Photo © Noelle Théard
Sunday, May 27, 2012
Tuesday, May 08, 2012
Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
In addition to being one of the nicest guys I know, my friend Ben Fountain also happens to be one of the best American writers of fiction alive today. If you liked his terrific 2006 book of short stories Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, grab his new novel Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, a book about war, class and commerce that is one of the best books of the year.
Here is Janet Maslin's review in the New York Times and By Jeff Turrentine's review in the Washington Post.
Here is Janet Maslin's review in the New York Times and By Jeff Turrentine's review in the Washington Post.
Wednesday, May 02, 2012
Oil discovery ignites political tensions in Uganda
Oil discovery ignites political tensions in Uganda
By Michael Deibert
11/04/2012 9:02 am
fDi Intelligence
(Read the original article here)
The east African country of Uganda, perhaps better known for its lush national parks and history of garish dictators than its natural resources, has unexpectedly found itself as a player in the world energy markets.
Following years of natural oil seeps near the vast Lake Albert, which forms a natural border between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, London-based Tullow Oil has discovered 1 billion barrels of potential oil reserves in the country. Tullow estimates that 1 billion to 1.5 billion barrels still remain to be located, while Uganda’s ministry of energy says this number could be as high as 2.5 billion.
So is this reason for celebration? Perhaps, but given the political landscape in Uganda, the discovery of oil is, like most things, an intensely political matter. And the discovery has occurred at a particularly delicate time for the country.
Fragile ground
Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, who seized power as the head of the National Resistance Army in January 1986 following the dictatorships of Idi Amin and Milton Obote, and the short reign of Tito Okello, is an increasingly polarising figure in this country of 33 million people, where half the population is under 14 years old. Many in the country suggest that the way the Tullow deal has been handled thus far is indicative of much that is currently wrong in Uganda.
When Tullow bought out Energy Africa in May 2004, it acquired 50% equity in blocks EA1, EA2 and EA3 of the oil concern on the Albertine Basin. Upon its acquisition of Hardman Resources in December 2006, Tullow became the 100% equity holder of EA2.
At the outset of 2010, Tullow sold equity in the blocks to French company Total and the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) – the third largest in the triumvirate of China’s state-owned oil companies – meaning that each company held one-third of the equity in each of the three blocks. This deal attracted state involvement in February 2012, when Tullow company signed two $2.9 billion production sharing agreements with the Ugandan government.
Thus far, Tullow has drilled 45 exploratory wells, of which 43 have been successful, and the company believes that the discovery of oil within its borders presents a golden opportunity to Uganda. “Riding on the back of oil comes a whole raft on ancillary industry and development that any government – be it this one or the next – would want to retain,” says Eoin Mekie, director of Tullow's Uganda operations.
Precious reserves
The World Bank has estimated that revenue from the oil industry could potentially double the Ugandan government’s revenue within six to 10 years. That would be a windfall that could potentially transform the economic status of a country that has received more than $19bn in overseas development aid from Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries over the past 25 years.
A so-called 'stabilisation clause', which reimburses companies that might lose future profits due to government tax policies and other variables, was overcome when the Ugandan government agreed to compensate the companies involved in the Lake Albert deal for any losses. A formula to calculate that loss has not yet been agreed upon, though, according to Mr Museveni.
At present, one of the greatest sources of debate between the Ugandan government and Tullow appears to be the size of any refinery to be built on Lake Albert, with the Museveni government favouring a large refinery and Tullow favouring, at first, a mid-sized one to produce 20,000 to 30,000 barrels of oil per to day to feed domestic demand, eventually getting up to 150,000 to 200,000 barrels a day.
Bad timing
The oil has been found at a particularly sensitive and politically tumultuous time. Mr Museveni secured his current term as president in controversial elections in February last year, and over the past 12 months several large-scale protests against alleged political corruption and economic mismanagement have occurred in the Ugandan capital of Kampala, many aligned with the country's opposition party, the Forum for Democratic Change, which is led by Kizza Besigye, a doctor, former soldier and one-time ally of Mr Museveni.
Government security forces have treated the protestors brutally, with at least 10 people dying and several hundred being put in jail during the demonstrations in 2011. The capital has also seen large protests against load-shedding by national power company Umeme, which has left some neighbourhoods without power for days at a time.
Then there is the matter of transparency. Uganda’s Petroleum Exploration and Production Act dates back to 1985. In May 2010, the country’s minister of energy released a draft of a new petroleum bill to members of Uganda’s civil society and others, asking for review and input. Following meetings among dozens of groups and residents in the area along Lake Albert most likely to be affected by the construction of any refinery, recommendations were submitted to the ministry. As of yet, no new law has been forthcoming.
Following a raucous debate in Uganda’s parliament – which is dominated by members of Mr Museveni’s National Resistance Movement party – it was concluded that there should be a complete moratorium on oil-related activity until new laws were put in place, which could raise questions about the status and efficacy of the February 2012 agreement between Mr Museveni and Tullow.
“It seems that anything to do with the agreement is the preserve of the ministry of of energy, which is really just three or four people,” says Lynn Turyatemba, an attorney with the Africa Institute for Energy Governance in Kampala, which focuses on electricity, renewable energy and extractive industries. “The executive wants to have a completely autocratic say in the industry.”
Stepping stone
It is a concern echoed elsewhere in Uganda’s civil society. “When the president acts without respecting the other branches of government, he is undermining the institutions of the parliament and the judiciary,” says Mugusha Henry Bazira, executive director of Kampala’s Water Governance Institute, a group that has called on further environmental impact studies to be done before drilling proceeds. “The head of state is running the country as if the presidency is the sole arm of government.”
With Tullow estimating substantive production of oil to be at least five years away, it remains to be seen if the Museveni-Tullow deal can produce any substantive change between now and the date of scheduled next presidential elections in 2016. At that point, Mr Museveni will have been in power in Uganda for 30 years.
For its part, Tullow’s public position is that the discovery of oil in the country should be viewed as a stepping-stone, and not an end unto itself. “Uganda’s future is not in oil,” says Tullow’s Mr Mekie. “What [Uganda] needs to do is develop infrastructure, roads, education, industry and agriculture on a larger scale, so when the oil does run out in 30 to 40 years' time, there is a sustainable economy left behind.”
Whether or not Uganda can achieve those aims, and what role oil and the country’s foreign partners will play in helping to achieve them, remains one of the burning questions confronting Uganda today.
By Michael Deibert
11/04/2012 9:02 am
fDi Intelligence
(Read the original article here)
The east African country of Uganda, perhaps better known for its lush national parks and history of garish dictators than its natural resources, has unexpectedly found itself as a player in the world energy markets.
Following years of natural oil seeps near the vast Lake Albert, which forms a natural border between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, London-based Tullow Oil has discovered 1 billion barrels of potential oil reserves in the country. Tullow estimates that 1 billion to 1.5 billion barrels still remain to be located, while Uganda’s ministry of energy says this number could be as high as 2.5 billion.
So is this reason for celebration? Perhaps, but given the political landscape in Uganda, the discovery of oil is, like most things, an intensely political matter. And the discovery has occurred at a particularly delicate time for the country.
Fragile ground
Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, who seized power as the head of the National Resistance Army in January 1986 following the dictatorships of Idi Amin and Milton Obote, and the short reign of Tito Okello, is an increasingly polarising figure in this country of 33 million people, where half the population is under 14 years old. Many in the country suggest that the way the Tullow deal has been handled thus far is indicative of much that is currently wrong in Uganda.
When Tullow bought out Energy Africa in May 2004, it acquired 50% equity in blocks EA1, EA2 and EA3 of the oil concern on the Albertine Basin. Upon its acquisition of Hardman Resources in December 2006, Tullow became the 100% equity holder of EA2.
At the outset of 2010, Tullow sold equity in the blocks to French company Total and the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) – the third largest in the triumvirate of China’s state-owned oil companies – meaning that each company held one-third of the equity in each of the three blocks. This deal attracted state involvement in February 2012, when Tullow company signed two $2.9 billion production sharing agreements with the Ugandan government.
Thus far, Tullow has drilled 45 exploratory wells, of which 43 have been successful, and the company believes that the discovery of oil within its borders presents a golden opportunity to Uganda. “Riding on the back of oil comes a whole raft on ancillary industry and development that any government – be it this one or the next – would want to retain,” says Eoin Mekie, director of Tullow's Uganda operations.
Precious reserves
The World Bank has estimated that revenue from the oil industry could potentially double the Ugandan government’s revenue within six to 10 years. That would be a windfall that could potentially transform the economic status of a country that has received more than $19bn in overseas development aid from Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries over the past 25 years.
A so-called 'stabilisation clause', which reimburses companies that might lose future profits due to government tax policies and other variables, was overcome when the Ugandan government agreed to compensate the companies involved in the Lake Albert deal for any losses. A formula to calculate that loss has not yet been agreed upon, though, according to Mr Museveni.
At present, one of the greatest sources of debate between the Ugandan government and Tullow appears to be the size of any refinery to be built on Lake Albert, with the Museveni government favouring a large refinery and Tullow favouring, at first, a mid-sized one to produce 20,000 to 30,000 barrels of oil per to day to feed domestic demand, eventually getting up to 150,000 to 200,000 barrels a day.
Bad timing
The oil has been found at a particularly sensitive and politically tumultuous time. Mr Museveni secured his current term as president in controversial elections in February last year, and over the past 12 months several large-scale protests against alleged political corruption and economic mismanagement have occurred in the Ugandan capital of Kampala, many aligned with the country's opposition party, the Forum for Democratic Change, which is led by Kizza Besigye, a doctor, former soldier and one-time ally of Mr Museveni.
Government security forces have treated the protestors brutally, with at least 10 people dying and several hundred being put in jail during the demonstrations in 2011. The capital has also seen large protests against load-shedding by national power company Umeme, which has left some neighbourhoods without power for days at a time.
Then there is the matter of transparency. Uganda’s Petroleum Exploration and Production Act dates back to 1985. In May 2010, the country’s minister of energy released a draft of a new petroleum bill to members of Uganda’s civil society and others, asking for review and input. Following meetings among dozens of groups and residents in the area along Lake Albert most likely to be affected by the construction of any refinery, recommendations were submitted to the ministry. As of yet, no new law has been forthcoming.
Following a raucous debate in Uganda’s parliament – which is dominated by members of Mr Museveni’s National Resistance Movement party – it was concluded that there should be a complete moratorium on oil-related activity until new laws were put in place, which could raise questions about the status and efficacy of the February 2012 agreement between Mr Museveni and Tullow.
