Northern Uganda Messenger Post

MAKING AUTHENTIC CHOICES IN TIME OF CRISIS. Sverker Finnstrom’s recent work on northern Uganda picks up and continues a particular theme of existential inquiries that echo Shakespeare, de Sade, Tolstoy, Proust, Kafka and Moravia. Living With Bad Surrounding re-states the nature of daily human and individual struggles to live under turbulent circumstances (Piny Marac) in northern Uganda. Read in broad existentialist terms, the Ugandan State and regime are absurd worlds, from which its citizens in the north have been alienated from themselves and estranged from the popular view of national normalcy. Trumpeted NRM/A revolution, liberation, peace and prosperity, contrast very sharply with their lived realities of violence, abduction, murder, rape, diseases and social dislocation. The fish-bowl existence in the concentration camps, characterised by rights abuses, sexual violence, suicide, prostitution, idleness, and a host of other social ills and diseases, is for many individuals and fam...

If you spent four months weaving your way about and sleeping in IDP camps as I did during the last electoral mobilisation and campaigns, you would understand how it is indisputable that 1000 people should die a week in Acholiland. And that 41% of such deaths should be children under five, and also that the rate of violent deaths should be three times higher than in Iraq. Amazingly, Museveni and his henchmen are busy discounting and dismissing such studies, reports and policy briefings, without as little as offering situation reports and policy briefs that undermine such findings. Once you visit and sleep in these camps, and have spoken with the residents, you cannot help but come out feeling, perception and conclusion that, the Buturos and military spokesmen speak about a different country, when they issue denials on events in northern Uganda. Official denials and the rosy pictures they paint, whether by understatements or dismissive bravado, clash very sharply with lived daily realit...