government supporters to exonerate the state. On the other hand, some LRA supporters, especially those in exile thousands of miles from northern Uganda, claim that it is the UPDF that abducts children [5].
The aim of reporting human rights abuses is not to argue over which side has the moral high ground but to identify what is happening in order that appropriate measures to improve the situation can be introduced. Whatever the level of abuses by the LRA, under international law the government has the main legal responsibility to ensure the protection of human rights”.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In that respect, it is safe for us to assert that , rather than Kony’s actions alone, it is the lack of ( intersubjective) communication between the dichotomous, conflicting worlds in Acholiland or Uganda, and reliance on objective reason alone, in trying to understand Joseph Kony, that have undermined the authenticity of the actors and process in the overall search for justice and peace for northern Uganda, especially through the Juba Peace process.
Von Schelling’s conception of intersubjectivity talks of what is innate to our existence. It is those things, the bases on which two people meaningfully relate to each other personally, and how an alienated individual who cannot meaningfully communicate with others relate with the impersonal mass of people outside himself. Intersubjective communication gap occurs when the individual and the others inhabit two separate, impermeable worlds specific to themselves, with no attempt to acknowledge and understand, imagine, or put themselves in or sympathise with the particularities of the other’s situations of existence. We believe this is the impervious wall that separates the world inhabited by Kony from the conventional world of reason, rationality, and common sense of the other, exemplified by the intellectual idealism and objectivism of Opiyo Oloya and others, whose arguments and positions advertently or inadvertently, fall into the traps of vindictive contentions and parochial self-righteousness of Museveni’s triumphalism, incumbency and its benefactors abroad.
We believe, maintaining one’s personal freedom and resisting an all-consuming, pervasive and dominating clutches of the NRM system and its international barnacles, as Joseph Kony has been able to do, is no mean feat. Many greater Ugandan intellects- professional soldiers, experienced politicians, statesmen and tacticians- than the illiterate rustic from Odek, Awere, have fallen by the wayside; to the attraction of office, status, monetary gains and creature comforts traded for their consciences. Unlike political and military leaders of other insurgent uprisings against Museveni, such as the UPDM/A, NALU, UPA, and WNBF, who could be dismissed as men and women who had lost positions, status and privileges in previous regimes and armies, Joseph Kony was an unemployed village boy, who like Alice Lakwena, picked up arms as a result of the bewilderment wrought by the material, spiritual, and moral destruction of Acholiland, as the NRM/A and Museveni resorted to gratuitous violence as a means to expanding and consolidating social, political and ideological control over Uganda.
Contrary to the broad brush lore of resistance to Museveni being mounted by former rapacious national armies dislodged from privileges and power, Kony had no previous office to fight for; he had no privileges and status to regain, but the intuitive, reflex defence of personal existence and freedom of an Acholi peasant whose world suddenly fell apart around him. In the heat of such tumult, he had to make a personal choice, and by all accounts, contrary to the popular myths and sensationalism, and reasoned, objective scientism of my friend Opiyo Oloya and others, the choice Joseph Kony made to resist and postpone his death in 1986, was an authentic one.
We are almost certain that, without resistance in 1986, it is doubtful whether Col. Walter Ochora, Brig. Otema Awany, Maj. Obwoya Fearless and other former UNLA officers and men from Acholi, would be alive today. Let us bear in mind that, by 1985, Walter Ochora was a lowly 2nd Lt. in the UNLA. Few senior former UNLA officers and men, who surrendered to Museveni in Kampala or in northern Uganda before the outbreak of rebellion, are alive today. How could it be possible that a whole national army, staffed with generals and such, could only be survived by 2nd lieutenants and non-commissioned officers, and the only generals who survived are non-Acholi from southern Uganda? We need no reminding that scores were summarily executed or taken to labour camps in the south of the country, allegedly for re-education, but to date have never returned. It was partly because of this that, people took up arms in Acholi in the first place; because it was not only former soldiers being picked up and never being seen again, but all able-bodied youths and men.
The accounts of the situation by Heike Behrend in her Alice Lakwena and Robert Gersony in his The Anguish of northern Uganda, told of circumstances of great uncertainties in Acholi where reason seemed stood on its head, as people came face to face with the realities of their existence and death as a great possibility of their everyday life. They had neither the luxury of time to rationalise, nor many choices with safe and secure outcomes, but self-preservation through resistance, even with greater risks of death as possibility. Therefore, we cannot understand Joseph Kony well, or judge him fairly, unless we bring ourselves to understand, imagine and place ourselves in his place, to appreciate the prevailing situations that determined his choices and controlled his actions.
What would we have done in his place, were history and fate to deal us the cards of his choices and possibilities in 1986?
See Part IV
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