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First the Bullets, Now They Don't Have Food

The Monitor (Kampala)
COLUMN
January 29, 2003
Posted to the web January 29, 2003

By Henry Ochieng
Kampala
More than a million people are dying in Acholi sub-region because they do not
have food. Two hundred have died in Karamoja because they do not have food.
Uganda is a country with two rain seasons and one of the best soils you could
wish for.
But you have people dying because they do not have food. They do not have food
because, as everybody must know by now, their homeland is in the grip of
insurgency. The Lord's Resistance Army continues to fight government in a war
that has laid the Acholi countryside to waste.
The World Food Program sounded the alarm on Friday last week.
Those people cannot work their land. These once proud Luo are on their knees,
begging for food where they never wanted before.
They are caught in a war they do not want. A woman who cannot feed her children
will not be excited about fighting for power. When you have been forced to
abandon your spacious courtyard and the simple joys of rural life and herded
into those miserable protected villages, you cannot think about fighting.
But you still have apparently intelligent people peddling the lie that the
Acholi are suffering because they have chosen to fight government.
If there are irresponsible politicians both within and outside of government
who have quietly stoked the fires of war, then I say death to them. When your
eyes have rested on the tragic sight that Pabbo displaced people's camp is, or
been to Anaka, you cannot support that war.
When you have seen 12-year-old girls selling their virgin bodies to soldiers
(whose HIV sero-status is questionable), just so as to raise money to feed the
family. When you have looked a man in the eye as he tells the story of the
abduction of his son and daughter. Or when you have been to St Mary's Hospital,
Lacor and seen the festering wounds of landmine victims, you cannot accept that
someone will blame the Acholi for their own suffering.
I have done all these things.
In the same vein, I do not want to believe that some people in this government
planned a low-intensity conflict here as part of some macabre insurance plan
against insurrection. In believing this way, I however, do not understand how
come one million Ugandans are dying and the authorities are quiet.
Let us believe that the president, vice president, and ministers and everyone
else in power are African. Once we believe that way, we shall find it unAfrican
that they have kept an uncharacteristic silence when their neighbour is in a
life threatening situation.
I have heard from my elders that our various cultures believe it's the correct
thing to do to beat the drums when you hear your neighbour crying. But the
minister for Disaster Preparedness, Brig. Moses Ali is perfectly still, or if
he is moving on the problem, he is being very secretive about it.
The president is always in Gulu, although understandably barricaded in the
barracks. From the barracks, the daily painful existence of this once self-
sufficient people cannot hit him with the necessary intensity. The expected war
talk has come from him but not a word about the malnourished children in
Palabek.
Who will believe me now when I say there is nothing suspicious about this war?
Is it possible our society has been so traumatised by years of killing, dying
and maiming we no longer see the horror of war? Today, we look at the victims
of war but do not see their suffering.
The government, it appears, has been so de-sensitised it no longer reels back
in shock when one million people are going to die because they do not have
food.
How else can you explain the lack of movement in Karamoja where for three years
the rains have been erratic -- and yet no contingency plans were hatched to
deal with the inevitable starvation ahead. A supposedly crack army unit,
commanded by the experienced Col Sula Semakula, seems powerless to stop the
low-intensity primal battle between the rival clans that has rendered that area
almost lawless.
For this or that reason, our people are dying. When history asks about the
catastrophe in Acholi what will I say?

   

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