Social Torture. Chris Dolan
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of war-related corruption and the internal momentum of the ‘aid industry’. At a more important level they relate to the shifting balance of economic and political power within and between states in the post-cold war era of globalisation. In this context social torture supports entire processes of social and political change, and here again analogies can be drawn between the functions of individual and social torture. When considering the Ugandan state's relative vulnerability vis-à-vis its own population and within the wider international community, the contribution of social torture can be seen as three-fold. While hard-won political independence demands that states control their own populations, it offers little in the way of economic power with which to exercise this control. Other means therefore have to be found: demonization of individuals and sub-groups, and militarization in the name of pacification, provide important opportunities. The political need of the Government is for a process of subordinate inclusion (rather than social exclusion) of the population in northern Uganda. Insofar as it breaks down social practices which distinguish the war zone from the wider state (e.g. cattle-based restorative justice mechanisms) and replaces them with alternatives (e.g. the Local Council system), it gradually establishes the inclusion of the targeted social group into the national structure but on a subordinate basis. Insofar as these processes are publicised at a national level (as Chapter 4 suggests they are), they serve as a warning to other social groups in other parts of the country.
The aid and development donors, while talking of good governance, are in fact complicit in this process, as it serves their own need to maintain the Government of Uganda in a subordinate position. By allowing the client state to break with international conventions, a series of latent conditionalities are created that enable these donor states to exercise leverage and control over the client. Yet insofar as the Government is able to implicate external actors, it limits to a certain extent the powers of intervention of those external actors and thereby increases the Government's room for manoeuvre.
To support the vested interests which develop, complex mechanisms are in place to legitimise the process, including the use of the mainstream discourse on war. This discourse, and the careful silences about the vested interests of those promoting it, justifies a whole range of interventions (with the stated intention of doing good and the observed impact of doing considerable harm), and obscures the need for alternative interventions. The discourse and its silences are thus shown to be a form of violence.
The low intensity and wide impact of social torture, its geographical extension and time-indifference, its involvement of multiple actors and the functions it has for each of them, and the way the dynamics of violation become to a degree self-perpetuating (particularly in the sense that some victims themselves become perpetrators) all offer explanations for why the situation in northern Uganda continues. Taking all these different elements into account, it is possible to see that the fundamental process is one of social torture, but that this is disguised by the appearance of it being a war.
Chapter 9 explores the implications of this analysis. As a counter-narrative to the mainstream discourse on today's ‘wars’ it highlights the limitations of models based on binary oppositions such as ‘internal-external’, ‘greed-grievance’ and ‘rational-irrational’. It also highlights the practical limitations of legal approaches when it comes to dealing with multiple perpetrators, with the changing positions of perpetrators, bystanders and victims, and with the fact that people's behaviours are not reducible to the intentionality that lies at the heart of the Convention Against Torture definition. It suggests that the power of the concept of torture will be strengthened rather than weakened by broadening the lens from a primarily legal one to a more socio-economic, psychological and political one, particularly as such a lens suggests a correspondingly broader range of interventions to address human suffering in situations such as northern Uganda.
Notes
1. UN Security Council Resolution 688 of 5 April 1991.
2. In considering the political functions of silence it is useful to consider Kapucinski's observation that silence is ‘a signal of unhappiness and, often, of crime. It is the same sort of political instrument as the clatter of weapons or a speech at a rally. Silence is necessary to tyrants and occupiers, who take actions to have their actions accompanied by quiet…’ (Kapuscinski 1998: 189).
3. As Lan records, ‘During the last years of the war [in Rhodesia], the majority of the population had been forced into concentration camps, the so-called ‘protected villages’, in order to limit the amount of assistance they could give the guerrillas’ (Lan, 1985: 230).
4. In 2002, for example, Amnesty was concerned that twenty prisoners illegally removed to a military detention facility in northern Uganda were at increased risk of torture or ill-treatment whilst they remained in UPDF custody (Public AI Index: AFR 59/004/2002).
5. The Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, adopted and opened for signature, ratification and accession by General Assembly resolution 39/46 of 10 December 1984, entered into force on 26 June 1987.
6. The American Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.
7. Given what is known about the process of forcible displacement into the ‘protected villages’, this immediately makes a large proportion of the northern Uganda population, 90 per cent of which was displaced, increasingly susceptible to PTSD.
8. Then Minister for Northern Uganda Reconstruction, Hon. Owiny Dollo, Bedo Piny Pi Kuc, Gulu, 26 June 1998.
9. For an exploration of the difficulty/impossibility of erasing past experiences of war, see Bao Ninh, The Sorrow of War: ‘Losses can be made good, damage can be repaired and wounds will heal in time. But the psychological scars of the war will remain forever’ (Bao Ninh 1994: 180).
10. B.G. Melamed et al. in Suedfeld, 1990, p 16.
11. The term ‘internalise’, as used in psycho-analysis, ‘means the process whereby inter-subjective relations are transformed into intra-subjective ones (internalization of a conflict, of a prohibition, etc.)’(Zur 1998: 189). By extension I shall use ‘externalisation’ to describe a process whereby intra-subjective relations (in this case the thought processes used by an individual to justify their non-intervention) are transformed into inter-subjective ones and given form through discourses.
2
THE RESEARCH PROCESS
The majority of fieldwork on which this book draws took place in Gulu and Kitgum districts from May 1998 to March 2000 as part of a wider DFID funded research Consortium on Political Emergencies (referred to in this text as COPE). At the time, I was working full-time for ACORD (an international Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) with a long history of working in northern Uganda and other conflict-affected areas), and registered as a part-time PhD student. As the NGO member of COPE, ACORD had thematic responsibility for investigating the local impacts of complex emergencies and of interventions into them. Although it was initially proposed to do this in Rwanda, staff there expressed reservations about a large research project being carried out in their name, and Northern Uganda was suggested as an alternative. During my main period of fieldwork I was therefore based in Gulu town, with occasional trips to Kampala for administrative purposes. During this main research period I had a number of co-researchers, including ten fieldworkers, four part-time documentation assistants, and one full-time research assistant.
After my main period of fieldwork I made several further visits. One was in March 2000 when I returned to Gulu to co-facilitate a workshop on the implications of the research for ACORD's programming in northern Uganda. The second was from February – April 2002, just as Operation Iron Fist was getting underway. In January 2004 I visited again while conducting a Conflict Assessment for Christian Aid, and found that the humanitarian and military situation had escalated substantially (Dolan 2004). Subsequently I returned to northern Uganda during a national conflict analysis for SIDA (Dolan 2006), and for an assessment of humanitarian