Great news from Juba, Southern Sudan, where on May 2nd negotiators from the Government of Uganda and the once violently oppositionist group the Lords Resistance Army (LRA) signed an agreement that goes considerably beyond a ceasefire and starts to sketch out the political contours of a final settlement.
This settlement will include the return of the LRA’s fighters to Ugandan society, the much-longed-for return to their lands and farmsteads of 1.5 million or so Ugandans– mainly but not exclusively ethnic Acholis– from the north of their country whom the government has held penned up in strategic hamlets (“IDP camps”) for the past ten years, and some re-ordering of power relations within Ugandan society to increase the real inclusion of those communities into national society.
The Acholis have been the main (but not the only) targets of LRA violence and are also the community from which he and most LRA fighters come and in whose name they claim to speak.
The latest accord was signed by Henry Oryem Okello (perhaps himself an ethnic Acholi?) on behalf of the government and by Martin Ojul, the LRA’s peace delegation chairman. The Daily Monitor notes that the signing was was witnessed not only by the two delegations’ host there in Juba, the Vice-President of Southern Sudan and chief mediator Riek Machar, but also by observers from Kenya, Mozambique, South Africa and Tanzania.
That indicates significant African-state buy-in and support for the agreement.
That report from The Daily Monitor gives these further details:
- The agreement on comprehensive solutions handles issues of participation in national politics, system of government, inclusiveness in participation in the government, ensuring equal opportunities, participation in state institutions, the judiciary, security organs, Internally Displaced Persons, reconstruction of Northern Uganda, land and restocking of cattle in the war affected areas.
“The parties agree that members of the LRA who are willing and qualify shall be integrated into the national armed forces and other security agencies in accordance with subsequent agreements between the parties” the draft copy obtained by Daily Monitor indicates.
The two parties also agreed that the children of the departed LRA combatants shall benefit alongside other conflict-affected children from the Universal Primary Education and Universal Post-Primary Education and Training.
On land, the parties agreed that fair and equitable compensation shall be payable in case of expropriation of land.
“No expropriation shall be allowed except in the public interest and in accordance with the law” the agreement reads.
It states that land owners whose land has been used for settlement of IDPs or establishment of barracks and detaches, will be entitled to repossess their land or to receive fair and just compensation.
“The government shall strengthen and fast track re-stocking programmes in the affected areas by committing additional resources to mitigate the effect of losses of livestock taking into account individual losses and the need to improve the quality of livestock in the affected areas,” the draft copy of the agreement said.
“The parties affirm the principle of proportional representation and agree to adopt security measures.
On the system of governance, the parties agreed that government shall, through the Equal Opportunities Commission, review and assess the nature and extent of any regional or ethnic imbalances and disparities in participation in central government institutions and shall take all necessary steps to remedy any anomalies.
Hat-tip to Jonathan Edelstein for having posted about this agreement on Headheeb.
He concludes with this:
- The talks have now adjourned to May 11 to address amnesty from the international war crimes charges against five key LRA leaders. This has proven an obstacle on a number of past occasions necause the Internatonal Criminal Court prosecutor’s office, which is the sole body authorized to withdraw the indictments, has declared that it won’t honor any amnesty agreed by the Ugandan government. With peace so close, and with a Ugandan accord potentially critical to other peacemaking efforts in the region, now is the time for the ICC to change its mind and, if necessary, participate directly in the Juba talks. Whatever the LRA’s atrocities, and they are both real and extreme, the international community’s abstract need to punish them does not outweigh what may be millions of central Africans’ best chance for peace and stability.
In connection with the ICC issue, I see that Elise Keppler and Richard Dicker of Human Rights Watch have recently been in Uganda. They have an article in The Monitor in which they argue:
- the warring parties and the mediators cannot bargain away prosecution of the LRA leaders who have been charged with grave crimes. Simply put, a solution that avoids meaningful justice will undercut the prospects for a durable peace.
