Af Anton Baaré
Lord´s Resistance Army (LRA) terroriserede det nordlige Uganda i 20 år, før det lykkedes at få parterne til forhandlingsbordet. Fredsprocessen i 2006-2008 skabte nogenlunde fred i det nordlige Uganda, men LRA skaber nu død og ødelæggelse i Ugandas nabolande.
U-landsnyt.dk marks that it is 50 years since Uganda became independent. When asked to give my perspective on conflict and development in Northern Uganda, I realised that I had spend almost 20 of those years either living in Uganda or working on Uganda – not least with the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).
And I recalled sitting in the bush negotiating peace with the army´s now globally infamous leader Joseph Kony.
The LRA was already active when I came to Uganda for the first time in 1993. In the mid to late 90s, the LRA kept below the international radar of the international community in Kampala.
The Internet gives easy access to a still growing number of reports, articles and opinions (www. wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord’s_Resistance_Army) so instead of a detailed historical overview of the LRA, I will share with you my experience with, and my perspective on, the LRA against the background of the significant changes in the politics, policies and practice of development assistance in the past 20 years.
How can a group that never has been a serious threat to the state of Uganda fester for so long?
Kony´s Ten Commandments
Joseph Kony must have been around 28 at time he started his rebellion in 1986/87, when ‘northerners’ in Uganda were shocked that someone from the south-western part of the country could takeover state power.
President Museveni had done just that by winning the 1981-1986 ‘Luweero’ civil war that saw the defeat of Ugandan independence President Milton Obote.
As the too often repeated characterisation goes, Kony was former alter boy with a messianistic message, but without a political agenda, who wanted to rule Uganda by the biblical Ten Commandments.
He had tapped into local resentment among the Acholi ethnic group and soldiers from the defeated national army to start an insurgency. His was one of several groups refusing to accept the new National Resistance Movement (NRM) government.
Stories were told about how holy water and rituals were making his fighters believe that bullets would not hurt them.
Back in the 90s, I recall that the whole issue was cast as one between enlightened modern ‘new generation’ African leadership and bush-backwardness mixed with a perversion of Christian dogma that was sprinkled with beliefs in spirits and demons.
LRA as a footnote story
Internationally, few found reason to doubt that representation of the LRA by the NRM government – including myself. If the group at all made it into the news, it was as a footnote story in a local newspaper.
The LRA was an example of a residual issue from Uganda’s civil war that surely would disappear soon, it was assumed. We development workers were occupied with the local democracy introduced by Museveni’s National Resistance Movement (NRM).
A new constitution was being debated in parliament and international development in Uganda was at a peak of optimism.
The few years since the collapse of communism in 1989 had meant a windfall for development aid. Expectations of what it could achieve in term of poverty reduction were high.
It was a time when the genocide in Rwanda had not yet happened and no one could imagine it ever would; or that in the event, the international system would fail so abjectly.
The 1994 genocide would spark what would be called Africa’s Great War in neighbouring Zaire – now called the Democratic Republic of Congo. In the development industry, the genocide and its aftermath started a reflection on the ‘conflict sensitivity’ of humanitarian and development aid.
Participatory approaches
However, when I started working in Uganda, the language of the development aid was about poverty reduction and growth. Anthropologists like myself were hired to introduce participatory approaches to empower project beneficiaries.
It was December 1993, I had arrived in Kampala a couple of weeks earlier for the first time to start working as monitoring adviser to the Uganda Veterans Assistance Board, UVAB.
In today’s language, I was ‘DDR expert’: someone working on disarmament, demobilization and reintegration of ex-soldiers and rebels.
Seven years before that in 1986, Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Army (NRA) had come out on top in a civil war that reduced the country once known as the ‘Pearl of Africa’ to what we in today’s international development jargon would call a ‘fragile state’.
Set in today’s perspective on security and development we would probably talk about ‘Peace and Security Goals’ that soon will replace the so called Millennium Development Goals set to expire in 2015.
But in 1993 the development industry could not speak the language of security and conflict, it pretended development to be largely a-political.
Accordingly, there were no international demands on the new NRM regime to be reconciliatory.
Musevenis “Operation North”
The reality was that capturing Kampala and subsequent international recognition of the new regime in 1986 had not ended the civil war.
