War, Peace and Faith in Northern Uganda

How strange it must be to experience peace if your entire life has been ravaged by war.

In March of 2008 I applied to be a participant in the Aftermath Workshop in

Uganda, to explore the aftermath of the long, gruesome, exploitative civil war there. This
was the first time I had heard of the war in Northern Uganda, a cowardly war that preyed
on women and children. Many were kidnapped from the safety of their homes and
schools, forced to fight, forced to walk for miles, forced to slice and dice parents, friends,
siblings upon command, forced to have sex with many older men, forced to give birth in
swamps, forced to be smart, strong, and resilient beyond their years.
The perpetrators of this war, a rebel movement known as the Lord’s Resistance
Army or LRA, terrorized the people of Northern Uganda. The army’s leader, Joseph
Kony claimed to be chosen by God to lead the Acholi tribe in the north, against the
government of President Yoweri Museveni based in Kampala. But, rather than leading his
forces south to attack the government, LRA rebels were forced to attack their own people.
The government’s response to this threat was to radically alter the lives of 1.7 million
people by forcing them from their land into displaced person’s camps. In theory, these
camps would be guarded by the government’s army, the Ugandan People’s Defense
Forces or UPDF, and would provide villagers with security from the rebels. In reality, the
camps became crowded, disease-ridden plots of land where people could no longer farm
crops and needed to depend on international aid for food. In reality, more people were
kidnapped and Yoweri Museveni used the conflict to fuel his long reign of power in
Uganda.
This war is notorious for its duration, often called “Africa’s longest running war.”
By the time I learned of this war it had been going on for more than twenty years. As I
write this, I am twenty years old. While I was growing up, the children fighting in this
war were growing up. When I was in grade school children the same age as I was were
abducted from their homes and schools and given a new education in murder. When I was
learning arithmetic the child soldiers of Uganda were instead learning how to kill others
to survive. Many were forced to murder a family member or friend upon abduction in
order to escape being murdered themselves. Stories exist of children being forced to tread
over others, trampling them until they died, or beating their heads with the sides of
machete blades. Amputations were not uncommon. Rebels often cut off civilians’ ears,
noses and lips as a way of inciting fear among the population.”
During the war there were many attempts at peace talks, both by individuals and
by the government, but most failed miserably. The difference now is that the lull in
violence, brought on by a ceasefire signed in 2006, has opened up dialogue on what it
means to being justice and lasting peace to this region. Questions have been posed as to
by what practices criminals should be prosecuted in order to better give closure to the
communities most affected. Currently there is a large debate surrounding the extent to
which traditional methods of justice and western methods of justice should be
implemented (if at all) to deal with the conflict. While this discussion has yet to be
concluded, many of those living in Acholiland have expressed their preference for the use
of traditional methods which emphasize truth and forgiveness to create restorative rather
than retributive justice and lasting peace.
These traditional methods are a hybrid of the long-established spiritual practices
used to restore harmony among individuals and within the community and of the
Christian practices which were brought to the area by missionaries in the early nineteenth
century and have now taken root and flourished. Uganda is currently leading the
explosion of Evangelical Christianity across the African continent, perhaps due to the
need for faith in a higher power and in the hope that some goodness can come from
forgiveness after so much blood has been shed.

