Social Torture. Chris Dolan
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accorded to the LRA in mainstream accounts, I would have to make my own assessment of its relative importance in the overall situation, and that this would require some insight into the LRA's internal dynamics and motivations. I therefore asked him if he would be prepared to tell me his story. Although he agreed to do so he then avoided me throughout the rest of the meeting and I assumed he did not really wish to. However, when I was subsequently in Kampala he telephoned to say he was coming to tell me the story there. In the event his story, from the day he was abducted in 1996 aged 19, to the day he returned to Uganda under the Amnesty in late 2001, took eight days to tell and a further two days to check through. Rather than taping it I typed it straight onto my laptop with him looking over my shoulder, and we ended up with a transcript of forty-four pages.
Against the backdrop of numerous accounts given by returned abducted children, this account is important because, at nineteen years of age, Jacob was already an adult when abducted, and he spent his six years mainly within the LRA's headquarters. His story confirms many of the elements of the feedback given by younger abductees, but adds a whole layer of information about the day-to-day running of the LRA and the gradual changes in political climate and their influence on the LRA – at least as he was able to perceive them. I have included the entire transcript as Annex A so that readers can assess the account for themselves.
For several reasons I did not prioritise key informant interviews with NGO or IGO staff. As an NGO staff member myself, I felt I would have numerous opportunities to engage in participant observation of NGO activities, such as weekly NGO security meetings. Most of the international and many local NGOs operating in Gulu district participated in the September 1999 conference,5 and several international NGOs participated in meetings with the Government following the eviction of ACORD from Kitgum district. More importantly, I wanted to capture their role as institutions as perceived by their ‘beneficiaries’, rather than the opinions of individuals within them. As such I decided to rely to a large extent on the observations of their work as seen throughout the fieldwork, together with their own documentation and statements to the media. However, in the course of my eighteen months fieldwork and subsequent visits I had opportunity to have conversations with many aid workers and to get a sense of how they saw the problem and how they justified their approaches. I have tried to give an overview of those conversations, notably in Chapter 8.
Audio-Visual Data
Another major item, which informed my view of the LRA (and Government), was a video recording of the 1994 peace talks, which my research assistants transcribed and translated (see Annex B).
I felt that our findings would be stronger and more accessible if supported with visual documentation. In addition to photographs, a digital video camera was used to document a whole range of activities; food distributions, political occasions (e.g. NRM day), ceremonies (e.g. the installation of Archbishop John Baptist Odama, the anointment of a local chief), celebrations (e.g. World Women's Day, World AIDS day). These were dubbed onto standard VHS tapes and then edited. Again, while basic guidance was provided on how to use the digital camera, the decision about what to film in a given place or situation was generally left to whoever had the camera. Where it was not possible to use video recording, audio recordings of public functions and cultural activities were made. The team also taped radio broadcasts – covering occasions such as the District Council meetings and including the LRA's own ‘Radio Voice of Free Uganda’ for the few weeks that it succeeded in broadcasting to northern Uganda (see Chapter 4).
Media Monitoring
In the event I made relatively little use of the transcriptions of these recordings, and drew instead on newspaper clippings to give a sense of the kind of information circulating inside the ‘war’ zone. Newspapers were a constant feature of daily life in Gulu town. The two dailies, the New Vision and The Monitor, arrived with the first bus in the morning and by mid-morning were sold out. They were eagerly scanned and their contents fed into numerous discussions. On the one hand they were the only regular source of news, and provided some record of events as they occurred. On the other hand, they could not be consumed unquestioningly, the New Vision because it was Government controlled, The Monitor because it was subject to constant harassment by the Government. They also seemed inconsistent in the tone adopted, at times expressing a critical voice, at times simply reflecting official positions. The ambiguous space thus created contributed substantially to my own sense of being in a surreal environment in which nothing was quite as it seemed. To try and get an insight into this phenomenon I employed two part-time documentation assistants to go through these daily papers (including local language papers), clipping and filing those items of concern to the project (e.g. Sudan, LRA, Gulu and Kitgum districts, Diaspora, International NGOs, Human Rights, Gender, West Nile Bank Front, ADF).
Some of these (e.g. Sudan) were a useful source of information on ‘linkages’, others were more useful as a control of the quality of reporting as a whole (e.g. we could compare our own accounts of events in Gulu district with those given in the media). Analysing the discrepancies found through this juxtaposition of public information and our own primary data allowed some conclusions to be drawn regarding the manipulation of public information and thereby of public opinion (see Chapter 4).
Throughout the thesis I have quoted from these news clippings. In some instances I have used them as references for particular events, in others to demonstrate the biases in the opinions expressed in them, and in others to give readers a sense of the extent to which the media contributed to peoples’ sense of disorientation and could thus be integral to the dynamics of situation.
Research Integrated with Programming – The Use of Focus Groups
To engage existing programme staff in the research process I was keen to establish joint research exercises with my colleagues in ACORD's Gulu office. These had to emerge during the course of the work rather than being cast in stone before I had even arrived. The opportunity to make a connection emerged around ACORD's involvement in a Belgian-funded project concerning traditional leadership, as it was agreed that some assessment of how this leadership was generally viewed should be carried out. From January 1999 we therefore embarked on research into the roles and responsibilities of traditional and modern leaders, as seen by the members of ten community-based organisations with whom ACORD had longstanding relationships. These included youth, subsistence farmers, women victims of conflict, and people living with HIV/AIDS (see Chapter 6). In each discussion we first drew up a timeline for the period 1986–1999 and asked people to remember one or two incidents which had happened in each year as a result of the war at national, district, community levels, and, finally, to them or their immediate family. It was a very simple but extraordinarily powerful method, which left the respondents to determine what to mention or to keep silent about. In each group, regardless of its composition, a litany of unceasing abuse and violation emerged. In addition to the better documented LRA abuses, this stage of the research revealed heavy levels of sexual abuse by the military, as well as rampant destruction of peoples’ livelihoods by different forces at different points in the history of the conflict (see Chapter 3 for findings from one women's group). Had the exercise just been conducted with one group it might have appeared exceptional; when it became clear that such experience of violation was consistent across groups with very different profiles and in very different parts of the district, it was shockingly unanswerable.
These findings led us into a second phase of research with the ACORD programme on HIV and AIDS.6 The main objective was to explore the perspectives of the military on issues of HIV and of sexual relations with civilians, again using focus group methods with groups of ordinary soldiers, officers, and military wives, both in Gulu barracks and in a number of rural detaches. Again, ACORD's existing relationships greatly facilitated this otherwise potentially problematic exercise. In most military sites where we carried out the research we were