In the ‘greater north’ of Uganda, the Museveni regime had continued to face resistance, and basic conditions for equitable development did not exist.
In the north eastern Teso region a rebellion started in 1986 had just ended in 1992. The LRA’s direct predecessor Holy Spirit group had been defeated in 1987.
In 1991, after three months of military action against the LRA under ‘Operation North’, the government had declared that the whole of the country was ‘pacified’.
The military strategy had included setting-up local militia in northern Uganda: the so-called Arrow Boys made up of Acholi youth were to be part of combatting the LRA, who’s fighters also were drawn from the same ethnic group.
In the course of 1991 government support to the Arrow Boys was fickle and soon disappeared altogether. The local Acholi militia was abandoned to fend for itself when an enraged Kony turned his fighters on the brethren that had ‘betrayed’ him and his cause.
At the same time, confident that the country was pacified, the NRM regime embarked on a down-sizing of the national army, the NRA.
40.000 soldiers demobilized
My first job in Uganda was to assist the Uganda Veteran’s Assistance Board; UVAB was responsible for sending 40,000 soldiers from the National Resistance Army, back to their homes.
They came from all over Uganda and many vanquished opponents had become soldiers in the NRA after first having fought against it.
As Yoweri’s Museveni’s army fought its way to winning the civil war and take power in 1986 they had been allowed to join the NRA. The soldiers were to be ‘demobilized’ and ‘reintegrated’ in their home villages.
My job was to keep track of who they were, document that they got their ‘package’ of benefits of some money, training and corrugated iron sheets to roof the houses they were suppose to build to start new lives for themselves and their families.
The iron sheets had been donated by the US and looked different from what other Ugandans were using.
I remember that the main issue with the LRA that got noticed by UVAB was that in northern Uganda only few veterans wanted to roof their houses with the American iron sheets: it would lead the LRA straight to the ex-national army soldiers’ home.
LRA atrocities barely noticed
Once in a while there would be a small article in the newspaper talking about the LRA as a small rebel group in northern Uganda. The article would mention either an ambush or speculate about the peace talks with Betty Bigombe, a prominent Acholi politician and peace activist who at the time was Minister for the North. Her first mediation attempt definitively broke down in 1994.
However, this local news went by barely noticed by internationals even as the atrocities of the LRA increased and the regional dimension of the conflict became more important.
In 1994, development aid and the international community were stunned and shamed by the Rwandan genocide, and the first and second Congo wars it precipitated in the years there after. In comparison, Uganda was seen a haven of stability and progress.
Forced to protected villages
Recognizing the ‘international mind set’ at the time is important to understand the lack of concern when in 1996 the Ugandan government and military introduced a national policy of forcing civilians in the north out of their family compounds to create the ‘protected villages’.
The stated aims of this approach were twofold: to group civilians in more easily defensible locations, and to clear the countryside of civilians so as to avoid having them caught in the crossfire of the army’s attempts to achieve a quick military victory by rooting the LRA out of the bush.
Implicitly, the third aim was to deprive the LRA guerrillas a local support base and anyone outside the camps became suspect of subversion.
Faced with an unprecedented inter-state war in the region, few in the development aid circles in Kampala understood the real implications of the establishment in northern Uganda of ‘protected villages’ in 1996.
The usual 2-3 years staff turnover cycle of embassies and development agencies played its part in the fact that the military side of the double-edged rationale for these ‘camps for internally displaced people’ (IDP camps) was soon to be forgotten.
What remained was the ‘self-evident’ fact that the internal displacement was solely caused by LRA violence.
Officials in Uganda continued to say that the LRA’s days were numbered and that remaining numbers of LRA fighters compared to the number of IDPs seemed to suggest that one LRA fighter could displace 10,000 people.
“We-focus-on-poverty-reduction”
In the aftermath of the Rwanda genocide, the development industry was struggling to incorporate ‘conflict-sensitivity’ in its mode of planning and operations. But change and progress in practice takes time.
When I came back to Uganda in 2000 to become Danida adviser to the Uganda Human Rights Commission, development aid – including that of Denmark – was still in a ‘we-focus-on-poverty-reduction-and-don’t-do-conflict-responses’ mode.
