When Elephants Fight (4 page)

Under the glare of the bright lights, surrounded by darkness, his parents bound, screams and threats raining down on them, Jimmy knew that these could be the last moments of his life, or at the very least, the life he knew
.

Suddenly his parents and uncle were grabbed and hauled to their feet, dragged away. The last words his father screamed were “please, I beg you, don't
hurt our children!” and then they disappeared into the night, swallowed by the darkness
.

Jimmy taking a break in the tree that provides shade for the family home
.

Almost before the words had faded, the boys were grabbed and hauled to their feet. They were dragged back to their hut and thrown through the door, landing in a heap on top of each other on the dirt floor. The door was slammed shut, and all four huddled together as the men screamed outside. They heard objects being thrown against the door to barricade them in. Were they being left...or were they trapped inside, barricaded, unable to leave before the hut was set on fire?

Christopher tried to quiet the tears of Julius and Douglas. Jimmy listened at the door, straining to hear anything...but there was nothing. Silently they stayed in the hut, still afraid to cry out, afraid to even try to break through the door and escape. What if the men were still close by? What if they heard and came back to get them...to kill them?

Jimmy wasn't sure how long they stayed in the hut. He wasn't sure if he had drifted off to sleep, but he did know what happened next. Finally Christopher felt that enough time had passed that it was safe for them to try to get out
.
They pounded at the door, they called out and they were heard—by their grandmother. She was old and hard of hearing and had slept in her hut, unaware of what had happened. She pulled away the barricade and opened the door, and the four boys almost toppled her over as they rushed out
.

The soldiers of the Lord's Resistance Army were gone. And with them were Jimmy's parents and uncle, leaving the old woman and the four children behind—the children who were too young to become soldiers. At least too young that night
.

When morning finally broke, their grandmother went in search of her two sons and her daughter-in-law. Where had they been taken? Where were they? She started to ask questions and to search, but she didn't have to look long or far. They were discovered in a field less than a kilometer away. The bodies of the three were found beaten, hands still bound behind their backs, with a bullet in their skulls. They'd been dragged away simply to be killed
.

The neighbors helped bring back the bodies, helped dig the graves and helped put the bodies to rest. And they were there, in those mounds just off the path, within sight of the homes where they had lived their lives
.

Since then it was just the four boys and their grandmother. Their parents were dead, but the people who killed them were still around, still killing and kidnapping. It wasn't safe for the boys to remain in their home at night, but they still needed to return each day to work the fields to grow food to live, to go to school and to have any hope for a better future. So each night and each morning, they walked to and from Gulu, seeking shelter and safety. Constantly in motion, never having time to rest or stop. But what choice did they have?

Jimmy is now seventeen years old and still lives in the three-room family home near Gulu, with his three brothers and his ailing grandmother. His impeccable English has been featured in a segment of the documentary film
Uganda Rising
. He now ventures into town daily to attend computer classes, and he hopes to return to school full-time early next year.

The Republic of Uganda is located in eastern Africa. It is a landlocked country that sits directly on the equator and is bordered on the west by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, on the north by Sudan, on the east by Kenya, on the south by Tanzania and on the southwest by Rwanda. While not a coastal country, Uganda is surrounded by an abundance of water, including Lake Victoria to the south, Lake Albert to the west and is cut down the middle by the Nile River.

Winston Churchill, former prime minister of the United Kingdom, once praised Uganda's beauty by saying, “For magnificence, for variety of form and color, for profusion of brilliant life—bird, insect, reptile, beast—for vast scale— Uganda is truly the pearl of Africa.”

Uganda's history began about two thousand years ago when it was first populated by the ironworking Bantu-speaking people of central and western Africa. They were joined from the north by the Nilotic people, including the Luo, whose lifestyle centered around cattle-herding and farming in the northern and eastern parts of what is now Uganda.

The first external influence in the region came from Arab traders moving inland from the Indian Ocean in the 1830s. They came in search of slaves and ivory. They were closely followed in the 1860s by the British who were exploring the source of the Nile River.

In the late 1880s the United Kingdom put the area under the charter of the British East Africa Company, which became part of the colonial “scramble for Africa” in which European nations staked their claims on African resources and its people, for their own gain. The region was initially a collection of kingdoms led by chiefs and clan leaders. These groups were changed forever by this influence from outside, but the different groups still are at the core of who Ugandans are today.

