Northern Uganda: Children of lesser moral worth?
Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), Joseph Kony, Yoweri Museveni, National Resistance Movement (NRA), DRC Congo, Southern Sudan, Uganda, Juba Peace Agreement.
News that Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and the autonomous regional Government of Southern Sudan (GoSS) have attacked the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) in their Garamba Forest hideout, must be condemned in the strongest terms possible.
For the last two years, an uneasy peace held over northern Uganda and much of the region previously ravaged by the LRA insurgency and NRA / UPDF counter-insurgency. Although faulty in process design and severely limited in its objectives, the Juba Peace negotiations and agreements, had moved the parties and the region closest to a peaceful resolution, more than at any one time in the many previous attempts and twenty-three year history of the conflict in northern Uganda.
For the first time, there was international involvement and somewhat credible third party mediation, through Southern Sudanese Vice President Riek Machar, and at the later stages, the appointment of a UN Scetretary General's Representative to the LRA Affected Areas, the former Mozambican President, Joachim Chissano. This lent the needed international moral support and diplomatic goodwill lacking in the previous attempts in 1994, 1998, and 2004, which was more or less a do-it-yourself (DIY)peacemaking initiated by either of the parties or civil society groups.
Unfortunately, all these efforts and the gains out of Juba, even if it had remained inconclusive, pending the signitures of the principal protagonists, Ugandan dictator Yoweri Museveni, and LRA leader Joseph Kony, stand to be undone by the latest recourse to military means. It is partly why we believe, all peace-loving people of the world, child rights fraternities, and human rights collectives and the humanitarian communities, ought to condemn dictator Yoweri Museveni's itchy, trigger-happy fingers.
The other reason is that, dictator Yoweri Museveni and his NRM/A government failed or rather neglected to protect thousands and thousands of abducted northern Ugandan children, while he turned his gaze towards Rwanda and Congo, where he was fighting to install his comrades-in-arms, Paul Kagame and the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF), who had been part of Museveni's NRA in Uganda. Moreover, Uganda could afford to send thousands and thousands of Ugandan troops into the Democratic Republic of Congo, where they ousted former dictator Mobutu Ssesesekou. However, for 23 years, the same Ugandan forces could not deal a death blow to the LRA, composed predominantly of abducted children of northern and eastern Uganda. Museveni only started to concern himself with abductions of children, when it served his political purposes at home and abroad.
We do not give a hoot about Joseph Kony and those indicted by the International Criminal Court with him, even though we have well-founded moral reservations about the other commanders because they were abducted as children and grew up and rose through the LRA ranks. Moreover, those who were more senior to them in the LRA command structure and hierarchy; men like Brig. Banya and Brig. Kolo, who were not abducted but joined the rebellion as adults and former soldiers, and in fact trained and deployed the children who now stand accused of the deeds of the rebellion together with Kony, are free men in Uganda, after they escaped and joined dictator Museveni as agents.
Similarly,Yoweri Museveni can go to hell, we will not shed a tear; because he is the chief architect and author of the genocide in northern Uganda, Rwanda and the DRC Congo and the Great Lakes Region of East and Central Africa. After losing an election he could not win in 1980, he fomented a tribal war that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in central Uganda, which he and his Western backers chiefly blamed on his opponents and the former government army. Additionally, he was the first to introduce and use children as child soldiers in combat in Uganda and the region.
Moreover, Museveni's scorched-earth counterinsurgency strategies in northern and eastern Uganda, ensured crops, foodstuffs and livestock were looted and burnt, and the population driven at bayonet points into makeshift camps without making provisions for them. Once in the camps controlled by security forces, they were raped and sodomised and killed by government security services and militias. Consequently, northern and eastern Uganda is today unrivalled as a poster for poverty, human misery arising from wilfull neglect and failures of government policies and a breakdown of normal politics. And as the most despicable and diabolical site of war crimes and crimes gainst humanity in the first decades of the 21st Century.