I strongly disagree. First of all, these two– like so many other activists within the western-based human rights movement– seem to be completely conflating the concept of “justice” with the idea of the orderly working of a western-style criminal court (though goodness knows, even in the west there are numerous other ways in which the concept of “justice” is understood.) Secondly, the history of the world has been full of peace settlements in which perpetrators of even extremely grave conflict-era atrocities were not all prosecuted; and many of those peace agreements have proven remarkably durable over time. (Perhaps if Keppler and Dicker really want to hold perpetrators of very serious conflict-era atrocities to account in a criminal court, they might start closer to HRW’s home and start agitating for the prosecution of the US’s very own ‘shock and awe” campaigns around the world??)
Keppler and Dicker write that they did go visit some of the members of the IDP communities in northern Uganda. And they write this about what they learned and heard there:
- Nearly all those we met in displaced camps expressed an intense desire to return to their homes. A number conveyed real concern that prosecution of LRA leaders could further delay their departure and therefore saw the ICC as an obstacle. A distinct vocal minority, however, declared a desire to see those most responsible brought to trial, although they questioned how the ICC could arrest those it had charged.
I read this as them clearly conceding that most of the people they heard from in the camps saw the ICC as an obstacle– which tracks exactly with my own findings when I was in northern Uganda last summer. But Keppler and Dicker– no doubt writing after their own return either to the comforts of a decent hotel in Kampala, or perhaps after a return to their comfortable homes and well-equipped offices in New York– blithely assume that they know what’s best for these people! (It would be nice if they had written a little more about the extremely bleak, comfortless, and often actually lethal conditions inside the IDP camps there.)
It is also faintly hilarious when they write: “A peace worth having cannot rest on impunity. It is up to key players such as the UN Secretary-General’s special envoy, former Mozambican President Joaquim Chissano to convey this message loud and clear at the Juba talks.”
Chissano, after all, was the far-sighted leader of Mozambique’s Frelimo government who intitiated and then concluded a peace agreement with the Renamo insurgents that was based precisely on the approach of using a blanket amnesty for all perpetrators of conflict-era violence (of which there had been considerable amounts), and on traditional healing and sociopolitical reconstruction.
Keppler and Dicker are notably silent about the inspiring achievements that Chissano and his country registered in building a stable and rule-of-law-based peace on the basis of this approach. If you want to read my own reflections on the contribution that war crimes amnesties made to building a sustainable peace in post-civil war Mozambique and post-apartheid South Africa, you can do so here. (And if you want to read the whole book of which that is the concluding paragraph, you can get it from the publishers.)
But anyway, the main message of this post is: a big congratulations to all the negotiators for the work they’ve done so far! And let’s hope they can finish the rest of the work on the agreement soon, and get implementation off to a successful start before the next planting season.
First of all, these two– like so many other activists within the western-based human rights movement– seem to be completely conflating the concept of “justice” with the idea of the orderly working of a western-style criminal court
Their opinion might also have to do with divergent conceptions of who “owns” the criminal justice process. The prevailing Anglo-American view is that justice belongs to society, and that although it is often invoked in the victim’s name, the victim isn’t a party and social interests are paramount. Restorative justice cultures, which include the Acholi, view criminal justice more as something that the victim and perpetrator define, with society acting as facilitator to ensure that the definition reflects equity rather than power relations. Keppler and Dicker’s position along that continuum might affect their opinion on whether justice for the Ugandan civil war ought to be defined by society (here represented by the international community) or the victims and perpetrators (the Acholi, the LRA and the Ugandan government, with the AU as facilitator).
Their opinion on the ICC proceedings, though, seems somewhat at odds with their statement that “meaningful justice will undercut the prospects for a durable peace,” because it’s the international community’s justice and the Ugandans’ peace. Most of the arguments I’ve seen in favor of criminal punishment at the international level, especially against the will of the victims, center on deterrence rather than peace or even closure. It’s arguable that instead of “peace worth having cannot rest on impunity,” what Keppler and Dicker really mean is “peace in Uganda should, if necessary, be sacrificed to ensure that whoever’s running Nepal ten years from now doesn’t take it in his head to commit atrocities.”
The trouble, of course, is that criminal penalties only deter when they’re reliably enforced, and international criminal justice isn’t even close to reliable. The fact that Kony and his top aides have been hit by the ICC’s lightning – and it’s just about that random – isn’t likely to deter anyone from doing anything. To my mind, that tilts the moral equation pretty decisively against the international community overriding the stakeholders’ wishes, although reasonable minds can no doubt disagree.
