p. scott cummins blog

Reflecting on Gov. Rick Perry

2011-08-19T10:20:00.000-07:00

Just finished reading another excellent column by Charles Krauthammer. What does that have to do with sudden emergence on the presidential election scene by Gov. Rick Perry? Plenty. And just like business, both big and small, keeping their capital on the sidelines as the Obama era is defined by attempts to change the rules of the game regarding so many aspects of our lives - Americans are merely waiting for enough confidence to make predictions about certainty before getting back in. Perry has jumped on to the ship of presidential politics because he leans hard on the right rail, urging the ship back on to a straight course after three years of listing more and more to the left from a president who has been an absent leader, a blamer, someone who would rather blame the last captain than actually get into the wheelhouse and steer the ship. Perry's involvement may help with that. But here's what I think: Americans want someone back in the wheelhouse putting the ship back on course running strong and upright. They want the listing to stop. They are taking charge of their own lives (strong evidence: credit card delinquencies hit new low) That's why I feel everything happening right now in August will lead to a strong look at another governor, Jon Huntsman - and there will be a lot of agreement around him from both left and right about what we can do as a country. Until then, we are in for some choppy seas in a listing ship.

Donald Miller's blog on How to live a Great Love Story, Vol 1 (For the Girls)

2011-08-12T10:05:00.000-07:00

How to live a Great Love Story, Vol 1 (For the Girls)
by Donald Miller

Today I’ll talk to the girls, tomorrow I’ll talk to the guys.

Living a great love story doesn’t look like winning the lottery, it looks like training for a marathon. It’s hard work and you have to do the work long before you ever meet Mr. Right, otherwise you’ll be the girl who shows up for the marathon having eaten a gallon of ice cream every night, listening to Taylor Swift songs and watching love stories about vampires. No good man can run with that girl, not for much longer than a mile.

In movies and books, there are formulas for great love stories. Not all movies follow them, but we can depend on a variation on certain themes. They go something like this:

1. Boy meets girl.

2. Boy falls in love with girl.

3. Girl is a bit hesitant knowing her heart is tender and could get hurt.

4. Boy proves himself strong enough to handle and defend her heart.

5. Girl trusts boy and they live happily ever after.

All love stories are different, of course, but these are central themes that weave in and out of the good ones. And if they don’t, the stories are normally tragedies.

Juliet does not trust Romeo right away, for instance, but he pursues her and he wins her love. The same goes with the characters in The Notebook and Twilight (I confess I labored through both) and in the great romantic novels of Jane Eyrie and Charles Dickens and so on and so on.

So, if these are the principles of a great love story, how do we play them out in our lives? How do we live a great love story? Here are some suggestions:

1. Don’t hook up: Girls shouldn’t make it too easy on the guy. Don’t hook up, in other words. A recent article in Scientific American revealed when a girl hooks up with a guy, she esteems him very highly. She may think of him as powerful or famous, somebody who is strong. But the opposite is actually true from the guys perspective. Guys hook up with girls they find less attractive and sexually easy. All they want is sex, and so if they perceive she will give them sex and then get out of their lives, they are going to jump at the chance. The girl may feel very wanted and beautiful but the truth is he’s insulting her. If he thought of her with respect, he’d sit and ask questions about her life and her family. He’d try to get to know her because he wants to develop a friendship and perhaps a romantic relationship. In other words, guys don’t hook up with girls they would marry. They marry the girls they get nervous around and are made to pursue. So, if you become a “hook up” girl you get labeled, in the minds of guys as a girl you really don’t have to fight for. And when your husband finds out you were the “hook up” girl he’s going to have to have a lot of grace, which is fine, it just puts you in the category of “charity” in his mind and not “equal” or “partner.” He may still love you, but he will have serious questions about whether you’re in the kind of shape it takes to run a marathon. Unless you get over it and move on and do a period of time where you put it all behind you, he will and honestly should lose respect for you. Respect is not free. Respect is earned. Grace is free, but grace and respect are different.

2. Make him work for it: When a guy is made to fight for a girl, he esteems her much more highly. She becomes more attractive in his eyes, and for that matter she becomes more attractive to other men, too. That said, most of the time this will backfire because lots of guys are just looking for cheap and slutty sex and for her to get lost afterward. Still, it’s your chance to weed them out. And believe me, girls, there are a lot of weeds.

3. Weed them out: Guys who are just looking for a hook up need to hit the road. By weeding them out you definitely end up with a smaller pool of guys to choose from. It’s unfortunate and that is truly bad news. But there’s good news, too. There are fewer girls with the strength to not have one night stands, and those girls become much, much more attractive to men. Those are the girls who present a challenge, and who are esteemed more highly. These are the girls guys recognize as the kind of women they want to partner with in raising a family. In other words, it’s a great strategy to be more attractive to a smaller group than cheap and easy to a larger group. Plus, the stronger guys are up for the work while the weaker guys are just trying to get laid.

4. Be willing to suffer: What this means for you is that your love story needs to have a lot of lonely crying in it. Believe it or not, there will come a day when a man will fall madly in love with you and you will have the honor of sitting down with him one special night to explain that, while you weren’t perfect, you turned down plenty of guys and and cried yourself to sleep hoping somebody would come around and treat you with respect. He will be honored by this, and he will love you and feel humbled. If he doesn’t have the same story, he will feel intensely convicted and unworthy. You’ll really be giving him the foundation he needs to love your heart.

5. Have some faith: I’ve noticed that most women who complain a good man won’t come along are actually interested in the wrong guys. They make lists of their perfect gentleman coming to rescue them meanwhile they’re hooking up with guys who have a track record of just having sex with random women. Really? Your husband won’t really care what you say, he will care what you do. We tell our love stories with our actions, not our words. Life isn’t a Taylor Swift song, with all the hardship left out. It works more like a Normal Mailer novel, with all the gritty garbage left in. Stop falling for the romantic version of life, and start realizing that a romantic story is told with an enormous amount of pain, sacrifice, suffering and patience.

6. Don’t be thirteen: Unless you’re thirteen, ladies, grow up. Many women claim that men just won’t grow up, but then you sit and talk to them and realize they haven’t grown up either. They aren’t strong enough to demand something more from their men. They aren’t strong enough to say no to a guy who just wants to use them. These are all elements of immaturity. And it’s the stuff of a bad love story. A good man will attract a good woman. And a victim will attract a predator. Stop acting like a victim. If you want a strong man who can protect you and your children, stop trolling for predators by crying all the time. Act like a dignified woman who believes her company is valuable and should come at a price.

So, if you want a great love story, start training for it today. Start suffering, like somebody training for a marathon. Do the pain, suffer through the nights where you cry in your pillow, have some faith and stop cheapening your love story with scenes you’ll never be able to edit out.

You’re love story may not work, it’s true. Plenty of them don’t. But the chances of your love story succeeding are greatly increased when, on race day, you can actually run.

So, what do you do if you’ve completely screwed this up:

1. Be honest about it. Don’t hide it. If you went through a slutty season, don’t act like you were a helpless victim, a sweet girl who got caught up. You probably weren’t. A confession and an excuse are entirely different. Excuses talk about being hurt or drunk or being lied to. Confessions start with a radical and real understanding of how bad your human nature actually is and how you were caught up in a selfish search for validation and pleasure. Don’t lie to yourself and don’t lie to him. Don’t act like the sweet girl who “accidentally made twenty-five mistakes.” He won’t trust you because what you say and what you’ve done are different.

No good man is going to marry a woman with multiple personalities. And besides that, you’d be surprised at how much unbelievable trust you can build by being brutally honest. You shouldn’t share a bunch of details, but you should definitely share you went through a slutty season and have very few, if any, excuses. But now you want more. Now you want to put that behind you and build a love story. Honesty is very rare, and an honest girl is a girl you can build a family with, regardless of her past. I really mean this, too. If you’re brutally honest about your motives (keep the details vague, ladies. I’m serious about this. He doesn’t need visual images) then you ARE BUILDING TRUST and he can love you. If you play the victim, he’s going to walk away. And he should. A victim is great material for a counselor, but not for a husband.

