Uganda peace talks – The realists in Juba
By Sverker Finnström and Ronald R. Atkinson
Sept 18, 2006 — Africa’s longest-running war has ravaged northern Uganda for 20 years. The International Crisis Group on September 13 released an important policy briefing that highlights the complexity of the ongoing peace talks in Juba (Africa Briefing no 41, available at www.crisisgroup.org). The report correctly points out that the long war in northern Uganda reaches beyond only Acholi grievances, or realities restricted to the north of Uganda.
The report also points out that the Juba talks need international backing and support. “Riek [Machar] has done an impressive job,” they write, “but he cannot realistically navigate the waters ahead without more help from both his own government and the international community.”
It is obvious that the talks need better international support. But we have some concerns with such an involvement. Several past efforts to bring peace to northern Uganda have been marred by the unrealistic—rather than realistic—involvement of the international community. The realists, to say the least, have often not been from the international community. For example, in 1999 the Carter Center effectively excluded the LRA from the negotiating process and the final agreement between the governments of Sudan and Uganda. This pleased the Ugandan government but angered the rebels. In late 1999, after a year-long lull, the rebels launched new attacks. We must avoid a similar scenario.
The Government of Southern Sudan (GoSS), in contrast, has carefully navigated the realities of the region. It 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 of the LRA as a dying, ragtag gang. Of course the GoSS needs international backing and support in the peace process, but we are also afraid of Eurocentric attitudes and agendas and their potential bearings on the peace process.
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. As one of its first cases, the Court accepted the Ugandan request, issuing indictments in October 2005. Ever since, international retributive justice has become a hotly debated issue in northern Uganda. 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,” army spokesman Shaban Bantarisa 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 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.”
Whose threshold are we talking about? 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 a national truth 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. So neither the retributive justice of the ICC nor the national truth commission in Uganda can even hope to attain justice, or end impunity, in Uganda, because neither will facilitate—or even allow for—a political understanding of the structural, historical and even global conditions that caused and sustained the war.
Just as humanitarian aid has become a dimension among other dimensions of war in Uganda, 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 in many years to end the war, not least because of the GoSS’s careful and realistic assessment of the situation on the ground. The ICC chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, initally dismissed the peace initiative by asserting that the rebels were only buying time to regroup. “Well, these are words of a politician, not of an impartial international judge,” John Akec, a London-based Sudanese blogger and political analyst noted with frustration as Moreno-Ocampo’s words rather than those of the GoSS hit the world news. “And when so important a figure gets that close to local politics, justice flies out of the window.” The GoSS, on their side, had worked for a long time behind the scenes to gain rebel agreement for the talks. When Riek Machar, named the chief mediator in the talks by the GoSS, met 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 skepticism, the parties signed a historical cessation of hostilities agreement in late August 2006.
We are convinced that the realists are the people on the ground, who indeed grasp the complexity of the war, because they have lived with war for so long. We do not agree with researchers 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. 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, only that they find the rebels to be religious but incomprehensible fanatics.
Anthropologist Michael Taussig’s classic description of the construction of colonial culture comes to mind. Taussig has written extensively on the colonial conquest of the Putumayo region in South America, a conquest equally violent to that of King Leopold ’s in the Congo. Taussig argues for the existence of a “colonial mirror which reflects back onto the colonialists the barbarity of their own social relations, but as imputed to the savage or evil figures they wish to colonize.” Still today, we in the West tend to regard ourselves as peace-bringers and promoters of law and order, while we often see non-Westerners as warmongers and promoters of violence and chaos.
To avoid such a mirroring, we propose that we seriously ask people at the grassroots levels who they identify as the masters of the dog, and why. We agree with the International Crisis Group that the Juba talks need greater international backing, perhaps even outside observers who can document the progress of the talks. But also, 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.
We also urge outsiders, especially those who might have important supporting roles to play in the complex and unfolding dynamics of peace building going in on Juba, to avoid the trap of excessively personalizing the process—as sometimes occurs in the language of the recent International Crisis Group briefing. From the very beginnings of the GoSS initiative approaching the rebels about mediating peace talks to end the northern Uganda war, this has been a collective effort.
Sverker Finnström ([email protected]) is an anthropologist at Uppsala University, Sweden. He has followed developments in northern Uganda since 1997. Historian Ronald Atkinson of the University of South Carolina in the USA ([email protected]) first lived and worked in northern Uganda more than 30 years ago.