In the course of my interviews in the country I meet with Bishop Ochola, one of
the leading advocates for traditional justice in Uganda. This is a man who knows
forgiveness.
Bishop Ochola became a priest when Idi Amin had just forced his way into power.
Amin was a military dictator who became the official Ugandan president from 1971 until
1979. In these years the country became a notoriously despotic state under fire for mass
human rights abuses. It is estimated that between 100,000 and 500,000 people were killed
at the hands of Amin’s regime. The Bishop spent most of these early years burying the
dead and comforting their families.
His eyes cast downward as he recalls this time, “It was very painful because this
was senseless killing- the children that were killed did not do anything wrong. [They
were] only killed because they belonged to a different tribe.” It was at this point he says,
“I began experiencing injustice with impunity in the world.”
The experience was far from over. During this time the Bishop and his wife had
been in North America, and separated by thousands of miles from their daughter back in
Gulu. Just before leaving for the airport to be reunited with their girl, they received a
telegram that would forever change their lives; thrusting them into a personal struggle
with forgiveness. They were told their daughter, Joyce Ado had died under mysterious
circumstances and that they could not yet return to Gulu, in northern Uganda, because of
the instability there. The two arrived in Kampala where the Red Cross had also brought
children airlifted out of their homes in Gulu. When these children arrived in Kampala
Bishop Ochola and his wife learned their daughter had been gang raped by rebels in the
area. Devastated by what had happened, she had committed suicide.
The Bishop and his wife prayed for the strength to forgive the rebels. According
to the Bishop, “what they did was not just to abuse her [their daughter] but abuse the
family.”
They moved from Gulu to Kitgum.
Ten years after Joyce had died the Bishop’s wife was killed when her vehicle hit a
land mine planted by the LRA. She died with another innocent woman and another
innocent man. They had been returning to Kitgum, and were six kilometers away from
home when the car exploded.
Bishop Acholi tells me, “I felt like a tree, split from top to bottom by lightening."
From that time he committed his life to working for peace, trying to help others
avoid the suffering he had endured in his own life. To this end, he thanks God that he
lives in a society which practices forgiveness and peaceful reconciliation in the form of
restorative justice. This holistic, pro-life system of justice aims to restore broken
relationships through acts of truth telling and repentance on the part of the offender,
testimony by both the offended community and the offender community that address
grievances, and a ceremony known as mato oput, or the bitter root ceremony.

The Bishop fixes his gazes to meet my eyes and explains to me that the council
justice of the Acholi, restorative justice, real justice, begins with the truth.
For the Acholi this means truth telling, a confession and show of public
repentance by the offender, who publicly accepts responsibility for his crime and
apologizes for it. Public acknowledgement of for responsibility of the crimes committed.
The whole truth is revealed. There can be no lies, no denial, and no deception.

I think of the child soldiers. These children hated their rebel commanders; these children
depended on them for survival. They are now being asked to forgive.

In Acholiland conflict is explained in four phases which align with the life cycle of a tree.
The roots of conflict sprout from a specific set of circumstances which have caused
turmoil in the life of a particular individual family or tribe. If the grievance is ignored,
these roots erupt out of the veil of the soil. The tree becomes visible; there is open
conflict. The conflict escalates. There is war. The roots are not seen, and often not
remembered. There is just war.

Eventually, for a variety of reasons that can and cannot be traced (explained?) little by
little violence lessens. Talk of peace begins. The roots of the conflict must be addressed.
The truth must be told. If all parties can come together and address the issues of truth,
mercy, forgiveness and compensation for the wrong done the discussion will be complete.
It is successful if these combined with the ceremony of mato oput can be powerful
enough to excavate the tree and the roots from the metaphorical landscape of shared
history.
Traditionally mato oput has been used to restore the unity of the village when a
killing has torn it apart. In the ceremony the two parties pretend to fight each other
physically with sticks as spears and then stop, throw the spears to the side and hug each
other as a show of reconciliation. A sheep is slaughtered, the offending party cooks for
the offended party and then food is exchanged between them and eaten. The juice from
the root of a special tree, the Oput tree, a bitter tree for which the ceremony is named is
then cut from the ground and served. The tree is significant in that the bitterness of its
roots represent the bitterness of conflict, and in that one root from the tree connects to
another tree, serving to nourish both trees. The cutting of the middle section of this root
represents the relations that were cut between two tribes. The oput roots is then mixed in
a drink and drunk by both parties. This act now represents the two tribes tasting the
bitterness of the conflict that has divided them and the reparation of relations. All food
and drink must be finished for the ceremony to be completed. After this ceremony and the
other processes of reconciliation have taken place the two groups are able to return to the
same land; the lives of those who committed atrocities and those against whom the
atrocities were committed must once again be intertwined.
Only after this has happened will things heal. Only after this has happened will
there exist the possibility of lasting peace.
 Moses, the former child solider with whom I am working to write this story, was
kidnapped by members of the LRA from his school in Gulu at the age of 16. Along with
the other thirty –nine children kidnapped that night, he was forced to walk north to Sudan
where he was taught lessons on how to brutally murder and how to incite fear. When he
had mastered the horror of how to kill another human being, he was sent back to brutalize
his own people, as a member of the LRA. Moses is twenty-eight now. He was twenty-
four, a commander, lieutenant and brigade administrative officer who met with Joseph
Kony almost every week before he escaped. Because of his high position in the LRA he
feared retaliation if he returned home to Gulu. The rebel army did not reveal information
to soldiers about their former communities. Many were told that the Ebola virus had
killed everyone in Uganda, and that there was no home to which to return.
It was not easy but in January 2004, with a bullet injury in his left shoulder, after
hearing two of his brothers had died in the bush and that his mother was now raising his
other brother and Moses’s own daughter, Nhurah, he knew he had to return. Moses soon
found out that all the others who had been taken from his school eight years ago on the
night he was kidnapped had died or been killed. He knew he had to return home as the
sole survivor of those captured that night in order to bring the message home concerning
the others, concerning what had happened to all of them.
Moses learned that the government had passed an act, which gave blanket
amnesty to all LRA combatants who returned home, and he learned that other LRA
commanders had escaped and been welcomed back in their communities. Moses tricked
his LRA superiors, and managed to escape along with his one male and two female
bodyguards.
Though the, “rebel of rebels,” was welcomed home Moses was disillusioned by
the counseling program he was made to enter and he still asks, “Do you think you can
counsel someone who has been away eight years in only one month?”
He went back home and got together with other former child soldiers, and tried to
come up with a better answer for reintegrating ex-combatants. They decided to form the
Information for Youth Empowerment Programme in order to promote peace in the
villages by getting rid of the stigma that some child soldiers faced when they returned
home, addressing the needs of the families born in captivity and to convince former
abductees that they can return to school. Once home, most of the work that must be done
is internal.
Moses has reclaimed his life, something that proves difficult for many returnees.
Moses is proud of his transformation. This “rebel of rebels,” now often says of his life,
“To go from a child soldier to a peace builder, that is a big transformation.”
Moses says he forgives.

