Museveni must stop the suffering in North ( By ELIAS BIRYABAREMA )

Tuesday, November 15, 2005

Museveni must stop the suffering in North

ELIAS BIRYABAREMA - GULU

Now and then, inhibiting feelings of resignation, submission and stoicism by a people who have long endured dehumanising treatment by their government or any authority, break and those people rush triumphantly to celebrate their newly won freedom, initially, in cathartic violence.

Then follows the secondly and more devastating violence that stems from the struggle between the Old Order seeking to restore its unjust and loathsome power and the hitherto oppressed people hell-bent on liquidating their past master and sustaining their hard won freedom.

It was true of the Israelites extracting themselves from the Pharaonic tyranny (though with a God’s Providence), the Americans fighting King George’s despotism up to their independence in 1776, the French against aristocratic excesses in 1789, the Africans against European colonists and slave perpetuating savages.
This will be true of northern Uganda. Just one day. It might take half a decade, a decade, a generation.
It will happen

Not a single explanation on earth can justify the sickening human catastrophe going in Lango and Acholiland: the degradation, desolation and the horrors killing off generation after generation.

Coming from Western Uganda and knowing the rest of the country pretty well, what I saw in Acholi Bur IDP Camp and the adjoining areas on a recent visit there, convinces me that perhaps only a callous government such as one of President Museveni is capable of keeping its people in such conditions.

Frankly, It’s not entirely imprecise to describe what I saw as a slow extinction facing the Acholi and Langi peoples. I have traveled to nearly all of rural Uganda. The lot of a typical poor man, woman or child elsewhere— in Kabale, Mbarara, Bushenyi, Mbale—is hardly impressive. Yet it is only here in Acholi Bur, as is similar or worse all across much of the region that I encountered unique and heart-stopping suffering. It is here, in Acholi Bur, that I met shocking cruelty and death stalking a people by the minute, by the hour, by the day; for the last two decades.

When you meet such sort of a situation you ask yourselves why? These children, these women have committed no crime to deserve this. They deserve an explanation from their president. Museveni must tell these children why he took a Bible in his hand solemnly promising God that he would secure his people’s rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and instead allowed barbarity and unspeakable wretchedness to engulf them.

Museveni owes these children, these women an answer: they deserved it yesterday, they do today and will do tomorrow.
That he has chillingly failed to provide that answer and used state machinery to continue to claim sovereignty over them should never be a means to preserve this tragedy.
Never

Museveni himself must engage cerebral members of his intelligence community—Noble Mayombo and the like—to draw interpretive projections on the long term implications of the continuing indifference to the human catastrophe in Uganda.

Museveni and any farsighted Ugandan must know that the squalor in Northern Uganda, the hopelessness and the slow death cant continue for long. It’s a powderkeg that will explode anytime. History shows us that unjust situations in a society go so far as no revolutionary man has emerged to galvanize the little energies and the resilience of the oppressed and transform them into a force potent enough to break the yoke of bondage such as the one that confines Acholis and Langis in the death-inducing IDP camps.

There’s enough indignation in Acholi, in Lango and Teso. One day a lightening rod in form of young man, like Museveni himself brimming with patriotic and revolutionary fervor of the late 1960s and 70s, will spring up and remove the spigot on that cauldron of anger.
What will gush out and its ferocity, only God can foretell.

America’s founding father and the author of the Declaration of Independence adopted by Congress on July 4th 1776, George Washington, noted in it that document that mankind is more disposed to suffer and summit to a government long established.

There reaches a time though when a government willfully, to use his word, becomes “destructive” of a peoples’ rights in which case it becomes their duty to seek abolition of that government. What is happening in Northern Uganda, I believe, are not mere light and transient causes said by Washington not to be significant enough to justify secession.

They are a train of abuses by a government that has all but abdicated its duty to care for a people over whom it rules. And the abuses are appalling enough as to amount to a justification for seeking self-rule.

For long I thought Norbert Mao with his fiery championing of his peoples’ struggle for emancipation might turn out that ferocious malcontent that will ultimately inspire Northern Uganda to seek a separate state that can probably care for its people. Time has proved me wrong; Mao can as well be said to be a spent force.

Still, Museveni must think and think hard about the tragedy of Northern Uganda. That situation can persist only up to a certain point: that seeming complacency, the notion that the region has been contained must stop. We should foresee a scenario where Uganda simultaneously collides with Southern Sudan while fighting separatist insurgents in Northern Uganda intent on splitting the country around Karuma and also visualize the possible scale of destruction and the wider impact on Uganda’s development.

If Museveni doesn’t do that, he will have left not only a most terrifying time bomb but also one of the most tragic legacies.
Biryabarema is journalist