Uganda: Realists in Juba Hold Hope for Northern Peace
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The Monitor (Kampala)
OPINION
September 21, 2006
Posted to the web September 20, 2006
September 21, 2006
Posted to the web September 20, 2006
Sverker Finnström & Ronald R. Atkinson
Africa's
longest-running guerilla war has ravaged northern Uganda. The International Crisis Group on September 13 released an important policy briefing that highlights the complexity of the ongoing peace talks in Juba, southern Sudan.
The report points out that the Juba talks need international backing. This is obvious but we have some concerns with such an involvement. Several past efforts to bring peace to northern Uganda have been marred by the unrealistic involvement of the international community.
For example, in 1999 the Carter Center effectively excluded the LRA from the process and the final agreement between the governments of Sudan and Uganda. After a year-long lull, the rebels launched new attacks.
The Government of Southern Sudan (GoSS),has been successful so far, we think, because it has been realistic about the situation, including the military and organizational strength of the
LRA, a rare but important insight that penetrates beyond the simplistic view in the international community that the LRA as a dying, ragtag gang. In late 2003, the Ugandan government requested the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague to collect evidence of crimes committed by the LRA leadership.
Ever since, international retributive justice has become a hotly debated issue. Initially, the Ugandan government's call for international justice left out possible war crimes committed by its own army. "Our position is if they [the ICC] come across any allegations against government officials, they should let them be tried by the government," then army spokesman Shaban Bantarisa (Lt Col) is reported to have said.
An increasing number of Ugandan commentators and academics, however, have asked why the court has decided not to investigate other crimes against humanity, such as the army's alleged arbitrary killings
and rape of civilians, or the forced displacement of millions of people to squalid camps?
In an interview with the anthropologist Tim Allen, a court representative responded to the question by claiming that "the alleged crimes perpetrated by the Ugandan government were not grave enough to reach the threshold."
By international diplomatic consensus, when the ICC was created their mandate excluded crimes committed before 2002, something that gives it a high degree of arbitrariness when imposed upon Ugandan reality.
In addition, when Museveni launched human rights commission in 1986 to account for human rights violations in Uganda since independence in 1962, he explicitly barred this commission from subsequently investigating any crimes committed after his military takeover.
Under these two already-established institutions, therefore, the years from 1986 to 2002
are left outside the parameters of accountability, a great disappointment to people in northern Uganda who have been living with war since 1986.
The ICC too is now part of the realpolitik of war. When the GoSS first reached agreement with the rebels to mediate peace and then persuaded the Ugandan government to attend the Juba talks, this represented the best opportunity to end the war, not least because of the GoSS's realistic assessment of the situation.
The ICC chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, initally dismissed the peace initiative by asserting that the rebels were only buying time to regroup. The GoSS, on their side, had worked for a long time behind the scenes to gain rebel agreement for the talks.
When Vice President of GoSS, Dr Riek Machar, met LRA's Joseph Kony for the first time publicly, he intentionally addressed him as his brother, thus following the most basic rule in
any successful peace talks - facilitating a feeling of equality between the parties. Talks commenced, and despite the Ugandan government's and much of the international community's initial scepticism, the parties signed a historical cessation of hostilities agreement in late August 2006.
We do not agree with researchers like Doom and Vlassenroot, who in a widely quoted article in African Affairs called the LRA the "dogs of war" and then claimed that "Acholi people at grassroots level can easily identify the dog that bites, but cannot see its master," while "better informed persons are fully aware" of the international complexities.
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The conclusion to be drawn from Doom and Vlassenroot's metaphorical
comment can only be that people on the ground do not have a proper idea of the complexity of the war.
We think it essential that we allow the GoSS mediators, together with the Ugandan government and the rebel delegations, to be the primary realist navigators here. So far, they have shown a remarkable ability to navigate pragmatically the terrain of the national and regional realities that they confront in moving the peace process forward.
Finnström is an anthropologist at Uppsala University, Sweden and has followed developments in northern Uganda since 1997. Historian Atkinson of the University of South Carolina in the USA first worked in northern Uganda more than 30 years ago.
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