by Opiyo Oloya
The concept of mato oput as an alternative mechanism for creating resolution for returning child combatants was proposed in 1997 by Denis Pain in a widely circulated document titled The bending of the spears. In another document, Roco wat i Acoli (Re-Establishing Kinship in Acholi), the Liu Institute for Global Issues, the Gulu District NGO Forum, and Ker Kwaro Acholi (2005) elaborated the steps needed to complete the ritual of mato oput. As traditionally conceived and practised by the Acholi, mato oput involved known actors. This, however, is not possible in the current conflict in northern Uganda, given the scale of the war and the atrocities committed over the last twenty years. It may never be possible to identify all the victims. There are instances where some of the abducted children were killed in the bush and, to paraphrase Ringo Otigo, their skulls were left to be pushed by wild pigs. Meanwhile, the confusion over victims’ identities is irresolvable in cases like the Corner Kilak Massacre,7 where hundreds were mowed down in a lopsided battle in which inexperienced and sometimes unarmed HSM fighters, while singing hymns, faced NRM/A bullets. Most of the victims were buried in mass graves.
Even in cases where it is possible to know the identities of the victims, as in the cases of the Atiak, Mucwini, and Bar-Lonyo massacres, the killers may never be identified. Except for vague allusions to crimes committed during the war, neither the LRM/A nor the NRM/A (now UPDF) has admitted responsibility for atrocities. This very point is emphasized by O. Lucima (2007), an Acholi academic living in London, who rejects mato oput as a mechanism for achieving justice and reconciliation in the northern Uganda war. He writes:
To apply mato oput and partial ICC indictments to end the northern Uganda conflict and as a basis for a just peace, is tantamount to consciously promoting impunity and acquiescing in state-led propaganda that seeks to absolve the Ugandan state from responsibility to protect, and its own unjustifiable counterinsurgency strategies that, like the LRM/A’s insurgency methods, victimised unarmed women and children; targeted entire ethnic groups for collective punishment in order to discourage support for insurgency. (para. 8)
Nonetheless, despite its obvious limitations, mato oput provides a framework for reconciling former CI soldiers to their communities. The ritual could, for example, be used to drive home the reality, in the minds of victims and returning CI soldiers alike, that the war is over and that there is now a need to move forward. As Pain argues, this imperfect process of mato oput needs to take into account the ‘impossible task of differentiating the coerced from the instigators of violence’ and, further, the fact that returning fighters lack ‘the means to pay compensation’ (Pain, 1997, 3). While it cannot be a silver bullet, mato oput, when combined with yweyo kom rituals, has the potential to move former CI soldiers and the Acholi community beyond remembering the war with all its atrocities and suffering to learning to live with those memories.
Yweyo Kom (Cleansing the Body)
Unlike the more elaborate mato oput, hybridized Acholi traditional rituals collectively known as yweyo kom, also known as yubo kom (repairing the body), have been used by different families and communities to welcome back returning CI soldiers. These include rituals such as nyono tong gweno (stepping on an egg), kalo opobo (stepping over the opobo branch), and tumu dyel (sacrificing a goat).8 These ceremonies are performed mostly to welcome the returning child combatants, cleanse them of contaminants, and reconcile them to the community. But, in a study conducted in all Acholi districts, the Liu Institute for Global Studies (2005) concluded that almost half of returnees did not go through cleansing and purification rituals. The authors noted:
Interviews with returnees found that just over half (50 per cent) went through a family level ‘Stepping of the Egg’ ceremony before being welcomed back into the family home. Usually this is done at the entrance of the home to chase away anything bad encountered while in the bush. One Elder also described it as a message to the returnee that the door of the family is open, encouraging the returnee to pass through it and join the family again: ‘Stepping on the egg means that the relationship that once existed between a child and family has not yet been broken.’ By reunifying the person and their family, the returnee is encouraged to contribute to the health and productivity of the community. (39)
According to the study by the Liu Institute, when returning CI soldiers went through the communal cleansing rituals, they ‘felt more accepted’ and ‘better able to communicate and socialise with community members’ (45). The feeling of acceptance was starkly demonstrated in the way Ringo Otigo and Payaa Mamit were received at home. When Ringo’s mother learned that her son had returned, she immediately arranged to take him home from the army barracks where he was being kept, in order to complete the cleansing ceremonies. Six years later, Ringo could still recall the episode as if it had happened the day before our interview in July 2008:
A vehicle was provided at that moment, and a driver asked to take me home. Three army soldiers went in the back of vehicle to go along with us. With my mother, we were driven to the village. Once we got home, the vehicle stopped some distance from the homestead, and I was asked to get out. Fresh branches of the opobo tree were split and some chicken eggs provided. Water was poured in the courtyard. I stepped on the eggs and the opobo tree and then entered our home. Afterward, a goat was slaughtered and all the traditional rituals that went along with it were completed, and then we left, returning to the barracks. My family remained at home.
