I’ve been reading a lot about ethnic conflict this week to prepare for two presentations I’m giving next month, but rather than quote something, I’d like to point you to two related links that came my way today:
Never Again in Sri Lanka is a set of video clips in English, Sinhala and Tamil that commemorate the 25th anniversary of the 1983 anti-Tamil riots in Sri Lanka. The videos were originally broadcast on Sri Lankan television and have been collected and preserved online as part of the effort to document the Sri Lankan civil war, one of the longest-running ethnic conflicts in the world. (Original link from GV: Sri Lanka: Anti-Tamil riot videos.)
Resolve Uganda is hosting a petition to President Bush, thanking him for meeting with President Museveni this week at the UN and asking him to continue to work for peace and justice in northern Uganda. The meeting and the petition are in response to a recent spate of LRA attacks in the Democratic Republic of Congo that have caused at least 75,000 people to flee. UNICEF is estimating that 90 children were abducted.
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.
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.
Trial Justice gave me a much better understanding of the International Criminal Court’s role in the conflict, and I’ve been glued to the Uganda Conflict Action Network blog since it began in the summer of 2005.