2. Find out why you did what you did. Why are you capable of having sex without love or commitment? What are you using sex to accomplish? When those questions are a mystery to you, you aren’t healthy enough to get married and no good man should marry you. Those questions need to be answered and understood in a way that the two of you can build on as a foundation.

3. Start training for the freaking marathon. Marriage is the hardest job you’ll ever have. It works nothing like a hookup. The sex is more sloppy and vulnerable and affected by all kinds of emotional contexts. If you’re used to one off sex acts where you’re having crazy experiences, you’re husband is never going to be able to match up because, well, he’s got to stick around and do the laundry and argue with you about the electricity bill. That’s not sexy stuff, that’s the stuff of real love stories. It feels boring in the moment, but twenty years in you’ll be crying your eyes out over this man who stuck with you through the thick and thin and who honestly didn’t care that you got fat! Why not give yourself to the one who didn’t care whether you got fat than give yourself to the one who makes you feel like you’ve got to throw up after eating a lolly-pop? That kind of love story sucks so stop living it!

4. Work through your need to be validated by men. You’re going to marry a man, not men. So cut the slutty dresses and facebook photos. Start acting like a woman a man can partner with to build a family, not a woman who would make a great romp on a drunk and emotionally foggy friday night. And stop using alcohol as an excuse. Nobody gets drunk and accidentally sleeps with a hamster. You know what you’re doing, drunk or not, so cut it out. In other words, become the woman who fits the character in the love story you want to live.

5. Don’t act. Don’t pretend. Don’t pretend to be a wholesome girl who is starting over when you’re secretly still wanting to hook up. These changes need to be internal and they need to be real. You are going to have to go through the withdrawal of using guys for validation. If it helps, just know you’ll stand before God one day and you want him to be proud of you. That’s the only thing that helped me stop validating myself with women. I couldn’t do it for Paige, but I could do it for God. Turns out God loves Paige more than I do. Go figure. Anyway, get over the acting part and start doing the real living part. Every great story demands enormous sacrifice. Start sacrificing your validation with other men to make a real love story happen.

Tell a great love story and you’ll dazzle the world. Do the work and enjoy the benefits. The world needs some great love stories, but few people are willing to do what it takes to tell them. No wonder we all love them so much.

Do you want a great love story. Do you want to run the marathon it takes to be married to the same man after fifty years. Do you want him to look you in the eyes with so much respect it bring tears to his. If you do, start training for the marathon. No good story comes easy. A great love story is still possible. Go for it!

* Will you do me a favor and print this blog out and read it with the women in your life who you love, especially the young women who are dating? I think you’ll be shocked at what a great conversation you’ll have when we talk openly about what it takes to live a real love story.

How to live a Great Love Story, Vol 1 (For the Girls) is a post from: Donald Miller's Blog

Donald Miller's blog on How to Live a Great Love Story Vol. II (For the Guys)

2011-08-12T10:02:00.000-07:00

How to Live a Great Love Story Vol II (For the Guys)
by Donald Miller

How to Live a Great Love Story Vol II (For the Guys)

Any great story contains the following elements:

• A person (or group of people)

• That wants something.

• And are willing to overcome conflict.

• To get it.

A great love story is no different. In a love story, a guy, wants a girl, and is willing to fight the dragon, to get her. Or at least some variation on this theme.

If you’re like me, though, you don’t like to sit and watch romantic movies. If it’s a comedy, I can bear it, but I’m the guy who fast-forwards romantic dialogue they throw in to endear a female audience. I could care less.

That said, though, men were designed by God to live a great love story.

But there’s a difference between men and women, here. Men were not designed to have love stories “happen to them” as much as they were designed to “make a love story happen to a woman.” Do you understand. You’re the writer of the story. You’re the guy who initiates and has the character to follow through. You’re the one responsible for how the love story turns out.

I think we can all agree we live in a culture of guys who couldn’t write a love story to save their lives. Honestly, American love stories suck. If you want a girl to be crazy about you, you’ve got so little competition that it’s easier than ever.

The only thing is, it looks nothing like the sappy stuff Hollywood is selling to our current culture of women who are, perhaps, lost in fantasy. Those kinds of stories have men stuttering about feeding women’s egos by falling all over themselves and practically peeing their pants. In real life, women think those guys are losers. A woman wants a man who is confident, who knows where he is going, and knows exactly where she fits into his life. Her preference, of course, is that she fits into his life as a best friend, lover, wife, and the mother of their children. At lest that’s the case in the love stories I want to talk about in this blog.

Women do like bad guys for a period of time. Usually, this lasts between the ages of 18 to about 24.The reason is simple. Their bodies are looking for somebody who is strong enough to defend their offspring, and they mistake strength for, well, the general characteristics of a jerk.

But, as she gets a little older, a woman’s chemistry begins to change and she enters into a more mature understanding of strength. As a woman matures, she literally loses interest in the bad guys and looks for somebody more dependable. She loses interest in guys who can’t be faithful and, well, can’t seem to stop smoking pot. After that, women become interested in stable, well adjusted men headed somewhere that involves safety, security and emotional stability. That’s where you come in because the real love stories, the ones that don’t end with her bailing her loser boyfriend out of jail, or worse, catching him with another woman, happen when two healthy people finally find each other. If you’re reading this and you’re young, you might have to put up with a few years of girls chasing guys with tattoos on motorcycles, but don’t worry about that. You start down a solid career path and girls will be knocking down your door in a few years. I promise.

Most people think love stories only benefit women. But don’t be fooled. There’s a lot in this for you. A man can have sex with a thousand women and he’ll never feel as masculine as he will be leading a woman through a good love story. God designed it so a man felt his most powerful while guiding a woman through an amazing love story.

Love stories, though, are told through sacrifice, patience and pain. It may take you five years or more to get your act together, but when you do, every woman around you will recognize a potential leading man in the love story they are dreaming about.

Here are some things to work on to lead a woman through a great love story.

Want something. Every story involves a person who wants something, and you’re love story can’t be any different. First of all, you should want some kind of career or impact. You should want make the world a better place and you should be very focused and dedicated to making this happen. This means going to college, starting a company, coaching a team or teaching a class. If you want to make a woman’s dreams come true, pick up your X-box and throw it in the trash and start doing something with your life. Have you ever noticed that ancient paintings of women always have them draped over a bed or a couch, arms outstretched in rest? And yet the guys are yielding a sword or riding a horse or captaining a ship. That’s because men were designed to work. Want something. Work hard to become good at a craft. Get off your couch and move. My friend Henry Cloud actually recommends that when a father is approached by a young man asking for is daughters hand in marriage, he withholds his blessing until the man presents his last few years worth of tax records. No kidding, it’s true. It’s not because Henry believes the man should make a lot of money, it’s because the young man should be responsible enough to file taxes and have a job. How else is he going to provide for a family. All that to say, part of being a leading man in a love story is being a dependable, action-oriented worker.

Choose the right women to date. The book of Proverbs was primarily written to men, and while there is a great deal of advice in the book about work ethic and finances, a significant percentage of the book is spent warning men to stay away from certain women. Is she seductive? Stay away. Is she nagging? Stay away. Is she sexually promiscuous? Stay away. In my dating history, I’ve dated some amazing women. But on two occasions, I dated girls who were pretty seductive in nature, and I paid dearly. I lost sleep and nearly lost my sanity. I’ll never forget taking a flight to Vancouver BC one night, reading through the book of Proverbs and realizing what the source of my problems was, I was dating a girl the book told me not to date. I broke up with her immediately and sanity returned.

