{UAH} THE MULINDWA NOTES ON VIOLENCE IN UGANDA {---Series two-Hundred but thirty eight}

Friends

As the series on Acholi violence continues, I am going to use this series to do some touch ups that I did not have the time to do a fair sheiks, and what I am  going to specifically deal with this time around is the term "Acholi violence" Why am I using it and why is it used out there? Why is it legally acceptable to be used? Well It is a tough question but tough questions must always be dealt with or we will become useless lumens that support the wave than the facts. To those that care to know my back ground, I never bunch people in one class, in fact while discussing The Luwero war I was very careful to always protect UNLA members for not all were killers. I have members of UNLA in this city and I have treated them with the respect they so deserve even though I know that a whack of them especially Acholi were brutal killers. How then did I change from that principle to reaching a point of accepting a term "Acholi violence" but use it?

When the Kony war started men like Dr Kiiza Besigye never wanted it to be made public, they operated that war from a very quiet moment where they never allowed members of press to go there , they never allowed soldiers back to talk about what is happening there. When the helicopter went in to destroy homes and granaries thus forcing the people to camps, North was a secret killing zone. The attitude The Besigye's did in Northern Uganda is exactly what Allan Barigye is doing in UAH to educate Ugandans that we have absolutely no problem in The North, if a mother cooked her baby it happened ten years ago. So to Barigye and Besigye they have a statute of limitation when a Northerner dies, a statue that does not hold if the name of Iddi Amin comes up. But through the noise many of us did to the international community, NGOs started to go up there at a slower pace, they started to see the atrocities Acholi were committing to each other, atrocities Barigye has now told us that based on his past experiences, Acholi were not brutal enough to be bothered with, NGOs continued coming back filling reports that Acholi are actually violent people. Foreign embassies in Kampala started to file same reports. Those reports raised an outrage from many Northerners for you are camping a whole lot of people in same camp, I raised up and opposed them as well. But what caught our attention was the simple fact that many of the people that were using the term, were unrelated, so you find The Swede saying we have Acholi violence, The Brit same thing, Chinese used the same term, now when it comes from different sources you need to be an idiot to ignore it. In as much as many international organizations went North to feed and provide shelters, a good number of them raised up to study if a tribe can be classified violent. Among those that flew to Gulu is the Liu Institute for Global Issues of University of British Columbia. And they researched as to whether Acholi are violent and filled many reports on the region some of which I have posted and some I have not.

There are two universities that flew into Uganda to study Acholi violence, The Human rights Center, University of California, Berkley and International Center for transitional Justice Payson Center for International Development Tulane University, through Phuong Pham, Patrick Vinck, Eric Stover, Andrew Moss, Mariake Wierda and Richard Bailey, they used the number of Langi and Acholi we have in and out of the country, and the base number they used was very basic, if you count all Acholi and Langi we have in and out of Uganda, they are 1,817,916 Acholi and 1,211,944 Langi. And the question they went after was does Acholi violence exist? How did the war affect them and how did they react to it? When you look at all Acholi in Amuru, Gulu, Kitgum and Pader, but also look at all Langi in Lira and Oyam as a sample of all the total population in the country, you get these numbers that are simply startling:-

People that were displaced 93.9% Acholi  and 94.3% Langi

People that lost income  88.6% Acholi and 91.9% Langi

People that had houses destroyed 92.8% and 93.6% Langi

People that had productive assets taken away 91.2% Acholi and 90.9% Langi

People that had other assets taken away 94.7% Acholi and 92.8 Langi

People that had at least one family member killed 88.0% Acholi and 77.0 Langi

People that had a father killed 6.5% Acholi and 6,7 Langi

People that had mother killed 14.3 Acholi and 6.1 Langi

People that had a brother killed 39.6 Acholi and 30.7 Langi

People that had a sister killed 12.3 Acholi and 9.0 Langi

The numbers above are simply too high to be ignored, Acholi and Langi lived under this oppressive system past 20 years,  if anyone is forced to live that way that long, I would not blame them  for becoming violent. If we are talking about a 2% that is a very different story, but when we start to talk about high 90% of a population affected for that long, you must agree that the population must react that way. There are many dangers in our denial that these friends are violent {a} we will stall on writing good laws to safe guard the rest of society of their violence, {b} Those of us in diaspora have started to see a huge number of especially Acholi that are failing to get employed, some do not have homes but run from city to city, and we have seen a raise in crime convictions. If we agree that they have such a bad back  ground, may be such information can be useful to social  workers and lawyers with judges to make preferable pre-sentence reports. But maybe it can help agencies that try to find them jobs and accommodations. The numbers above are way too high for any intelligent man/woman to ignore. With such numbers the term Acholi violence became accepted and widely used.

Fellow Ugandans Acholi violence is real and we need to address it but candidly.

 

 

Stay in the forum for Series two hundred and thirty nine on the way   ------>

EM

On the 49^th Parallel          

                 Thé Mulindwas Communication Group
"With Yoweri Museveni, Ssabassajja and Dr. Kiiza Besigye, Uganda is in anarchy"
                    Kuungana Mulindwa Mawasiliano Kikundi
"Pamoja na Yoweri Museveni, Ssabassajja na Dk. Kiiza Besigye, Uganda ni katika machafuko"