Category: conflict

In my efforts to pay more regular attention to the ongoing conflict in northern Uganda, I’ve been spending a lot of time on these web sites:

The Uganda Conflict Action Network has been posting near-daily updates about the conflict since June 2005.

A month-by-month description of the peace talk process and of the status of peace and reconciliation (these overlap a lot; anyone know why they aren’t merged?) can be found at USAID’s Virtual Presence Post: Northern Uganda.

The Beyond Juba Project looks beyond the peace talks and the conflict in northern Uganda to address larger issues of sustainable national reconciliation. It is a joint initiative of the Refugee Law Project, the Human Rights and Peace Center and the Makerere University Faculty of Law.

A photo essay about the six days photographer Erin Baines spent with the LRA in Nabanga, Sudan in August 2006: “How does one prepare to meet the world’s most wanted man? Should I have at least brushed my hair that day? He told me it was nice to meet me. I think I smiled stupidly the whole time. It hardly seemed appropriate.”

I also wrote earlier about my northern Uganda reading list. If a book and a cup of coffee are more your style, this is a good place to start.

One of my strongest memories from Uganda is riding the bus between Kampala and Gulu, watching the land — green, thick, damp and hilly in Kampala, at times stifling and claustrophobic — flatten out to meet the bright, open sky. It always felt good, no matter what meetings I had ahead of me or what I had left behind in Kampala.

from Flickr via Snaptography
In an essay titled “Landscape and Character,” Lawrence Durrell, a novelist and travel writer whose works I devoured in Uganda, claimed that “human beings are expressions of their landscape.” Land is a central part of the northern Ugandan conflict; the Acholi, for the most part, are subsistence farmers, and being separated from their land and herded into Internally Displaced Persons camps has ruined their economy and their social structure. Not a difficult thing, to be tied to your land, when your land is as beautiful as northern Uganda. On the bus I always wondered what Uganda would have been like if Kampala had looked like Gulu, or vice versa.

Earlier this month, DeTamble and Gay Uganda both linked to BBC’s special feature on the war, an interactive map of the destruction the conflict has wrought in a single village near Lira, Uganda.

BBC’s mash-up of a map, complete with individual huts and trees, and individual accounts from community members of the war’s toll on their households brought the conflict back in a way that I hadn’t experienced since I was last in Gulu. When I started this blog, I wrote extensively about the conflict, about Joseph Kony, about the International Criminal Court and traditional reconciliation rituals. When I left Uganda, I kept writing, but for some reason — the land in Kansas? — I stopped writing about northern Uganda. My last substantive post on the conflict was almost a year ago. I’m going to try to remedy that this week.

On another note, tonight I’ve been listening to Exile, an album by northern Ugandan musician Geoffrey Oryema. Oryema’s father was a cabinet minister who was murdered by Ugandan security forces during Idi Amin’s reign. Exile, at least according to Wikipedia, chronicles the singer’s subsequent flight from Uganda in 1977. As I’ve listened and read through the BBC feature I’ve been wondering what landscapes Oryema remembers from Uganda.

I leave town for ONE WEEK, and Joseph Kony has to go and announce a new offensive.