In 1894, Uganda was ruled as a protectorate, and the Bantu-speaking people of the south were placed in
civil service positions, while the Luo of the north, mainly the Lango and the Acholi, were forced into labor camps and the military. This divided the nation in two classes, increasing the tension between the groups. This divide would be most evident after independence and is, to a great degree, responsible for the seemingly endless military coups and rebel uprisings that have plagued the nation.

The first of those military coups came from the notorious Idi Amin. In 1962, less than nine years after independence, Amin ousted Uganda's first president, Milton Obote. Amin was responsible for the death of as many as 300,000 Ugandans, while also expelling the Indian community, who controlled a major stake in the country's economy. Originally seen locally and internationally as a welcomed change, Amin's rule of bloodshed and shortsightedness sent the country into a downward spiral. Inflation climbed to 1000% and unpaid soldiers rebelled. Amin finally sealed his own fate by choosing to go to war with Tanzania.

The Tanzanians took control of Uganda and turned on the local population, who they claimed to be helping, while Amin fled to Libya. Obote's reinstallation as president in 1980 was short-lived, as was Tito Okello's military coup. In 1986 Yoweri Museveni took power when his National Resistance Army (NRA) claimed the capital.

Museveni quickly introduced economic reforms that provided some sustained growth in Uganda and he was lauded as a “new breed of African leader,” by then United States president, Bill Clinton. What continued to be ignored was Uganda's north-south divide, which proved to be the birthplace of the worst of rebel uprisings.

The ongoing civil strife in northern Uganda is a conflict that continues to be misunderstood. The war is essentially two conflicts in one: first, the fighting of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), which is waging war against the Ugandan government and terrorizing the civilian population in the north, and second, the real grievances of Ugandans in the north against the existing government.

The war arose out of the embedded policy of the British during colonial rule in which tribal groups were divided. This ‘divide and rule' policy was continued by post-colonial Ugandan politics. When the current president, Yoweri Museveni, and his National Resistance Movement took power
by coup in 1986, they worsened the north-south divide by alienating northerners, creating grounds for rebellion.

A view south into Gulu, northern Uganda's largest town
.

Since 1986, the insurgency within northern Uganda has undergone four stages, beginning with a more popular rebellion of former army officials and evolving into the current pseudo-spiritual warlordism of the LRA. To date, the LRA consists mainly of abducted children brainwashed, brutalized and forced to kill viciously as child soldiers. Alienated from the Acholi, the LRA wages terror on the civilian population as a means to maintain attention and challenge the government.

After attempted peace talks facilitated by Betty Bigombe collapsed in 1994, the conflict changed into a proxy war that cannot be understood separate from the geopolitics of the entire Great Lakes Region of Africa.

In 1994, the country of Sudan began to provide military assistance and support to the LRA, while the Ugandan government provided military assistance to the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), a rebel group in southern Sudan. The West, particularly the United States, saw this as the battlefront of the war against the spread of Islamic fundamentalism in sub-Saharan Africa and provided significant amounts of aid to the SPLA through Uganda. New elements of a war economy and arms trafficking made finding peace more difficult.

Following September 11, 2001, the United States increased its strategic
alliance with President Museveni and his NRM regime in Uganda. The U.S. quickly declared the LRA a terrorist group and increased military aid to the Ugandan government. This relationship only further solidified the insistence of Museveni on a military approach to end the war. Unfortunately, the “military solution” has worsened northern grievances and proven ineffective over the years. It is strongly believed that rather than continued war, that the keys to peace are to negotiate and build mutual trust.

In the summer of 2006, the newly formed semi-autonomous Government of South Sudan agreed to host and mediate peace talks between the warring parties. The involvement of such a strategic mediator, coupled with new openness by the parties to negotiations led many to call this the “best opportunity in over a decade for peace in northern Uganda.” In August, the parties agreed to a Cessation of Hostilities—to stop fighting—that led to relative calm in northern Uganda. However, the talks have since stumbled due to the rigid involvement of the International Criminal Court (ICC), a weak Monitoring Team and divisions within the LRA networks.

The war in northern Uganda has raged now for 21 years, making it Africa's longest-running conflict, and has been described by one UN official as “the world's worst neglected humanitarian crisis.” The war has led to the displacement of 1.7 million people—over 80% of the region— who now live in camps in squalid conditions. At its worst, 1,000 people were dying each week as a result of the poor conditions in these camps. The war is also known for the brutal abduction and use of child soldiers. The LRA has filled its ranks by abducting over 50,000 children.

As this neglect continues, the people of northern Uganda remain condemned to lives of despair and displacement.