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Uganda — A nation at war
Uganda, a land-locked country in East Africa, is bordered on the east by Kenya, on the north by Sudan, on the west by the Democratic Republic of Congo, on the southwest by Rwanda, and by Tanzania on the south. The state takes its name from the Buganda Kingdom, which encompasses a portion of the south of the country including the capital Kampala.
The East African nation has significant natural resources, including productive land, regular rainfall and ample mineral deposits of copper and cobalt. Agriculture is the mainstay of the economy and employs over 80 per cent of the labour force. The government has been trying to recuperate an economy devastated during the regime of Idi Amin and ensuing civil war.
The year 2006 proved to be an exciting year for the country as the first multi-party elections were held and Kampala’s international reputation shifted from ‘basket-case’ — dependent on foreign aid to ‘donor darling’ — having lots of economic potential. Yet the government and its development partners celebrate these achievements, they put out of sight a quite different Ugandan reality that colours its success with a shadow.
It is a veracity in which almost eight per cent of Uganda’s population has been forced to live in extreme poverty and suffering. They have been devastated by a war that targets civilians and children; in which 1.8 million people are forced to live in filthy and grave conditions, displaced from their homes by bloodshed and intimidation and where hope for the future of an entire generation has withered away.
There is a civil war going on in northern Uganda for the last 20 years which is now home to both ‘the world’s largest forgotten emergency’, and sub-Saharan Africa’s ‘longest-running war’ and the expanse is becoming ever more marginalised with each passing year.
It is a complex conflict that has been exploited by various vested interests and groups and which leads to inadequate and futile policy prescriptions. This war has got two dimensions — firstly, the Lord’s Resistance Army, that is waging a war against the central government and is unleashing a reign of terror against civilian population of Acholi ancestry (the dominant race of the region) and secondly, the dissatisfaction of northern Ugandans against the present regime.
Going to the genesis of the problem, the war was the result of a suppressive and divisive political climate which was entrenched by the British ‘divide and rule’ colonialism and further reinforced by post-colonial Ugandan policies. It resulted in politicised North-South divide in the country which created conducive environment for insurgency. When National Resistance Movement took power in 1986, their policies sowed the seeds of recalcitrance by alienating the northern population.
The conflict in Uganda is part of a large climate of violence and impunity in the Great Lakes region of Africa. It cannot be separated from the genocide in Darfur, the recent civil war between northern and southern parts of Sudan, and the incipient resistance in eastern Sudan. Instability in one of these regions affects the prospects of peace in the other three.
The conflict has been transformed into a proxy war. The Sudanese government began to provide military assistance and support to the LRA in 1984, while the Ugandan government provided military assistance to the Sudan’s People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), an insurgency in southern Sudan.
After the 9/11 the West, particularly the US, saw this as another frontier of ‘war on terror’ against the spread of Islamic fundamentalism and pumped generous funds to SPLA through Kampala. New elements of a war economy and lucrative arms business made chances of peace more elusive.
Washington declared the LRA a terrorist group and increased military aid to the Ugandan government. Unfortunately, it further hardened the present regime’s stance on a military approach to end the war and intensified northern grievances and on the whole the approach proved unproductive over the years.
Despite the fact that the civil war started as a conventional conflict between military forces, over the period of time it has acquired the status of a ‘dirty war’ in which civilians become the primary target of the fighting. This metamorphosis took place in 1994, when the LRA began attacking civilian population in a systematic way in order to steal vital resources as food and to abduct children.
This is a war waged against children, who have been abducted in thousands and forced to work as soldiers or sex slaves. Nearly eighty per cent of the LRA soldiers are kidnapped children. According to the UNICEF estimates more than 25, 000 children have been held against their will in the course of the war and out of these 7,000 were girls.
In short, northern Uganda is trapped in a lethal maze of violence and distress and each month, over 3,500 people die from easily avertable diseases. Thus, in order to solve this gigantic human catastrophe all the concerned parties — LRA, the government of Uganda and the international community — should uphold their legal and moral obligations to secure the protection, security and peace of the civilians. It is high time to act determinedly without any delay to secure a just and lasting peace.
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