{UAH} Pojim/WBK: If you’ve known war, you wouldn’t wish it on your enemies - Comment

http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/OpEd/comment/If-you-ve-known-war--you-wouldn-t-wish-it-on-your-enemies-/-/434750/2824630/-/kbukro/-/index.html

If you've known war, you wouldn't wish it on your enemies

I have lived through nearly all of Uganda's wars and political upheavals. One effect of living through wars is that one never wishes them on other people.

Over the years I have travelled quite a bit through some of Africa's once war-torn countries and seen the physical after-effects of violent conflict.

Just over a decade ago, I ventured into rural Mozambique, in an area that had experienced some of the worst destruction as a result of the bitter fighting between the Frelimo-led government and its perennial rival, Renamo.

My trip to Gaza Province came after a year of living with, and researching the lives of, Mozambican war refugees living in the northeast of South Africa, in what used to be the Gazankulu Homeland during the apartheid years.

he Mozambicans had run away from war and had harrowing stories to tell, including encounters with wild animals as they traversed the lion-infested Kruger National Park.

Quite a number of would-be refugees were eaten alive, others killed by electric shock courtesy of the fence the apartheid regime had erected to keep the animals in the park, and the Mozambicans out. A few refugees had lost young children or spouses to lions.

After a period of killing and eating human beings, the big cats had taken to waylaying refugees at the exact locations where they used to cross into the park, through gaps that had been cut into the electric fence by those who had crossed before them.

Conversations with the refugees revealed that, for the most part, they had no desire to return to Mozambique. It wasn't as if the quality of life in the specific corner of South Africa where they had settled was any better than had been the case back where they had come from.

Their new home was one of the poorest regions of post-apartheid South Africa. It was the bad memories and the fact that they had lost everything. They did not want to go back and start from scratch.

By the time I arrived in Gaza, the war that had driven them out had long ended, through negotiations. Frelimo was still in power. Renamo, which had sought to depose it, had given up the fight and was now in parliament as the opposition.

However, significant parts of Gaza Province — and other regions of the country — still lay desolate. The few returnees I saw there lived worse than the refugees in South Africa, as they struggled to reconstruct the lives they had once lived.

There is a sense in which one could ask what the point of that war had been, given that, at the end of the day, power did not change hands. As with most wars, the Mozambican one had complex origins and was driven by forces within the country and beyond its borders. It would therefore be simplistic to argue that it was necessarily avoidable.

After Mozambique, I found myself in South Sudan, in parts of Western Equatoria and Northern Bahr-el-Ghazal. It was after the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement between the Bashir government and the Sudanese Peoples Liberation Movement.

Here, too, the physical consequences of war were in evidence everywhere. There were no schools. No hospitals. No roads.

Governmental authority was at a bare minimum, thanks to traditional chiefs who had kept whatever remained of local communities together, providing whatever leadership they could, as the fighting raged on.

I had many memorable encounters with survivors. One gave me more pause for thought than the others.

In one village, my colleagues and I chanced upon villagers having their afternoon meal. Among a group of grown-up men eating separately from the women, was a man without arms.

One man seated next to him would eat a mouthful and then feed him too, like one feeds a baby. What, I wondered, had happened to the chap? It turned out that during the war, "Arabs" had cut off his arms as they did those of others during a raid on the village.

Here, as in Mozambique, the war had ended through negotiations. The secession the government had fought hard to prevent from happening was only a matter of months away.

Again, it would be simple to argue that the war was avoidable. It, too, had complex origins and drivers. However, as with the Frelimo-Renamo war and others that have been fought elsewhere on the continent, its consequences seem to prove the point that above all else, political stability is the most important asset of any society, whose value usually becomes evident only after it has been lost.

While my Uganda experience and accidental war tourism has not turned me into a knee-jerk pacifist, it has shown me what societies risk when they open themselves up to political violence in the belief that through it they can satisfy their immediate needs, whatever they may be, and also achieve their long-term aspirations.

Stability may not feed or clothe you or even give you the leadership you want. However, it will allow you to stay safely at home if you so choose, amid inevitable, if perhaps frustratingly slow, progress.

Frederick Golooba-Mutebi is a Kampala- and Kigali-based researcher and writer on politics and public affairs. E-mail: fgmutebi@yahoo.com

If you've known war, you wouldn't wish it on your enemies - Comment

http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/OpEd/comment/If-you-ve-known-war--you-wouldn-t-wish-it-on-your-enemies-/-/434750/2824630/-/kbukro/-/index.html

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