| Uganda: Acholi MPs Laugh At Govt's Plan for Northern Reconstruction
April 5, 2006
Posted to the web April 4, 2006 Rodney Muhumuza
The announcement last week of government's plan to unveil a massive recovery programme for war-torn northern Uganda coincided with reports that the rate of violent deaths there is three times higher than in Iraq. A new report, Counting the cost: Twenty years of war in northern Uganda, released by 50 international and local civil society organisations, says there are 146 violent deaths a week in
northern Uganda or 0.17 violent deaths per 10,000 people per day, which is by far higher than the rate in Iraq, estimated to be 0.052 per 10,000 people per day. The report, which called for government to acknowledge the full scale and horror of the humanitarian situation in northern Uganda, was predictably dismissed by the UPDF establishment, whose spokesman Felix Kulayigye said that rebel leader Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army was now only a mirage not worth discussing. After all the LRA, said Maj Kulayigye, had killed only 46 people in the last six months that have also seen the retreat of Kony and his top commanders into the DR Congo. "There are no more LRA to talk about so those who talk about up-scaling our engagement with the LRA are simply daydreaming," Kulayigye said in a recent statement, which summed up the government's conviction that two decades of war and pain were
firmly behind the north. Now the government has formed the Joint Country Coordination and Monitoring Committee (JCCMC), which will be tasked to cause a turn-around of the security and humanitarian situation in Internally Displaced Peoples camps. Though details of the JCCMC, which is yet to be launched, were not available to Inside Politics, some press reports said the overall strategy would be to decongest IDP camps (from 10,000 to 60,000 per camp to 1,000 to 3,000 per camp) through a protracted process that voluntarily takes displaced individuals closer to their villages. The proposal, however, has been received with a lot of skepticism by lawmakers from Acholi who say it was unilateral and have threatened to deny it the legitimacy it needs. Aswa MP Reagan Okumu told Inside Politics that the JCCMC was the latest in a series of "dubious schemes" tailored for
using the north to fundraise monies to sustain the Kampala regime. "There is nothing new this government is doing. They are just using new terminologies. If we don't give legitimacy to any recovery programme, it will be as good as useless," he said. The disagreement is on a number of issues, from the current state of the conflict to the approach being taken to reconstruct the north. Mr Okumu said the government was mixing up issues because "reconstruction is different from development". "The government must differentiate between a recovery programme and a development programme," he said. The JCCMC, Okumu said, cannot be taken seriously because "like the previous ones, it had been imposed on our people". Though it is described as a master plan, the JCCMC will not be the first major attempt at rehabilitation of northern Uganda. The Northern Uganda Reconstruction Programme (I and II) and
the associated Northern Uganda Social Action Fund were conceptualised to implement development activities that would specifically alleviate the service delivery problems in the north and generally reduce poverty levels there. Though the project is well funded (by the World Bank), there is a feeling within the political opposition that its efforts were wasted. The Democratic Party, during the recent presidential campaign, proposed that in order to encourage the LRA to surrender, there was need to build trust among their allies and to extend the Amnesty Commission's mandate, which DP officials said they would have loved to call the Amnesty and Resettlement Commission. "This commission will take over the responsibilities and assets of the Northern Uganda Reconstruction Programme, which, though heavily funded by Uganda's development partners, lacks focus and technical competence to put in place the necessary
infrastructure," the DP publicity team wrote in the January 8 edition of Daily Monitor. Though President Museveni's re-election manifesto made vague proposals on the resettlement of displaced persons back to their homes, what it made clear was that the Acholi "entrapped" in camps would have to wait a little longer than their Lango and Teso counterparts. A summarised version of Mr Museveni's re-election manifesto said, "Working closely with both the SPLA and the Sudan government, we will pursue the remnants of LRA until there is total peace in northern Uganda. The Kony groups have been so degraded that we have now to decide to send home the people of Lango and Teso." However, it has been the Acholi districts of Gulu, Kitgum and Pader that have been at the heart of the northern conflict, which has eluded peace efforts since
1993 when Ms Betty Bigombe made her maiden effort at peace-making. Her last real effort to resume contact with the LRA hierarchy (including Kony) was in July 2005, not long before the World Health Organisation published a troubling report revealing that, in IDP camps, over 1,000 people die of starvation, violence and disease every week. | 
