What to think when visiting an IDP Camp in Northern Uganda?

The first one to greet me when I stepped out the car in Pabbo IDP Camp, was this little boy. First pointing at me with his toy gun, then posing with a huge smile for a photo. I thought; 'That is almost too perfect, we all want to shoot a photo like that...'.

I pushed the thought in the back of my head. Instead I tried to put him in the category 'children'. I sent a thought to my 4 year old nephew in Iceland, who has all options of making anything he wants. I sent a thought to the refugee children from Screbrenica I worked with in Tuzla in 1997, wishing that they have overcome the turmoils of their childhood.

On Tuesday I visited Pabbo IDP Camp, about 20 km north east of Gulu. Pabbo IDP Camp is the home of about 50,000 internally displaced persons - the biggest camp in northern Uganda. Going on a short visit to a place like this, where you instantly get a tail of children attaching themselves to you, is never easy. You have to create a distance between your instinctive reactions and the obvious need of the children.

My presence doesn't make much of a difference for them, apart from 'something happening' during the next hour or two. It doesn't help them, nor me, if I get emotionally carried away with what I see, though there are plenty of reasons. The only thing I can do is to write my impressions, and hope that someone reads them and get a little insight into the impacts of  one the longest lasting conflicts in Africa. Additionally, I wish you will follow and support Willy Akena from the Diocese Of Northern Uganda. Comment or ask him - use his blog and his articles to get answers to your questions!

For about 20 years Northern Uganda has been marked by the disturbances of the Lord's Resistance Army  - and by the ignorance of the Ugandan government. There is no other way you can explain why a bunch of local bandits with messed up minds have been able to make more than 1,6 million people - refugees in their own country - internally displaced persons (IDPs). People were forced to leave their land due to the insecurity created by the LRA which has abducted, maimed, killed, raped and tortured people, and hence basically made it impossible for people to live in their homes. The Ugandan government created these camps in order to protect people from the rebels. It is said that all people in this camp has a concrete experience with the LRA, either been abducted or maimed by the LRA, or lost relatives. Facts that made me ask a lot of stupid questions several times; 'why didn't the government deploy military where people lived, instead of moving them?' and 'why did the government accept this state of emergency for 20 years?'. One of the answers is that this is more complicated than you think.

A year ago the LRA suddenly moved to a new turf, as they crossed the River Nile and entered into Southern Sudan - some say backed by the Kharthoum regime. About half a year ago the peace talks then began, initiated by the Government of South Sudan (GoS). The picture is clear - the Northern Sudanese would now benifit from LRA disturbing the Southern Sudanese refugees returning - hence the GoS had a strong motivation for making peace. I find it terribly strange how many things in Uganda right now are depending on the peace talks in Juba and on how similar things develop for the two most vulnerable groups in Uganda - caught up in conflict - the Sudanese refugees in north western Uganda, and the IDPs in central and Eastern Uganda.

For the people in Pabbo IDP Camp the peace talks have meant that people now can walk from the camp to their fields to dig and harvest. The absence of adults creates other problems. You see the children on the photos. Way too small girls are carrying babies, substituting mothers, children are growing up without a traditional family structure and with no care. And then in the middle of it all I saw this father doing homework with his child. The contrast to all the other children not being looked after to this father caring for his child was, I have to admit, overwhelming. I guess because it signaled hope.

But there is still a huge distance between the words of the politicians and the traditional Acholi leaders who now tell people to leave their camps and go to their homes, to integrate and reconcile with former rebels - to the real facts. People forget that the Peace Talks are far from completed, and they also tend to forget that even though peace might be a turn-out, it takes much more effort to create long-lasting peace.

Here they deal with immidiate physical needs, whereas the mental needs seem to be another business. My concern are the stuff people have to deal with inside their heads. The children, the teenagers and the former child soldiers. The have all lived an unusual and untraditional childhood, you can't expect them to go back to normal, to the villages. It might sound crazy, but living in the IDP camps is an urban life style compared to living in the villages. Besides, having lived outside a tradtional African family system for this long, makes it difficult to return and accept it again.

Here the relationship between peace and justice differs from Europe, where we don't see peace without justice. I have all along been sceptical about the traditional Acholi approach, I simply can't get it into my Scandinavian head, that the Acholis will live happily ever after, if only the rebels go through certain reconciliation ceremonies.  Here there is a tendency to wish that if only peace is here, then the rest will come. I am not sure, I think it takes more, and I hope that a future positive result of the Peace Talks will make people realise that now the real work for long-lasting peace has to be done.