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Erin Baines and Boniface Ojok*

Le résumé français ci-dessous

A rebel commander of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) lay in a hospital bed lamenting the loss of his left leg. He had been planning to abandon the rebellion when his group was ambushed by the Ugandan army and he was injured. After his recovery, he would be granted a government amnesty but he worried about how his family and their neighbours would view him. ‘I was a real rebel’ he told us, ‘I can’t hide away from that.’ The man in the hospital bed beside him looked down. He had been shot in the back by rebels while transporting his brother to a neighbouring camp. His brother was now dead. Children were slowly shuffling their way into the ward, waiting for us to finish. We thanked the commander for the interview and made room for his new visitors. They addressed him as lapwony, teacher.

This is life in northern Uganda. Perpetrator and victim live side by side. They sleep in huts across from one another in the crowded camps and shop at the same market. They till neighbouring fields, share the same water source, lie in the same hospital room. They are often related: virtually everyone in northern Uganda has someone in their clan that has been forced to either join or work for the rebels. If one’s family has not had a child taken by the LRA then another will have joined the Ugandan army or a local militia and both will have shot at the other on the battlefield. Over 30,000 children have been abducted and forced to fight, rape, mutilate, beat, and kill. Their teachers are rebel commanders and they in turn grow up to be vicious rebel leaders; the commander in the hospital bed was abducted by rebels as a child. In northern Uganda, victim is also perpetrator.

Local supporters of the government amnesty – which include victims groups, parents associations, human rights groups, civil associations, and religious and cultural leaders – have always maintained a uniform message: amnesty is part of their culture, amnesty is forgiveness.[i] Religious and community leaders have risked all to build the confidence of LRA commanders and to encourage them to return home. Victims have encountered rebels while in their fields and retained their composure in order to reassure them that the amnesty is real. Chiefs have held ‘forgiveness ceremonies’, a neo-ritual to send a message to those remaining in the bush that they too can benefit from amnesty. To date, 10,016 former LRA rebels have reported to amnesty offices in the districts of Gulu and Kitgum and resettled into town centres or one of the hundreds of internally displaced persons camps where up to 90 percent of the population now live. [ii]

Across the North, returning rebels have drawn upon coping mechanisms to make peace with themselves and with the community. For example, Achan was an LRA commander. She does not know the names or recall the villages of those she killed, but their dead spirits haunted her and her daughter. She went through a week long reconciliation ceremony with a witchdoctor and her elders. [iii] In separate but interrelated ceremonies the spirits of the civilians she murdered were harkened and a resolution found in the form of giving symbolic death compensation (culu kwor) - a payment traditionally provided by the perpetrators’ clan to the victim’s clan to be used for remarriage and eventually the birth of a child to replace the life that was lost. Where she and her daughter were once regarded with suspicion and marginalized, she now finds acceptance; people no longer fear that her contamination will contaminate them.[iv]

Other former LRA rebels or captives, however, flatly reject the idea of communicating with the spirits of the dead. Many Christians distance themselves from witchdoctors who negotiate between the living and the dead. In Acholi, the ethnic group that has suffered the brunt of the war, the younger generation look at their elders with scepticism and doubt; youth no longer know much about cleansings or rituals.

Most who return from the LRA fear telling anyone of what they have done, or are dissuaded by family members from doing so. Death compensation has been demanded of clans who identified children and youth as responsible for killing in their families. In a more dramatic situation, an LRA soldier trying to turn himself in was identified by the community as one who ordered the mutilation of a local man by having cut off the man’s penis. The soldier was beaten to death. Those with the means have sent loved ones to live far away from home where no one knows that they were once a rebel.

Not only do most former rebels prefer to say nothing, their elders and religious teachers urge them to forget about the past. It is considered too painful to retell experiences in the bush; their stories may unearth new conflicts. Besides, the elders told us, there have been too many killings, too much death.

Forgiveness, we have been repeatedly told by the elders we meet in our work, is a central feature of Acholi cultural beliefs. For instance, mato oput is a restorative justice process that involves determining guilt in a collective forum with a committee of elders, payment of culu kwor, and a symbolic ritual to restore relations by drinking the oput root.[v] While its practice diminished over the course of colonialism and independence, it has continued to take place. The applicability of the process is limited by the circumstances of the war – mato oput cannot be practiced in the usual manner given that not everyone knows who has killed whom. But should peace come, it may be a means to resolve crises between known perpetrators, as in the case of the Mucwini massacres of 24 July 2002.