Therefore, both Joseph Kony and Yoweri Museveni are obverse sides of the same coin. There is simply nothing to choose between the two. Fortunately for Museveni, he wields the power of government and the state. International relations being relations of states, he has ready support and protection of those powerful global interests he serves in the region. Reports that this latest combined attacks on the LRA may have been aided by American intelligence and technology, say a lot about why dictator and war criminal Museveni has alluded the searing gaze of international justice.
Our problem with the latest attacks on the LRA is borne out of history. In 2001, the NRA/UPDF overran LRA bases in Southern Sudan. The aftermaths was that, it renewed brutal and devastating retaliatory incursions by the LRA into northern and eastern Uganda, after a long lull and relative peace similar to the one the people in the region have known for the last two years. That onslaught by the Ugandan government, dubbed Operation Iron Fist, came despite warnings from peace and humanitarian groups, that it would worsen the situation in the region. Moreover, it came at a time when there were overtures for peace, and a real possibility that, a negotiated settlement was within grasp.
Unfortunately, like in 1985 and 1994, the people were sorely disappointed, because dictator Museveni chose to flex his muscles rather than honour a peace agreement or negotiate a peaceful solution.
We and the people of northern Uganda, particularly those who hoped against hope,that their children, abducted by the LRA, after the state failed to protect them, might return home with the conclusion of a peace deal, comdemn the latest gratutitous and indiscriminate use of deadly force against women and children held captive by the LRA. However long it was going to take for Joseph Kony to finally relent and give himself up to the ICC prosecutors or whatever authorities, we and they were prepared to wait, as long as it held the hope that those children still in captivity will be able to finally return. Or that, with a peaceful deal or conclusion, once all those in the LRA have returned, parents, wives, and children and even grand children, can finally put a closure to their long wait for a home-coming for long-lost loved ones with joy or to come to terms with the heart-wrenching reality that they are dead- and among the nameless and faceless left to the beast of the wild on the battlefields-and mourn their losses.
Despite the fact many thousands of abducted children have been killed in the conflict, as parents, partners and relatives, they still clung to the elusive hope that, may be, just may be, they were alive and well in the ranks of the LRA, and with a peace deal, they would have eventually come home. They are the parents who have been unfortunate-living with the dreadful unknowns and the possibility that they are waiting for children who may never come home. And now, their dread may have just become a reality, as the expediency for political power have once again trumped the morality of rights and the need to exercise political power in the interest of the people.
What George Bush, Salvar Kir, Joseph Kabila, and Yoweri Museveni have done, is to tell the people of northern and eastern Uganda, including their abducted children in the ranks of the LRA, that their interests do not count, and that they inhabit a lesser moral world. Because the action is neither to protect the population and the children of northern and eastern Uganda,nor to rescue those in captivity with the LRA. Even if it were to apprehend Kony on the ICC warrant, how many more lives must be lost to bring one man to justice, in addition to the lives he is accused of brutally ending?
In our opinion, the LRA were too far away to pose any more credible threats to the people of northern and eastern Uganda, let alone the Ugandan state. This latest action has therefore more to do with Museveni's paranoia of an LRA force sitting somewhere, a ready and battle-hardened and tested force that his opponents in the country or region could potentially easily reactivate and use against him. With the ruling NRM/A political fotunes having been but all spent, Museveni faces uncertain political future after 2011. And with a new man in Washington come January 20th, it is unclear what political realignments will take place globally and regionally.
Therefore, the LRA and northern Ugandan dynomite could not be left unattended, particularly with loose wires of atrocities running back to 1980s that anyone could ignite and blow up to take down every significant figure involved in the northern war theatre and genocide. It is a risk dictator Museveni would rather not take. Someone would rather have to dig around to find an entry point than to latch onto open and unresolved issues, particularly with the controversies around the partiality of the ICC in the Ugandan indictments, and Museveni and his forces not garnering even a passing interested gazes from the ICC investigators and prosecutor.
Whatever the outcome of this latest military offensives against the LRA; and whenever Joseph Kony pays his debts and dues for his role in the debacles of northern Uganda, the last chapter will have not yet been written on the case. Until fellow traveller and prince of the macabre, dictator and war crimes and crimes against humanity suspect, dictator Yoweri Musevreni, also has his day in court or pays his debts and dues, the jury is out.