Juba, Southern Sudan
I’m not sure when I started noticing, but I haven’t seen a story datelined simply “Juba, Sudan” in a long time. Evidently the press is treating Southern Sudan as a de facto independent country already, and they’re probably not far wrong. I’d guess that the powers that be consider the referendum a foregone conclusion at this point, which might mean that Khartoum and its local proxies will try to hang onto Darfur even more tightly in order to keep some of the oil. The Chinese concessions reach into Darfur as well, which means that come 2011, China will be treading a fine line between Juba and Khartoum. I fear we’re in for interesting times.
“the much-longed-for return to their lands and farmsteads of 1.5 million or so Ugandans”
How do you imagine this is going to happen? When was a displaced peasantry last restored to its previous condition?
Consider some of the examples of such processes. Tanzania post-independence had a “kijiji” policy including what amounted to an internal passport system, to restrain peasants from leaving land from which they had not yet been displaced. It worked for a time. Zimbabwe at present is trying to resettle people and even to drive them out of towns. Is it working? South Africa’s land restitution programme is resolving itself towards the creation of a very few black capitalising farmers, and on the other hand a rentier situation of entitlement similar to some US situations in “Indian reservations”.
The “longings” of displaced peasants are conflicted and contradictory. Such contradictions are the source of millenial movements like the LRA (or Alice Lenshina’s Lumpa Church movement long ago in Zambia, for example). You (Helena and Jonathan) are not taking this into consideration at all. The abstract discussion about “justice” helps not at all.
In an Imperialist world, the prospects of successful management of historical changes among peasant populations are bleak, and you should admit this, in my opinion. The problem begins with the factor observed by Karl Marx in the “18th Brumaire”: that the peasantry is inherently like a “sack of potatoes”, with no intrinsic overall social organisation except the occasional “sack” that locates them willy-nilly together. The relatively successful more successful (but still problematic) transitions of peasantry in India and China have been managed externally by national-bourgeois and proletarian powers, respectively.
Now consider the present concrete condition of Uganda, and its place within the Imperialist neocolonial arrangements.
What chance have these Acholi peasants really got?
Let’s look at some of the history. Acholi and (now Kenyan) Luo people speak the same language and have lived in similar circumstances since before colonial times.
Far from being simply a reservoir of anachronism, the Luo-speaking people have a long tradition of generating intellectuals, revolutionaries and internationalists of a high order.
Helena, you note the surname Okello as indicating that the government rep may also be Acholi. Does anybody remember the revolutionary John Okello who played a leading part in the post-colonial Afro-Shirazi overthrow of the Omani Arab hegemony in Zanzibar, before the union with Tanganyika? Before you rejoice with vicarious pleasure, Jonathan, don’t forget that the Shirazis referred to are Iranians (Freddie Mercury’s people).
Then there was the poet of peasant angst, Okot p’Bitek; Oginga Odinga, Kenya’s first vice president; Achieng Oneko, today the only surviving Kapengurai trialist. (That trial included Jomo Kenyatta, Paul Ngei, Bildad Kaggia, Fred Kubai and Kungu Karumba) Odinga and Oneko were strong opponents of neocolonialism and later suffered at the hands of Kenyatta and his successor, Daniel arap Moi. They were the true modernisers, and opposed to the “underdeveloping” neo-colonialist “globalists”.
Others like Tom Mboya and now Barack Obama became the very model of the type of “evoluée” or “assimilado” who personally transcends his people only to help maintain their oppressed condition, and not to fight against it.
Barack Obama is now one of your US presidential candidates. Leaving aside the man’s own spin on his situation, what does it mean to you as you contemplate the plight of the Acholi people? This is your ideal, isn’t it? Eating the cake and keeping it at the same time? Obama is your license to patronise his co-linguists the Acholi (and others) isn’t he? You have resurrected Leopold Senghor, haven’t you? The evoluée becomes the leading proponent of “negritude”, and is rewarded. Imperialism proceeds, with an alibi.
