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| Civil societys role is key in the success of Juba talks |
| July 25, 2006 |
| The peace talks went into recess without any significant breakthough. No, the photo op between Chief of Military Intelligence Col. Leopold Kyanda and LRA commander Lernard Bwone Lubwa at the Saturday cocktail party at Jubas Raha Hotels doesnt count. If history is anything to go by, our self-serving politicians and the soldiers who for one reason or the other continue to kill and die for them have a disquieting penchant for eating from the same bowl on one day and massacring each other and luckless civilians on the next. So, the jury is still out on how the worm will turn. But this isn't to say that no progress is being made. The interesting thing is that unlike in past peace talks, civil society, represented by religious and traditional leaders, is playing a more prominent role. To a certain extent, the initiator of the peace effort, Dr Riek Machar, vice president of the southern Sudanese government, was responding to pressure from wananchi in his own backyard when he convened the talks in Juba. Not much is known in Uganda about how religious and community leaders in southern Sudan have, in the course of over 20 years of enduring war, repeatedly confronted the SPLA/M leadership over human rights violations. That same spirit of courage apparently came into play when local leaders made it known to the southern Sudanese government that they did not want to see Joseph Kony and Yoweri Musevenis fighters continuing to kill, loot, rape and maim their people in a senseless war.. Quite independent of the southern Sudanese development, a similar groundswell of revulsion has built up among the civilian population in northern Uganda and the rest of the country against the human cost of a war in which more non-combatants are dying than the belligerents. The result has been the extraordinary mobilisation of the residents of the internally displaced peoples camps and other concerned Ugandans. The unflinching leadership of Catholic Archbishop John Bosco Odama of Gulu and retired Anglican Bishop Macleod Baker Ochola and traditional chiefs and politicians from the war ravaged areas eventually managed to pierce national and international apathy. In the past year alone, these men of the cloth, former top UN civil servant Olara Otunnu, and concerned nongovernmental organisations bore witness to the suffering of millions and drew the attention of the media, diplomats, politicians, and increasingly ordinary people in the Western countries -- Museveni's traditional allies. Externally, the UN raised the ante by labeling the northern crisis, the worlds worst neglected humanitarian disaster. Oprah Winfrey, on at least two occasions, delivered footage of the plight of at-risk northern Ugandan children, directly into the living rooms of tens of millions of viewers of her talkshow. Young North American activists took up the cause of the night commuters making and screening documentaries of the heartrending stories of innocent people, two generations of them, being wasted physically and psychically in virtual concentration camps. Two months ago, thousands of citizens in the United States and Canada started walking for miles and sleeping out in solidarity with the night commuters. Many more called their senators and congressmen, asking what they were doing about the appalling conditions in northern and eastern Uganda. But by and large, the rise in the level of consciousness about the northern war is a collective achievement of ordinary Ugandans: media, musicians, social workers, activists, politicians, and wananchi whose individual voices trickled and grew into a mighty river, whose roar could no longer be dammed or tamed by slick UPDF/NRM propaganda. The people in the marginalised areas of Uganda, including the long-suffering Acholi people, showed their anger against Museveni's stone-deaf government with a stunning vote for the opposition during elections this year. This is the political environment in which the NRM could no longer afford to do business as usual while more civilians died or suffered bodily and mental mulitation. Once again, last Thursday, civil society in southern Sudan and northern Uganda closed ranks even as the LRA and the NRM/UPDF continued to shadow box from across the negotiating table. The elders from communities on both sides of the common border told UPDF and LRA to stop their obduracy because civilians were dying. IRIN, the UN sponsored news service, reported that the elders handed a statement to the LRA and Ugandan government delegation in which they cited incidents of atrocities both sides committed against civilians. Quick note: Regardless of George Bush and Tony Blairs hypocrisy, the killing and kidnap of a handful of Israeli soldiers cannot justify the medieval vengeance with which Israel is bombing Lebanon into the stone age. The images that Israels actions in Gaza and Lebanon evoke is that of the punitive air and ground raids of the white supremacist soldiers of Apartheid killing South African refugees and their hosts in neighboring countries. [EMAIL PROTECTED] |
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