“It seems that anything to do with the agreement is the preserve of the ministry of of energy, which is really just three or four people,” says Lynn Turyatemba, an attorney with the Africa Institute for Energy Governance in Kampala, which focuses on electricity, renewable energy and extractive industries. “The executive wants to have a completely autocratic say in the industry.”
Stepping stone
It is a concern echoed elsewhere in Uganda’s civil society. “When the president acts without respecting the other branches of government, he is undermining the institutions of the parliament and the judiciary,” says Mugusha Henry Bazira, executive director of Kampala’s Water Governance Institute, a group that has called on further environmental impact studies to be done before drilling proceeds. “The head of state is running the country as if the presidency is the sole arm of government.”
With Tullow estimating substantive production of oil to be at least five years away, it remains to be seen if the Museveni-Tullow deal can produce any substantive change between now and the date of scheduled next presidential elections in 2016. At that point, Mr Museveni will have been in power in Uganda for 30 years.
For its part, Tullow’s public position is that the discovery of oil in the country should be viewed as a stepping-stone, and not an end unto itself. “Uganda’s future is not in oil,” says Tullow’s Mr Mekie. “What [Uganda] needs to do is develop infrastructure, roads, education, industry and agriculture on a larger scale, so when the oil does run out in 30 to 40 years' time, there is a sustainable economy left behind.”
Whether or not Uganda can achieve those aims, and what role oil and the country’s foreign partners will play in helping to achieve them, remains one of the burning questions confronting Uganda today.
Friday, April 27, 2012
After Charles Taylor, Justice for Haiti?
26 April 2012
After Charles Taylor, Justice for Haiti?
The Huffington Post
(Read the original article here)
The conviction today by the International Criminal Court (ICC) of former Liberian president Charles Taylor for aiding and abetting war crimes committed in neighboring Sierra Leone -- the first such conviction of a former head of state -- is a welcome development for those seeking to hold politicians accountable for their crimes.
Coming as it does on the heels of the conviction earlier this year of former Democratic Republic of Congo militia leader Thomas Lubanga for war crimes, the Taylor conviction represents a welcome completion of one of the ICC's missions.
To those of us who have seen the political convulsions of the Caribbean nation of Haiti first-hand over the years, the country makes a compelling case for attention by the ICC as perpetrators of human rights abuses often go unpunished or are even rehabilitated in subsequent governments.
Two of Haiti's former rulers, Jean-Claude Duvalier and Jean-Bertrand Aristide, returned to the country from exile early last year, and both stand accused of gross human rights abuses.
Duvalier, who took the helm of Haiti in 1971 as a rotund teenager following the death of his father, the dictator François Duvalier, presided over a police state where the national treasury was viewed as little more than a personal checking account and all political dissent was ruthlessly crushed. Perhaps the best symbol of his reign, which ended in 1986 amid a popular uprising, was a prison on the outskirts of the Haitian capital called Fort Dimanche, where thousands of enemies of the state were sent to die by execution, torture or to simply waste away amidst conditions that were an affront to humanity.
Mr. Aristide, one of the driving forces behind the movement that ousted Mr. Duvalier, is a former Catholic priest who twice served as Haiti's president and was twice ousted, once by a military coup and once by a popular uprising and armed rebellion. It was the abuses of Mr. Aristide's government that I witnessed first-hand.
In February 2004, in the midst of the chaotic second rebellion against Mr. Aristide's rule, the photojournalist Alex Smailes and I found ourselves in the central Haitian city of Saint Marc, at the time the last barrier between Aristide and a motley collection of once-loyal street gangs and former soldiers who were sweeping down from the country's north seeking to overthrow him.
Several days earlier, on Feb. 7, an armed anti-Aristide group, the Rassemblement des militants conséquents de Saint Marc (Ramicos), based in the neighborhood of La Scierie, had attempted to drive government forces from the town, seizing the local police station, which they set on fire.
On Feb. 9, the combined forces of the Police Nationale d'Haiti (PNH), the Unité de Sécurité de la Garde du Palais National (USGPN) -- a unit directly responsible for the president's personal security -- and a local paramilitary organization named Bale Wouze (Clean Sweep) retook much of the city.
By Feb. 11, a few days before our arrival, Bale Wouze -- headed by a former parliamentary representative of Aristide's Fanmi Lavalas political party named Amanus Mayette -- had commenced the battle to retake La Scierie. Often at Mayette's side was a government employee named Ronald Dauphin, known to residents as "Black Ronald," often garbed in a police uniform even though he was in no way officially employed by the police.
When Alex and I arrived in the town, we found the USGPN and Bale Wouze patrolling Saint Marc as a single armed unit. Speaking to residents there -- amidst a surreal backdrop of burned buildings, the stench of human decay, drunken gang members threatening our lives with firearms and a terrified population -- we soon realized that something awful had happened in Saint Marc.
According to multiple residents interviewed during that visit and a subsequent visit that I made to the town in June 2009, after government forces retook the town -- and after a press conference there by Yvon Neptune, at the time Aristide's Prime Minister and also the head of the Conseil Superieur de la Police Nationale d'Haiti -- a textbook series of war crimes took place.
Residents spoke of how Kenol St. Gilles, a carpenter with no political affiliation, was shot in each thigh, beaten unconscious by Bale Wouze members and thrown into a burning cement depot, where he died. Unarmed Ramicos member Leroy Joseph was decapitated, while Ramicos second-in-command Nixon François was simply shot. In the ruins of the burned-out commissariat, Bale Wouze members gang raped a 21-year-old woman, while other residents were gunned down by police firing from a helicopter as they tried to flee over a nearby mountain. A local priest told me matter-of-factly at the time of Bale Wouze that "these people don't make arrests, they kill."
According to a member of a Human Rights Watch delegation that visited Saint Marc a month after the killings, at least 27 people were murdered there between Feb. 11 and Aristide's flight into exile at the end of the month. Her conclusion was supported by the research of the Réseau National de Défense des Droits Humains, a Haitian human rights organization.
Following Aristide's overthrow, several members of Bale Wouze were lynched, while Yvon Neptune turned himself over to the interim government that ruled Haiti from March 2004 until the inauguration of President René Préval in May 2006.
Held in prison without trial until his May 2006 release on humanitarian grounds, a May 2008 decision by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights found the Haitian state had violated the American Convention on Human Rights in its detention of Neptune, though stressed that it was "not a criminal court in which the criminal responsibility of an individual can be examined." Neptune ran unsuccessfully for president in Haiti's 2010 elections.
After being jailed for three years without trial, Amanus Mayette was freed from prison in April 2007. Arrested in 2004, Ronald Dauphin subsequently escaped from jail, and was re-arrested during the course of an anti-kidnapping raid in Haiti's capital in July 2006. Despite several chaotic public hearings, to date, none of the accused for the killings in La Scierie has ever gone to trial.
Frustratingly for the people of St. Marc, far from being supported in their calls for justice, the events they experienced have become a political football among international political actors.
The United Nations independent expert on human rights in Haiti, Louis Joinet, in a 2005 statement dismissed allegations of a massacre and described what occurred as "a clash", a characterization that seemed unaware of the fact that not all among those victimized had any affiliation with Haiti's political opposition.
The Institute for Justice and Democracy (IJDH), a U.S.-based organization, has lauded Mr. Dauphin as "a Haitian grassroots activist." The IJDH itself maintains close links with Mr. Aristide's U.S. attorney, Ira Kurzban, who is listed as one of the group's founders, has served as the chairman of its board of directors and whose law firm, according to U.S. Department of Justice filings, earned nearly $5 million for its lobbying work alone representing the Aristide government during the era of its worst excesses. By comparison, the firm of former U.S. congressmen Ron Dellums received the relatively modest sum of $989,323 over the same period.
When I returned to St. Marc in June of 2009, I found its residents still wondering when someone would be held accountable for the terrible crimes they had been subjected to. Amazil Jean-Baptiste, the mother of Kenol St. Gilles, said simply, "I just want justice for my son." A local victim's rights group of survivors of the pogrom, the Association des Victimes du Génocide de la Scierie (AVIGES), formed to help advocate on residents' behalf, but have had precious little success in what passes for Haiti's justice system, broken and dysfunctional long before January 2010's devastating earthquake.
Though Mr. Aristide remains something of a fading star for a handful of commentators outside of Haiti -- most of whom have not spent significant time in the country, cannot speak its language and have never bothered to sit down with the victims of the Aristide government's crimes there -- to those of us who have seen a bit of its recent history firsthand, the words of veteran Trinidadian diplomat Reginald Dumas -- a man who does know Haiti -- seem apt, that Mr. Aristide "[acquired] for himself a reputation at home which did not match the great respect with which he was held abroad.''
The ICC has sometimes been criticized for acting as if war crimes and crimes against humanity are simply African problems, taking place in distant lands. The people of St. Marc, only a 90 minute flight from Miami, and the survivors of Forth Dimanche, know differently. Though Mr. Duvalier sadly cannot be tried by the ICC as the court only has jurisdiction with respect to crimes committed after the entry into force of Rome Statute, no such restrictions apply to Mr. Aristide.
It is time that the government of Haitian president Michel Martelly and Haiti's parliament ratify the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and give the victims of Haiti the justice that they have so long been denied.
After Charles Taylor, Justice for Haiti?
The Huffington Post
(Read the original article here)
The conviction today by the International Criminal Court (ICC) of former Liberian president Charles Taylor for aiding and abetting war crimes committed in neighboring Sierra Leone -- the first such conviction of a former head of state -- is a welcome development for those seeking to hold politicians accountable for their crimes.
Coming as it does on the heels of the conviction earlier this year of former Democratic Republic of Congo militia leader Thomas Lubanga for war crimes, the Taylor conviction represents a welcome completion of one of the ICC's missions.
To those of us who have seen the political convulsions of the Caribbean nation of Haiti first-hand over the years, the country makes a compelling case for attention by the ICC as perpetrators of human rights abuses often go unpunished or are even rehabilitated in subsequent governments.
Two of Haiti's former rulers, Jean-Claude Duvalier and Jean-Bertrand Aristide, returned to the country from exile early last year, and both stand accused of gross human rights abuses.
Duvalier, who took the helm of Haiti in 1971 as a rotund teenager following the death of his father, the dictator François Duvalier, presided over a police state where the national treasury was viewed as little more than a personal checking account and all political dissent was ruthlessly crushed. Perhaps the best symbol of his reign, which ended in 1986 amid a popular uprising, was a prison on the outskirts of the Haitian capital called Fort Dimanche, where thousands of enemies of the state were sent to die by execution, torture or to simply waste away amidst conditions that were an affront to humanity.
