-Museveni is not interested in peace. For as long as he´s in power, there is little hope of having a real, genuine peace process between the government and the rebels in Northern Uganda. Our wsh is that the international donor-diplomacy community could speak out louder about this, said Jessica B. Nkuuhe of Isis-WICCE to a packed auditorium at the Norwegian Human Rights House recently. (9-JUNE-05)
-Museveni doesn´t really want to put an end to this war. On the contrary, he needs the conflict with the Lord´s Resistance Army (LRA) as a unifying force ofr the rest of the country. At the same time, even if this war is restricted to the northern regions, all of Uganda is suffering. The development and progress of the whole of the country is delayed, in some areas brought to a halt as a direct consequence of the war with the LRA. It is a terrible tragedy that this has taken so long.
-Thousands have been trained
Jessica B. Nkuuhe was the keynote speaker at the seminar ´Women, war and peace. The case of Northern Uganda,´ co-hosted by the Norwegian Council for Africa and the Human Rights House Foundation last week. For the last few years, she has travelled extensively in the north and interviewed women about their situation and how the war has affected them as women and mothers, very often single mothers. At the moment, more than 1.6 million people have been driven away from their homes. Most of these live in more or less organised IDP camps. And in these camps, a disproportionate amount of the population are women. -Both outside the camps and inside them, we see a lot of sexual violence, with cases of rape and various kinds of sexual maiming as the most common, said Nkuuhe. Isis-WICCE has always focused on women in conflict-ridden areas. To this day, we have trained more than a thousand, who in turn have trained many, many more, on how to document, understand and report violations of human rights and then use local, national and international advocacy mechanisms to seek justice. We have also done a lot of conflict mitigation, transformation and peace building.
-A disingenuine play to buy time
In addition to this, we do all that we can to make the donor-diplomacy community understand the importance of the role they can play in putting pressure on our authorities, a pressure these very same authorities always find it a lot harder to neglect, since it comes from the outside, from above so to speak, and not from within and below, as the positioning goes here in Uganda. For as long as all the authorities do is present the rebels with one ultimatum after the other, knowing full well that the rebels won´t bow to that kind of pressure, the whole process is just a show-off, a disingenuine play to buy time, and make it seem as if the rebels are the problem, and that the only possible solution is to vote Museveni in for life.
-This war will continue
Morten Bøås, researcher and an expert on the conflict in Northern Uganda, gave further weight to what Nkuuhe said. -The donors must become a lot tougher and make clear and explicit political demands. All state budget support must be conditional. Somebody ought to tell Museveni that he has the chance now to go down in history as the president who brought peace and democracy to Uganda. Instead, it looks more likely that Museveni is a new Mugabe in the making. For there to be a lasting peace in Northern Uganda, one will have to look into the distribution of land in the region. At the moment, there are rumours that the UPDF (government) soldiers have grabbed huge areas of cultivated land from families who have been driven away from their homes, into the IDP camps. To prevent the LRA from finding any food to stea, growing any kind of crop, large or small, has even been forbidden in some areas. If the land issue is not resolved, this war will go on, regardless of what happens to the LRA, concluded Bøås.