Now this does not mean you shouldn’t date a girl with a past. One of my all-time favorite girlfriends, a girl I consider amazing and will make a terrific wife to somebody some day, actually spent years living with a guy and has a fairly liberal standard regarding sexuality. That said, though, she’s not seductive, and she’s completely honest about her philosophy. In other words, we may not agree about everything regarding sex, but the woman has integrity. I’d take a non-christian woman with integrity over a Christian seductress any day, and I’d be a happier man for making that decision. You want a woman who is looking for a man, not a woman who is looking for men. Seriously, guys, just stay away from the woman who leads with her seductive side.

Have a plan. Did you know John Wooden, who won 10 National Championships with UCLA actually never won the championships the first 16 years he coached? It’s true. It wasn’t until he sat down one off season and created a plan that he began to succeed, and he’s of the most successful coaches in all of sports. My question to you, then, is do you have a plan? Do you know what kind of father you want to be? Do you know what kind of wife will be required to make your vision come true? If you don’t have a plan, you’re leaving your success up to luck.

Be honorable with the women you date. I made a rule a long time ago and it’s served me well. I told myself I’d never kiss a girl unless I cared deeply about her. For the most part, if not completely, I’ve never kissed a girl I wasn’t dating. Though looking back I think there were a few in there that weren’t quite defined. That said, though, I’ve never used a girl just for sex or just to hook up. I am so grateful for this, because I don’t want my conscious entangled in all that mess. While there are a few girls I’ve dated who may not like me, I think most of them think I’m pretty okay. At least that’s what they’ve told me. So here’s the thing. You can either wreck a girls heart, or build it up. You can either help her understand that she’s beautiful by protecting her heart and her body, or teach her she’s just a girl worth using for sex. To be sure, there are plenty of girls who actually just want to be used for sex, but remember, Proverbs says stay away from these women. Seriously, I’ve taken the bait a couple times and it’s a living nightmare.

Stop validating yourself with women. This is a pretty serious problem for many men, especially men who grew up with womanizing fathers or no fathers at all. Men who do not believe they have what it takes to live life well and with strength will validate themselves with women. They just aren’t sure they’re manly, so they have to test themselves all the time by trying to knock down girl after girl. Even if it’s not sexual, it can be emotional. A guy can get hooked on that feeling of having a girl like him. If you are going to tell a great love story, you are going to have to figure out how to let go of this tendency. Stop validating yourself with women. Stay focused on the one girl you’ve chosen and make it happen with her and her alone.

Stop having sex and learn to make love. I’m amazed at how many women hook up with guys and talk about how terrible the sex was. Seriously, I hear them talk about this all the time. But why? Why would a man who has slept with hundreds of women not be very good in bed? Well, the main reason is a woman wants to connect in ways beyond just a physical connection. Most “players” have no idea how to make love to a woman, precisely because they don’t even care about the woman they are sleeping with on a given night. They are so busy trying to get laid, they take no time to actually find out who she is. Essentially, sex to them is just mutual masturbation. It usually leaves the woman feeling dissatisfied and, well, disgusted and if she’s honest, a little used.

I mean sure she wanted to have sex, but she may have wanted something else, too. A woman often wants a deep, soul connection. Even though she hooked up with a stranger, she was just going through the motions of something else she really wants. She wants words of affirmation and eye contact and playful fun that only happens in intimacy. Why was the sex no good in the hook up? Because the relationship was no good.

That said, start being a man who knows how to connect with women. I’m not suggesting becoming a player. I really think you should only be connecting with a woman who is worthy of becoming your wife. But when she is your wife, make love to her heart, not just her body. As ferociously as possible, find that woman’s heart and connect with it. Learn everything about her and connect with her in as many ways as possible. Understand her story and care about her past. In fact, for the first several months, I wouldn’t even try to make a move. Just get to know her, become her friend, do things with her that she enjoys, take the relationship to the place where you smile when you hear her name. Once you get there, the sex will be great. Once you have earned the respect only a husband deserves, her body will respond in ways she never thought humanly possible, and, for that matter, so will yours.

Bring peace into chaos: I firmly believe that the job of a man is to bring peace into chaos. A man (and a woman too for that matter) can look into an empty field and see a house. He can look into a woman’s lonely heart and see how easily it could be loved. He can walk into a room and settle a group of wild children. Look at your life and ask yourself this question: Wherever I go, do I leave a trail of peace behind me? If not, then start practicing the art of ordering chaos right now. Is there chaos in your personal life? Clean it up. Is there chaos in your relationships? Clean them up. A man brings peace and order into chaos. You have what it takes to do this, I believe it firmly. You were designed to leave a wake of peace everywhere you go.

Surround yourself with good men. Years ago I asked about five guys who didn’t know each other to meet me for breakfast. I hand chose these guys. Each of them were intelligent, driven, successful and emotionally stable. We got together early one morning and I introduced them to each other. Then I did something very strange. I told them we all needed to be friends. I told them the world was in need of good leaders, and good leaders only become good leaders if they affect each other. As odd as it was, that group continued to meet for two years, and now we are all deeply imbedded in each others lives.

Lose your loser friends. This brings me to something hard. If you have some friends who are dragging you down, that is they are knocking down chicks and not applying themselves to a career, it’s time for you to invite them into something better, and then if they don’t want to come, cut them completely out of your life. I’m sorry to say it so bluntly, but it’s time for them to go.

Develop strength. A woman loves a man who can be tender with her, but believe me, while you’re holding her in your arms and she’s being comforted about her hard day, you’d better have a baseball bat behind your back, ready to obliterate anybody who tries to hurt her. Be tender to her, but be absolutely ferocious with anybody who takes advantage of her. If you aren’t a strong man, practice. Take stands, don’t be a pushover, protect the ones you love, and be willing to make a few enemies.

Okay, so what does this have to do with telling a good love story. Well, it has everything to do with telling a good love story. Women don’t just fall in love with flowers and chocolate. All that crap is fine. But what they fall in love with is dependability, strength, kindness, community, structure, strength and character. Being the leading man in a love story is, basically, about being just that, a man that leads. Be a good man, a man with character. Have a vision, lead the story, and be the man she’s been dreaming about.

Angelina Atyam - a mother's story of reconciliation

2010-12-06T21:52:00.000-08:00

Angelina Atyam, winner of the UN Human Rights Award - with a mother's plea for peace and an end to child soldier violence. Made particularly powerful by her own example of enormous forgiveness and reconciliation.

Washington "Can't Afford Patty" TV30

2010-10-01T21:10:00.000-07:00

Firefly

2010-05-27T22:54:00.000-07:00

PATH's awesome new global health video spot, "Firefly" is going viral - which, in this case, is actually a good thing for PATH! Watch it, share it. Be inspired, I know I am.

On the passing of Captain Phil Harris

2010-02-10T09:32:00.000-08:00

Phil Harris, captain of the FV Cornelia Marie, has succumbed to the stroke that he suffered last week it has been reported: ‘Deadliest Catch’ Captain Harris dies

Phil Harris was one of those rare completely genuine people. When you are in charge of a crab boat in the middle of the Bering Sea in the winter, and cameras are rolling - there is no room for posturing. You can't hide. The conditions require everything you can give. Phil brought that to his work, and in that we could all see his qualities as a skipper, manager and father shine through.

Prayers to Cornelia Marie and family - Phil was one of those rare great men born to be exactly who he was - and in that we watched in amazement and appreciation of all that he gave.

Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere;
Heav'n did a recompense as largely send:
He gave to mis'ry all he had, a tear,
He gain'd from hea... v'n ('twas all he wish'd) a friend.
- Thomas Gray (1750)

Phil, you are one for the ages!