Mr. Aristide, one of the driving forces behind the movement that ousted Mr. Duvalier, is a former Catholic priest who twice served as Haiti's president and was twice ousted, once by a military coup and once by a popular uprising and armed rebellion. It was the abuses of Mr. Aristide's government that I witnessed first-hand.
In February 2004, in the midst of the chaotic second rebellion against Mr. Aristide's rule, the photojournalist Alex Smailes and I found ourselves in the central Haitian city of Saint Marc, at the time the last barrier between Aristide and a motley collection of once-loyal street gangs and former soldiers who were sweeping down from the country's north seeking to overthrow him.
Several days earlier, on Feb. 7, an armed anti-Aristide group, the Rassemblement des militants conséquents de Saint Marc (Ramicos), based in the neighborhood of La Scierie, had attempted to drive government forces from the town, seizing the local police station, which they set on fire.
On Feb. 9, the combined forces of the Police Nationale d'Haiti (PNH), the Unité de Sécurité de la Garde du Palais National (USGPN) -- a unit directly responsible for the president's personal security -- and a local paramilitary organization named Bale Wouze (Clean Sweep) retook much of the city.
By Feb. 11, a few days before our arrival, Bale Wouze -- headed by a former parliamentary representative of Aristide's Fanmi Lavalas political party named Amanus Mayette -- had commenced the battle to retake La Scierie. Often at Mayette's side was a government employee named Ronald Dauphin, known to residents as "Black Ronald," often garbed in a police uniform even though he was in no way officially employed by the police.
When Alex and I arrived in the town, we found the USGPN and Bale Wouze patrolling Saint Marc as a single armed unit. Speaking to residents there -- amidst a surreal backdrop of burned buildings, the stench of human decay, drunken gang members threatening our lives with firearms and a terrified population -- we soon realized that something awful had happened in Saint Marc.
According to multiple residents interviewed during that visit and a subsequent visit that I made to the town in June 2009, after government forces retook the town -- and after a press conference there by Yvon Neptune, at the time Aristide's Prime Minister and also the head of the Conseil Superieur de la Police Nationale d'Haiti -- a textbook series of war crimes took place.
Residents spoke of how Kenol St. Gilles, a carpenter with no political affiliation, was shot in each thigh, beaten unconscious by Bale Wouze members and thrown into a burning cement depot, where he died. Unarmed Ramicos member Leroy Joseph was decapitated, while Ramicos second-in-command Nixon François was simply shot. In the ruins of the burned-out commissariat, Bale Wouze members gang raped a 21-year-old woman, while other residents were gunned down by police firing from a helicopter as they tried to flee over a nearby mountain. A local priest told me matter-of-factly at the time of Bale Wouze that "these people don't make arrests, they kill."
According to a member of a Human Rights Watch delegation that visited Saint Marc a month after the killings, at least 27 people were murdered there between Feb. 11 and Aristide's flight into exile at the end of the month. Her conclusion was supported by the research of the Réseau National de Défense des Droits Humains, a Haitian human rights organization.
Following Aristide's overthrow, several members of Bale Wouze were lynched, while Yvon Neptune turned himself over to the interim government that ruled Haiti from March 2004 until the inauguration of President René Préval in May 2006.
Held in prison without trial until his May 2006 release on humanitarian grounds, a May 2008 decision by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights found the Haitian state had violated the American Convention on Human Rights in its detention of Neptune, though stressed that it was "not a criminal court in which the criminal responsibility of an individual can be examined." Neptune ran unsuccessfully for president in Haiti's 2010 elections.
After being jailed for three years without trial, Amanus Mayette was freed from prison in April 2007. Arrested in 2004, Ronald Dauphin subsequently escaped from jail, and was re-arrested during the course of an anti-kidnapping raid in Haiti's capital in July 2006. Despite several chaotic public hearings, to date, none of the accused for the killings in La Scierie has ever gone to trial.
Frustratingly for the people of St. Marc, far from being supported in their calls for justice, the events they experienced have become a political football among international political actors.
The United Nations independent expert on human rights in Haiti, Louis Joinet, in a 2005 statement dismissed allegations of a massacre and described what occurred as "a clash", a characterization that seemed unaware of the fact that not all among those victimized had any affiliation with Haiti's political opposition.
The Institute for Justice and Democracy (IJDH), a U.S.-based organization, has lauded Mr. Dauphin as "a Haitian grassroots activist." The IJDH itself maintains close links with Mr. Aristide's U.S. attorney, Ira Kurzban, who is listed as one of the group's founders, has served as the chairman of its board of directors and whose law firm, according to U.S. Department of Justice filings, earned nearly $5 million for its lobbying work alone representing the Aristide government during the era of its worst excesses. By comparison, the firm of former U.S. congressmen Ron Dellums received the relatively modest sum of $989,323 over the same period.
When I returned to St. Marc in June of 2009, I found its residents still wondering when someone would be held accountable for the terrible crimes they had been subjected to. Amazil Jean-Baptiste, the mother of Kenol St. Gilles, said simply, "I just want justice for my son." A local victim's rights group of survivors of the pogrom, the Association des Victimes du Génocide de la Scierie (AVIGES), formed to help advocate on residents' behalf, but have had precious little success in what passes for Haiti's justice system, broken and dysfunctional long before January 2010's devastating earthquake.
Though Mr. Aristide remains something of a fading star for a handful of commentators outside of Haiti -- most of whom have not spent significant time in the country, cannot speak its language and have never bothered to sit down with the victims of the Aristide government's crimes there -- to those of us who have seen a bit of its recent history firsthand, the words of veteran Trinidadian diplomat Reginald Dumas -- a man who does know Haiti -- seem apt, that Mr. Aristide "[acquired] for himself a reputation at home which did not match the great respect with which he was held abroad.''
The ICC has sometimes been criticized for acting as if war crimes and crimes against humanity are simply African problems, taking place in distant lands. The people of St. Marc, only a 90 minute flight from Miami, and the survivors of Forth Dimanche, know differently. Though Mr. Duvalier sadly cannot be tried by the ICC as the court only has jurisdiction with respect to crimes committed after the entry into force of Rome Statute, no such restrictions apply to Mr. Aristide.
It is time that the government of Haitian president Michel Martelly and Haiti's parliament ratify the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and give the victims of Haiti the justice that they have so long been denied.
Wednesday, April 04, 2012
The Story of the Acholi : A Village Tale from Uganda
(Note:
An incredible 2011 Artfully AWARE summer program led to the creation of our AfA storybook entitled The Story of the Acholi – A Village Tale from Uganda.
This was born out of a project that encouraged Acholi community members living in Gulu, northern Uganda to write, paint and perform about their personal stories consisting of family, positive health and peace & reconciliation after the 20 year civil war.
Our 56 page storybook is written in both English and Acholi languages, is full of colorful illustrations, displays photographs of participating community members and captures personal quotes about this intimate and ultimately empowering project. It is suitable for children over the age of five, and it makes a wonderful gift for friends and family, as well as a great educational resource for the classroom and at home.
100% of proceeds raised through the purchase of our book goes straight back into developing more educational arts programs for community members in Uganda to promote empowerment, support psychological well-being, increase self-esteem and enhance local capacity building.
Statement by Hilary Wallis, Founder and Executive Director of Artfully AWARE
"The illustrations were first created in 2008 in Tororo, and by August 2011, Gulu residents wrote their own personal recollections in diaries describing events they lived through. They painted scenes depicting their beautiful and sometimes harrowing tales. As a collective group, we combined the essays into one – to colorfully tell the story of the Acholi people."
"We hope this storybook will bring Ugandan readers closer together and allow the chance for others around the world to share in this experience, while learning about northern Uganda’s remarkable culture and its people.”
The Story of the Acholi – A Village Tale from Uganda was made possible through a strong collaboration between Artfully AWARE, Childcare and Development Organization and Karin Parents Association.
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Organizations You Can Support in Central Africa
Given my two recent articles on the discussion surrounding the American organization Invisible Children and their Joseph Kony campaign (which can be read here and here), several people have written to me to ask me what organizations in Central Africa I do recommend supporting. A brief but by no means complete list, arranged alphabetically, would include the following.
Africa Institute for Energy Governance
This Kampala-based organization works for an environment where energy resources are equitably used for social and economic development, and the Government of Uganda uses such resources for the benefit of the country's citizens.
Artfully AWARE
An NGO that has been working in Uganda since 2008 and whose motto is "Connect, Collaborate, Change," Artfully AWARE connects communities and collaborates with local actors through advocacy events and innovative community development projects mostly centered around the arts. The organization has recently put out a wonderful new book, The Story of the Acholi: A Village Tale from Uganda, which can be purchased here, and which helps to show the beauty and richness of Acholi life and culture, with lovely drawings and fable-like text from people in and around Gulu.
Human Rights Focus (HURIFO)
Since its inception in 1994, Gulu-based HURIFO has championed the cause of human rights in the conflict-affected area of Northern Uganda,
Pole Institute
The Pole Institute, based in Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo's North Kivu province, serves as a meeting ground for reflection and discussion about issues confronting the Great Lakes Region of Africa.
Voix des Sans-Voix
Kinshasa-based Voix des Sans-Voix (Voice of the Voiceless) is the Democratic Republic of Congo's premier human rights organization.
Water Governance Institute
As it's name suggests, the Kampala-based Water Governance Institute works to improve the access to and quality of water for all Ugandans.
Apologies to any groups that I may have forgotten, but I hope that this gives readers a good base for exploring groups demonstrating genuine solidarity with the people of Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Africa Institute for Energy Governance
This Kampala-based organization works for an environment where energy resources are equitably used for social and economic development, and the Government of Uganda uses such resources for the benefit of the country's citizens.
Artfully AWARE
An NGO that has been working in Uganda since 2008 and whose motto is "Connect, Collaborate, Change," Artfully AWARE connects communities and collaborates with local actors through advocacy events and innovative community development projects mostly centered around the arts. The organization has recently put out a wonderful new book, The Story of the Acholi: A Village Tale from Uganda, which can be purchased here, and which helps to show the beauty and richness of Acholi life and culture, with lovely drawings and fable-like text from people in and around Gulu.
