Uganda's Moment for Peace
Ronald R. Atkinson and Sverker Finnstrom
International Herald Tribune
THURSDAY, AUGUST 10, 2006

COLUMBIA, South Carolina

While wars elsewhere have grabbed the headlines - most recently in Lebanon and Israel - Africa's longest-running war has been ravaging northern Uganda for 20 years. The conflict has mainly pitted the Ugandan government against a rebel movement called the Lord's Resistance Army.

Civilians have been caught in the middle. Thousands have been abducted, mutilated or killed. By 2005, nearly two million had been driven from their homes and relocated into squalid, disease-ridden camps, dependent on food aid for survival. Many have lived in such camps for a decade, in conditions that the United Nation's chief humanitarian officer, Jan Egeland, has characterized as "the biggest neglected humanitarian emergency in the world." The emergency has become chronic.

In May, leaders of the semi-autonomous government of southern Sudan, officially announced that it had reached an agreement with the LRA to mediate peace talks between the rebels and the Ugandan government. Last month, Uganda sent a negotiating team to begin talks, without preconditions, a major step forward for a government that had consistently favored a military solution to the war.

With months of behind-the-scenes work, this initiative is a serious one. It needs - and deserves - support. It offers the best chance in more than a decade to end the war and its associated suffering. Many northern Ugandans agree, and religious and cultural leaders from the region have now joined the talks.

But the international community has been either silent, skeptical or harshly critical. The LRA leadership, it is widely asserted, must be "eliminated" or arrested.

Taking the lead in this opposition, unsurprisingly, is the International Criminal Court, which last year issued arrest warrants for the LRA leadership. The chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno- Ocampo, has brushed the peace initiative aside, insisting that justice demands the rebel leaders' capture and trial and that peace talks are merely rebel attempts to "buy time and regroup."

Numerous others - from UN agencies, Western governments and many humanitarian aid agencies - have echoed similar sentiments. Just this week, notes the Monitor, a Ugandan newspaper, Britain is pushing a UN resolution to disarm the LRA forcibly.

In contrast, however, the U.S. Embassy in Uganda, as also reported in the Monitor, has "confirmed America's approval and support" of the talks.

The fundamental raison d'etre of the ICC is profoundly persuasive: that those perpetrating crimes against humanity should not escape with impunity. But the current moment offers two notions of justice. One is to implement the ICC indictments to pursue retributive justice. The other, which need not be mutually exclusive of the first, is to support a regional effort to negotiate peace and end a war that has denied justice in the broadest sense to millions, who have lacked for two decades such basic human rights as peace and security.

The LRA, with bases in southern Sudan and eastern Congo, is commonly depicted in the media and elsewhere as a dying, rag-tag army, numbering only in the hundreds. But many military observers hold the opposite view, that it is one of the region's strongest and best- organized forces, with strong loyalty among its members.

Officials of the government of southern Sudan agree with the latter analysis. The vast majority of LRA fighters - the government of southern Sudan estimates at least 4,000 - are based in southern Sudan, and are deeply embedded in local communities there. The Sudanese officials are currently working to build peace and trust in these communities, which were often on opposing sides during the long Sudanese civil war that ended in January 2005. The large LRA presence endangers these internal peace-building efforts, and having to confront the rebels militarily would pose big risks.

The current initiative to resolve the conflict thus serves the interests of peace in more than one country of a region that has known far too much war. All the parties directly involved - governments, the LRA and northern Ugandan leaders - will need international support, and pressure, to advance a difficult process that has just begun.

The obstacles to success are many: skepticism, mistrust, unspeakable atrocities, the indictments; indeed, all the weight of a complex and troubled past. Still, this represents the best chance for peace at least since 1994.

The chance must be seized. Millions of Ugandans - and southern Sudanese - deserve no less. And only peace can create the conditions in which widespread justice might, eventually, be addressed.

If the current opportunity is lost, we will be licensing the status quo and thus the continuation of one of the biggest and oldest humanitarian emergencies in the world.

Sverker Finnstrom is an anthropologist at Uppsala University, Sweden. Ron Atkinson teaches history and directs the African Studies Program at the University of South Carolina.

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