I was fortunate that the programme I was heading got the green light to use an early version of a rights-based approach to development to work on civil society involvement in conflict resolution and peace building.
In 2001, the 9/11 attacks had an irreversible effect on development aid: the discussion on conflict sensitivity receded to the background, while state security and fragile states as risks to international security came to the fore.
At the time it was difficult to anticipate just how much security and development considerations would merge to the degree that now has become the norm.
LRA on the agenda
The Danish human rights programme’s first decision in January 2000 was to support Track II diplomacy of the Carter Centre that in 1999 had brokered an agreement between the governments of Uganda and Sudan.
Although flawed in terms of mediation approach (the LRA had not been involved), supporting the Carter Centre to directly talk to the LRA (February 2000) seemed worthwhile.
We also supported Track III efforts of local NGOs, women groups and religious leaders in northern Uganda and elsewhere in the country.
The human rights and conflict resolution approach we used made some progress in putting the LRA on the agenda of the ambassadors in Kampala.
However, there was an in hindsight difficult to understand dislike to discuss or analyse the LRA (then based in south Sudan) as part of the so blatantly raging a regional proxy war.
Even the Carter Centre avoided doing so, which was a decisive reason for discontinuing Danish support in 2001.
West Nile peace accord
In the meantime, in West Nile, home of the notorious former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, the Danish human rights programme played a lead role in negotiating a peace accord with another Ugandan rebel group, the UNRF II.
The accord signed in December 2002 holds to this day and is probably the only one signed and actually implemented during the NRM regime. The peace accord received little attention internationally and went by unnoticed in Denmark.
I mention it here because the West Nile peace accord for many of the inside Government and military actors in Uganda showed that negations could yield results.
Denmark’s contribution through the human rights program and my personal involvement gave me some credibility later on in 2006 when the Juba negotiations with the LRA started. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/2607683.stm)
Two million displaced
In 2002, after ‘Operation Iron Fist’, the first official cross-border Ugandan military operations against the LRA in then southern Sudan, LRA retaliatory attacks in northern and eastern Uganda displaced 2 million people.
The LRA, however, soon brought the fight back to Ugandan soil, and the period of Operation Iron Fist was also the time of the internationally well known phenomena of ‘night commuters’, i.e. children seeking safety from abduction by the LRA by daily moving between the countryside and towns.
The new military situation (the LRA operated in an unprecedented large area including in eastern Uganda) almost derailed the just mentioned UNRF II peace talks.
Finally, the regional dimension of the LRA issues and how it relates to the geo-politics surrounding the war in Sudan came became explicit.
The US in late 2002 signed its ‘Sudan Peace Act’ as part of the negotiations between Uganda-supported south Sudan and its northern nemesis.
In the tit-for-tat logic of war, ‘Khartoum’ provided support to the LRA who’s senior commanders reportedly were quite astute Arab speakers.
UN: Worst forgotten crisis
The UN in 2003 called the war in northern Uganda the world’s worst forgotten crisis and international attention was slowly overtaking the informed inertia in Kampala.
When renewed efforts were made to revive peace talks with the LRA in 2004 the international community was ready to support.
‘Friends of Betty’ (Bigombe) were figuratively speaking tripping over each other to be helpful. The 2004 process would turn out to be the last attempt to resolve the conflict from within Uganda.
The effort collapsed by 2005. Already in December 2004, Betty had told me that President Museveni had set January 1, 2005 as an ultimatum.
For me the new presidential ultimatum – a rerun of the 1994 scenario – was a reason to inform the Netherlands embassy in Kampala that I was not interested in becoming a technical adviser to what was known as the Bigombe 2 process.
Strong links across the border
From a south Sudanese perspective, the northern Ugandan and south Sudan conflicts have always been connected by strong ethnic, cultural, economic links between the two regions.
In 2005, cultural leaders from northern Uganda extracted a promise from the late south Sudanese leader John Garang to tackle the LRA ‘problem’ after his organization had agreed to the peace accord with the government of Sudan.
Sudan’s Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) of 2005 diminished the LRA’s value as a proxy fighting force. The LRA had not been so ‘friendless’ before.