Human Rights Focus (HURIFO)
Since its inception in 1994, Gulu-based HURIFO has championed the cause of human rights in the conflict-affected area of Northern Uganda,
Pole Institute
The Pole Institute, based in Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo's North Kivu province, serves as a meeting ground for reflection and discussion about issues confronting the Great Lakes Region of Africa.
Voix des Sans-Voix
Kinshasa-based Voix des Sans-Voix (Voice of the Voiceless) is the Democratic Republic of Congo's premier human rights organization.
Water Governance Institute
As it's name suggests, the Kampala-based Water Governance Institute works to improve the access to and quality of water for all Ugandans.
Apologies to any groups that I may have forgotten, but I hope that this gives readers a good base for exploring groups demonstrating genuine solidarity with the people of Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Sunday, March 18, 2012
Thursday, March 15, 2012
Some important articles on Invisible Children and Kony 2012
Links to a few useful articles examining the Kony 2012 campaign, Uganda, human rights and Central Africa in general follow, arranged chronologically. All best, MD
7 March 2012
The Problem With Invisible Children's "Kony 2012"
By Michael Deibert
The Huffington Post
7 March 2012
A Ugandan female blogger responds to Kony2012 campaign.
You Tube
9 March 2012
Former child soldier "totally disagrees with approach of military action as a means to end this conflict."
National Geographic
9 March 2012
Kony 2012 Won't Change the Lives of Ugandans
By Adam Branch
Dissent Magazine
9 March 2012
How Invisible Children's Kony 2012 Will Hurt - And How You Can Help - Central Africa
By Michael Deibert
Huffington Post
12 March 2012
Kony2012: should have advocated for dialogue and not military option
The Acholi Times
14 Mar 2012
Kony screening provokes anger in Uganda
Ugandans, who suffered at hands of Lord's Resistance Army, react in anger at Kony video causing internet waves.
Al Jazeera
15 March 2012
Uganda screenings of Kony film halted after protests
Agence France Presse
15 March 2012
Kony: What’s to be done?
African Arguments
15 March 2012
“KONY 2012” and the Magic of International Relations
e-International Relations
20 March 2012
Kony Is Not the Problem
By Angelo Izama
The New York Times
20 March 2012
How Kony survives and Obasanjo’s one man peace mission
African Arguments
16 April 2012
Kony 2012 screening in Gulu leaves One dead and many injured
Acholi Times
20 April 2012
Critic: 'Communities are trying to heal broken hearts, but Invisible Children want to plaster Kony's face everywhere'
The Guardian
7 March 2012
The Problem With Invisible Children's "Kony 2012"
By Michael Deibert
The Huffington Post
7 March 2012
A Ugandan female blogger responds to Kony2012 campaign.
You Tube
9 March 2012
Former child soldier "totally disagrees with approach of military action as a means to end this conflict."
National Geographic
9 March 2012
Kony 2012 Won't Change the Lives of Ugandans
By Adam Branch
Dissent Magazine
9 March 2012
How Invisible Children's Kony 2012 Will Hurt - And How You Can Help - Central Africa
By Michael Deibert
Huffington Post
12 March 2012
Kony2012: should have advocated for dialogue and not military option
The Acholi Times
14 Mar 2012
Kony screening provokes anger in Uganda
Ugandans, who suffered at hands of Lord's Resistance Army, react in anger at Kony video causing internet waves.
Al Jazeera
15 March 2012
Uganda screenings of Kony film halted after protests
Agence France Presse
15 March 2012
Kony: What’s to be done?
African Arguments
15 March 2012
“KONY 2012” and the Magic of International Relations
e-International Relations
20 March 2012
Kony Is Not the Problem
By Angelo Izama
The New York Times
20 March 2012
How Kony survives and Obasanjo’s one man peace mission
African Arguments
16 April 2012
Kony 2012 screening in Gulu leaves One dead and many injured
Acholi Times
20 April 2012
Critic: 'Communities are trying to heal broken hearts, but Invisible Children want to plaster Kony's face everywhere'
The Guardian
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Michael Deibert and George Ayittey on Voice of Russia
George Ayittey, president of the Free African Foundation, and I were interviewed on Voice of Russia yesterday about the Kony 2012 campaign and issues surrounding democracy, governance, security and human rights in Africa. You can listen to full interview here. If I sound a little out of breath it's because I was moving furniture and boxes into my new apartment while on the air. All best, MD
Friday, March 09, 2012
How Invisible Children's Kony 2012 Will Hurt - And How You Can Help - Central Africa
How Invisible Children's Kony 2012 Will Hurt - And How You Can Help - Central Africa
The Huffington Post
(Read the original article here)
Posted: 03/ 9/2012 12:10 pm
The Huffington Post
(Read the original article here)
Posted: 03/ 9/2012 12:10 pm
Earlier this week, I wrote an essay outlining what I viewed as some of the problems with the "Kony 2012" campaign spearheaded by the American NGO Invisible Children.
The campaign and accompanying film advocate -- via technological assistance, training and the presence of United States military personnel throughout Central Africa -- for military support of the government of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, ostensibly to facilitate the arrest of Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) rebel group and an accused war criminal indicted by the International Criminal Court.
To anyone who has spent time in Central Africa in general and Uganda in particular, this appears to be a road fraught with peril. In response to several requests that I elaborate further on the problems of this approach and a possibly more constructive approach, I offer the following.
There are several instances of blatant dishonesty in the film that immediately catch one's eye and trouble one's conscience.
The first is the inference that in the Uganda of today thousands of children are continuing their grim sojourns as night commuters to escape the violence of the LRA. With the LRA's presence in Northern Uganda having essentially evaporated by the end of 2006, the use of images of the bodies of thousands of sleeping children -- who may or may not have consented to be filmed -- attempts to convince the viewer that the crisis of overt violence in Northern Uganda is ongoing, and thus necessitating direct military action. As the organization spent $1,859,617 on travel and filmmaking last year (out of total expenses of $8,894,630) one would think Invisible Children could have shown a more current (and accurate) picture of Northern Uganda and the organizations there working to improve it.
Also troubling is the film's depiction of Lieutenant Okot Santo Lapolo. A Museveni loyalist who serves as a Resident District Commissioner (RDC) in the Acholi region, Santo Lapolo is perhaps better known for harassing and threatening government critics in the press in the region than opining on human rights. When Invisible Children interview him, however, Santo Lapolo is described simply as a "politician," with no mention of his role as an éminence gris for the regime.
This is alas part and parcel of the film's and the organization's whitewashing of the highly tortured history and legacy of the Museveni government in Central Africa, a government that has done some good things for the country but which also, through reckless military adventurism and a hunger to retain power, has routinely trampled on the values of human rights that Invisible Children claims to champion.
The Museveni government has been undergoing a serious crisis of legitimacy since at least 2001, when the Supreme Court of Uganda, while upholding the vote in presidential elections that year, also found that "the principle of free and fair election was compromised." The situation deteriorated further in 2006 when elections were marked by what observers called "serious irregularities and significant shortcomings." In 2011 elections, the National Resistance Movement -- Museveni's political party -- handed out money and gifts, intimidated political opponents and in general behaved in a way that seriously called into question the validity of the final results.
Over the last year, large scale protests against alleged political corruption and economic mismanagement have occurred in Uganda's capital, Kampala, many aligned with the Forum for Democratic Change led by Kizza Besigye, a doctor and former soldier as well as a former Museveni ally-turned-critic. Government security forces have treated the protests brutally, with at least 10 people dying and several hundred disappearing into jail during the demonstrations last year.
Beyond Congo's borders, in addition to its military actions in Somalia (where Uganda's army is essentially fighting a proxy war for Western powers against Islamist militias in that country,) Uganda's army also still has yet to answer for its actions following its late 1990s invasion of the Democratic Republic of Congo (then Zaire) alongside Rwanda and a hastily-cobbled together Congolese rebel movement.
In the wars that followed, the Museveni government was the key military backer of the Mouvement de libération du Congo (MLC), a Congolese rebel movement led by Jean-Pierre Bemba, who is currently on trial at the International Criminal Court at the Hague -- the same body that indicted Kony -- for crimes against humanity and war crimes.
In addition to the MLC, the Museveni government also actively supported a faction of the Rassemblement Congolais pour la Démocratie (RCD) and the Union des Patriotes Congolais (UPC), both of whom were implicated in the grossest human rights abuses. One former UPC chieftain, Thomas Lubanga, is currently on trial at the Hague, charged with using child soldiers, while another former leader of the group, Bosco Ntaganda, nicknamed The Terminator and also an indicted war criminal, is now a power broker in the eastern Congolese province of North Kivu and a lynchpin of the regional détente between Congolese President Joseph Kabila (himself re-elected in a controversial ballot last year) and Museveni's erstwhile ally-turned-rival, Rwanda President Paul Kagame.
Then there is the history of high-level attempts to crush the LRA itself.
In December 2008, seventeen U.S. military advisers provided logistics, communications, and intelligence support for the Ugandan and Congolese army's Operation Lightning Thunder, an attempt to nab Kony which failed. In the weeks that followed, the LRA descended on several Congolese villages, killing hundreds of people and kidnapping over 100 children from communities left defenseless against the LRA's desire for vengeance.
What is the system of protection that Invisible Children advocates for communities such as these put in the line of fire by the military operations the group advocates? Invisible Children is silent on this score.
This, then, is the context that Invisible Children advocates further militarizing.
Complicating matters still further, the push for an increased military presence in Central Africa comes after the discovery of one billion barrels of potential oil reserves in the country, with an estimated 1 to 1.5 billion barrels yet to be located.
Last month, London-based Tullow Oil signed two $2.9 billion production sharing agreements with the Museveni government, despite the fact that Uganda's parliament had concluded that there should be a complete moratorium on oil-related activity until new laws were put in place (Uganda's Petroleum Exploration and Production Act dates from 1985). Security for the installations is being provided by a military unit closely linked to the president.
Reactions to the Invisible Children campaign from Uganda itself have been telling.
Writing in the newspaper The Independent, Ugandan writer Musa Okwonga suggested that Invisible Children should have let their viewers know that "when a bad guy like Kony is running riot for years on end, raping and slashing and seizing and shooting, then there is most likely another host of bad guys out there letting him get on with it. "
On the Project Diaspora site, one writer accused Invisible Children of being "a self-aware machine that must continually find a reason to be relevant....selling themselves as the issue, as the subject, as the panacea for everything that ails me as the agency-devoid African. "
How Invisible Children can push for the measures it has and remain eligible for tax-exempt status as an organization under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code -- which states that such an organization may not participate in any campaign activity for or against political candidates -- would seem to remain something a mystery.
