Social Torture. Chris Dolan
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observation by myself, the collection of press clippings and various audio-visual data, and discrete research exercises with colleagues from the ACORD Gulu programme in which we primarily adopted focus group methodologies.
Composition of the Research Team
As the research progressed the team of people involved grew. After a few weeks in Gulu I met Komakech Charles Okot, who had already worked as a research assistant to Sverker Finnstrom, and we agreed to work together on a part-time basis. When I found myself stuck in Gulu with no certainty about how soon or how regularly I would be permitted by the authorities to travel to the protected villages, I had to find another way to do the fieldwork. In discussion with Komakech, we decided to seek people from a number of protected villages who could carry out fieldwork in an ongoing fashion by virtue of being resident there, could report to us on a regular basis, and could provide us with entry points when we were able to visit the villages ourselves.
We identified a number of potential fieldworkers from people whom Komakech knew as a result of working in the Uganda Red Cross. On the basis of our interviews with them, eight were chosen. As the work progressed, two additional fieldworkers joined us, one based in Gulu town, the other in Awer camp, such that we ended up with a group which was highly diverse in terms of backgrounds, experiences and political positions. It included individuals who had spent time in the bush, camp leaders, religious leaders, teachers, students, district councillors, and otherwise unemployed civilians. A major weakness, however, was the lack of women fieldworkers. The one woman who came for interview was not amongst those selected.
The names of the fieldworkers were registered with the authorities and each individual received a card and a letter of introduction to present on demand. Notwithstanding these administrative safeguards I still could not realistically pre-determine what it was or was not safe for the fieldworkers to investigate; while it was likely to be acceptable to document the visits of priests and politicians, I could not decide for them if it was safe to document an LRA raid or the Government's response to that. Just because fieldworker X could talk about an incident of rape I could not assume that fieldworker Y would feel able to do so, as each person had his own particular profile in his own camp, some of which offered more protection than others (e.g. teachers, camp officials), and some of which allowed access to otherwise little represented sections of the population (e.g. youth). I therefore consciously sought to create a situation in which such decisions were left to the fieldworkers’ own judgement and individual sense of security.
In discussion with the fieldworkers we developed an approach centred around a report to be prepared and brought to Gulu for discussion on a monthly basis. This comprised several elements. The basic one was a standardised questionnaire, which covered relief deliveries (food, clothing, seeds and tools), health and sanitation services, education, sources of income, information flows (from LRA), visitors to the camp (e.g. politicians, religious leaders, journalists, cultural and recreational activities (in particular dances), deaths/burials/funerals. This was supplemented every three months with a price list of all items available in their local market. Information collected included cost of the item, and its origin, allowing us to demonstrate, for example; the sale of relief items, the importance of access to urban markets, and also the wide range of items produced, hunted or gathered locally, despite the ongoing insecurity.
To capture people's subjective experience and interpretation of the dynamics within the war zone, and for the fieldworkers to bring their own subjective view of what was significant to bear, they were given event and incident report sheets on which to write about any incident or event or issue they felt would be of interest to someone who knew nothing about life in the protected villages. This resulted in reports on a whole range of issues which it would have been impossible to specify in a pre-formulated questionnaire. In identifying incidents and events of interest, the fieldworkers became ‘co-investigators’ in the Freirean sense of taking an active attitude ‘to the exploration of their thematics’ (see Freire, 1996: 87). I subsequently clustered the reports as demonstrated in Table 2.1.
I have drawn heavily on these in providing qualitative evidence for the arguments made in the thesis. Wherever quotations have been used they seek to be as representative of the wider set of stories as possible. At the suggestion of one of the fieldworkers, these accounts were enhanced and supplemented through the use of cameras. Again, I did not specify what should be photographed, but requested that each photo be dated and given a brief explanation of what it depicted and where. In many cases the fieldworkers used such photographs to corroborate their written accounts and thus strengthened the quality of the incident and event data.
Over and above the monthly reports the fieldworkers also provided hand-drawn maps of their village, and on occasion filled in supplementary questionnaires related to the research, for example on HIV and conflict and on livelihoods. Each fieldworker also provided a history of the origins of his particular protected village. When the security situation allowed I would also visit their villages with Komakech. This allowed a degree of mentoring, corroboration of the findings they had already presented, and the development of relationships of trust with the fieldworkers, whom, in addition to their role as data gatherers, I also considered as among my key informants.
Table 2.1 Number of Reports by Subject Matter over the Six Months July–December 1999, from 10 Protected Villages in Gulu District
It is difficult to overstate the importance of developing such trust; I still remember the tension of the initial meetings, and how over the months this tension was replaced by what felt like a high degree of mutual confidence and trust. My sense was that the key elements in this evolution were regularity of contact, regularity of payment, confidence over time that their reports were not being shared with the authorities, and the visible influence of their opinions on both the content and methodology of the research. As this happened, so the nature of what they were prepared to document changed; reports became more critical and the material more sensitive. With a more rigid approach I would have expected the findings of the fieldworkers to become more homogeneous; with this very flexible approach each individual's reports became more rather than less distinctive as each individual felt more able to bring his subjective concerns to bear.
The diversity of the fieldworkers was also a major advantage in dealing with the political ambiguities of northern Uganda. Although it is impossible to verify, it is probable that by having this range of people involved, those parties with an interest in knowing exactly what was being done were in fact informed and updated by our own research staff. From a methodological point of view I was more interested in capturing a wide range of perspectives than in the consistency of data across villages, and again this was well met by the diversity of the team. In presenting data drawn from the fieldworkers’ accounts, the village of the fieldworker and the date of the incident referred to are given in the endnotes.
In-Depth Key-Informant Interviews
In parallel to the ongoing monthly reports I also carried out numerous key informant interviews, generally together with Komakech, who would also translate when necessary. We began with interviews on the issue of refugees, the diaspora and remittances. These early interviews were the least successful, perhaps because they touched on too many sensitive questions, or because we were not familiar enough to ask them correctly, or because our identification of key informants was poor.4 Later interviews, which in some cases involved interviewing the same person several times over, focused more on issues such as the peace process led by the then Minister for the North, Mrs Betty Bigombe, from 1993 to 1994, the creation of ‘protected villages’ from 1996 onwards, and the teaching and role of traditional dance.
The most in-depth key informant interview, which bears some discussion as I draw on it extensively in Chapter 4, was one conducted by myself over a ten days period with a returned LRA soldier. This was unplanned and resulted from our both attending a meeting in Kitgum in late March 2002. By this point, notwithstanding the problems of researching the LRA and the fact that documentation on LRA abductions and other atrocities already existed, I had realised that,