Please forgive the rhetorical tone of the last paragraph. Don’t take it too personally. I hope you see what I am driving at, though.
That’s Kapenguria, not “Kapengurai”, for anybody who wants to look it up. Sorry.
I’m talking to myself here, aren’t I? Never mind, I’ll pull over as soon as somebody wants to pass. At least I’m on-topic.
I was thinking, the world necessarily reflected in JWN is one based on three simple terms. They are (a) “us”, (b) “poverty” and (c) “Al Qaeda”. The rest of the fabric is spun from these three threads, as complex as the Brandenburg Concertos, but never violating the fundamental simple scale.
Do I exaggerate? For example, is it not true that Jonathan refers to Acholi “stakeholders”, which approaches personalisation as compared with the impersonal “poverty”?
Well, fine, but who articulates the stakeholders’ position? It is “Aid-workers”, “Human Rights Activists” and “NGOs” supported by “Donors”. These are all varieties of “us”. Even if there is some local colour among “us”, they are “us” because they share the same world outlook as “us”.
The ones who don’t share that world outlook are called “Al Qaeda”, or perhaps “Links to Al Qaeda”.
Well, fine, but who articulates the stakeholders’ position?
The short answer, which should be apparent from my comment, is that the stakeholders should. The stakeholders: i.e., those with a stake, rather than those (like aid workers, for instance) whose life is centered elsewhere. The Acholi should speak for the Acholi, and based on their performance in this round of negotiations, have been doing that without my help.
(Not that this makes them “them” as opposed to “us.” We’re all “us,” with fundamental qualities in common, even if politics places us on different sides. The first step in most genocides is forgetting that. But I digress.)
And while I really shouldn’t ask, exactly what makes you think I would take any pleasure (vicarious or otherwise) from the fact that the overthrown sultan of Zanzibar was Omani, or that my pleasure would be diminished by reason of the ASP’s makeup being partly Iranian? Or, for that matter, that I’d have anything much good to say about the massacre in the guise of class struggle perpetrated by Joseph Kony’s prototype?
Hi Jonathan!
The peasant outlook, as such, extends to the boundary of his family plot, and yes, we are typically talking about a male-dominated situation. Relations with other peasant families are problematic, often resembling the mating dance of scorpions. In the absence of a monolithic enemy, such as feudalism, or colonialism, the peasants have never been able to reconstruct a “Montagne” as they did in the French Revolution. In the presence of national capitalism the young people leach away to the cities. The peasant way of life fades like an old photograph. The centre is elsewhere. The articulators are imported or imposed (as church, as politicians, or as salaried “traditional leaders”, and others such as NGOs).
I have been out to a reunion today with Tanzania comrades of a quarter of a century ago. One of my abiding memories of running a joinery shop in the ANC school settlement there is of the huge desire of the young Tanzanians who worked there to get knowledge and become urbanised workers, and hence socialised on a grander scale than the petty “kijiji” (village).
In Tanzania then, the ruling party (Chama cha Mapinduzi – Party of the Revolutionaries) had a “chumba kumi” (tenth house) system. The tenth house would fly the CCM pennant. In this way the party attempted to remedy the inherent fragmentation of the peasantry, with some success, for a time.
Your statement “the Acholi should speak for the Acholi” is made in a political vacuum. You imagine there is a mystical bond among the Acholi. There isn’t. Your imaginary binding Acholiness is not different in kind from that of the LRA. If it is not enforced with brutality, it will not exist. It has no sui generis basis. The historic basis described by Okot p’Bitek in the “Song of Lawino” is gone and was already gone when he wrote it forty years ago.
Helena has been in Uganda not long ago, and she has just now returned from a long spell in England and France. I don’t know for sure, but I imagine she has now to readjust to an audience with a very much simpler set of mental furniture than she has recently been exposed to. JWN must reflect this change. It is not that Helena is unsubtle. But JWN must speak to its audience and not over its head. Then again, this disjuncture can be, and I think should be, problematised, as it had to be in the British Empire one or two generations ago. The Imperial fish rots from the head.
