Social Torture. Chris Dolan
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in identifying causal responsibility for what is happening inside the war zone.
Self-Perpetuating
Once under way, social torture elicits from its victims states of physical and psychological debilitation, dependency, dread and disorientation and corresponding behavioural responses. These tend to mutually reinforce and deepen each other rather than resolving themselves, and thus contribute to perpetuating or escalating the situation.
For example, although torture is often visited upon the physical body in the first instance, it is at core an invasion of people's minds which is very difficult to reverse, such that methods and impacts ultimately become one and the same thing. As Primo Levi (1989) puts it, ‘Anyone who has been tortured, remains tortured’. The mental state described as ‘disorientation’ is an outcome of torture, but being in that state is itself an additional form of torture.9
Even those who are being devalued may participate in their own devaluation, for discourses of devaluation catalysed by external actors (e.g. colonial notions of the ‘native’, or blaming the Acholi for what happened to them) are internalised by a particular population and quickly acquire a momentum which is independent of the actors who catalysed the discourse and continues long after they have left.
Not only is the invasion of the mind hard to reverse, it also finds expression in further physical debilitation. Both direct and indirect victims are subject to severe psychological stress, which is known to weaken the immune system.10 This may increase morbidity, thereby accelerating physical debilitation and economic dependency, a state in which people are unable to fulfil or learn the roles which under normal circumstances would give them a sense of their adult identity (e.g. provision and protection). This in turn aggravates psychological debility.
Once physical dependency has been induced through lack of food and lack of sleep (which in turn is related to dread), people cannot afford to bite the hand that feeds them, and their time horizons become foreshortened by the realities of day-to-day survival in the war zone. Coping mechanisms adopted to ameliorate their personal situation in the short term often have the opposite effect in the long term. To eat today, for example, people resort to selling sex with its concomitant risk of HIV tomorrow (see Chapter 6).
In a sense torture becomes involuntarily self-administered, and, insofar as these behaviours are perceived and/or portrayed as self-inflicted, it also becomes possible to ‘blame the victim’ and thereby reinforce discourses of devaluation and dehumanisation. This diverts attention away from causes and directs it to symptoms, in a manner which is used to justify the action and inaction of those who in principle have the capacity to do differently. It becomes difficult for any of the multiple actors involved to step back and assess their true contribution to – or position in – the various intersecting cycles of violation and violence. Social Torture thus acquires a degree of momentum independent of the perpetrators’ original actions or intentions.
Public Discourses
Because of the scale of social torture, and its potential visibility to the public eye, institutions such as governments, churches and NGOs need to convince their constituencies, congregations, and funding bases respectively, that institutional actions and inaction make sense and are legitimate. This is likely to be achieved through the manipulation of discourses and their accompanying silences. By focusing loudly on some elements of the situation, and keeping silent on others, these discourses serve to fragment and thus to divert attention from the bigger picture. Just as the individual perpetrator draws on a language of devaluation shared with other members of society to pre-empt any psychological discomfort with his own actions, so institutions and interest groups pre-empt the threat of their own failings being exposed by using discourses to externalise, make public and thereby involve their constituencies in processes of institutional self-justification.11
Overview of the Book
The book is structured in the following manner. Chapter 2 sets out the institutional framework within which the research for this book was conducted, and the key elements of the approach adopted in order to address the contextual and conceptual challenges arising from doing research both on and in a ‘war zone’. To uncover the hidden rather than focus on the already visible, and to enable the emergence of a counter-narrative from those who are generally silenced by the mainstream discourses of the powerful, it was necessary to adopt an extremely open and non-prescriptive approach, in which the subjectivity of people living in that situation was given considerable scope and priority.
Chapter 3 serves a three-fold purpose. It begins with an objective history of major events occurring in northern Uganda over the period 1986 to 2006, including the various Governmental initiatives to deal with the LRA. It is ‘objective’ in the sense that few would dispute these happenings. This is then juxtaposed with peoples’ subjective memories to illuminate the importance of bringing subjective accounts into ‘objective’ history, for when this is done it indicates that although there were undeniably elements of intra-ethnic violence, there were no obvious reasons for giving primacy to an intra-ethnic explanation as there were also inter-ethnic, nationalist, international and trans-national dimensions. Rather than being lead actor, the LRA appears to be one amongst many.
Chapter 4 therefore confronts directly the argument that this is primarily a war between LRA and Government of Uganda, first through a consideration of the nature of the LRA, then through a review of the gap between the Government's stated intentions and actions. The LRA is seen as having both a certain coherence and an identifiable cause – not least to confront the Museveni government, as part of a rejection of wider processes of social and political change. It is also shown to have been more of a force to be reckoned with than national and international propaganda generally allowed. However, it is also shown to have been inherently self-limiting by virtue of its rejection of ‘modernity’. As an organisation it could in principle have been overcome by military means many years ago, and therefore does not offer a sufficient explanation for the continuation of the war. A review of the Government's approach to the 1994 Peace Talks – often cited as the closest they had come to a non-military solution prior to the peace talks which began in June 2006 – suggests that dealing conclusively with the LRA was never the aim of the Government and that its ‘peace talks’ were in fact a form of war-talk. Chapter 4 concludes that the main targets of Government policy and strategy were broader than the LRA and also extended to the Acholi population. The self-limiting nature of the LRA and the Government's lack of commitment to achieving peace allow the argument that this is primarily a Clausewitzian confrontation between two opposing groups to be substantially discounted, and suggest that the confrontation between LRA and Government, though real, is limited and is more important in its function as a disguise for a deeper process, namely social torture.
The following three chapters, which focus on the objective and subjective experiences of the bulk of the population in the war zone in Uganda, particularly in the protected villages, provide the evidence for this argument. They show how, in the name of protection, the population experienced on a mass scale, the key elements of torture, most notably violation (Chapter 5), debilitation (Chapter 6) and humiliation (Chapter 7).
Chapter 8, in reviewing this evidence, argues that in addition to those elements, dread, dependency and disorientation, are also evident throughout the war zone. In exploring these impacts it also becomes evident that while the LRA and Government were the two most visible parties to the situation, a multiplicity of other actors were also involved with differing levels of visibility and with different ways of making the situation function for them. Perpetrators, complicit bystanders and victims are all in place.
At the