A refrain that is often repeated by Invisible Children's supporters is that the organization's goal is not to "get bogged down by history" but rather to "raise awareness" thus leading to "action." But what kind of action can come in Central Africa if one ignores the region's history?
So then, the line of reasoning goes, what is to be done? If not by supporting Invisible Children's campaign -- intentional or not -- to reinforce the Museveni government's hold on power, then how can those who have been inspired and moved by the plight of those suffering in Central Africa ameliorate the situation of those in greatest need?
Despite living under a rapidly ossifying authoritarianism, Uganda still has a vibrant civil society made up of and working for the empowerment of Ugandans, with a number of organizations that are worthy of any support we can give them.
In Northern Uganda itself, the group Human Rights Focus has labored for years and produced detailed reports on the the conflict there far more nuanced and accurate than anything Invisible Children has ever put out.
Elsewhere, as government officials and foreign investors lick their lips at the promise of an oil boom, groups such as the Africa Institute for Energy Governance and the Water Governance Institute are doing important work to hold both Uganda's politicians and their foreign partners accountable to the Ugandan people.
Further afield, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, groups such as the Goma-based Pole Institute and the late, heroic Floribert Chebeya's Voix des Sans-Voix work to defend the rights of the Congolese under the most difficult of conditions.
These are organizations led by people who risk their lives every day standing up to the Musevenis, the Kagames and the Kabilas of the world.
Likewise, by working with local organizations to strengthen the government of South Sudan, a region that the LRA long used as a redoubt and whose rapid disintegration the group is no doubt praying for to give it another refuge closer to home, would also be an extremely productive use of the time of those outside of the region who wish to help.
If the people who have been moved by the Kony 2012 campaign truly want to help Africa, they must start by learning about and supporting the struggles of the Africans themselves. This is their fight, this is their history, these are their countries. Not ours. The citizens of Africa must write their own future from within their own borders. We cannot do it for then.
Follow Michael Deibert on Twitter: www.twitter.com/michaelcdeibert
Thursday, March 08, 2012
The Problem with Invisible Children's "Kony 2012"
7 March 2012
The Problem with Invisible Children's "Kony 2012"
By Michael Deibert
The Huffington Post
(Read the original article here)
Recently, a new video produced by the American NGO Invisible Children focusing on Joseph Kony and the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) has been making the rounds. Having just returned from the Acholi region of Northern Uganda myself, where the LRA was born, I thought I might share some of my thoughts on the subject, for what it's worth.
I think it is easy for Invisible Children and other self-aggrandizing foreigners to make the entire story of the last 30 years of Northern Uganda about Joseph Kony, but there is a history of the relationship between the Acholi people from whom the LRA emerged and the central government in Kampala that is a little more complicated than that.
Kony is a grotesque war criminal, to be sure, but the Ugandan government currently in power also came to power through the use of kadogo (child soldiers) and fought alongside militias employing child soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo, something that Invisible Children seem wilfully ignorant of.
The conflict in Acholi -- the ancestral homeland of the ethnic group who stretch across northern Uganda and southern Sudan - has its roots in Uganda's history of dictatorship and political turmoil. A large number of soldiers serving in the government of dictator Milton Obote (who ruled Uganda from April 1965-January 1971 and then again from December 1980-July 1985) came from across northern Uganda, with the Acholis being particularly well represented, even though Obote himself hailed from the Lango ethnic group. When Obote was overthrown by his own military commanders, an ethnic Acholi, General Tito Okello, became president for six chaotic months until Yoweri Museveni's National Resistance Army took over. Museveni became president, and has since remained so, via elections -- some legitimate, some deeply flawed.
Upon taking power, the Museveni government launched a brutal search and destroy mission against former government soldiers throughout the north, which swept up many ordinary Acholi in its wake. Some Acholi began mobilizing to defend themselves, first under the banner of the Uganda People's Democratic Army (largely made up of former soldiers) and then the Holy Spirit Movement.
This movement, directed by Alice Auma, an Acholi who claimed to be acting on guidance from the spirit Lakwena, brought a mystical belief in their own invincibility that the soldiers of the Kampala-based government at first found terrifying: Holy Spirit Movement devotees walked headlong into blazing gunfire singing songs and holding stones they believed would turn into grenades. The movement succeeded in reaching Jinja, just 80km from the capital Kampala, before being decimated by Museveni's forces.
Out of this slaughter was born the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), led by Joseph Kony, a distant relative of Alice Auma. Kony added an additional element of targeting civilian Acholi to his schismatic blend of Christianity, frequently kidnapping children and adolescents to serve in his rebel movement. The Museveni government responded by viewing all Acholi as potential collaborators, rounding them up into camps euphemistically called "protected villages", where they were vulnerable to disease and social ills, and had few ways to carry on their traditional farming.
The LRA's policy of targeting civilians (though not the Museveni government's draconian measures) eventually drew international condemnation and in 2005 the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants against Joseph Kony and several other seniors LRA commanders for crimes against humanity and war crimes. Ironically, one of those commanders, Dominic Ongwen, was himself kidnapped by the LRA while still a small boy.
After peace talks between the LRA and the Ugandan government collapsed in 2007, the group decamped from its bases in southern Sudan to the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic.
Following the end of negotiations, the Museveni government launched its Peace Recovery and Development Plan (PRDP), an effort to stabilize northern Uganda after years of war. Since then, according to the United Nations 98% of internally displaced persons have moved on from the camps that once sheltered hundreds of thousands of frightened people.
Despite criticisms from the Acholi that the government's program has been insufficient, local initiatives and the work of some foreign organizations have helped restore a sense of normality and gradual progress to the region, with people returned to their homes and travel between once off-limits parts of the region now facilitated with relative ease.
Now a thousand miles from the cradle of their insurgency, the LRA would appear to have little hope of returning to Uganda, though their potential to wreak havoc on civilians remains little diminished. In Congo's Haut-Uele province, between December 2008 and January 2009, the LRA massacred 620 civilians and abducted more than 160 children; and a year later they returned and killed 321 and abducted another 250 people in December 2009.
In October 2011, U.S. President Barack Obama announced that he was sending 100 Special Forces soldiers to help the Ugandans hunt down Kony. By the end of the year, the Ugandan army confirmed that the troops had moved along with the Ugandan army to Obo in the Central African Republic and Nzara in South Sudan.
The problem with Invisible Children's whitewashing of the role of the government of Uganda's president Yoweri Museveni in the violence of Central Africa is that it gives Museveni and company a free pass, and added ammunition with which to bludgeon virtually any domestic opposition, such as Kizza Besigye and the Forum for Democratic Change.
By blindly supporting Uganda's current government and its military adventures beyond its borders, as Invisible Children suggests that people do, Invisible Children is in fact guaranteeing that there will be more violence, not less, in Central Africa.
I have seen the well-meaning foreigners do plenty of damage before, so that is why people understanding the context and the history of the region is important before they blunder blindly forward to "help" a people they don't understand.
U.S. President Bill Clinton professed that he was "helping" in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the 1990s and his help ended up with over 6 million people losing their lives.
The same mistake should not be repeated today.
Michael Deibert is a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Peace and Reconciliation Studies at Coventry University and the author of the forthcoming Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair (Zed Books).
The Problem with Invisible Children's "Kony 2012"
By Michael Deibert
The Huffington Post
(Read the original article here)
Recently, a new video produced by the American NGO Invisible Children focusing on Joseph Kony and the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) has been making the rounds. Having just returned from the Acholi region of Northern Uganda myself, where the LRA was born, I thought I might share some of my thoughts on the subject, for what it's worth.
I think it is easy for Invisible Children and other self-aggrandizing foreigners to make the entire story of the last 30 years of Northern Uganda about Joseph Kony, but there is a history of the relationship between the Acholi people from whom the LRA emerged and the central government in Kampala that is a little more complicated than that.
Kony is a grotesque war criminal, to be sure, but the Ugandan government currently in power also came to power through the use of kadogo (child soldiers) and fought alongside militias employing child soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo, something that Invisible Children seem wilfully ignorant of.
The conflict in Acholi -- the ancestral homeland of the ethnic group who stretch across northern Uganda and southern Sudan - has its roots in Uganda's history of dictatorship and political turmoil. A large number of soldiers serving in the government of dictator Milton Obote (who ruled Uganda from April 1965-January 1971 and then again from December 1980-July 1985) came from across northern Uganda, with the Acholis being particularly well represented, even though Obote himself hailed from the Lango ethnic group. When Obote was overthrown by his own military commanders, an ethnic Acholi, General Tito Okello, became president for six chaotic months until Yoweri Museveni's National Resistance Army took over. Museveni became president, and has since remained so, via elections -- some legitimate, some deeply flawed.
Upon taking power, the Museveni government launched a brutal search and destroy mission against former government soldiers throughout the north, which swept up many ordinary Acholi in its wake. Some Acholi began mobilizing to defend themselves, first under the banner of the Uganda People's Democratic Army (largely made up of former soldiers) and then the Holy Spirit Movement.
This movement, directed by Alice Auma, an Acholi who claimed to be acting on guidance from the spirit Lakwena, brought a mystical belief in their own invincibility that the soldiers of the Kampala-based government at first found terrifying: Holy Spirit Movement devotees walked headlong into blazing gunfire singing songs and holding stones they believed would turn into grenades. The movement succeeded in reaching Jinja, just 80km from the capital Kampala, before being decimated by Museveni's forces.
Out of this slaughter was born the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), led by Joseph Kony, a distant relative of Alice Auma. Kony added an additional element of targeting civilian Acholi to his schismatic blend of Christianity, frequently kidnapping children and adolescents to serve in his rebel movement. The Museveni government responded by viewing all Acholi as potential collaborators, rounding them up into camps euphemistically called "protected villages", where they were vulnerable to disease and social ills, and had few ways to carry on their traditional farming.
The LRA's policy of targeting civilians (though not the Museveni government's draconian measures) eventually drew international condemnation and in 2005 the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants against Joseph Kony and several other seniors LRA commanders for crimes against humanity and war crimes. Ironically, one of those commanders, Dominic Ongwen, was himself kidnapped by the LRA while still a small boy.
After peace talks between the LRA and the Ugandan government collapsed in 2007, the group decamped from its bases in southern Sudan to the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic.
Following the end of negotiations, the Museveni government launched its Peace Recovery and Development Plan (PRDP), an effort to stabilize northern Uganda after years of war. Since then, according to the United Nations 98% of internally displaced persons have moved on from the camps that once sheltered hundreds of thousands of frightened people.