During the week, Moses and I drive to Palenga IDP camp where we interview
Kolo Benoa, the Party Parish Chief of Palenga. He is fifty years old. He looks older. He
looks after the elderly in the camp who have known both peace and war and hope to
return to the former. He looks after the youth in the camp who have known war and hope
to discover the unknown: peace.
It is here I am told that the seeds of the roots of the metaphorical tree depicting
conflict can be compared to a pebble thrown into water. The small pebble causes a shift
that ripples out in circles, the circumference of which becomes infinitely larger than the
pebble as time passes. Kolo Benoa wants to place a limit on the limitless. Now.
Kolo believes that with forgiveness the effects of war can be stopped before they
affect the next generation.

Already there is hope. Of the 17,000 people who used to live in Palenga only
1,000 still reside within the camp’s boundaries. The rest have returned home.
Another woman I speak with is a born again Christian and shares with me verses
from the bible that teach forgiveness to show me that religion and the traditional Acholi
beliefs are one and the same. She emphasizes that all people must be humble and
merciful and that Acholi children are taught these lessons as well as mato oput when they
are ten years old and can begin to cognitively process these concepts. She knows for sure
I must, “welcome everything that has happened good or bad because you will have the
reward of God.”
A man I speak with has lost thirteen members of his family in a revenge killing by
the LRA that happened in 2002 after a boy from the neighboring village escaped from the
ranks with their gun and then gave the commanders false information about his family’s
identity. Enraged about the loss of their gun they followed the boy based on the
information he had given them about his family. The boy and his real village had fled
from the LRA but the neighboring village remained and due to the false information,
fifty-six people believed to be related to the boy were killed. This man no longer lives on
his land, and has raised his children somewhere else. On the day I meet him his village is
about to have a reconciliation meeting with the other village to discuss the extent to
which forgiveness is possible for the boy’s responsibility in this crime and in a land
dispute which resulted in the death of one person in 1992. Those present include religious
mediators and Bishop Ochola. Everyone in the room discusses what must be done so that
the two groups of people can again coexist. The meeting is heated, as both sides tell how
they truly feel about the other. When we leave it has been decided that except for the
boy’s family all those from the offending village can be accepted into society by the
offended village. The boy’s family will have to partake in the mato oput ceremony before
they can be forgiven.

The true aftermath for these families, for their village, for those in Uganda
effected by the war, lies in the future, and in forgiveness. People must be reacquainted
with their culture; they can no longer define themselves as perpetrators and victims if
they want lasting peace. These antagonistic labels must give way to something inclusive.
Trust must be rebuilt. The society must under go a profound change. Those I talked to
knew this would take time. But, they said they would wait. They are not tired of trying.
They are patient; they know that eventually the wounds will heal.