Palin: crib notes bad - Obama: teleprompter good

2010-02-07T18:46:00.000-08:00

You gotta love the media - the way they love to hate Sarah Palin - it is making her a multi millionaire and (if they keep it up) the next president of the United States. Most recently, it is outrage over "crib notes" on her hand during the big speech at the Tea Party convention this weekend. Here it is: msnbc.com: Did Palin have crib notes written on hand?

They just can't get over their "Palin (insert conservative name here) is stupid" label shtick.

What they can't seem to wrap their own effete (but hey, their brilliant, just ask them) minds around is that a story like Sarah's crib notes will bring instant recollection of Barack's affection for the teleprompter - up to, and including, presidential speeches in an elementary school classroom.

Here's a heads up to the power elite: "the folks" out there will find Sarah's crib notes endearing - and they already find Barack's teleprompter revolting.

Keep it up MSNBC, you just can't help yourselves.

Hats for Haiti

2010-01-28T09:12:00.000-08:00

Krochet Kids, in partnership with One Day's Wages, have come up with a fantastic fundraiser for Haiti relief benefiting Partners in Health and World Concern. PIH and WC are amazing organizations with two-plus decades commitment (each) to service in that country. Its called Hats for Haiti - check out the YouTube video, and have fun getting involved with these excellent organizations. Its win-win, you will definitely change the lives of many people forever - and you just might change your own forever too.

Louis Auchincloss dies at age 92

2010-01-27T18:04:00.000-08:00

By HILLEL ITALIE
AP National Writer

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NEW YORK (AP) -- Louis Auchincloss, a prolific author of fiction and nonfiction whose dozens of books imparted sober, firsthand knowledge of America's patrician class, has died. He was 92,

The author's grandson, James Auchincloss, said that Auchincloss died Tuesday, a week after suffering a stroke.

Louis Auchincloss, a longtime resident Park Avenue, wrote more than 50 books, averaging about one a year after the end of World War II. He was a four-time fiction finalist for the National Book Award, his nominated novels including "The Embezzler" and "The House of Five Talents."

P. Scott says: Quite a lot of what I know about life on Park Avenue (and all that entails, and that's a lot), and what I have learned about getting along with people from Park Avenue (don't get me started), I have learned from three people: my wife, my Uncle Asbjørn, and the writings of Louis Auchincloss. Okay, and some others, but you'll have to wait for my book! A fantastic novelist and essayist, it amazes me that the Associated Press, in their rush to get out this notice of his death, overlooks mention that Auchincloss was both cousin and close confidante of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis. Their kinship (and his encouragement of her) alone is fascinating, and is important back story in understanding the Kennedy era.

Photo: public domain (Wikipedia) Louis Auchincloss receives the National Medal of the Arts in 2005.

FAIR USE NOTICE

2010-01-16T20:25:00.000-08:00

FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This blog compiles and stores this material for personal use - providing access to those who have expressed interest in the included information for research and educational purposes as well as artistic exploration through parody and other forms of free expression. We understand that this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C § 107. Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 578 (1994); Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corporation (280 F.3d 934 (CA9 2002) withdrawn, re-filed at 336 F.3d 811(CA9 2003); Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enterprises, 105 S.Ct. 2218 (1985)

Dominican Republic airports key to Haiti relief

2010-01-16T18:07:00.000-08:00

Photo: Google Earth
Right now, the only international airport in Haiti is compounding the crisis. Here is a picture of the airport terminal ramp at Toussaint L'Ouverture International Airport. It is a very small ramp. Now get this: the runway does not have a taxi apron! This means that every plane (arriving and departing) has to go (one at a time) along the connecting ramp in the left of the photo - out onto the main runway, and taxi all the way to the end before turning around for takeoff. That is a disaster compounding a disaster. Aircraft are being turned away from Haiti. Crucial supplies and highly trained medical and search & rescue professionals can't get into the country. It is a horrible situation.

Photo: Beli Tours
Here is the main airport terminal at the Aeropuerto Internacional de las Américas in the Dominican Republic - it has large terminal ramps (with several access points) and a full taxiway so the airplanes can line up to take off at one end, and line up after they land at the other. The Dominican Republic also has another airport, called Punta Cana, which is actually larger than this. These airports are on the same little island of Hispaniola. The Dominican Republic is a tourist haven. Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. The two countries, unfortunately, have very little to do with each other. One speaks Creole French, the other Spanish.

Map: Hispaniola.com

So the Dominican Republic could really ride to the rescue here, and make both of their airports available for relief flights. UPS, which is taking a leading logistical role, is working on use of the Dominican Republic airports (see the article in the Financial Times linked below). But here's the problem. Get on Google Earth and look at the roads between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. They are dirt. I told you they didn't have much going on together. Now get ready, here is the roadway at the main border crossing between the two countries:

Photo: PADF
The road is in horrible condition. It is going to chew trucks up. It has to be done, of course. But it is not going to be easy, and the trucks will need to roll 24/7. This is going to be a bigger problem than anyone realizes. Please read more in the Financial Times article today:

FT.com / UK - Agencies struggle to secure transport link

Groups raise doubts about Wyclef Jean's charity

2010-01-15T19:52:00.000-08:00

By RYAN NAKASHIMA AP Business Writer

LOS ANGELES—Groups that vet charities are raising doubts about the organization backed by Haitian-born rapper Wyclef Jean, questioning its accounting practices and ability to function in earthquake-hit Haiti. Even as more than $2 million poured into The Wyclef Jean Foundation Inc. via text message after just two days, experts questioned how much of the money would help those in need.

"It's questionable. There's no way to get around that," said Art Taylor, president and chief executive of the Better Business Bureau's Wise Giving Alliance, based in Arlington, Va.

Taylor reviewed Internal Revenue Service tax returns for the organization also known as Yele Haiti Foundation from 2005 through 2007. He said the first red flag of poor accounting practices was that three years of returns were filed on the same day—Aug. 10 of last year.

In 2007, the foundation's spending exceeded its revenues by $411,000. It brought in just $79,000 that year.

"Here's the bottom line: for an earthquake of catastrophic proportions, do people really believe that this organization is in a position to do anything right now?" he said.

Jean, a 37-year-old Grammy-winning artist, has been imploring followers to text "Yele" to 501501 to donate $5 to his foundation in support of Haitian earthquake victims.

The foundation, founded in January 2005, intends to airlift supplies using a FedEx plane into Haiti early next week carrying medical supplies, water and Clif Bars, according to foundation president Hugh Locke. An Associated Press review of tax returns and independent audits provided by Jean's foundation showed that it was closely intertwined with Jean's businesses.

Three of the five foundation board members—Jean, Jerry Duplessis and Seth Kanegis—are involved in his personal music and business endeavors. According to an IRS tax return from 2006 reviewed earlier by the Web site The Smoking Gun, the foundation paid $250,000 to buy airtime from Telemax S.A., a for-profit TV station in Haiti that is majority owned by Jean and Duplessis. Part of that money went to pay for a concert in Haiti put on by Jean himself, Locke said.

Another $160,000 that year was spent on a concert in Monte Carlo that Jean participated in, of which $75,000 paid for backup singers and $25,000 went to Jean through a company he owns with Duplessis, Platinum Sound Recording Studios Inc., Locke said.

"I'm not saying he didn't benefit from it," said Locke, who says his own salary is $8,100 a month after taxes. "We were paying that to Platinum Sound because that covered the cost of him participating in the event."

Locke argued that the foundation took in "several hundred thousand" dollars in exchange for Jean's work through the proceeds of an auction.

The foundation also rents office space from Platinum Sound, paying about $2,600 a month in New York. Locke said the foundation also plans to partner with Jean's Sak Pase Records to build a music studio to provide vocational training to Haitian children.

Sandra Miniutti, vice president of marketing for Charity Navigator, an organization that evaluates charities, said the foundation was too small to have been examined recently, although the current flood of goodwill may change that. Its revenue in 2008 was $1.9 million.

