NGO part of the northern Uganda war
By Sverker Finnström
June 23, 2006 — The war in northern Uganda has dragged on for 20 years now. As a matter of fact, ever since the guerrilla leader Yoweri Museveni seized state power through the barrel of the gun, northern Uganda has been war-torn.
The LRA rebels’ gross violence and mass abduction of minors have drawn much international sympathy for Museveni’s government. Not least the media focus on the child abductees has justified a non-negotiation stance by the Ugandan government, in recent times supported by powerful donors like England, the US, and Denmark, and, of course, the International Criminal Court. The US even included the LRA on its list of global terrorist organisations.
So it is difficult to say if Riek Machar’s efforts to mediate will lead anywhere. Ignoring the fact that Machar actually had several face-to-face meetings with the LRA leadership, something that has not happened for many years, the named donors have all declared that they want to “eliminate” Joseph Kony. But I do not think this will solve Uganda’s or the region’s problems.
In October 2005, the International Criminal Court warrants of arrest for the LRA leadership became public. And now Ugandan government representatives refer to these very warrants, when they say that they cannot meet the LRA team in Juba. The warrants provoked rebel attacks on international NGOs and Western individuals last year.
Sad as this development is, I am however not that surprised. The renowned scholars Caspar Fithen and Paul Richards’s conclusion on the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels in Sierra Leone also says something about the Ugandan rebels. “Collapse into fatalistic violence and random killing is a development which might have been foreseen by opponents of the RUF,” they argue in an anthropological anthology called No peace no war, “had they been less busy denying the movement’s reasons to exist.”
So why were international NGOs targeted? Seldom can aid and humanitarianism of the international community be neutral in the eyes of the locals, and even less so in the eyes of the rebels. When humanitarian organisations take over many of the functions of the Ugandan government, some will also be perceived, as the government is, as a parallel partner to the army.
In the 2000 national referendum on political systems, government representatives obviously took advantage of the situation. In their massive campaigning, in which they benefited extensively from logistics provided by the Ugandan army, they told people in the camps that relief and humanitarian assistance would be withdrawn if they did not vote for the government’s no-party system.
The multiparty political opposition, on the other hand, was stopped from campaigning by the Ugandan security forces; when the referendum approached, few opposition politicians were even allowed to leave Gulu town. Some of these malpractices were repeated in the campaigns for the 2006 presidential elections.
Again people in the war-torn North were told that humanitarian aid and military protection would be removed if the sitting president lost. I am not revealing any secret here, as a matter of fact; this is common knowledge also among the influential donor countries and the big humanitarian organisations.
Neutral NGOs
But humanitarian organisations rarely consider the perennial problem of war and insecurity. Sometimes representatives of these organisations even confuse neutrality with an explicit anti-participatory ideology. The more we ignore the complex socio-political history of the war, and the less we interact with our local counterparts and beneficiaries, they seem to reason, the more neutral we are.
At the same time, a Muganda informant living in Gulu town argued, the international NGOs now “take a lean on the government” to the extent that they are “welcomed as its lovers”. This love relationship, he told me in late 2005, is “directed” by the government “but not according to the needs … of the community. And that is going to cause a big-big-big problem, because people are politicising everything now.”
With direct reference to the increasing humanitarian apparatus, some young Gulu University students told me that “this war is a project for both the NGOs and the government.” It has become a self-sustaining “business,” while ordinary Ugandans are “rendered useless.” And therefore, the students concluded, the international NGOs will not bring peace.
Over the years, humanitarian organisations have become entangled in the structuring of the camps, and eventually caught in a catch-22 situation. Humanitarian aid and relief programmes, as we know, are the response to a state of emergency, when something must be done at once.
They are by definition temporary. But after two decades of war, it is increasingly difficult to talk about a state of emergency in any conventional sense, if this is to imply that such a state is not increasingly permanent.
Some of the camps for internally displaced people in Acholiland have been in existence for more than 10 years, and so have the international organisations’ measures to lessen the human suffering in these same camps. Ironically enough, the UN and other representatives of the international community partly uphold the camp structures. Any international relief is distributed exclusively to camps that are recognised by the Ugandan government.
War Politics
As always, war is processual, and emergency relief operations will therefore increasingly be entangled with the politics and practices of war. So when the ICC arrest warrants close yet another door to a settled solution in northern Uganda, we need to realise another fact of war, as violently demonstrated by the rebels last year: the international community is deeply involved in the realpolitik of war.
The war is partly sustained by the complex relation between the military and humanitarian efforts to end it. Humanitarian aid is no longer impartial but shapes conditions it hopes to improve. If we do not self-critically assess this development, then relief assistance, even with the best of intentions, will boost those who exploit the suffering to further their own businesses of war.
The LRA and the Ugandan government now need to show their seriousness in talking peace, but also the international community has a big responsibility in the success or failure of Riek Machar’s effort to mediate. Please prove my student informants wrong.
* The author holds a PhD in cultural anthropology from Uppsala University, Sweden. He is the author of Living with bad surroundings: War and existential uncertainty in Acholiland, northern Uganda (Uppsala 2003). He can be reached at [email protected].