News that Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and the autonomous regional Government of Southern Sudan (GoSS) have attacked the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) in their Garamba Forest hideout, must be condemned in the strongest terms possible.
For the last two years, an uneasy peace held over northern Uganda and much of the region previously ravaged by the LRA insurgency and NRA / UPDF counter-insurgency. Although faulty in process design and severely limited in its objectives, the Juba Peace negotiations and agreements, had moved the parties and the region closest to a peaceful resolution, more than at any one time in the many previous attempts and twenty-three year history of the conflict in northern Uganda.
For the first time, there was international involvement and somewhat credible third party mediation, through Southern Sudanese Vice President Riek Machar, and at the later stages, the appointment of a UN Scetretary General's Representative to the LRA Affected Areas, the former Mozambican President, Joachim Chissano. This lent the needed international moral support and diplomatic goodwill lacking in the previous attempts in 1994, 1998, and 2004, which was more or less a do-it-yourself (DIY)peacemaking initiated by either of the parties or civil society groups.
Unfortunately, all these efforts and the gains out of Juba, even if it had remained inconclusive, pending the signitures of the principal protagonists, Ugandan dictator Yoweri Museveni, and LRA leader Joseph Kony, stand to be undone by the latest recourse to military means. It is partly why we believe, all peace-loving people of the world, child rights fraternities, and human rights collectives and the humanitarian communities, ought to condemn dictator Yoweri Museveni's itchy, trigger-happy fingers.
The other reason is that, dictator Yoweri Museveni and his NRM/A government failed or rather neglected to protect thousands and thousands of abducted northern Ugandan children, while he turned his gaze towards Rwanda and Congo, where he was fighting to install his comrades-in-arms, Paul Kagame and the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF), who had been part of Museveni's NRA in Uganda. Moreover, Uganda could afford to send thousands and thousands of Ugandan troops into the Democratic Republic of Congo, where they ousted former dictator Mobutu Ssesesekou. However, for 23 years, the same Ugandan forces could not deal a death blow to the LRA, composed predominantly of abducted children of northern and eastern Uganda. Museveni only started to concern himself with abductions of children, when it served his political purposes at home and abroad.
We do not give a hoot about Joseph Kony and those indicted by the International Criminal Court with him, even though we have well-founded moral reservations about the other commanders because they were abducted as children and grew up and rose through the LRA ranks. Moreover, those who were more senior to them in the LRA command structure and hierarchy; men like Brig. Banya and Brig. Kolo, who were not abducted but joined the rebellion as adults and former soldiers, and in fact trained and deployed the children who now stand accused of the deeds of the rebellion together with Kony, are free men in Uganda, after they escaped and joined dictator Museveni as agents.
Similarly,Yoweri Museveni can go to hell, we will not shed a tear; because he is the chief architect and author of the genocide in northern Uganda, Rwanda and the DRC Congo and the Great Lakes Region of East and Central Africa. After losing an election he could not win in 1980, he fomented a tribal war that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in central Uganda, which he and his Western backers chiefly blamed on his opponents and the former government army. Additionally, he was the first to introduce and use children as child soldiers in combat in Uganda and the region.
Moreover, Museveni's scorched-earth counterinsurgency strategies in northern and eastern Uganda, ensured crops, foodstuffs and livestock were looted and burnt, and the population driven at bayonet points into makeshift camps without making provisions for them. Once in the camps controlled by security forces, they were raped and sodomised and killed by government security services and militias. Consequently, northern and eastern Uganda is today unrivalled as a poster for poverty, human misery arising from wilfull neglect and failures of government policies and a breakdown of normal politics. And as the most despicable and diabolical site of war crimes and crimes gainst humanity in the first decades of the 21st Century.
Therefore, both Joseph Kony and Yoweri Museveni are obverse sides of the same coin. There is simply nothing to choose between the two. Fortunately for Museveni, he wields the power of government and the state. International relations being relations of states, he has ready support and protection of those powerful global interests he serves in the region. Reports that this latest combined attacks on the LRA may have been aided by American intelligence and technology, say a lot about why dictator and war criminal Museveni has alluded the searing gaze of international justice.