"My concern is it goes against our first tip, and that is to give only to groups with experience with disaster relief," Miniutti said. "I think it's very hard for a new organization even with the best intentions to handle something on this magnitude."

Locke said the foundation has been directly involved in delivering food and providing clean-up services in many disasters, including the hurricanes that devastated Haiti in late 2008. Jean's standing among Haitians can help the foundation gain access to gang-controlled or other troubled regions, he said.
"We have a niche which no one else occupies," Locke said.

He said the foundation is now seeking bridge financing to allow it to use money that has been pledged in unprecedented volumes by text message.

It could take at least a month for donors' money to flow in because it is not released until they pay their phone bills.

That delay presents a challenge and an opportunity, the Better Business Bureau's Taylor said.

"The challenge is they can't do anything until they get the money," Taylor said. "The opportunity is that some people may change their minds and decide that $10 or whatever they text to him might be better used somewhere else."
———
On the Net:
Better Business Bureau Wise Giving Alliance: http://bit.ly/8WJ1i3
Charity Navigator: http://bit.ly/8fCLch
The Smoking Gun: http://bit.ly/8h3mEj

P. Scott says: I've been involved with non-profit work for a long time - organizing, planning, launching, filing with the IRS, on and on. As CNN incessantly pitched texting of small donations to this foundation over the last couple of days, and as I watched Mr. Jean talk about this charity in interview after interview - my hackles were raised. Look, I'm not saying he is a total bad guy - and at least he has gotten into Haiti today and got involved in the relief work in a hand-on way. What I am saying is that cold, hard looks by professional journalists and non profit oversight organizations are raising legitimate concerns - and it looks pretty clear that this charitable foundation is much more about promoting his career than helping the people of Haiti. I would not donate to this charity. Mr. Jean should channel the funds he has raised through millions of dollars in free publicity on (especially) CNN and CBS, by (and without raking off the top) transferring that money donated in good faith by caring people around the world to established organizations that are doing relief work right now (not next week, or for a concert, or whatever nebulous plans this foundations has). But I'm not holding my breath on that demand. Unfortunately, while Mr. Jean could have chosen to work with established aid and relief organizations - and significantly bolstered his credibility as a humanitarian while getting some real work done to help others - he has instead (apparently) chosen to use this foundation as secondary/back channel financial padding for promotion of his career. There are words to describe people who would do that while those they purport to benefit are suffering...

Weekly Standard Reporter Roughed Up By Democratic AG Staffer? (VIDEO) - HispanicBusiness.com

2010-01-13T18:04:00.000-08:00

YouTube link here

Weekly Standard Reporter Roughed Up By Democratic AG Staffer? (VIDEO) - HispanicBusiness.com

Rob Kuznia -- HispanicBusiness.com

A reporter with the neo-conservative Weekly Standard says he was roughed up during a D.C. fund-raiser Tuesday night by an affiliate of Democratic Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley.

John McCormack, the magazine's deputy online editor, writes that Coakley had dodged a question he'd asked about Afghanistan during a brief Q and A session with reporters inside a Capitol Hill restaurant named Sonoma.

"Attorney General Coakley, you said last night that there are no terrorists in Afghanistan -- that they're all in Yemen and Pakistan. Do you stand by that remark?" he said, according to a post he wrote in the Weekly Standard. Her response, according to McCormack: "I'm sorry, did someone else have a question?"

Afterward, he followed her outside to ask another question: why are healthcare lobbyists supporting her at the fund-raiser? McCormack says she again ignored him. Shortly after, he said he was accosted by a man who appeared to be one of her staff members, Michael Meehan, who allegedly shoved McCormack into an iron gate.

"I ended up on the sidewalk," McCormack wrote." I was fine. He helped me up from the ground, but kept pushing up against me, blocking my path toward Coakley down the street."

McCormack said when he asked Meehan who he worked for, he replied: "I work for me."

The incident was caught on video and posted on YouTube. The video shows McCormack struggling to simultaneously show his press credentials and sidestep a man who is blocking his way.

A blogger for First Things, an ecumenical publication funded by Catholic theologian Richard John Neuhaus, reports that Meehan is also a vice president at Virilion, a "democratic advertising company" that represents the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America.

Many Firms Reluctant to Hire Because of New Taxes, Regulation - CNBC

2010-01-12T19:22:00.000-08:00

photo: swampolitics.com

Many Firms Reluctant to Hire Because of New Taxes, Regulation
Couldn't help but take notice of the headline, and this quote, from a story today on the CNBC website:

As Washington and Wall Street grow increasingly restless about the unusually slow pace of job creation and the risk of a so-called jobless recovery, key business groups have begun to bang the drum more loudly.

Not that we haven't seen anything like that happening around the country already, right?

“To create jobs we must ease the uncertainty over tax increases as well as health, environmental, labor, legal and fiscal policies,” (American Chamber of Commerce) president and CEO Thomas J. Donohue said in a speech Tuesday. Chamber members are predominantly small companies with ten or less employees.

Small business. And those businesses make up the largest part of our economy - and as a block, overwhelmingly our largest employer group. In other words (and economically speaking), they provide support (you know, backbone) for everything else we want to accomplish in this nation of ours. You have to ask yourself: do you like that? Or do you want it to change? Change into what, I'm asking. Because if you voted for change, this is what you're getting.

Just one year in, as President Obama's public opinion rating sinks further, faster than any president in modern times, to well down in the forties on both the approval and disapproval sides - officially into "presidential malaise" territory. My only advice is, please don't start the Rose Garden strategy yet. But you can count on this: voters are already poised for change (again).

Sending your coalition to the palace walls on health care politics this early in your term, watching a surprising number jump off in "retirement" - really ought to give you pause for thought. And that is the "Chicago Way" isn't it? Oh, I see. We need change.

Mainstream news media turns away from Africa

2009-11-28T17:21:00.000-08:00

McClatchy newspapers correspondent Shashank Bengali is closing his blog "Somewhere in Africa" because he is returning to the U.S. And the McClatchy newspaper chain is not replacing him - in effect, their Africa news bureau is closed.

Bengali is a gifted journalist, I always appreciate his analysis - check out this story printed earlier this year in the Seattle Times about the elections in South Africa. Bengali is also an excellent photographer, this taken for a story about a former Somali pirate now living illegally in Nairobi:

Bengali leaves Africa with a grim synopsis:

I am sorry to say that I find the continent in many ways a grimmer place than it was when I arrived in 2005. The crises in Sudan, Somalia and Congo haven't gotten any better, there are new troubles in places like Guinea, and the rigged elections in Ethiopia, Nigeria, Kenya and Zimbabwe dashed hopes and cost too many lives. (I'll never get used to hearing someone say that so-and-so "died in the election.") The rich are getting richer, the poor more desperate, the climate more unpredictable and the population growing faster than any politician seems to reckon.

I appreciate Bengali's candor, and appreciate his work in some places (like Mogadishu) where, frankly, I wouldn't consider travel. And I understand the economics of the print news media business. However, Africa is a place that is just too important to turn away from.

The McClatchy Company should reconsider their decision: a full time Africa bureau from just one location on the continent is the least they could be doing to dig hard for the important news we all need to hear from Africa.

Uganda: new kind of cold war or lurching toward fascism?

2009-11-28T15:44:00.000-08:00

Get ready to hear a lot more about the Uganda Parliament proposal declaring war on homosexuality. As reported in the Guardian today, "(a) law proposed by the Ugandan parliament which would introduce the death penalty by hanging for "aggravated homosexuality".

Alright. Full stop. What?

The report continues: "(t)he suggested legislation would apply to sex between gay men or lesbian women in which one person has HIV. The bill also proposes the introduction of a three-year prison sentence for anyone who knows of the existence of a gay man or lesbian woman and fails to inform authorities in Uganda within 24 hours."

Yes, that's right. Totalitarian reporting to the state security apparatus or you will go to prison for three years.

