IRIN Focus on displacement in the north

As villagers of Guru Guru in northern Uganda fled an attack by rebels of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), one man found himself surrounded and trapped inside his home. Unable to escape the armed rebels, Faustino Onek was abducted and forced into the bush, where he was tortured, stabbed and finally had his left arm amputated. Onek, a community elder and grandfather to 27 children, had met at least one of his attackers before: it was his nephew. It is the fear of further brutal attacks which forces Onek to remain in the so-called protected village in Pagak, near Gulu town in northern Uganda. The Pagak camp chairman, Lennoy Denis, told IRIN that if their security could be guaranteed, virtually all the 12,945 internally displaced people (IDPs) in Pagak would return to their villages of origin. “Everyone here wants to go home, but when many people go to the edge of the camp they see footprints which they think have been made by the LRA, they are afraid and they come back,” he said. The World Food Programme (WFP) estimates there are currently 480,000 IDPs living in such camps in the north, almost all of them from the Acholi ethnic group. Most were moved into the protected villages in 1996 when Joseph Kony’s LRA, buttressed by support from the Sudanese government, increased its attacks against communities in the region. The LRA has been fighting a guerilla-style war against government forces in the north of Uganda since the late 1980s, and has carried out widespread atrocities against the Acholi population during that time. Recent reconciliation efforts between the governments of Sudan and Uganda, following from the Nairobi peace agreement signed in 1999, have removed much of Kony’s support in Sudan and weakened the LRA. Other peace initiatives aimed at individual LRA commanders in northern Uganda have further raised the hopes that a lasting settlement could soon be reached. Walter Ochora, the local district council chairman, an elected representative, told IRIN that the security situation in Gulu District was improving on a daily basis. “It is high time people [in the IDP camps] went home,” he said. Ochora added that Gulu District receives some of the highest rainfall in Uganda and, before insecurity forced half the population into restricted camps, was known as the “bread-basket” of the country. Now, much of the population relies on food aid or imports food from other parts of the country or abroad. “The immediate thing the people are looking for is to get back to their land,” Ochora said. The Ugandan government says that the protected villages are the only way the army is able to provide adequate protection to the northern population. “The Acholi are free to go home, but would have to assume the security risk outside the camp,” Minister for the North Omwony Ojwok told IRIN. Others say the Acholi were forced into the camps and are still being forcibly prevented from leaving. Carlos Rodriquez, a member of the Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative (ARLPI), a group working to facilitate peace negotiations in the north, told IRIN that although IDPs were officially allowed to return home, if they attempted to do so they were beaten by Uganda People’s Defence Force (UPDF) detachments stationed to protect them from rebel attacks, and forced back into the camps. A recent report by ARLPI on conditions in the camps said that venturing into the countryside for farming or foraging for food had resulted in many cases of women being raped, people being beaten by both rebels and government soldiers or even being caught in the middle of gunfire. There was also evidence that many women in the camps had resorted to prostitution and were involved in the sex trade with local Ugandan army detachments, ARLPI said. The international human rights organisation Amnesty International says that international humanitarian law allows for civilians to be displaced when their “security or imperative military reasons so demand”. However, it also obliges the authorities to keep displacement to a minimum, to end it as soon as possible and to provide people with the food, water and security needed, according to Amnesty. The government of President Yoweri Museveni lacks broad support among the Acholi population, and his preferred candidate for the parliamentary seat in Gulu was comfortably defeated in June’s parliamentary elections. As a result, many say the north is not a high enough priority for many in the government to bring an end to the war, return IDPs to their homes and reverse the economic and political marginalisation of the Acholi sub-region. UNOCHA has reported that health and sanitation conditions in the IDP camps are deteriorating, and the camps themselves will soon become financially unsustainable. Sexual violence is rife and the incidence of HIV/AIDS and STDs is rising. Traditional community and family mechanisms for ensuring cohesiveness and stability in society have broken down and the population is traumatised, according to OCHA. Despite these problems and the fact that about half the Acholi population has been in the protected villages for over five years, the Ugandan government has yet to formulate a clear policy on displacement. However, in the current, hopeful security environment and under pressure from international aid agencies, the government has begun to look at plans for dismantling the camps. Ojwok told IRIN the government was pursuing a policy of “decongestion” under which the more heavily populated camps would be gradually moved out. If the favourable security situation continued and a programme of phased resettlement could be agreed upon, “we would have cleared the camps in three to five years,” he added. It is as yet unclear where exactly IDPs would be resettled under the decongestion plans. The Resident District Commissioner in Gulu, Musa Ecweru, said there were plans to resettle displaced people around schools nearer to their home villages, where they would have some access to land, and would live in temporary structures for a limited period. However, ARLPI said there appears to be little enthusiasm for the decongestion among IDPs, as it could simply mean they were moved to a smaller version of their present camps, and would still not be able to return home. The government’s plans for decongestion of Gulu District’s largest and most overcrowded camp at Pabbo, which hosts 47,000 IDPs, were costed at a prohibitively expensive Ush 11 billion (US $6.5 million), and it is considered unlikely that the plan will be implemented. According to UNOCHA, northern Uganda has suffered from donors’ split assistance strategy for the country, under which funds are disbursed to the more stable southern and central regions while humanitarian activities in the insecure north have been chronically underfunded. Many say that investment in security, infrastructure, and job creation would lead to improved security, and restore the Acholi’s confidence in the government. Others, including donors, say that insecurity prevents them from investing in humanitarian and development operations in the north. Humanitarian sources in Gulu told IRIN it was vital that donors came in to facilitate the return of IDPs. For the displaced to begin to move back to their homes, they would need food aid for a short period, as well as support for agricultural tools, seeds and more long-term development activities such as provision for health facilities and schools, they said. Without such support, the Acholi people would soon find themselves forced back into the overcrowded camps and dependent on relief food, the sources added. The urgent need for a clear, well-funded plan to return the IDPs safely to their homes was summed up by an elder in Cwero, Gulu District. “If this situation of displacement in the camps continues for five more years, it is going to be the total destruction of the Acholi,” ARLPI quoted him as saying.