I got the impression, surely not mistaken, from your previous post that you were keen to accentuate the tiniest indication (off-topic too) that there could be a split in the Sudan, on a Christian-Muslim or (spurious) African-Arab basis. I am of the OAU persuasion. I don’t like to hear that stuff. Your eagerness is unseemly, like that of an over-enthusiastic divorce lawyer.
Hi Dominic,
The notion of the Acholi speaking for themselves doesn’t require mystic bonds. They can do so in the same way as anyone else: by organizing, campaigning, voting, expressing opinions and demanding a place at the table. Nor do I assume that they would speak with one voice or that they would do so only through “traditional” leaders, especially given the way that the devastation of the last twenty years has led to self-organization. As I said, they’ve been articulating their interests without my help and I won’t presume to tell them what to say; my main prescription is that the ICC get out of their way.
The center may, as you say, be moving elsewhere. The changes in northern Uganda are far from over, and because peace will remove the artificial stasis of conflict, the Acholi may be remade as profoundly by the peace as they were by the war. In the meantime, though, a million and a half of them are in IDP camps and they have interests that require urgent attention. Whatever happens to “Acholi-ness” after the war ends will happen, but first the war has to end, and as the main victims, surely they’re entitled to a voice in the terms of its ending. How would you have them speak, in the here and now when their lives may depend on it?
I’m not rejoicing at division in Sudan, and the “I fear…” in my last sentence should have made clear that I’m not eager to see further trouble. (The term “interesting times” is, as you know, a curse.) I was merely stating what, from my imperfect vantage point, appears to be happening: that southern Sudan under the SPLM/A is quickly developing an independent regional presence, that the southern government is preparing very skillfully for the 2011 referendum, and that many observers are quite plausibly conceding the south its own international personalty. And, given thepriority that oil resources play in Sudanese government policy, that this will inevitably affect the proxy conflict(s) in Darfur.
I’m not sure what you mean by the Arab-African distinction being “spurious.” If you mean “constructed and artificial,” then it certainly is, but so are all the other differences that people fight over. The distinction is one used by the combatant parties themselves and is evidently meaningful to some of them rather than simply being a creation of the Western media. Spurious or not, the distinction plays a part in driving the conflict and must hence be addressed (even if only through reconciliation processes that will encourage its undoing) when resolving it.
In any event, the subject of Sudan is hardly off-topic, given that southern Sudan’s autonomy and its government’s assumption of a role in regional diplomacy are precisely why the current Ugandan peace talks are happening. The SPLM/A has proven a much better neighbor to Uganda than the Sudanese army. And in the long run there’s no reason why southern independence would necessarily be harmful to African unity, given that the OAU-cum-AU is organized above the state level and would only benefit if there were more but stabler member countries. Redrawing the lines on the map doesn’t mean that we can’t continue trying to make them less significant.
Anyway, I’ll be away for a few days and might not get the chance to respond further before next week. I’d be interested to hear what Helena thinks.
The Acholi “organizing, campaigning, voting, expressing opinions and demanding a place at the table”. Sure. That probably sounds plausible in the lame-brain USA.
Well, I’ve seen the full-dress road show twice (Kenya 1963 and South Africa 1994). The ICC may go out but in will come an IEC (Independent Electoral Commission), a voter education drive, party invention, formation and registration (the more the merrier), television election broadcasts, huge corporate advertising drives, et cetera, et cetera.
Are they going to do all this for the Acholi? Not on your nelly, Jonathan.
So then it’s back to your assumption that in the absence of war, all those good, peaceful means of dispute will arise by themselves. Leaving Clausewitz out of it for now, what is the empirical evidence of this possibility?
Let me suggest the United Democratic Front of South Africa as a test bed. Launched in 1883 and disbanded in 1991, therefore corresponding to the height of the anti-apartheid struggle, the UDF at the maximum comprised of 700 separate organisations. Which one was for peasants? As far as I know, not even one.
Nearly all the components of the UDF died out after its disbanding at the insistence of the newly-legal ANC. The main exception was the trade union part, which is COSATU, and which still survives, two million strong. Today COSATU is by far the biggest component of our democracy.
The working class can do, with ease, all of those things that you say that the Acholi must do. But peasants can’t do these things with ease. Peasants can’t do these things at all.