Oh, and it provides a life prison sentence for gay sex, and the death penalty for HIV positive people engaging in homosexual sex.

Of course the bill was introduced by a back bencher. But here's what a member of Uganda President Yoweri Museveni's cabinet had to say: "(U)ganda's ethics and integrity minister, James Nsaba Buturo, welcomed the proposal, saying that he regards the bill "with joy" because it will "provide leadership around the world".

That's right. Leadership. Which makes it sound as if he is fighting the culture wars by self-appointed proxy.

An Anglican (Church of Uganda) Bishop, Christopher Ssenyonjo was kicked out of the church three years ago for merely stating that gay people in Uganda were "marginalized" and "misunderstood" - and since then he has been vilified with false accusations of just about anything you could imagine. Ssenyonjo, who is straight, is continuously portrayed in Uganda as a follower of Satan, who practices necrophilia, on and on.

Mainstream media like to portray this as hatred exported from the religious right in America. While a few hate groups masquerading as Christian missionaries have had a forum in Uganda, nothing like that can explain the enormous anti-gay stigma which exists from one end of the country to the other (and throughout Africa, to be frank). You can't blame the religious right for this. Sorry, I know those "hate America" stories are so easy, but they do absolutely nothing for the cause of justice, or to help those that are oppressed. Time to grow up.

Uganda dictator Yoweri Museveni knows this makes good politics for his entrenched regime. Museveni is where responsibility lies - he and his ministerial sycophants like James Buturo bear responsibility for the politics of hate. Call it what it is: fascist hate. And correctly attribute it to the only person who would allow such a proposal to see the light of day: Uganda President Yoweri Museveni.

Yoweri Museveni, the man who could have gracefully announced his retirement in 2004 and taken a place among the elite pantheon of African leaders like Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu (okay, that's not much of a pantheon, let's admit it). But instead he rigs the vote suspending the constitution thereby repealing term limits - and after-wards renews his former Marxist-Leninist rhetorical style and jails, puts on trial and (finally, after inordinate international pressure) releases his existential opponents (including those from independent media and also opposition political parties) - and now kicks in with HIV-AIDS pandemic inspired hysteria against gays with a bit of East German communist police state flair. All the while making himself (and his family) multi-millionaires via crime and corruption against those who would endeavor to actually lift Africa out of poverty.

Yowi baby, do I have that right?

Brain Rules

2009-11-27T22:53:00.000-08:00

"If you wanted to create an education environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would design something like a classroom. If you wanted to create a business environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would design something like a cubicle. And if you wanted to change things, you might have to tear down both and start over."
- John Medina

John Medina, author of the New York Times bestseller "Brain Rules," is a developmental molecular biologist and research consultant. He is an affiliate professor of bioengineering at the University of Washington School of Medicine. He is also the director of the Brain Center for Applied Learning Research at Seattle Pacific University.

Here are more of the "Brain Rules" from Seattle Times reporter Richard Seven.

http://www.brainrules.net
http://www.johnmedina.comhttp://
www.brainrules.net/news

FAIR USE NOTICE

2009-11-27T13:09:00.000-08:00

FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This blog compiles and stores this material for personal use - providing access to those who have expressed interest in the included information for research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C § 107.

Charlotte, Grace, Janet and Caroline Come Home

2009-11-06T20:48:00.000-08:00

This story was originally published in the New York Times Magazine on May 8, 2005. It describes the challenges faced by child soldiers - huge burdens of stigma, self-blame, many even more complex issues - in ways very few stories by journalists have done before or since. Read their story: it is their individual walk, and it is emblematic of the challenges faced by thousands. My highest compliments to Melanie Thernstrom. And here's the postscript before you even start: we hope to bring Charlotte Awino here to Seattle to study nursing at Seattle Pacific University...

The rebels have ruined northern Uganda. No one wanted to look out the car window on the three-hour journey northwest from Lira to Gulu near the Sudanese border. Charlotte Awino leaned her cheek on the glass and closed her eyes against the abandoned homesteads and fallow farmland that once provided most of the country's cassava, millet and beans. After 18 years of civil war, more than 1.5 million inhabitants have fled to plastic-sheeted internment camps, preferring to risk slow death by disease and malnutrition rather than to wake in their beds one night to discover the rebels have arrived. The rebels are the Lord's Resistance Army (L.R.A.), which massacres or mutilates villagers -- cutting off their noses, ears and genitals -- and kidnaps their children, turning them into killers who then become kidnappers themselves.

A soldier at a military checkpoint instructed us to drive quickly; just ahead, he said, is a sweep of land where the rebels sometimes cross. He crouched down, peering into the car, his AK-47 dangling against the door, his gaze resting with relish on Charlotte and the other young women clustered in the back seat, their arms entwined, their silky dresses crumpling against one another. The girls stiffened and looked at their laps as he talked.

''What does the U.P.D.F. know?'' Charlotte spat as we drove away, referring to the Ugandan Army.

''The rebels don't cross before dark,'' Grace Acan agreed.

The four girls know this land far better than any government soldier, because for eight years they were rebels themselves. Abducted from their convent school when they were 14, 15 and 16, they were brutalized, brainwashed and forced to be ''wives'' to rebel commanders. They crossed this road on foot many times, hiding from the Ugandan Army while their commanders scouted for villages to raid.

In July, Charlotte was the first of the friends to escape. Janet Akello followed in August, Grace in September and finally Caroline Anyango in November. The girls eventually returned to their hometown of Lira to live with their parents and to try to pick up the lives they lost. They are in their mid-20's now and burdened by children they were raped to bear; yet as they showed me around Lira or journeyed to Caroline's ancestral village, where Caroline's grandmother danced welcome around her, they often seemed like the schoolgirls they once were. They are pretty, polite, docile and devout, their personalities blending like their dresses, and it was hard to imagine that they were recently guerrilla girls, as some terrified villagers used to call them.

At unexpected junctures, however, their moods change and darkness surfaces: Charlotte's prim composure gives way to bitterness and contempt; Janet's impassiveness becomes depression; Grace's good spirits crumple; Caroline cries; and then -- the rift exposed -- they all fall into a pained silence.

In Lira, the girls had heard that some of their other friends were living in a rehabilitation center called World Vision, in Gulu, where the Ugandan government houses former rebels for a month. When I told the girls that I was planning to visit the center, they asked to come with me. Their parents were reluctant to permit the trip, worried less about the road's dangers than about the moral risks of letting their daughters reconnect with their past. Janet's parents were especially concerned about her ''husband,'' Charles Otim, who had been recently captured and was living at World Vision, too. (Charlotte's husband is still with the rebels, Caroline's is dead and Grace's is now a government informant.)

When I asked Janet whether she would like to see Otim, she twisted her body, touched her mouth and looked away. ''If I see him, I will greet him,'' she declared finally, leaving the matter to happenstance -- the force that dictated her life for so many years.

The light was waning by the time we reached World Vision. As a result of government military victories in the past two years, more than 10,000 rebels have been captured or have managed to escape the L.R.A. The former child soldiers, as they are called, have all been given amnesty, but reintegrating them into society remains a daunting problem.

A guard showed us into the office of Sam Kilaro, the center's outreach coordinator, an ambitious, upright young man in a starched white shirt who betrayed just a touch of pride in his authority.

''Grace Acan,'' he exclaimed, reaching out and clasping her hands.

''Sam!'' Grace flushed with pleasure, her customary demureness overcome. They attended elementary school together, Sam explained, and then they lost touch. As they chatted, he studied her approvingly: a lovely young woman, he seemed to be thinking, the kind of woman he might like to marry. ''What are you doing here, Grace?''

She hesitated. ''I went to St. Mary's school, you see--'' She broke off, holding her hands up defensively. ''I was taken by the rebels, you see; we all were,'' she said, appealing to her friends for fellowship.