Despite criticisms from the Acholi that the government's program has been insufficient, local initiatives and the work of some foreign organizations have helped restore a sense of normality and gradual progress to the region, with people returned to their homes and travel between once off-limits parts of the region now facilitated with relative ease.
Now a thousand miles from the cradle of their insurgency, the LRA would appear to have little hope of returning to Uganda, though their potential to wreak havoc on civilians remains little diminished. In Congo's Haut-Uele province, between December 2008 and January 2009, the LRA massacred 620 civilians and abducted more than 160 children; and a year later they returned and killed 321 and abducted another 250 people in December 2009.
In October 2011, U.S. President Barack Obama announced that he was sending 100 Special Forces soldiers to help the Ugandans hunt down Kony. By the end of the year, the Ugandan army confirmed that the troops had moved along with the Ugandan army to Obo in the Central African Republic and Nzara in South Sudan.
The problem with Invisible Children's whitewashing of the role of the government of Uganda's president Yoweri Museveni in the violence of Central Africa is that it gives Museveni and company a free pass, and added ammunition with which to bludgeon virtually any domestic opposition, such as Kizza Besigye and the Forum for Democratic Change.
By blindly supporting Uganda's current government and its military adventures beyond its borders, as Invisible Children suggests that people do, Invisible Children is in fact guaranteeing that there will be more violence, not less, in Central Africa.
I have seen the well-meaning foreigners do plenty of damage before, so that is why people understanding the context and the history of the region is important before they blunder blindly forward to "help" a people they don't understand.
U.S. President Bill Clinton professed that he was "helping" in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the 1990s and his help ended up with over 6 million people losing their lives.
The same mistake should not be repeated today.
Michael Deibert is a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Peace and Reconciliation Studies at Coventry University and the author of the forthcoming Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair (Zed Books).
Wednesday, March 07, 2012
Notes on Invisible Children's "Kony 2012"
Lately, a new video produced by the American NGO Invisible Children focusing on Joseph Kony and the Lord's Resistance Army has been making the rounds. Having just returned from the Acholi region of Northern Uganda myself, where the LRA was born, I thought I might share some of my thoughts on the subject, for what it's worth.
I think it is easy for Invisible Children and other self-aggrandizing foreigners to make the entire story of the last 30 years of Northern Uganda about Joseph Kony, but there is a history of the relationship between the Acholi people and the central government in Kampala that is a little more complicated than that. Kony is a grotesque war criminal, to be sure, but the Ugandan government currently in power also came to power through the use of kadogo (child soldiers) and fought alongside militias employing child soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo, something that Invisible Children seem wilfully ignorant of.
I think it is easy for Invisible Children and other self-aggrandizing foreigners to make the entire story of the last 30 years of Northern Uganda about Joseph Kony, but there is a history of the relationship between the Acholi people and the central government in Kampala that is a little more complicated than that. Kony is a grotesque war criminal, to be sure, but the Ugandan government currently in power also came to power through the use of kadogo (child soldiers) and fought alongside militias employing child soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo, something that Invisible Children seem wilfully ignorant of.
The problem with Invisible Children's whitewashing of the role of the government of Uganda's president Yoweri Museveni in the violence of Central Africa is that it gives Museveni and company a free pass, and added ammunition with which to bludgeon virtually any domestic opposition (people like Kizza Besigye and the Forum for Democratic Change, for example).
By blindly supporting Uganda's current government and its military adventures beyond its borders, as Invisible Children suggests that people do, Invisible Children is in fact guaranteeing that there will be more violence, not less, in Central Africa.
I have seen the well-meaning white person do plenty of damage before, most notably in Haiti, so that is why people understanding the context and the history of the region is important before they blunder blindly forward to "help" a people they don't understand. Bill Clinton thought he was "helping" in DRC in the 1990s and his help ended up with over 6 million people losing their lives.
By blindly supporting Uganda's current government and its military adventures beyond its borders, as Invisible Children suggests that people do, Invisible Children is in fact guaranteeing that there will be more violence, not less, in Central Africa.
I have seen the well-meaning white person do plenty of damage before, most notably in Haiti, so that is why people understanding the context and the history of the region is important before they blunder blindly forward to "help" a people they don't understand. Bill Clinton thought he was "helping" in DRC in the 1990s and his help ended up with over 6 million people losing their lives.
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
North Kivu’s False Peace
North Kivu’s False Peace
By Michael Deibert
February 29, 2012
African Arguments
(Read the original here)
At first glance today, things in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s eastern North Kivu province seem far calmer than in years past.
As recently as 2008, a rebel group, the Congrès National pour la Défense du Peuple (CNDP) under the command of renegade general Laurent Nkunda, controlled sizable swaths of the territory, especially around the area of Masisi in North Kivu’s south-eastern corner.
Nkunda, a Congolese Tutsi from North Kivu’s Rutshuru territory and a former commander in the Rwanda-backed Goma faction of the Rassemblement Congolais pour la Démocratie (RCD) rebel group, seemed poised to attack the provincial capital of Goma at any time.
Travelling much beyond the town of Sake, 25 km to Goma’s northwest, was a complicated endeavour, as the CNDP had battled the forces of Congo’s president Joseph Kabila fiercely for Sake in November 2006 before withdrawing in defeat. At the time, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimated that some 800,000 people had been displaced by fighting in the province.
Since those dark days, much has changed in eastern North Kivu.
In January 2009, Rwanda’s government, long believed to be the CNDP’s key backer in its vying for regional advantage, announced that they had arrested Nkunda on Rwandan territory. This event took place shortly after the CNDP had begun to splinter, with one high-ranking member, Bosco Ntaganda, advocating dialogue and détente with the Kabila government.
Since then, a bitter pill scenario has seen Kabila, in power in Congo since the 2001 assassination of his father, Laurent Kabila, cede influence and control of much of the eastern part of the vast, mineral-rich country to Rwanda and its proxies, with the Rwandan army now allowed to enter Congolese territory in hot pursuit of the Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda (FDLR), the main Hutu-led military opposition to Rwanda’s Tutsi-led government. The FDLR has its roots in Rwanda’s 1994 genocide when nearly 1 million Tutsis and Hutu moderates were slaughtered by extremist Hutu supremacist elements.
The CNDP, for its part, has now become a registered political party and has seen its forces integrated with the official armed forces, the Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo (FARDC), and its chieftain, Bosco Ntaganda, has become an important powerbroker in Goma.
All is not as it appears, however.
Beyond simple integration, the Congolese army in eastern Congo is now dominated by the CNDP, much to the chagrin of other armed groups such as the government’s erstwhile allies in the Patriotes Resistants Congolais (PARECO) – a loose umbrella of paramilitary organizations who also have been gradually entering the official security forces.
A significant breakaway movement, the Alliance des Patriotes pour un Congo Libre et Souverain (APCLS) led by ‘General’ Janvier Buingo Karairi and mostly consisting of members of the Hunde ethnic group, broke off from the larger PARECO configuration in April 2008, and has thus far refused integration.
During Congo’s deeply-flawed general elections last year, which saw Kabila returned to office ahead of his main rival, long-time opposition figure Étienne Tshisekedi, Human Rights Watch recounted how in some villages in Masisi, voters were compelled by the presence of former CNDP rebels at polling stations to vote for Kabila and CNDP candidate Bahati Ibatunganya.
In the run-up to last November’s vote, Fabrice Mumpfiritsa, a well-known Hunde singer, was kidnapped in Goma and found days later, injured but alive. Formerly a Kabila partisan, Mumpfiritsa had grown disenchanted with the president and began vocally supporting Kabila’s local opposition.
Visiting North Kivu again this month, it soon became apparent to me that, after being in office for over a decade, Kabila, though once having strong support in the east, has brought precious little development to this part of Congo.
An entrepreneur in Goma with extensive contacts within both the CNDP and the government told me that “the state has a symbolic presence in North Kivu today, nothing more.” A high-ranking official in an international organization that has long had a presence in the province referred to the system of governance that has been put into place as being “like a mafia…Whoever doesn’t side with (the CNDP), doesn’t agree or says something in opposition will be intimidated, or eventually put under house arrest or killed.”
It would have been hard for the Congolese and Rwandan governments to have found a more poisonous and tainted proxy than Bosco Ntaganda.
In January 2006, Ntaganda was indicted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague for three counts of war crimes that allegedly occurred while he was helping to command the Forces Patriotiques pour la Libération du Congo (FPLC) in Congo’s Ituri region during the early part of the last decade, a time during which he earned the sobriquet “the Terminator.”
The FPLC itself grew out of the Union des Patriotes Congolais (UPC), an armed group that claimed to champion the cause of the pastoralist Hema ethnic group against that of the agriculturalist Lendu, the very kind of apocalyptic ethnic politics that Ntaganda would also engage in with the CNDP in North Kivu.
The fighting in Ituri killed an estimated 60,000 people.
In a letter from the Group of Experts on Congo to the United Nations Security Council dated 18 October 2011, the group found that since his reintegration into the Congolese army, Ntaganda has continued to collaborate “with East African regional networks of dealers selling both real and counterfeit gold to international buyers.”
Troublingly, and as if to underline its occupant’s ultimate fealty to Kigali, Ntaganda’s Goma residence is situated on a lane that crosses directly over a neutral zone to Gisenyi, Rwanda, just across the border. According to a December 2011 United Nations Security Council report, Ntaganda crossed into Rwanda at least twice, in March and September of 2011, despite an ostensible travel ban imposed on him.
As before, the region’s politics remain nothing if not maddeningly complex and unsuited to the international community’s often one-size-fits-all approach to peace-building.
Surrounding Congo, in neighbouring Uganda, President Yoweri Museveni, who in 1986 told his country that “the problem of Africa in general and Uganda in particular is not the people but leaders who want to overstay in power” now enters his 27th year as the country’s president, having secured his current term through particularly controversial elections in February 2011.
Over the last year, several large scale protests against alleged political corruption and economic mismanagement have occurred in Uganda’s capital, Kampala, many aligned with the Forum for Democratic Change led by Kizza Besigye, a doctor and former soldier as well as a former Museveni ally turned critic.
In Rwanda, President Paul Kagame has solidified a tight-lidded dictatorship over the country based upon what the French academic Gérard Prunier has characterized as “passive acceptance of undivided Tutsi power over an obedient Hutu mass.” Government critics meet either death, (opposition politician Andre Kagwa Rwisereka, killed in Rwanda in July 2011), exile (former general Kayumba Nyamwasa, wounded in a shooting in South Africa in June 2010) or both (Inyenyeri News editor Charles Ingabire, shot dead in Kampala last December).
