Ugandas hidden genocide
The world needs to act now to halt the killing fields in northern Uganda
By Daniella Boston
(August 14, 2006)
IN A BARREN LAND: Northern Uganda is suffering the blight of genocide
(Photo: TknoxB/Flickr)
(Photo: TknoxB/Flickr)
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Northern Uganda is a blighted land scarred by 20 years of a brutal, murderous civil war that has claimed more than 250,000 lives. The government that purports to protect the people has played an inexcusable role in the perpetuation of this conflict.
More to the point, Olara Otunna, the former U.N. under-secretary-general for children and armed conflict, has said that the human rights and humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in northern Uganda is a methodical and comprehensive genocide, conceived and being carried out by the government.
Since 1986, tens of thousands of civilians have been killed or brutalized by a war fought between the Ugandan government and the murderous Lords Resistance Army (LRA) rebels. The war has left more than 1.8
million people displaced. About 95 percent of the Acholi people, the main ethnic group in northern Uganda, have been uprooted from their ancestral homes. More than 25,000 children have been abducted and forced to become rebels who kill and are killed. Each night, to avoid abduction, more than 40,000 children flee their homes to seek relative safety in urban shelters.
The atrocities taking place daily are not only the work of the LRA. Government troops have maimed, raped and killed innocent civilians. Soldiers have engaged in scorched-earth tactics and the deliberate spreading of HIV and AIDS, often without punitive consequence. (In fact, many of the military commanders responsible for these acts have enjoyed long and successful careers.) Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have documented cases of tortures, rapes, extra-judicial killings, the burning of granaries, the poisoning of wells and instances of burying people alive.
Since 1996,
the government has forcibly herded more than 1.6 million people into concentration-like camps where, according to the World Health Organization and the United Nations, more than 1,000 people die each week of starvation and preventable diseases. In the first half of 2005 alone, an estimated 30,000 people died in these camps.
Of these, 11,000 were children under five. Rapes and suicides are widespread. Meanwhile, the government refers to the camps as protected villages.
The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (ratified in 1951) describes genocide as a crime constituted by acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical or racial, or religious group, or destroying conditions of life calculated to destroy a group; killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; or deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated
to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.
These elements of genocide exist in northern Uganda today. In the Acholi region alone, more than a quarter of the population has been killed since 1986, and the killing has continued with increased intensity, causing the progressive destruction of a culture and a way of life. As a Catholic priest who has worked in the region for the past 50 years maintains, Everything Acholi is dying.
Government officials have sanctioned a propaganda campaign that refers to the northern population as murderous and backward. President Yoweri Museveni himself has consistently referred to the people in the north as those people, and during an interview with The Atlantic Monthly in September 1994, he said that those who are stupid deserved to be made into slaves.
If the Ugandan government has not been entirely explicit about its intentions to allow the Acholi people to be
destroyed, its reluctance to stem the violence is incriminating. When Ugandas parliament passed a resolution declaring northern Uganda a disaster region, Museveni and his government vetoed it. Whenever the international community has attempted to intervene in northern Uganda to safeguard the population, the government has refused to grant permission. Until recently, the government simply refused to acknowledge that there is a serious humanitarian problem in the north. This is a classic case of an ipso facto genocide.
For more than two decades, the international humanitarian community has remained conspicuously silent about the destruction in northern Uganda. We need to bear witness to the genocide unfolding there and to build an effective constituency abroad to support the generations of children whose culture and way of life is being systematically destroyed in full view of the world.
Daniella Boston is co-founder and executive director of
uNight: for the Children of Uganda, a New York-based nonprofit organization dedicated to ending the humanitarian catastrophe in northern Uganda.
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