On that day, 56 members of the Pajong clan were brutally beaten to death with clubs by the LRA in their villages close to the trading centre in Mucwini.[vi] The LRA left a note explaining that their acts were retaliation for the escape of an abducted man named Otim who had taken with him a gun. Otim claimed he was from Pajong clan. It is common knowledge in northern Uganda that should one be abducted, they should deny their name and birthplace to rebels in order to protect the clan. Otim was in fact from Pubec, a clan involved in a long standing land dispute with Pajong. Otim purposely told the rebels he was from the rival clan of Pajong in an attempt to wipe them out and grab land they held a legal title to. Following the massacre, the two clans broke off relations completely and the Pajong threatened to avenge the death of their loved ones. As is the norm, the acts of an individual in Acholi are considered a collective act, and the clan must assume responsibility. When we met with both parties in December 2007, they were involved in a cooling down period and awaiting the negotiation of elders for death compensation. Both parties hoped to undergo a process of mato oput and move on.

When children and youth return home, hands bloodied, turned into commanders and as mothers with children born of rape, their amnesty receives little attention from the international community. It is the return of more senior commanders – those that gave orders, those who joined voluntarily – that is more hotly contested. The indictment of the top five LRA commanders by the International Criminal Court (ICC) stirred up quite a storm in the media and public debate over whether the indictments undermine the amnesty process and prospects for peace. [vii] On the one hand, LRA senior commanders have little incentive to come home peacefully if they will only face arrest and transport to The Hague. On the other hand, blanket amnesty is considered a slap in the face of justice that encourages warlords everywhere by rewarding war crimes with impunity. [viii]

This debate overshadows equally pressing concerns, some of them highlighted here. One of the indicted, Dominic Ongwen, was abducted at the age of 10. [ix] What are the implications of one of the first courts to prosecute persons for child soldiering, to indict someone the international community did not protect? Many children – like Ongwen – have grown into vicious commanders and are now returning home. All have easy access to guns. Some, like commander Sunday Otto, were so disillusioned with amnesty that they re-entered the bush. Others, like commander Onen Kamdulu, have resorted to crime. Women with children born of rape, rejected by their families and communities, have reunited with former commanders. Others have taken responsibility for what they have done into their own hands, seeking forgiveness.

Paying attention to how these cases are addressed is just as important as the peace versus justice debate, because it provides insight into how Ugandans will cope with the aftermath of a brutal conflict and find the means to move forward together as a clan, community and country. Learning how people cope with violence will illustrate to some extent the limits and possibilities of forgiveness. The Ugandan case also reminds us of the complexity of victims in any conflict require a nuanced approach to justice and reconciliation, such as those being embraced by northern Ugandans today.

* Erin Baines is the research director of the Justice and Reconciliation Project and assistant professor at the Liu Institute for Global Issues. Boniface Ojok is the lead researcher and project officer of the JRP. The project conducts action research, with researchers living in five of the internally displaced camps year round. For more information see www.justiceandreconciliation.com 

Le résumé français - Faire face à la violence en Ouganda nordique : Réflexions sur l’amnistie

Cet article fournit un aperçu sur les vies des anciens membres de l’Armée de résistance du Seigneur (LRA) et les communautés de l’Ouganda nordique qu’ils ont terrorisées comme les deux côtés essayent d’obtenir la paix et la réconciliation. Baines et Ojox font des entrevues avec des ex rebelles et leurs victimes, tout en assistant aux cérémonies locales de réconciliation qui favorisent le pardon et la réintégration plutôt que des procédures judiciaires et des punitions. Tel que noté par les auteurs, les malfaiteurs et les victimes de crimes sont souvent connectés : pratiquement toutes les personnes en Ouganda nordique ont quelqu’un dans leurs clans qui a été forcé de se joindre ou de travailler pour les rebelles. Cet article illustre que les questions relatives à l’amnistie ne sont pas aussi noires et blanches que prétendu par des discussions courantes. Au lieu de cela, il indique qu’une variété de différents types d’approches seront nécessaires pour traiter le défi de la réconciliation en Ouganda. L’étude sur la façon dont les personnes font face à la violence illustrera dans une certaine mesure les limites et les possibilités de rémission et le besoin de nuancer la compréhension des victimes et des auteurs de crimes afin de se diriger vers la paix et la justice.