Throughout North Kivu itself, things remain tense, and the region’s civilian population continues to be at risk.
This month, around Masisi alone I spoke to residents of displaced person camps such as Kalinga (population 4,551), Bihito (5,742) and Bukombo (3,338), some of whom have been living in the most squalid of conditions for up to five years. Across the border in Kisoro, Uganda, I found around 2,000 refugees who had fled fighting between the FDLR and militia elements in Rutshuru camped in the shadow of Mount Muhabura. It is a situation replicated in hundreds of registered and unregistered displaced persons settlements throughout the province.
In the township of Bisie in North Kivu’s Walikale territory – which remains a stronghold of the FDLR – an illegal mine producing cassiterite, which is eventually turned into tin, has been giving up its bounty to an ever-shifting array of armed groups for a number of years. In villages and displaced persons camps such as those in Masisi, a sense of deep resentment against both the broken promises and lack of development offered by the Kabila government, and what some residents see as the growing Rwandanization of eastern Congo, continues to fester. Armed groups, particularly those flowing from former PARECO elements, continue to form, break apart and re-form in a dizzying array of alliances that the international community, patting itself on the back for its “success” in eastern Congo, seems ill placed to address should the tension once again flare into large-scale open violence.
By turning the other way as North Kivu in general and Goma in particular have become, with Kigali’s connivance, a virtual fiefdom of Bosco Ntaganda’s CNDP, the international community, including the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Congo (known by its acronym, MONUSCO), are not guaranteeing peace in North Kivu. They are in fact fanning the embers for the potential eruption of a new conflict in the province.
The belief that the more territory held by the Kabila government’s FARDC and CNDP allies equals more stability in the long-term may very well prove to be sadly mistaken, and MONUSCO is currently in danger of being perceived as dangerously partisan to a government and military of questionable popular legitimacy.
By ceding an axis of influence in the east to Rwanda, Kabila may have indeed rid himself of the immediate problem of the CNDP armed insurgency, but the group’s subtle takeover of the province has helped to plant the seeds for enmities and resentment that could lead to an even greater crisis in the future.
It is important that all international actors speak out against the abuses being committed with official sanction in North Kivu today, and to hold the state actors behind them, whether they be in Kinshasa or Kigali, accountable for the crimes of those who act in their name. Without such accountability, lasting peace in North Kivu would seem to remain a distant dream.
Michael Deibert is a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Peace and Reconciliation Studies at Coventry University and the author of the forthcoming Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair (Zed Books).
By Michael Deibert
February 29, 2012
African Arguments
(Read the original here)
At first glance today, things in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s eastern North Kivu province seem far calmer than in years past.
As recently as 2008, a rebel group, the Congrès National pour la Défense du Peuple (CNDP) under the command of renegade general Laurent Nkunda, controlled sizable swaths of the territory, especially around the area of Masisi in North Kivu’s south-eastern corner.
Nkunda, a Congolese Tutsi from North Kivu’s Rutshuru territory and a former commander in the Rwanda-backed Goma faction of the Rassemblement Congolais pour la Démocratie (RCD) rebel group, seemed poised to attack the provincial capital of Goma at any time.
Travelling much beyond the town of Sake, 25 km to Goma’s northwest, was a complicated endeavour, as the CNDP had battled the forces of Congo’s president Joseph Kabila fiercely for Sake in November 2006 before withdrawing in defeat. At the time, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimated that some 800,000 people had been displaced by fighting in the province.
Since those dark days, much has changed in eastern North Kivu.
In January 2009, Rwanda’s government, long believed to be the CNDP’s key backer in its vying for regional advantage, announced that they had arrested Nkunda on Rwandan territory. This event took place shortly after the CNDP had begun to splinter, with one high-ranking member, Bosco Ntaganda, advocating dialogue and détente with the Kabila government.
Since then, a bitter pill scenario has seen Kabila, in power in Congo since the 2001 assassination of his father, Laurent Kabila, cede influence and control of much of the eastern part of the vast, mineral-rich country to Rwanda and its proxies, with the Rwandan army now allowed to enter Congolese territory in hot pursuit of the Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda (FDLR), the main Hutu-led military opposition to Rwanda’s Tutsi-led government. The FDLR has its roots in Rwanda’s 1994 genocide when nearly 1 million Tutsis and Hutu moderates were slaughtered by extremist Hutu supremacist elements.
The CNDP, for its part, has now become a registered political party and has seen its forces integrated with the official armed forces, the Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo (FARDC), and its chieftain, Bosco Ntaganda, has become an important powerbroker in Goma.
All is not as it appears, however.
Beyond simple integration, the Congolese army in eastern Congo is now dominated by the CNDP, much to the chagrin of other armed groups such as the government’s erstwhile allies in the Patriotes Resistants Congolais (PARECO) – a loose umbrella of paramilitary organizations who also have been gradually entering the official security forces.
A significant breakaway movement, the Alliance des Patriotes pour un Congo Libre et Souverain (APCLS) led by ‘General’ Janvier Buingo Karairi and mostly consisting of members of the Hunde ethnic group, broke off from the larger PARECO configuration in April 2008, and has thus far refused integration.
During Congo’s deeply-flawed general elections last year, which saw Kabila returned to office ahead of his main rival, long-time opposition figure Étienne Tshisekedi, Human Rights Watch recounted how in some villages in Masisi, voters were compelled by the presence of former CNDP rebels at polling stations to vote for Kabila and CNDP candidate Bahati Ibatunganya.
In the run-up to last November’s vote, Fabrice Mumpfiritsa, a well-known Hunde singer, was kidnapped in Goma and found days later, injured but alive. Formerly a Kabila partisan, Mumpfiritsa had grown disenchanted with the president and began vocally supporting Kabila’s local opposition.
Visiting North Kivu again this month, it soon became apparent to me that, after being in office for over a decade, Kabila, though once having strong support in the east, has brought precious little development to this part of Congo.
An entrepreneur in Goma with extensive contacts within both the CNDP and the government told me that “the state has a symbolic presence in North Kivu today, nothing more.” A high-ranking official in an international organization that has long had a presence in the province referred to the system of governance that has been put into place as being “like a mafia…Whoever doesn’t side with (the CNDP), doesn’t agree or says something in opposition will be intimidated, or eventually put under house arrest or killed.”
It would have been hard for the Congolese and Rwandan governments to have found a more poisonous and tainted proxy than Bosco Ntaganda.
In January 2006, Ntaganda was indicted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague for three counts of war crimes that allegedly occurred while he was helping to command the Forces Patriotiques pour la Libération du Congo (FPLC) in Congo’s Ituri region during the early part of the last decade, a time during which he earned the sobriquet “the Terminator.”
The FPLC itself grew out of the Union des Patriotes Congolais (UPC), an armed group that claimed to champion the cause of the pastoralist Hema ethnic group against that of the agriculturalist Lendu, the very kind of apocalyptic ethnic politics that Ntaganda would also engage in with the CNDP in North Kivu.
The fighting in Ituri killed an estimated 60,000 people.
In a letter from the Group of Experts on Congo to the United Nations Security Council dated 18 October 2011, the group found that since his reintegration into the Congolese army, Ntaganda has continued to collaborate “with East African regional networks of dealers selling both real and counterfeit gold to international buyers.”
Troublingly, and as if to underline its occupant’s ultimate fealty to Kigali, Ntaganda’s Goma residence is situated on a lane that crosses directly over a neutral zone to Gisenyi, Rwanda, just across the border. According to a December 2011 United Nations Security Council report, Ntaganda crossed into Rwanda at least twice, in March and September of 2011, despite an ostensible travel ban imposed on him.
As before, the region’s politics remain nothing if not maddeningly complex and unsuited to the international community’s often one-size-fits-all approach to peace-building.
Surrounding Congo, in neighbouring Uganda, President Yoweri Museveni, who in 1986 told his country that “the problem of Africa in general and Uganda in particular is not the people but leaders who want to overstay in power” now enters his 27th year as the country’s president, having secured his current term through particularly controversial elections in February 2011.
Over the last year, several large scale protests against alleged political corruption and economic mismanagement have occurred in Uganda’s capital, Kampala, many aligned with the Forum for Democratic Change led by Kizza Besigye, a doctor and former soldier as well as a former Museveni ally turned critic.
In Rwanda, President Paul Kagame has solidified a tight-lidded dictatorship over the country based upon what the French academic Gérard Prunier has characterized as “passive acceptance of undivided Tutsi power over an obedient Hutu mass.” Government critics meet either death, (opposition politician Andre Kagwa Rwisereka, killed in Rwanda in July 2011), exile (former general Kayumba Nyamwasa, wounded in a shooting in South Africa in June 2010) or both (Inyenyeri News editor Charles Ingabire, shot dead in Kampala last December).
Throughout North Kivu itself, things remain tense, and the region’s civilian population continues to be at risk.
This month, around Masisi alone I spoke to residents of displaced person camps such as Kalinga (population 4,551), Bihito (5,742) and Bukombo (3,338), some of whom have been living in the most squalid of conditions for up to five years. Across the border in Kisoro, Uganda, I found around 2,000 refugees who had fled fighting between the FDLR and militia elements in Rutshuru camped in the shadow of Mount Muhabura. It is a situation replicated in hundreds of registered and unregistered displaced persons settlements throughout the province.
In the township of Bisie in North Kivu’s Walikale territory – which remains a stronghold of the FDLR – an illegal mine producing cassiterite, which is eventually turned into tin, has been giving up its bounty to an ever-shifting array of armed groups for a number of years. In villages and displaced persons camps such as those in Masisi, a sense of deep resentment against both the broken promises and lack of development offered by the Kabila government, and what some residents see as the growing Rwandanization of eastern Congo, continues to fester. Armed groups, particularly those flowing from former PARECO elements, continue to form, break apart and re-form in a dizzying array of alliances that the international community, patting itself on the back for its “success” in eastern Congo, seems ill placed to address should the tension once again flare into large-scale open violence.
By turning the other way as North Kivu in general and Goma in particular have become, with Kigali’s connivance, a virtual fiefdom of Bosco Ntaganda’s CNDP, the international community, including the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Congo (known by its acronym, MONUSCO), are not guaranteeing peace in North Kivu. They are in fact fanning the embers for the potential eruption of a new conflict in the province.