Ringo was asked to disembark several hundred metres from the entrance of the ancestral home so he would not bring contaminants into the homestead. Fresh branches of the opobo tree were split and some fresh chicken eggs provided for traditional ritual cleansing. The breaking of the egg signifies a new beginning, the spilling of whatever evil contaminants might have inhabited his body. The stepping over the opobo branch symbolically marked the demarcation point between the violent, stigmatized identity Ringo knew in the bush as an LRM/A operative and the one he was about to reacquire at home as a civilian, the desired identity. He explained, referring to himself in the third person: ‘The goat was sacrificed to wash away whatever bad deeds that Ringo Otigo committed as a CI soldier. He was a new person again.’
By contrast, Payaa Mamit felt rejected outright by her father, who did not go through the rituals. She was bitter and could not hide her deep disappointment: Although she had physically left the bush, Payaa’s homecoming was unremarkable and unmarked by a cultural sign that said she was finally home. Feeling alone, alienated, and unwanted, Payaa Mamit suffered from not knowing whether she could ever relinquish her stigmatized identity and restore fully the desired identity she had had before she was abducted by the LRM/A. As she put it, ‘This makes me remember the past, and think, had I not gone to the bush, I would not be like this.’ Moreover, the rejection by her family and community confused Payaa about the nature of forgiveness as a process for burying her stigmatized war identity:
Before I went to the bush I was young, and you could fight with your best friend, you hit your friend or step on her leg, and later say, ‘Please, pal, forgive me, I did not mean to …’ But at this moment that I am a grown up, understanding the meaning of forgiveness is a lot more difficult because I still understand it the same way as in the past. When I say, ‘Please forgive me, look, I did not know that this was a bad thing, so forgive me,’ [this] means that the action was not deliberate and if the person could forgive then he or she should forgive your action. But at this time, I do not understand the deep meaning of forgiveness.
It is not that Payaa cannot forgive, or is unable to forgive; rather, she is searching for a forgiveness that has deeper meaning for herself and for the community to which she has returned. In this sense, Payaa, like the other informants in the book, recognizes the impossibility of returning to the life she led as a child before being abducted by the LRM/A – so much has happened since then. Yet, at the same time, she has no wish to drown in the shame and guilt of having been one of the CI soldiers who caused so much pain in the community
. She is seeking cultural absolution, a discharge from the suspended purgatory to which she was forced to reside as a CI soldier who committed certain acts of violence. She wishes to leave behind her identity as the guilty person she was in the bush, in order to find forgiveness, to forgive, and eventually to live free of guilt.
Payaa, I would argue, like the other returning former CI soldiers, is willing to engage in the process of personal renewal by accepting responsibility for her role in the war, as well as by forgiving the community that failed to protect her in the first place. Embedded within Payaa’s doubt about the meaning of forgiveness is a space where fellow CI soldiers and the community can sit down and engage in a dialogic process of defining the terms and meanings of post-war healing and repair. She acknowledges the possibility that this soul-searching process is messy, difficult, and rife with uncertainty and indecisiveness. Yet she is optimistic about the prospects for a renewed relationship with her community.
