A journalist’s report of the war in Northern Uganda is priceless.
The battle in the north has its origins in Yoweri Museveni's National Resistance Army (NRA) ascension to power in 1986, as most of us are aware.
John Muto-Ono p’Lajur’s book Fighting in Northern Uganda: A Journalist’s Account is a collection of newspaper stories regarding the war in northern Uganda.
It uses the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), led by Joseph Kony, as a jumping off point for this story and digs deep into the impact of conflict in Northern Uganda.
The battle in the north has its origins in Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Army (NRA) ascension to power in 1986, as most of us are aware.
The NRA, predominantly a group from Uganda’s south, is accused of exacting vengeance on the north for its leader’s role in reducing Uganda to a shell of its pre-independence self.
As a result, a civilian resistance movement led by Alice Lakwenawas developed by late 1987.
Lakwena’s Holy Spirit Mobile Force was defeated by government forces in November 1987, only to be replaced by the LRA in 1988.
The LRA decimated northern Uganda, displacing, abducting, and killing thousands of innocent people.
As reflected in the seventh essay of this book, written on January 20th, 1997, there were soon appeals for discussions with the insurgents.
“In a surprising turn, locals in the war-torn Acholi sub-region are now advocating for a blanket amnesty for all rebel operations, including Kony’s LRA, if it helps stop the northern insurgency,” it says in part. Absolom Ongom, deputy chairman of the Acholi Parliamentary Group, gave this overall assessment of the Acholi sentiments.”
The book examines the nature of reconciliatory discourses in the context of a peace process, focusing on the interaction between rebels and government in the context of a negotiated settlement.
It does so by looking at the dialogical processes that are in place to work in the interest of peace, as well as the ideals that would support such peace.
According to the author, these dialogical mechanisms aimed to re-examine the terms of knowledge that established the ostensible north-south divide.
It is also documented here how talks and talks about talks never yielded any results.
“Gulu Woman Member of Parliament, Mrs. Betty Akech Okullu, has declared that despite President Yoweri Museveni’s fondness for the Acholi, he has surrounded himself with people who loathe the tribe,” according to one story.
Whether or if this is accurate, we won’t know until the president is lobotomized and we can peer inside his skull.
However, as William Pike demonstrates in his book Combatants: A Memoir of the Bush War and the Press in Uganda, there is a germ of truth here.
When Pike saw the carnage in the bush, he wondered:
“Who did these things?” says the narrator.
One of the NRA combatants responded, “It was the army, no, it was the Acholi.”
So plainly, there existed an ethnic bias and animus toward the north, as expressed by the generic name “Acholi,” which was the seed of the North-South division.
Much of John Muto-work Ono’s might be utilized as a repository of true and factual knowledge regarding the northern war. As a result, it will be extremely useful to policymakers and decision-makers in comprehending the origins and nature of that conflict.
John Muto-Ono p’Lajur, the author, has established an amazing resource.
It’s also a big benefit to academics and people interested in academic inquiry who want to have a sense of the social and political dynamics at work at the time.
As a result, a causal and evidential link between conflict in the north as a microcosm and war in Uganda as a macrocosm may be drawn.
Finally, and most crucially, it serves as a reminder of and reprimand to the negative consequences of bad politics on our country if we choose to follow Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s adage, “We learn from history that we do not learn from history.”