Our problem with the latest attacks on the LRA is borne out of history. In 2001, the NRA/UPDF overran LRA bases in Southern Sudan. The aftermaths was that, it renewed brutal and devastating retaliatory incursions by the LRA into northern and eastern Uganda, after a long lull and relative peace similar to the one the people in the region have known for the last two years. That onslaught by the Ugandan government, dubbed Operation Iron Fist, came despite warnings from peace and humanitarian groups, that it would worsen the situation in the region. Moreover, it came at a time when there were overtures for peace, and a real possibility that, a negotiated settlement was within grasp.
Unfortunately, like in 1985 and 1994, the people were sorely disappointed, because dictator Museveni chose to flex his muscles rather than honour a peace agreement or negotiate a peaceful solution.
We and the people of northern Uganda, particularly those who hoped against hope,that their children, abducted by the LRA, after the state failed to protect them, might return home with the conclusion of a peace deal, comdemn the latest gratutitous and indiscriminate use of deadly force against women and children held captive by the LRA. However long it was going to take for Joseph Kony to finally relent and give himself up to the ICC prosecutors or whatever authorities, we and they were prepared to wait, as long as it held the hope that those children still in captivity will be able to finally return. Or that, with a peaceful deal or conclusion, once all those in the LRA have returned, parents, wives, and children and even grand children, can finally put a closure to their long wait for a home-coming for long-lost loved ones with joy or to come to terms with the heart-wrenching reality that they are dead- and among the nameless and faceless left to the beast of the wild on the battlefields-and mourn their losses.
Despite the fact many thousands of abducted children have been killed in the conflict, as parents, partners and relatives, they still clung to the elusive hope that, may be, just may be, they were alive and well in the ranks of the LRA, and with a peace deal, they would have eventually come home. They are the parents who have been unfortunate-living with the dreadful unknowns and the possibility that they are waiting for children who may never come home. And now, their dread may have just become a reality, as the expediency for political power have once again trumped the morality of rights and the need to exercise political power in the interest of the people.
What George Bush, Salvar Kir, Joseph Kabila, and Yoweri Museveni have done, is to tell the people of northern and eastern Uganda, including their abducted children in the ranks of the LRA, that their interests do not count, and that they inhabit a lesser moral world. Because the action is neither to protect the population and the children of northern and eastern Uganda,nor to rescue those in captivity with the LRA. Even if it were to apprehend Kony on the ICC warrant, how many more lives must be lost to bring one man to justice, in addition to the lives he is accused of brutally ending?
In our opinion, the LRA were too far away to pose any more credible threats to the people of northern and eastern Uganda, let alone the Ugandan state. This latest action has therefore more to do with Museveni's paranoia of an LRA force sitting somewhere, a ready and battle-hardened and tested force that his opponents in the country or region could potentially easily reactivate and use against him. With the ruling NRM/A political fotunes having been but all spent, Museveni faces uncertain political future after 2011. And with a new man in Washington come January 20th, it is unclear what political realignments will take place globally and regionally.
Therefore, the LRA and northern Ugandan dynomite could not be left unattended, particularly with loose wires of atrocities running back to 1980s that anyone could ignite and blow up to take down every significant figure involved in the northern war theatre and genocide. It is a risk dictator Museveni would rather not take. Someone would rather have to dig around to find an entry point than to latch onto open and unresolved issues, particularly with the controversies around the partiality of the ICC in the Ugandan indictments, and Museveni and his forces not garnering even a passing interested gazes from the ICC investigators and prosecutor.
Whatever the outcome of this latest military offensives against the LRA; and whenever Joseph Kony pays his debts and dues for his role in the debacles of northern Uganda, the last chapter will have not yet been written on the case. Until fellow traveller and prince of the macabre, dictator and war crimes and crimes against humanity suspect, dictator Yoweri Musevreni, also has his day in court or pays his debts and dues, the jury is out.
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