Pito Lwit Okono Odoco (Replanting the Pumpkin Roots)
It is a reality that the dilemmas confronting returning child combatants are not entirely metaphysical, or concerned mainly with their conflicting identities, their images of themselves and how we see them. These dilemmas also involve their physical needs, including their grumbling stomachs and uncertainty about where they will sleep at night. As noted by N. Boothby, L. Crawford, and J. Halperin (2006) in a study of reintegration of child combatants in Mozambique, there cannot be a return to the status quo that existed prior to the war. In the case of the Acholi, so many have lost their homes, lives, families, relatives, even whole villages during the war. Furthermore, the difficulty for returning former LRM/A child combatants seeking their homes was compounded by the creation in 1996 of camps for the internally displaced in Acholiland. At the height of the LRM/A war and the counterattacks by the UPDF between 2002 and 2004, an estimated 1.5 million Acholi were living in camps, depopulating the countryside and turning villages into what the Acholi refer to as paco wii obuu (abandoned decrepit homesteads). The haphazard manner with which the Uganda government forced the population to relocate to the camps meant that scant or no records were kept of which families lived in which camps.
For many returning child combatants, tracking down families often involves painstaking research by non-governmental agencies. For over a decade, the reunification of returning child combatants with their families has been carried out by three NGOs, World Vision and GUSCO in Gulu and Kitgum Concerned Women’s Association (KICWA) in Kitgum town. When the returnee can recall where his or her family originally lived, field workers are given the job of locating the family home, if it still exists. In cases where family members cannot be readily tracked down, the agencies have used mass media, mostly radio. When Radio Mega FM 102.1, which broadcasts all over northern Uganda, went on air in August 2002, it quickly became an avenue for returning child combatants to alert family members that they had come back home (Otim, 2009).
In addition to the problem of finding their families, many former CI soldiers were abducted in their early years of formal education, before they had developed a level of literacy beyond the ability to read and write simple sentences in the Acholi language. Almost none of my informants spoke English, which is the official language of Uganda and a prerequisite for employment in large centres like Kampala and Jinja. And, despite carrying out initial assessments of returnees, providing for their temporary upkeep, and furnishing them with skills training and other educational resources, non-governmental services are generally hard-pressed financially, continually searching for sources of funding to keep programs running. Many of the returning CI soldiers, consequently, must eke a living tilling the land and selling what they produce. As one put, it, ‘it makes me feel that maybe living in the bush was better.’
Aside from their immediate basic needs, CI soldiers must worry about the lack of a comprehensive peace agreement between the government of Uganda and the LRM/A. Officially, as of December 2011, the war remains an unfinished business. International Criminal Court indictments of five senior LRM/A officials for war crimes and crimes against humanity (ICC, 2002; Lee, 1999) have further complicated the process of reconciliation in northern Uganda (Allen, 2005; Hovil & Lomo, 2005; Li, 2005; Lomo & Hovil, 2004). The ICC prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, has insisted that there cannot be impunity in the conduct of the war. He has argued vociferously for the prosecutions of Joseph Kony, Vincent Otti, Okot Odhiambo, Raska Lukwiya, and Dominic Ongwen.9 The ICC, however, withdrew the warrant against Raska Lukwiya in March 2007 when it was confirmed that the LRM/A officer was killed in a firefight with the UPDF in August 2006.10 Pending as well is confirmation of the death of the LRM/A’s second-in-command, Vincent Otti, who is believed to have been executed on the orders of Joseph Kony in December 2007, and whose death was confirmed by the LRM/A in January 2008.11
The LRM/A, for its part, has tendered the argument that reconciliation cannot occur so long as the threat of ICC prosecution remains. This was a major issue for discussion during the 2006–8 Juba Peace Talks and likely prompted the LRM/A not to sign the final peace agreements in April 2008. What this all means is that resolving the social dilemma faced by returning former LRM/A CI soldiers demands a multifaceted and complex social, moral, political, and cultural approach that must consider the wider contexts of Acholi society today, Uganda national politics, and, indeed, the international political landscape. It requires the engagement of actors and resources at many levels so as to address not simply the pressing issues facing the child combatants but also those issues being experienced by families, communities, and Acholi society as a whole.
