Right now the people of Acholi are in a dilemma. They are neither pro-government nor pro-rebel, but they don't know how to go forward. Once we have clarity about which side will win, we can organise…it is not possible for this war to end. It will cause a lot of division among the tribes of Uganda. When it started people saw it as just Acholi. Now they see Kony in Kasese, West Nile, Kampala…(Elder, Gulu district, 1998)

Introduction

      It is never easy to know when a war truly began (Azar, 1986; 36). Was it when deaths per year reached a certain level? Or the day the first shot was fired? Or before that, when conditions of structural violence (Galtung 1969) were created which would eventually lead to physical violence? Furthermore, what defines a particular period of violence as a war in its own right rather than simply one more in a succession of phases of violence? The so-called LRA war, after all, follows on from the violence of the Obote and Amin periods, violence during the establishment of colonial rule, and the depredations of the ivory and slave trade in the nineteenth century, to mention only the most obvious. When the explorer Samuel Baker described the Acholi area as he found it in January 1864, he drew a picture which was to be repeated over and over, not least in the years since 1986: ‘For many miles circuit from Shooa, the blackened ruins of villages and deserted fields bore witness to the devastation committed; cattle that were formerly in thousands had been driven off, and the beautiful district that had once been most fertile was reduced to a wilderness’ (16) (quoted in Gray, 1951: 125). When Girling conducted fieldwork in the area in 1951, he described it as a ‘colonial society’ and argued that ‘it is long since the political organisation of the Acholi…was changed by the direct intervention of the British Administration’ (1960: 84).

      When a war truly begins is thus not an academic question. It lies at the heart of ambiguities about what it is that interventions such as conflict resolution, peace-building, truth and reconciliation and related transitional justice processes should actually be addressing. How far back do they need to go? Is it sufficient to address the most recent period only, particularly if that recent violence is a symptom of a failure to resolve grievances arising from earlier violence and violations?¹ Certainly many of the older people in northern Uganda made connections between the LRA war and injustices of both the colonial and post-colonial era; when I visited the remains of Baker's Patiko Fort in 1999, my guides could still show me the exact spot where the slavers kept their captives more than one hundred years earlier.²

      Not with standing these substantive reservations about the way in which choosing a start-date risks pre-empting analysis of the current situation, 1986 offers a useful starting point, as the takeover by the NRM marked a dramatic shift in power – and the emergence of new non-state actors. Having recovered a degree of political strength under Obote II (1980 to 1986), the Acholi reverted to a position of relative weakness more akin to their experience during the Amin years (1971 to 1979). The national army, in which 30–40 per cent of troops had been northerners, was routed and replaced by what had been a rebel force dominated by people many regarded as foreigners at worst and southerners at best. Tutsis, who formerly had been their herds-boys, were suddenly the allies of the new regime, and the Karimojong, who traditionally had sheltered Acholi children in times of adversity, were now said to be rustling away Acholi cattle. People's sense of social and cultural cohesion and material security was severely threatened.³ The decimation of cattle stocks in the early years of the war echoed the thefts by the slave- and ivory-raiders of the late 19^th century, which had also resulted in ‘The destruction of the once-large herds of Acholi cattle’ (Girling 1960: 14). Willet Weeks gives a figure of 123,375 for 1983 dropping to 3000 in 2001 (Weeks 2002: 4). Gersony claims a drop from 285,000 for 1985 to 5,000 in 1997 (Gersony 1997: 27).⁴ People's principal asset base was stripped away and, particularly post-1996, life in the protected villages further undermined peoples’ subsistence strategies. The period 1986 to 2006 thus marked a dramatic reversal in fortunes for the majority of people in Gulu and Kitgum, a reversal within the lived experience of a significant proportion of the population.

      This chapter begins with a brief note on the place of northern Uganda in national politics during the colonial and post-independence period, and then focuses on the period 1986–2006. After setting out the situation in seven distinct chronological phases, it presents the history of the period as remembered by the women of a self-help group, before closing by identifying some key issues and questions which lie at the heart of subsequent chapters. It is possible, as does Gersony (1997), to structure a post-1986 account in terms of the different movements (UPDA, HSM, Severino Lukoya, Early Kony, Current Kony), but this is problematic given that the movements did not constitute wholly distinct chronological phases. It also narrows the conceptual framework to one in which conflict between government and one insurgent grouping or another is the defining feature of the situation. To avoid these shortcomings, I have adopted a structure based on chronological phases of physical violence and relative calm.

      Each phase was characterised by a period of acute violence followed by lulls which ended when a failed ‘solution’ unleashed a new wave of ever more intensive violence. Phase I ended after a Peace Accord was signed with one of the main insurgent groups in northern Uganda, the UPDA. Phase II ended with the collapse of direct negotiations between Government and LRA in early 1994. Phase III came to an abrupt close following the signing of a peace accord between the Governments of Uganda and Sudan at the end of 1999, and Phase IV ended following the failure of a massive military operation code-named ‘Iron Fist’. True to form the violence which this failed solution catalysed escalated the situation to previously unimagined levels of humanitarian need in Phase V. The overall trend, despite lulls, was one of escalation. It was only in Phase VI, following a damning and unprecedented critique of the situation by the UN, that there was a massive up-turn in external intervention and interest and a corresponding change in the pressures on the Government of Uganda. Phase VII was marked by the Government's decision to engage in peace talks with the LRA from June 2006 onwards, a move which generated some hopes of an eventual return home for the hundreds of thousands of IDPs in northern Uganda.

      The Build-Up to War

      Missionaries first arrived in the Buganda kingdom in the 1870s, and the area known as Uganda became a British protectorate in 1894. Under British rule development was driven by a divide-and-rule strategy whereby different ethnic groups and the regions they hailed from were favoured for different areas of activity – southerners (notably Baganda) for agriculture and the civil service, northerners (including the Acholi) for the security establishment.⁵ As recalled by one Acholi elder (himself a former member of the King's African Rifles during World War II, and an elected chairman of a division in 1952 under British rule); ‘The Acholi were promoted by the British Government to handle key administrative positions because of their tolerance and honesty. For example, the leaders of the police force and of the prison service were both Acholis. They would not steal anything and showed a great interest in their work’. When asked if this was a divide-and-rule strategy on the part of the British, his answer was that;

      A father of many children will always develop a particular liking for one of them. The Acholi were the favoured child of the British. For example, British bosses would test their staff's honesty by leaving money and thing lying around to see if it would still be there. But to some extent divide and rule was manifested during the distribution of seeds to the different