You cannot point to any example of spontaneous peasant democracy of the kind you insist upon. Instead, you are extrapolating from other, different historic circumstances and dictating that scheme back to the poor Acholi. Finally, you will surely blame the Acholi peasants when they do not perform to your expectations.
Nothing you have written is inconsistent with the views of a person who wants all kinds of people “third-worlded”, “underdeveloped” and confined to Bantustans, while the Imperialists fiddle about “above state level” in words but in fact poke in everywhere with their blackmails and their troops.
I liked your piece Dominic about the Acholi and great names that have emerged from this geo-political area. We are keenly observing what transpires in Juba!!
Thanks, Owor.
Jaramogi Oginga Odinga was a great man. His life is written in the book “Not Yet Uhuru”, as told to Ruth First, South African Communist and wife of the late Joe Slovo, who was blown up and killed in Maputo, Mozambique, by a letter bomb sent by the apartheid monster Craig Williamson (who is still alive and free).
Oginga Odinga’s son Raila is still a leading politician in Kenya.
Henry Oryem Okello is the son of the late Tito Okello, who took part in the removal of Idi Amin in 1979 and in 1985 overthrew Milton Obote, was President for six months, and was then overthrown by Yoweri Museveni and the NRA. In 2002 Erisanweri Opira, brother of Tito, Uncle of Henry, was abducted by the LRA. I don’t know what happened to him.
The task of managing the problems of the Acholi people will mainly fall on the Ugandan government. The Imperialists will not be interested. But just imagine the fuss if Joseph Kony had been a Muslim, and not a Christian.
Dominic, who said anything about spontaneous democracy among peasants? The majority of Acholis have spent the better part of the last twenty years as refugees or, to be pedantic about it, IDPs. There’s no shortage of examples of self-organization among refugees; I’m sure you can think of a dozen others without trying.
Note, also, that I’m speaking in the past tense. As Helena described in depth when she visited north Uganda last year, the Acholi have organized, and it’s a good job they did, because they’ve saved the peace talks a time or two. And while I’m sure they’d be devastated in the event of my disapproval, rest assured that I don’t feel any particular right to judge them.
BTW, your argument would sound a lot better without the gratuitous nationality slurs. The “Americans are clueless about Africa” thing isn’t even true anymore; we may not have had African colonies (which creates its own kind of cluelessness) but there’s been ample African immigration and cultural penetration here during the past generation. Among many other things, there are as many Malians in NYC these days as in Paris, and there’s an Igbo cultural center not a mile from my old home in the Bronx. There’s no lack of ignorance, of course, but at this point it’s a purely individual affair.
Hi Jonathan,
“Americans are clueless about Africa” is not a quote from me. I never use the word “Americans” to describe US people; nor do I make slurs on the many other nationalities in the two Americas. We respect all of them, especially Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales. But we do not respect the general US intelligentsia which works so hard to find not one but many reasons for every Imperial move, especially the violent ones (military and sanctions). This site is all about the pro-peace critique of such US intellectuals.
(For example, the one (bb) who writes that the peace demonstrations prior to the Iraq invasion were responsible for it; and another one (Inkan) who writes that Iraq may be horroble but that Afghanistan is a good war).
This site is not about re-creating Bantustans in the Bronx or Cantons in Chicago, or worse. You are approaching the reductio ad absurdum of political dispute, Jonathan. Going beyond your usual cod anthropology, you now take refuge in a denial of the polity altogether, saying that “it’s a purely individual affair”.
Your remarks about self-organisation among refugees are cruel. Refugees, and more especially peasant refugees, are cast together by their condition and by the bureaucracies that maintain them, if at all, in camps.
You are disingenuous and misleading to suggest that a population organised by force into camps is going to carry that imposed organisation with it back to the land. That is no liberation. That is a fiction and a recipe for conflict.
When the imposed potato-sack (camp) is split open, the potatoes will roll around and take up positions and attitudes of their own. This is the nature of peasants, in particular. The camp capos may afterwards try to maintain a cult of authority, based on violence and/or religion. In that case the Acholi will be back where they started, won’t they? Is that what you want?