The belief that the more territory held by the Kabila government’s FARDC and CNDP allies equals more stability in the long-term may very well prove to be sadly mistaken, and MONUSCO is currently in danger of being perceived as dangerously partisan to a government and military of questionable popular legitimacy.
By ceding an axis of influence in the east to Rwanda, Kabila may have indeed rid himself of the immediate problem of the CNDP armed insurgency, but the group’s subtle takeover of the province has helped to plant the seeds for enmities and resentment that could lead to an even greater crisis in the future.
It is important that all international actors speak out against the abuses being committed with official sanction in North Kivu today, and to hold the state actors behind them, whether they be in Kinshasa or Kigali, accountable for the crimes of those who act in their name. Without such accountability, lasting peace in North Kivu would seem to remain a distant dream.
Michael Deibert is a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Peace and Reconciliation Studies at Coventry University and the author of the forthcoming Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair (Zed Books).
Sunday, February 26, 2012
In northern Uganda, a difficult peace
26 February 2012
In northern Uganda, a difficult peace
By Michael Deibert
Le Monde diplomatique
(Read the original article here)
Gulu, Uganda — Gazing out from this bustling provincial capital in northern Uganda, a lifelong resident gestured towards the red dirt roads that lead out towards the Sudan border and talked of the changes that have come to this corner of Uganda in recent years.
“We used to not even move from town, going for two miles was a terrible challenge,” says John Lukwiya (not his real name) who works with displaced people in the region. “You thought you may or may not live. But today things are quite okay, development is going on and people are planting their crops.”
The conflict in Acholi — the ancestral homeland of the eponymous ethnic group who stretch across northern Uganda and southern Sudan — raged for the better part of 25 years. But today the region is, however tentatively, starting to get back on its feet.
The Acholi conflict has its roots in Uganda’s history of dictatorship and political turmoil. A large number of soldiers serving in the government of dictator Milton Obote (who ruled Uganda from April 1965-January 1971 and then again from December 1980-July 1985) came from across northern Uganda, with the Acholis being particularly well represented, even though Obote himself hailed from the Lango ethnic group. When Obote was overthrown by his own military commanders, an ethnic Acholi, General Tito Okello, became president for six chaotic months until Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Army took over. Museveni became president, and has since remained so, via elections — some legitimate, some deeply flawed.
Upon taking power, the Museveni government launched a brutal search and destroy mission against former government soldiers throughout the north, which swept up many ordinary Acholi in its wake. Some Acholi began mobilizing to defend themselves, first under the banner of the Uganda People’s Democratic Army (largely made up of former soldiers) and then the Holy Spirit Movement.
This movement, directed by Alice Auma, an Acholi who claimed to be acting on guidance from the spirit Lakwena, brought a mystical belief in their own invincibility that the soldiers of the Kampala-based government at first found terrifying: Holy Spirit Movement devotees walked headlong into blazing gunfire singing songs and holding stones they believed would turn into grenades. The movement succeeded in reaching Jinja, just 80km from the capital Kampala, before being decimated by Museveni’s forces.
Out of this slaughter was born the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), led by Joseph Kony, a distant relative of Alice Auma. Kony added an additional element of targeting civilian Acholi to his schismatic blend of Christianity, frequently kidnapping children and adolescents to serve in his rebel movement. The Museveni government responded by viewing all Acholi as potential collaborators, rounding them up into camps euphemistically called “protected villages”, where they were vulnerable to disease and social ills, and had few ways to carry on their traditional farming.
“It was not about enemy confronting enemy, but about controlling civilians to cut off the source of information,” explained Francis Odongyoo, executive director of Human Rights Focus, a Gulu-based human rights organization. “The government said they were failing to defeat the LRA because the population was providing information to them; and the LRA was saying that they were failing to survive well and failing to overtake the government because the civilians were providing the information. The civilians were caught between two fires.”
Many concur that the LRA-Museveni struggle upended life in the region as no other conflict before.
“The impact of this last war was almost universal,” says Ron Atkinson, a history professor from the University of South Carolina who has studied the region for 40 years and authored several books on the Acholi. “Almost everyone was impacted very directly by overt violence, not just from the LRA or earlier rebel groups but from the Ugandan army and government, especially its policy of forced displacement.”
The LRA’s policy of targeting civilians (though not the Museveni government’s draconian measures) eventually drew international condemnation and in 2005 the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants against Joseph Kony and several other seniors LRA commanders for crimes against humanity and war crimes. After peace talks between the LRA and the Ugandan government collapsed in 2007, the group decamped from its bases in southern Sudan to the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic.
Following the end of negotiations, the Museveni government launched its Peace Recovery and Development Plan (PRDP), an effort to stabilize northern Uganda after years of war. Since then, according to the United Nations 98% of internally displaced persons have moved on from the camps that once sheltered hundreds of thousands of frightened people.
Despite criticisms from the Acholi that the government’s program has been insufficient, local initiatives and the work of some foreign organizations have helped restore a sense of normality and gradual progress to the region, with people returned to their homes and travel between once off-limits parts of the region now facilitated with relative ease.
Now a thousand miles from the cradle of their insurgency, the LRA would appear to have little hope of returning to Uganda, though their potential to wreak havoc on civilians remains little diminished. In Congo’s Haut-Uele province, between December 2008 and January 2009, the LRA massacred 620 civilians and abducted more than 160 children; and a year later they returned and killed 321 and abducted another 250 people in December 2009.
In October 2011, President Barack Obama announced that he was sending 100 Special Forces soldiers to help the Ugandans hunt down Kony. By the end of the year, the Ugandan army confirmed that the troops had moved along with the Ugandan army to Obo in the Central African Republic and Nzara in South Sudan,
Though life remains very difficult for the Acholi, those who have seen the crisis remain cautiously optimistic about the future here.
“Whatever else has gone on, whatever disappointments there are, however hard life is — peace is better than war," says Ron Atkinson.
(This article first appeared in Portuguese in Folha de São Paulo.)
Michael Deibert is a journalist, Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Peace and Reconciliation Studies at Coventry University, and the author of Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair, Zed Books, London, forthcoming.
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Thoughts on leaving Africa
Photo © Michael Deibert
I write now as I prepare to depart Kampala, Uganda in a few hours for my trip back to the United States. I traveled across Uganda yesterday during an 11 hour bus journey after interviewing several of the circa 2,000 refugees camped out in Kisoro, Uganda, who have fled fighting between the Forces démocratiques de libération du Rwanda (FDLR) and Mai Mai militias in the Rutshuru territory of Congo's North Kivu province.
While in North Kivu, I spoke to many other displaced people in the sprawling camps throughout Masisi territory such as Bihito, Kilimani and Kalinga, and discovered the worrisome false peace that has descended on the province since the 2009 détente between the Congrès national pour la défense du peuple (CNDP) rebel group (now led by accused war criminal Bosco Ntaganda) and the government of Congo's president, Joseph Kabila. I was also able to witness first-hand the tight-lid military dictatorship that currently rules Rwanda even as its president, who is directly responsible for helping to cause so much suffering in Congo, continues to be fêted abroad.
As during my previous visits to Congo, I found so many stories to be told there, so many people who wanted to have their fate be known, not just as a footnote to the larger geopolitical struggles of the Great Lakes Region, but as the living, breathing testimony of those swept up by forces they did not seek out and which they could not control.
It is in the measure that it gives voice to the people such as those pictured above - the residents' council of Kalinga Camp - that this work I do is worth anything. And it is in gratitude for being able to hear and record their stories that I again thank my generous Kickstarter backers and the International Peace Research Association for their support of my upcoming book, Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair (Zed Books). This research couldn't have been done without you.
Asante sana.
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Note from North Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo
I have had the most extraordinary trip to Africa thus far.
Conducting final research and interviews for my forthcoming book Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair, which will be published later this year by Zed Books in cooperation with the Royal African Society, the International African Institute, the Social Science Research Council and Justice Africa, I have traversed Uganda, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo over the last several weeks, and the experience reminds me how much I love about this continent.
I have been fortunate enough to examine in detail the history of the Acholi people and the genesis of the Lord's Resistance Army in Northern Uganda, explore the reality of oil and politics in Kampala, witnessed the subtle power of Mount Muhabura and Lake Bunyonyi, seen a bit of both the antique and modern faces of Rwanda in Ruhengeri and Gisenyi, and have now returned to North Kivu, the area of Congo that perhaps made the deepest impression on me when I was here before.
There is much to tell, and much to report, but for the moment I am happy just to have had the privilege of having the people of the Great Lakes Region of Central Africa tell me their stories once more. I will do my best to record them diligently and report them honestly.
As I write this, the sound of beautiful Swahili hymns from a local evangelical church is drifting out over Lake Kivu as the sun sets.
Koyémba, Africa.
Conducting final research and interviews for my forthcoming book Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair, which will be published later this year by Zed Books in cooperation with the Royal African Society, the International African Institute, the Social Science Research Council and Justice Africa, I have traversed Uganda, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo over the last several weeks, and the experience reminds me how much I love about this continent.
I have been fortunate enough to examine in detail the history of the Acholi people and the genesis of the Lord's Resistance Army in Northern Uganda, explore the reality of oil and politics in Kampala, witnessed the subtle power of Mount Muhabura and Lake Bunyonyi, seen a bit of both the antique and modern faces of Rwanda in Ruhengeri and Gisenyi, and have now returned to North Kivu, the area of Congo that perhaps made the deepest impression on me when I was here before.
There is much to tell, and much to report, but for the moment I am happy just to have had the privilege of having the people of the Great Lakes Region of Central Africa tell me their stories once more. I will do my best to record them diligently and report them honestly.
As I write this, the sound of beautiful Swahili hymns from a local evangelical church is drifting out over Lake Kivu as the sun sets.
Koyémba, Africa.
Sunday, February 05, 2012
Wamala Tombs
Wamala Tombs, situated in Wakiso district about 30 minutes from Kampala, is the sacred burial site of Ssekabaka II, the 29th king of Buganda. Visiting it yesterday to pay my respects, I found the location and the tomb itself to have a profoundly spiritual air, radiating a quiet power.
Saturday, January 21, 2012
A note of thanks to the International Peace Research Association
The International Peace Research Association has been generous enough to award me a modest grant to aid in the completion of my forthcoming book Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair, which will be published later this year by Zed Books in cooperation with the Royal African Society, the International African Institute, the Social Science Research Council and Justice Africa. As the recipient of a Small Peace Research Grant, which seeks to support systemic observation or study of conflict phenomena and peace strategies, I am humbled and honored to receive this support and, as such, wanted to take a moment to publicly thank the Association here. Merci mingi.
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