Issue 10
Pader - Northern Uganda
By Matt KettmannPhotography By Connie Aramaki
Illustration By Matthew Goldman
In war-torn Northern Uganda, the Acholi tribespeople who reside in the squalid Internally Displaced Person (IDP) camps worry every morning about filling their yellow jerry cans with barely potable water from the few wells that dot the landscape. They worry every mealtime about getting enough basic grains and desiccated vegetables to occupy their swollen bellies. They worry every afternoon about the unexplained fires that might annihilate their rooftops, torch their meager belongings and eliminate their only shelter from the searing sun and drenching rain. And every Savannah-seared sunset, they worry about their own lives. Nightfall is the preferred time of attack for the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), the anti-government, pseudo-Christian rebels who have ravaged the region for more than 20 years.
But their worst fear is that these same Kalashnikov-toting rebels, led by self-proclaimed prophet Joseph Kony, will snatch their children under the cover of darkness and turn them into soldiers or sex slaves. Since the 1980s, the LRA has kidnapped more than 25,000 children, according to a March 2006 Oxfam report. The Ugandan government—run by recently re-elected President Yoweri Museveni, whose rise to power sparked the current civil war—has done little to ease the people’s concerns. It is Museveni’s government that has cloistered these 2 million Acholis into IDP camps. They are crammed, as many as 700 people per acre, into poorly sanitized huts that have become the perfect breeding ground for diseases like AIDS and malaria. For the people of these camps, every second of existence is tarnished by the threat of violence and illness. “This is what we call ‘Escort to Pader,’” chuckles Richard “Ricky” Anywar, the 30- year-old former child soldier and current aid worker who is serving as the guide for the photographer and me during a spring 2006 visit to the region. He is driving his golden Toyota Corolla over the muddy road that leads from the safe city of Lira into the Pader district—the broken heart of the Ugandan conflict that the United Nations deemed the “epicenter of terror.” The six soldiers we hired as escorts trail behind us in a rented blue truck, each holding cocked semi-automatic rifles. One soldier grips a machine gun connected to a Rambo-esque rope of bullets hanging from his neck.
Born, raised, orphaned and abducted twice in Pader, Ricky frequently drives to the dangerous district to run Friends of Orphans (FRO), a humanitarian nonprofit he founded in 1999 to aid child victims of the conflict. He smiles at his passengers and says, “Remove your seatbelt because when the bullets begin flying you won’t be able to get out.” Daylight ambushes are a frequent occurrence on the road to Pader, which covers sites of the worst battles in the history of the Northern Ugandan conflict. The route passes through Barlonyo, where in 2004 over 300 civilians were tortured to death; it cuts through Corner Kilak, where a 1987 battle between Museveni’s National Resistance Army and rebel forces resulted in corpses piled as high as trees. Even Ricky’s constant banter changes to a nervous whistle as we pass one of the more notorious spots along the route.
The rutted road’s only relatively safe spot is Pader Town Council, a community that sprung to life in 2000 as a boomtown for aid organizations. Acholi villagers were moved into the 200-plus IDP camps in this region without even the means to build huts. Government soldiers patrol the perimeters, but this does not stop the LRA from breaching the borders. Dozens of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), including UNICEF, the Red Cross and the World Food Programme have set up programs in Pader to do the work that the Ugandan government can’t—or won’t—do. Millions of dollars of foreign aid pour into the region every year. Humanitarian workers on the ground believe that the ongoing Northern Ugandan conflict serves as the mainline for the government’s addiction to foreign money.
Uncontrolled fires consume whole blocks of the camp, jumping from grassy roof to grassy roof, displacing already homeless families. They are started by—depending on who you believe—spirits, unwatched kitchens or kids playing with matches. Toilets are sporadic holes in the ground surrounded by wisps of dry grass that barely provide privacy. Naked children with dirt-covered, fly-plagued faces and distended bellies eat fistfuls of mushy grain provided by the World Food Programme. Nearly everyone wears filthy, torn scraps of clothing. Many are visibly diseased, suffering from the normally treatable effects of malaria, diarrhea and AIDS. The Ugandan People’s Defense Force (UPDF), the country’s military wing led by President Museveni— whom the Acholis fear almost as much as the LRA—restricts the people’s movement with sunset-to-sunrise roadblocks.
Over 3,000 children—about 150 per teacher— converge daily at Olwornguu Primary School on the outskirts of town. These students are lucky. More than 250,000 of their peers in the camps receive no education at all. Still, many see schooling as futile. As Olwornguu’s principal says, “Why waste seven years when you won’t be able to get a sponsor to go to secondary school?”
