Northern Uganda Messenger Post

A New Vision article by Edward Mulindwa attacked Olara Otunnu for serving the 1985 Military Council government. According to Mr. Mulindwa, it is unacceptable to serve your country under military regimes. It is clear Mr. Mulindwa and others view realities from the same frame and stock of divide and rule, and exclusionary politics that has been perfected for the last 23 years by Yoweri Museveni. Divisions along regional, ethnic, historical , and who served what government; who fled and who remained in the country; who fought and did not fight what regime, which have been used too long, as a basis to exclude, marginalise and legitimise injustices. In the rush to label, condemn and exclude, such proponents confuse the conceptual distinctions between a state and government. The NRM, UPC, FDC, DP and any other party or clique of army generals may form a government; through elections or military putsch. Such regimes or governments, will come and go, but the Ugandan state remains. Civ...

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...

Okello Lucima. Recent Pa Raa retreat for “Ächoli leaders” had less to do with exploring problems facing Acholi, the wretched of IDP camps and charting realistic exit from the impasse. What transpired in Pa Raa, was a valiant but inconsequential attempt to salvage the collapse of the movement or NRM/A & O in Acholi, and bolster flagging fortunes of its political dummies in Kitgum, Pader and Gulu (See Pa Raa Declaration, Justice and Peace News, July 2005; Museveni meets Acholi leaders, New Vision 28 June 2005; Tracing the roots of the Acholi people’s suffering, Monitor 28 June 2005, and Moving towards total liberation of the north, New Vision 29 June 2005). If Pa Raa summit were a serious soul-searching and thinking moment for the obvious problems in Acholi, demanding creative, bold, immediate and realistic actions, the participants would have been hard-pressed to ignore the preponderant evidence to the fact and realisation that Yoweri Museveni, and plausibly, his government and the...