He gaped at her. ''I'm sorry,'' he said. But his sorriness seemed tinged with horror, as if to say: I'm sorry you were a killer and a sex slave. I'm sorry you are not the innocent Christian virgin you were raised to be and I was raised to want. I'm sorry.

''I'm going back to school again soon,'' she said hastily. ''In just a few weeks. In Kampala.''

He seemed unable to recover his poise. ''Go in if you like,'' he said, turning away. Grace blinked at him. Like the others, she is accustomed to rejection. In Lira, villagers who were once jealous of the girls' modest prosperity now hiss rebels as they pass. Although northerners know that all but a few of the oldest commanders were themselves once abducted children, their pity for the rebels as victims is overlaid with hatred and fear of them as victimizers.

In the center's women and children's section, the new escapees were thin, with scarred skin and broken teeth. Many of the children playing in the dirt resembled one another; as it turned out, many were half-siblings since each of the commanders had many wives. The leader of the Lord's Resistance Army, Joseph Kony, is said to have 56 wives and more than 100 children: he aims, he professes, to repopulate his tribe, the Acholis.

The girls hugged their friends, exchanging shy smiles. The women admired Charlotte's rustling black dress and Grace's delicate sandals, revealing feet no longer cut by underbrush. None of them said much at the reunion: in captivity, they had not been allowed to talk to one another lest they conspire. But they all stood in the gold late-afternoon light reveling in the wonder of something they never expected: to meet together in freedom.

On Independence Day, Oct 9, 1996, the girls at St. Mary's, a prestigious boarding school run by Italian nuns, were awakened by the blaze of torchlight and the sounds of shattering glass as rebels broke into their dormitory. They recognized some of the rebels -- boys abducted just a month earlier from a school nearby -- who dragged them out from under their beds, tied them together with ropes and marched them off into the moonless night.

The next day, the deputy headmistress, Sister Rachele Fassera tracked the rebels into the bush and managed to persuade their commander to return 109 of the girls. He insisted on keeping 30, selecting them for desirable traits (strength, beauty, light skin). Charlotte, Grace, Caroline and Janet recall how they sobbed as they were left behind, how the rebels ordered them to be quiet, forced them to lie down and then trampled them with heavy boots.

If any of them tried to escape, they would be killed, the commander told them. Shortly after the abduction, a girl named Jennifer disappeared. When the rebels discovered Jennifer hiding in a hut, they ordered the other girls to beat her to death. The girls hit her lightly about the legs at first, but the rebels encircled them, yelling for them to hit Jennifer harder and beating them to make sure they did so. Afterward, the rebels left the body on the ground unburied and beat the girls who cried.

Killing was the crux of the abductees' initiation. According to rehabilitation-center counselors, all new recruits were forced to murder within the first week, not only to illustrate the peril of trying to leave but also to make escape psychologically difficult by destroying the new rebels' old selves and turning them into murderers. When Jennifer died, Charlotte said, the girls realized they could not help one another and passed into the numb solitary trance in which they endured the next eight years -- and from which they are still trying to awaken.

After a week's walking, they reached Kony's base camp in southern Sudan. (The Sudanese government harbored and armed the L.R.A. in retaliation for Uganda's support of the Sudanese rebels.) Raised by their traditional families to obey authority, particularly religious authority, the girls said they believed Kony's claim that he was ''the Messiah -- the true Jesus Christ,'' as Janet recalls. They described him as a ''tall, handsome'' man whom the rebels called father or Lakwena, the Acholi word for one who serves the holy spirit. Kony would chant for hours, at times waking them up in the middle of the night to lead them in prayers that interwove Christian, Muslim and tribal spiritual beliefs and superstitions. Lakwena was mercurial. One day, for example, he would direct everyone at camp to stand bare-chested in the rain for four minutes; on another, they could not have sex or cook with oil from the yao tree.

The girls came to believe that Kony was their protector in a cruel, strange world rather than the creator of that world. He prophesized in ways they still insist came true, like foretelling the outcome of a particular battle with the Ugandan Army, and he protected them, they told me, by executing girls and boys they believed were witches and wizards.

Kony prized the St. Mary's girls above the other abductees, keeping them closely guarded and telling them they would one day be his ministers when he took over the Ugandan government. In the meantime, however, he gave them as wives to commanders. When I asked the girls in what sense they were married -- whether there were ceremonies, for example -- Charlotte laughed mirthlessly. ''You're just distributed, like shoes,'' she said. The girls recalled how Kony told them what he would do if they refused their husbands sex: the punishment was 200 strokes and then a hot-iron branding of their foreheads and backs.

None of the girls knew at the time exactly what sex was, they said, only that the loss of their virginity would leave them as damaged -- culturally, spiritually and psychologically -- as those who had been mutilated in more visible ways. The commanders made a point of having sex with each wife during her fertile period. Charlotte, Janet and Grace each gave birth to two children.

Although they were starved, beaten and forced to do hard labor -- digging all day in the garden, walking long distances barefoot carrying heavy jugs of water on their heads -- their positions as commanders' wives meant that unlike the other children, they would not be forced to be fighters. At a rehabilitation center in Lira, the former child soldiers are asked questions like: Were you forced to kill your parents, your relatives or your neighbors? Were you forced to cut, burn or pluck out eyes? Again and again, the answers in the files are yes.

Charlotte told me that her husband had 21 other wives and had been with the rebels for 19 years. But when I asked her more about him, her expression became especially solemn and distant, and she refused to say anything other than that he was ''very rude, very cruel. He doesn't have mercy for people.''

Grace and Janet and Caroline said that their husbands favored them over their other wives and helped them to survive. ''I was given to an old man,'' Grace said. She laughed bashfully, as if speaking of a boy on whom she had a crush. ''I was given to a disabled man,'' Janet said, blushing, as she described Otim, a commander whose leg had been amputated years before and who fought using crutches. ''He was not rude; he was nice,'' Janet said.

Grace chimed in that her husband had ''taught me everything.'' He punished her often, she said, but she felt it was for her own good because ''he knows students are always lazy.'' When Caroline's husband died, she felt there was ''no one to take care of me'' and she had to work as a nurse in another commander's household.

According to human rights groups, the rebels abducted an estimated 20,000 children. Most were the offspring of peasants who, fearing revenge, obeyed the rebels' command that they not complain to the government. The rebels illustrated their injunctions of silence by literally sealing villagers' lips with stakes or padlocks and taunting them to ask President Yoweri Museveni to find the keys.

While Kony's professed aim has been to take over the government in the southern capital of Kampala and replace it with rule by the Ten Commandments, in fact the Lord's Resistance Army never crosses the Nile River that divides the desolate northern region from the rapidly developing south. Kony's insurgency afflicts primarily his own people, the Acholi and other northern tribes, whom he claims to be punishing for their sins, particularly the sin of not supporting him.

It is widely held among African policy experts, human rights groups and people in the north that during the late 1980's and 90's Museveni showed little resolve to win the war. In fact, many believe, Museveni found it politically advantageous to leave the troublesome northern region to self-destruct. The United Nations has called the situation in northern Uganda the most neglected human rights crisis in the world.

The abduction of the elite private-school girls, however, changed the political landscape. Sister Rachele, along with Charlotte's mother, Angelina Atyam, Caroline's father, Frank Olyet Ayo-Ogang, and other parents founded an effective lobbying group called the Concerned Parents Association, which made the most of the narrative power of the case, turning an obscure war into a terrible fairy tale -- a story of schoolgirls stolen in the night and compelled by a demon man's spell to roam in the wild and commit unspeakable acts. They appealed to the pope, who condemned the abductions, gaining attention from the international media.

