AND WHAT SHALL I TELL THE CHILDREN OF NOTHERN UGANDA?

When they ask about the human rights catastrophe that is stalking their land
and devouring its people

***
I wish to draw the attention of the Commission on Human Rights and the international human rights community to a particularly horrendous human rights situation. I refer to the human rights and humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in northern Uganda.

This human rights catastrophe has been going on now, non- stop, for over twenty years, under cover of a war whose end remains elusive despite conceited efforts at mediation. It is now abundantly clear that there is no desire or interest to end that war. Because it is a war that serves a purpose: the war has become a cynical pretext for the systematic destruction of a people, of an entire society, the vast majority of who are innocent children and women. The war also is being used as a political alibi to avoid addressing key questions facing a country in pain; moreover it has become lucrative source of ‘magendo’ (ill- gotten revenue) for those presiding over it.

• Over the last twenty years, the children of northern Uganda have endured and witnessed things beyond belief.
• Twenty years of massacres, atrocities, and dying made all too banal.
• Twenty years of systematic dehumanization, discrimination and humiliations, employed as deliberate instruments of policy.
• Twenty years of a people trapped between the atrocious crimes and impunity of those supposed to protect them and the brutality of the LRA coming in from the bush.
• Twenty years of a land reduced to desolation, of a people reduced to an existential shadow of a once- vibrant society.
• Twenty years of a slow- motion process of destruction that is radically undermining the underpinnings of a deep and proud culture.
• Twenty years of the destruction and loss of social services, particularly education and medical services, thus deliberately condemning generations of children to a life of underdevelopment, disease and disadvantage.
• And for years, children have been abducted and brutalized by the LRA.

 

For over twenty years now, some two million people, most of them children and women, have been placed into internment camps- - euphemistically called ‘protected villages’—under inhuman and abominable conditions, where despair and disease, over- crowding, infant mortality, hunger and malnutrition, rape and sexual abuse, cultural and personal humiliation and suicide and rampant; where the lack of sanitary facilities, clean water or clothing have become ‘normal conditions’ of life.

This human rights catastrophe has now lasted more than twenty years, watched in studied silence by an indifferent world. Concerning the grave human rights situation in northern Uganda, the response of the international human rights community has been: “We see no evil.”

What will it take to break this conspiracy of silence about the human rights scandal in northern Uganda?

And those who are being systematically destroyed, are they not also God’s children? Do those children not also deserve a small place under the sun?

What shall I tell the children of northern Uganda, when they ask about our commitment to and embrace of human right - - does that embrace extend to them and their fate as well?

What do I tell the children of northern Uganda, when they write and ask: “How come that the champions of human rights are also the ardent champions of those responsible for such dark deeds in our land? Does anybody out there really care about our fate, about what is happening to us and our parents? We hear your deep silence.”    

How shall I explain to the perplexed children that those on whom they had counted to defend their human rights have instead become the cheerleaders and chief providers of succor and support for a structure which practices and celebrates systematic repression, ethnic discrimination and hatred, impunity, corruption and anti- democracy, a structure which routinely and chillingly gloats about destroying “those people” - - “those people”
and their children? But who will say that the emperor has no clothes but these terrifying fragments?

If not you, then who will listen to the voices of these children? If not to you, then to whom will the children turn to address their anguished pleas?

With a very heavy heart indeed, I have felt duty- bound to bring to the attention of the Commission on Human Rights and the human rights community at large, the horrendous human rights situation in northern Uganda. The time has come for a very, very deep soul- searching about what is going on in Uganda. The Ugandan situation and the response to it - - or rather the conspicuous lack of response thereto - - raises some very disturbing questions about the discourse and the application of human rights policies by the international community. Our turning the heat here but a blind eye there, our playing favorites with those who have betrayed the children, those who have committed gross human rights violations against their own people.

And tomorrow, shall we once again be heard to say that we did not know what was going on? That for over twenty years we were unaware of these dark deeds?   

And so, what shall I then tell the children of northern Uganda - - when they ask about the human rights catastrophe that is stalking their land and devouring its people?

I pray that, one day, we in the international community shall find a way to restore in those children and their mothers, the faith they have lost in us and our discourse on human rights.

Olara Otunnu is President, LBL Foundation for Children; World’s Children Ombudsman; Former UN Under-Secretary and Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict