Gulu

After we arrived at the UNICEF Night Commuters shelter in Gulu, we pulled the camera from the boot, and I reviewed with Wasswa how to use it. He and Olee set off with the camera while I discussed with a few aid workers about the security situation.

While the statistics for driving around Gulu are frightening (you are more likely to be killed on a two-hour drive down the roads to the camps outside Gulu than on a one-month deployment in Iraq), the violence is seasonal. In the dry season (now until March), there is not enough greenery to shield the LRA soldiers from helicopters of the Ugandan army and the UN. Also, during the dry season, food and water is scarce and most of the soldiers head to Sudan or the Congo. It was during these periods, that many of my students survived off the piss of older soldiers.

The Loa north is much quieter than the Buganda south. But, everyone in and around Gulu was anxious to talk about the civil war. Despite the armed-to-the-teeth military presence, Museveni is held only with contempt here. And most people I talked to believed that he is intentionally prolonging the war for personal profit.

The argument goes like this: By allowing the civil war to continue, Museveni garners military equipment and support from other nations and can continue to build his army, and the horrors of the war inflate foreign aid to Uganda, which is syphoned off to his friends and other government officials by at least 50% before it reaches those it is intended to help. The other half of the argument is that it is difficult to explain why it has taken Museveni twenty years to catch one person. Yes, Bush has dropped the ball on Bin Laden several times, but most people know more-or-less where Kony is (some of my students have even met him), and he is despised by surrounding communities and protected only by his soldiers.

So, Kony's soldiers continue to kidnap thousands of children (one place we went to had lost on average ten children a week during the last rainy season) each season and force them to fight or be 'wives'.

In the drive from Gulu to the Otwal IDP camp, we passed by a school, where a few years ago, LRA soldiers had entered and captured every student from. In Otwal (the camp Olee was living in when he was abducted at the age of nine), we met Olee's family and hundreds of others displaced by the war. We even ran into a boy Olee had abducted when he was a soldier.

Since being in Uganda, I have met at least two hundred children from the north, and although my work here has been focused on those displaced by the war, every single child I have met has either lost family members to the war or has been abducted. After having traveled to Gulu and seen what the terrain was like in the surrounding areas, it is even more difficult to understand how this war has gone on for 20 years. No one lives in the bush but soldiers, and even with the most modest of infrared systems, it would be easy to protect most of northern Uganda from the LRA.

The most far-out of conspiracy suggests that Museveni delibeately funds and arms Kony (perhaps that was what my Loa friend at the party meany by 'there is no Kony'), but even Museveni most ardent admirers cannot explain why he has failed to end the conflict in the twenty years he has held power.

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One last story:
On the second day in Gulu, I worked with a fourteen-year-old girl who had watched her parents killed when she was abducted five years earlier. Her father had been tortured before he was killed, and they slowly chopped off his body parts with a panga in front of her. She lived in the bush with the LRA for three years. When she finally escaped (many of these kids escape... there is little organization or morale in the LRA), she found her grandmother living near her home village with her two younger siblings. She has taken care of them since she was thirteen.

Now, they are all Night Commuters, people who walk from their villages into Gulu at night for protection from the LRA. Every night, thousands pour into Gulu to sleep in Night Commuter centers, hospitals, and the streets.

After taping her story, one of those running the UNICEF center suggested we go with one of the kids to see where they lived. We piled into the car. But, neither Olee nor Wasswa would go. This was daytime during the "safe season" on a trip only a few kilometers from town, but even Olee, who had fought with the LRA and knew that this was the safest time possible to go, would not venture toward this girl's village.