Further raising the pressure on the LRA, in October 2005, the International Criminal Court (ICC) unsealed its indictments against five of the top LRA commanders for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The move came soon after the first group of LRA had crossed the river Nile in September 2005 to settle in Garamba forest on the border between the DRC and south Sudan.
LRA negotiations in Juba
From 2006 to 2008, Denmark and later Sweden seconded me to the negotiations with the LRA in the Juba, the capital of South Sudan.
The early 2006 Juba peace talk initiative of the fledgling government of southern Sudan to broker and internationalise a new mediation effort seemed to many both unlikely and unconvincing. However, by early 2008 the process had gained substantial international recognition.
Insiders in Uganda and Denmark, who knew of the UNRF II process were kind enough to give me opportunity to contribute to the process.
My role was ultimately to draft the peace accord’s protocols on disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) of the LRA, and my work included advising the mediation on security arrangements such as monitoring the 2006 Cessation of Hostilities agreement that I had also helped to negotiate.
The cessation of hostilities agreement at the time was considered the best opportunity in 20 years to reach a negotiated settlement.
Although Kony in 2008 repeatedly refused to sign the Juba accords, the Juba process at least saw the LRA exiting northern Uganda.
Now Northern Uganda is peaceful but dealing with the aftermath of the war, and social and political tension stemming from the legacy of violence and conflicts over land.
‘Operation Lightening Thunder’
On a different track, both the LRA and the Ugandan government and their US allies were preparing for a new war.
‘Operation Lightening Thunder’ started on December 14, 2008 with a botched ‘surgical strike’ by the Ugandan national army on Kony’s headquarters.
A telling detail of how personal the LRA issue is to State House in Uganda is the fact that president Museveni’s son, Maj. Muhoozi was among the first troops in Garamaba.
Then President Bush had authorized US support to the operation in November 2008.
Operation Lightening Thunder applied a ‘to kill a snake you need to chop of its head’ approach that since has come under serious criticism from the human rights community from not using adequate military and humanitarian resources to protect civilians.
The approach back-fired and the LRA went on a killing spree starting with the ‘Christmas Massacres’ of 2008. (http://www.hrw.org/news/2009/01/17/dr-congo-lra-slaughters-620-christmas-massacres)
Old approach to beat LRA
Too little attention had been paid to putting in place prudent military plans and resources to protect civilians. Since then, attempts have been made to improve the military response and the protection of civilians.
Results have been mixed and basically the last four years have been a continuation of the old approach to beat the LRA through a war of attrition.
Since 2010, I have been part of an ‘international working group’ on the LRA that brings together the UN, the US, and the EU.
Since the beginning of 2012 my work includes supporting the African Union’s efforts under its Regional Initiative against the LRA. All this work is necessary, if it also is effective, remains to be seen.
Likewise, one wonders if a military solution-only approach to this long running conflict can achieve the human security outcomes one seeks.
Kony´s global myth
Kony’s myth and theatre have become global, aided by well-intended but misguided efforts of international NGO’s that erroneously think that the way to deal with the LRA is to make Kony an internet household name – by adding to his myth and mystique – exactly 50 years after Uganda became independent.
According to the latest UN endorsed figures, 200-300 LRA fighters are responsible for the displacement of 440,000 people equivalent to 25 per cent of the population in the tri-border area of DRC, the Central African Republic and South Sudan – an area the size of France.
There is what conflict resolution experts call ‘negative’ peace in Northern Uganda but conditions of structural violence still prevail.
Achieving ‘positive’ peace requires addressing root causes such as the influence of the military in politics, marginalization of northerners and economic imbalances that all are part of a deeper conflict in Uganda of which the LRA only is a symptom.
Anton Baaré is an international consultant on Development, Stabilisation, and Conflict Resolution. He currently works for the Africa Fragile States and Social Development Unit of the World Bank and supports the African Union regional initiative against LRA.
Between September 2006 and March 2008, Baaré was seconded by Denmark and Sweden to the office of Riek Machar, Vice-President of Southern Sudan. As such, he was part of the team negotiating the August 2006 Cessation of Hostilities Agreement between the government of Uganda and the LRA, he provided technical advice to the Cessation of Hostilities Monitoring Team, and he was lead consultant on the ceasefire and disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration protocols signed in February 2008.