Notwithstanding the above concerns, much like pito lwit okono odoco, which I translate as ‘replanting the pumpkin roots,’ what is much needed is an ambitious process to restore Acholi cultural stability, re-establish social connectedness where individuals relate to one another as dano adana (McCallin, 1998), and create a robust self-sustaining economy in which returning former LRM/A child combatants can thrive again. To explain the process of healing using the pumpkin metaphor, just as returning to the old homestead requires clearing the bushes, replanting the uprooted pumpkin, and re-establishing a habitable community, so does healing the wounds of war demand the inclusion of the affected individuals, Acholi society, and Uganda as a country. As outlined in the Roco wat i Acoli, a good starting point for this exercise is the regeneration of Acholi culture itself after the war. There is urgent need for the restoration and rehabilitation of the various Acholi traditional leaders such as rwodi-moo (anointed chiefs), ludito kaka (clan leaders), and ludito (elders). The main tasks of the traditional leaders will be to guide and lead the cultural rebirth in Acholi, and, especially, to help with the difficult task of sorting out and addressing the numerous claims, grievances, anger, trauma, and unresolved spiritual issues pertaining to those who died in the war but who were not given proper customary burials, orphans born during the war as a result of rape, children of returning child combatants who were born in the bush … the list goes on.
The restoration of traditional leaders was given a boost in 1995 when the government of Uganda included a provision in the constitution formally recognizing their existence. The following year, Rwot David Acana I was nominated and elected by various Acholi elders as lawi-rwodi (paramount chief) of the Acholi. He died, however, before his official coronation, and was immediately replaced by his son, David Onen Acana II. The young leader was elected by the Acholi and his peers as lawi-rwodi in August 1999 and was crowned at a large ceremony held in Gulu on 17 January 2005.12 The impact of the election of the paramount chief gave the Acholi people renewed confidence in their traditional institutions and cultural practices, crucial for their recovery from the war. Notably, when the Juba Peace Talks stalled in late 2006, the call to restart the negotiations came from Rwot David Onen Acana II at the Juba Peace Conference in February 2007.13 The peace talks resumed a month later in Juba.
There is a also need for persuasive narratives about the scale
of the suffering of the people of Acholi and CI soldiers. Although there are signs of change, one of the most surprising elements of the two-decades war is how very little is known about it in the rest of Uganda and internationally. In November 2003 the UN under-secretary for humanitarian affairs, Jan Egeland (2008), indicted the national and international media when he described the situation in northern Uganda as ‘worse than Iraq’ and was quoted by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) as saying, ‘I cannot find any other part of the world that is having an emergency on the scale of Uganda, that is getting such little international attention.’14 Indeed, while the atrocities in Rwanda in 1994 (Human Rights Watch, 1999) and Darfur (2003–7) gained the international spotlight, relatively little is known about what has happened in northern Uganda since 1986. And, because the casualties of the war are largely unknown outside the families immediately affected, the perpetrators have not been made to account for their actions.
The failure to acknowledge the suffering of the people of northern Uganda and specifically the pain of the CI soldiers has perpetuated a sense of neglect. Today, there is not a single public event in Uganda that memorializes the children who lost their innocence, and in many cases their lives, as LRM/A combatants. The only memorial of any significance to the children who fought in the war is a monument erected by the government of the Netherlands in July 2009. It is located at the main intersection in the middle of Gulu town. Called the Pillar of Peace, it depicts two children, with dismantled guns at their feet, reading a book. This is, as the Acholi like to say, loyo nono (better than nothing). Though small, even insignificant, the monument serves to remind, not only the former CI soldiers themselves, but also the population as a whole, of what the war did to thousands of children who became soldiers against their free will.