Ricky guides us to his Friends of Orphans center. The purpose of his organization is to reintegrate child soldiers into civilian life. They are taught skills such as tailoring, carpentry and other “income-generating activities.” But like many NGOs here, steady funding is lacking, and things move slowly, if at all.
Later in the day, Ricky shows us the home he grew up in—the place where he was first abducted at age 14 and where he watched the LRA burn his mother, father and seven siblings to death. Ricky peers across the plain where he once tended cows and played soccer and tears well in his eyes. “What I want most,” he says, “is to protect this place.”
The Lira Palwo (pronounced “paloo”) IDP camp is further down the road. Some tall trees provide shade here—a rarity in the district. The lack of vegetation is another price of war: the Savannah is rapidly being deforested to provide much needed firewood for the people in the camps. Lira Palwo is surprisingly clean and industrious activities are underway. Men make adobe-like bricks, and families polish their hut floors with wet cow dung. But mostly, like at Pader Town Council, young men pass the day gambling with cashew shells and getting drunk from kwete, a liquor fermented from maize.
Tolit Okesh has lived in Lira Palwo since 2001. He stands amidst a long line of children and women holding jerry cans and seeking water from a well. “There is not enough water,” he says. “There is a lot of mosquito troubles and malaria. There is no education. But the worst part of it is that there is no work for us. So, we drink, have sex and lots of people get infected with HIV. Even if you don’t get disease, you have another mouth to feed.”
Oxfam reports that since 1994, over $1 billion in aid have come into Uganda. Every prominent NGO under the sun has a presence here. Yet, the IDP camps remain an atrocity. According to Angelo Miramonti, the region’s program manager for Italy’s Cooperazione Internazionale (COOPI), there is an inherent flaw in Western relief agencies’ dealings with Northern Uganda: they lack follow-through and don’t demand accountability. Miramonti, who lives in Pader Town Council, says many foreign agencies only send representatives into the region on sporadic one-day jaunts. With this kind of distant management, funds get misallocated or lost, and programs stall. “Every development agency wants to work here with a remote control,” he says. “The remote control is not working.”
The sprawling Patongo IDP camp is a devastating example of mismanaged aid money. With nearly 50,000 displaced Acholi, it is the second largest camp in all of Uganda. Unlike Pader Town Council, Patongo was a town before the conflict. There is an open air market in the main square. Everyone is selling, but no one is buying. Withered cucumbers, dirty heads of lettuce, sun-dried fish and bars of soap are on display. Laundry lines draped with the latest secondhand clothing donations hang next to soot-faced vendors selling clumps of freshly charred coal. A blown-out truck, brought in from the battlefield, sits a half block away—a scalded testament to a hopeless war.
In the evening, back in Pader Town Council, Ricky notices a familiar figure walking through town: Kenneth Banya, the infamous former LRA commander who is said to have ordered the chopping off of breasts and lips. In 2000, the Ugandan government passed the Amnesty Act, which forgives former LRA members if they denounce the rebellion and disarm. In July 2004, Banya surrendered and accepted the government’s offer of amnesty.
For the most part, the Acholi people believe this amnesty program is appropriate for child soldiers. There is an understanding that these children were victims of abduction and brainwashing, no matter the atrocities they caused. But there is general unease about the amnesty granted to LRA masterminds, like Banya who now walks freely and is in charge of government programs that make him the boss of the very people he once oppressed. Museveni granted a hotly disputed amnesty to LRA leader Joseph Kony, who The Hague has charged with multiple counts of crimes against humanity. As night falls on Pader Town Council, Ricky and his friends talk over salted pork and beer under a moth-filled sky. “[Banya] is a bad man, and he should be dead,” Ricky says. “He tried to go back to his community, but they rejected him.”
Negotiations between Museveni and the LRA in 2006 resulted in a tenuous ceasefire. But after 20 years of brutal war, the cycle of violence continues.
On the way out of Pader Town Council, Ricky picks up a passenger who needs a lift back to Lira. She shares some news: the previous night, three children and their cows were abducted by the LRA less than a mile away. The rebels are close, and the ride back to safety is extra bumpy.
To help out in Northern Uganda, contact Ricky Anywar’s Friends of Orphans by visiting www.frouganda.org, Angelo Miramonti’s COOPI at www.coopi.org, the Uganda Conflict Action Network at www.ugandacan.org or World Vision at www.worldvision.org.