The parents' group mounted a campaign to get the countries who gave aid to Uganda, including the United States, to put pressure on the Museveni government to end the war. In 2002, Uganda and Sudan signed a treaty to stop supporting each other's insurgents. The Ugandan Army was allowed to go into southern Sudan to attack the L.R.A., which was thus forced out into the northern Ugandan bush. Fighting intensified, as did abductions. The next year, Museveni put a new general, Aronda Nyakairima, in charge of the army to defeat the rebels. Now, Nyakairima told me, he estimates that the rebels only have 300 to 500 experienced fighters left. Late last year, the rebels began peace talks with the government.

Each battle provided an opportunity for rebels to escape. Nyakairima described to me how during a battle the Ugandan Army calls out to the wives and children to surrender -- and thousands have. But the girls' recollections are of the soldiers' attacks: of their classmate Jessica being wounded and then bayoneted, of Grace finding only her 4-year-old son's leg and a bit of shirt in a tree after an explosion.

Grace, Janet and Caroline all believed what Kony had told them repeatedly -- that their parents were dead and that if they tried to escape, Ugandan soldiers would rape and imprison them. Grace was so convinced of it that one day, when she was separated from other rebels after fleeing a battle, she hid for a week with her starving toddler before turning herself in to a villager.

Charlotte, however, had heard rumors of the Concerned Parents Association from the guards who watched over her, who had overheard news reports on the commanders' radio. And so she believed her mother was looking for her. ''I kept praying,'' Charlotte said: ''I don't belong here, I can't fit in. God, please, please, please.'' By talking continually to God, Charlotte kept from despairing and wholly losing herself. ''Some of my friends would say, 'There are bullets flying -- let us ask God to kill us,''' Charlotte told me. ''But I said, 'Let us tell Him that as long as we are alive, keep us so we can see our parents.'''

Then, one night, she had a dream in which a messenger of God told her she would escape the next day. Just walk away, the messenger said.

The next morning, as she marched through the bush, Charlotte turned and took a few steps off the trail. A guard looked directly at her, she said, but just as the dream had foretold, he did not register her presence. She carried her 2-year-old son, Miracle, on her back. (Her 6-year-old son, Ronald, had disappeared a month earlier during a battle. She later found out that he had wandered for three days before reaching a village, his pockets holding mangoes that must have helped him survive.)

Back in the camp, she was told by a girl who escaped after her, 50 rebel boys were selected to hunt her down and drag her back to be killed. But God arranged for the group to cross paths with the Ugandan Army instead, Charlotte told me, and she reached a town where a villager took her to the authorities, who called her mother.

Although the idea of her mother looking for her had sustained Charlotte all those years, the truth she learned when she arrived home was not so simple. Eight years earlier, according to Charlotte's mother, Angelina, the Concerned Parents Association had stirred up so much international anger against the L.R.A. that Angelina was able to arrange a meeting with the rebels. An intermediary set up a rendezvous in an abandoned house in Gulu with a man nicknamed Lagira, the commander who led the raid on St. Mary's. Lagira told Angelina that he would release Charlotte if Angelina, the spokeswoman of the group, would stop her activism. But Angelina refused to take her daughter unless all the girls were released.

The ancients distinguished between different kinds of love: personal attachment as opposed to caritas, love for mankind. But how many situations dramatize the difference so clearly? Angelina saw in the commander's offer a deep, emblematic choice. The former midwife and mother of six described to me how, in the seven months after Charlotte was abducted, she had become completely committed to the cause and realized she needed to sacrifice her love for her daughter for caritas. ''Charlotte is special in my life, but as the Concerned Parents Association we had become a family,'' she said in her deep, slow, sermonizing voice. ''For C.P.A., every child is our child. Me getting one child, it would feel very selfish. How would I walk the streets in joy while others are captive?''

As a practical matter, the refusal seems puzzling: if Angelina had said yes, and the commander came through on his offer, what was to stop her from taking Charlotte and then continuing her advocacy as before? The rebels could kill her, but they could have killed her anyway.

But when I asked her about this, Angelina dismissed these details, focusing instead on the symbolism of the gesture. And as a gesture, her renunciation was very powerful -- a mother-daughter Abraham-Isaac sacrifice story that she relayed on TV and radio and in letters and opinion articles she sent to newspapers around the globe. The year after Angelina refused the rebels' deal, she was invited to the White House by Hillary Rodham Clinton to receive an award. She showed me the first lady's letter and described their ''beautiful'' meeting. Her office wall is filled with plaques of other awards to her and the Concerned Parents Association- from Human Rights Watch, Kofi Annan at the U.N., Nelson Mandela and Bishop Tutu. She adopted the nickname Mama.

But when Charlotte's mother became everyone's mother, did Angelina's child become no one's child? Angelina denies that rejecting the rebels' deal affected her relationship with her daughter. ''There is no tension between my daughter and me,'' she said testily.

While I was in Lira, the two declined to meet with me together. One night, however, I took Charlotte and the other girls home late. They worried that they would be in trouble with their parents, who still treat them as the children they wish they were. ''Us girls are not supposed to be out after dark,'' Charlotte explained. When we arrived at Charlotte's house, Angelina invited me into the small front room and served Fantas and ginger ales in glass bottles. When she started on a speech about her calling, her daughter's face puckered. She sat, slouched and sullen, as she heard how the Concerned Parents Association gives ''voice to the voiceless'' and how ''the future generation is the future''; then she abruptly stomped out of the room. Her mother didn't appear to register her absence.

When I was alone with Charlotte, she spoke with a flat demeanor, duly answering questions with a dull detachment as if she had little hope of, or interest in, being understood. One night, she and I sat on the porch outside the Concerned Parents Association's office. I asked about the deal her mother turned down all those years ago.

''Yes, yes,'' she said. ''It wouldn't look good for me to be happy with my mother and be leaving my friends behind.'' But her soft voice, with its African-British accent, was hollow.

Charlotte and her friends are fortunate to have families who still want them and are willing to accept the children they bore in captivity -- children many grandparents consider the devil's spawn. Many former child soldiers have returned from the bush to find themselves homeless. They cannot go back to villages where people recall the night they returned with the rebels and massacred their relatives and neighbors -- and sometimes, even, their own parents.

Counselors at the rehabilitation centers regard these cases helplessly. ''How can you tell a boy to go back to grade school and learn arithmetic when he remembers killing his last headmaster?'' asked a counselor.

At World Vision in Gulu, Janet's husband, Charles Otim, 34, told me bitterly that the best option for returning male rebels is to join the Ugandan Army and prove they are no longer enemies of the state. But he is a cripple; he showed me the bullet holes in the metal crutches from the battle where he was shot in the pelvis and captured by the Ugandan Army.

While Otim was still with the L.R.A., he heard on the radio that Janet was free, he told me, and thought about leaving the rebels to join her. I must bring Janet to him, he commanded. I asked if he loved her. ''I have need of Janet'' -- for money and a place to live. As the father, he should have dominion over their children, he added.

Then Janet, who had been talking with some others, walked slowly toward us. She looked as dazed as if she were sleepwalking, drawn against her will to Otim's side -- the man who had controlled her every move for so long. She reached down to where he sat on the bench and touched his neck in a joyless half-hug. They began to speak in Acholi. Janet studied the ground as he spoke, his voice loud and threatening, hers faint and frightened. When I returned a while later to pick her up, she rose to leave. He ordered her to stay, and she froze, momentarily caught between us.

On the ride home, she was silent and withdrawn. She could say nothing of her own feelings, only that she had disobeyed her parents. One of the other girls proposed that when they leave Gulu, they forget that Janet saw him and never speak of it again.

''See, it's erased,'' Charlotte said as the edges of Gulu flattened into soft savannah.

Although the girls learned many things in captivity (how to give birth, forage for potato roots and beat someone to death without crying), they did not learn to think for themselves. Half a year after their escape, it is still difficult for them to say what they want in even the simplest sense. During our excursions around Lira, no one ever said she was hungry or thirsty or had to go to the bathroom -- until I did. When we did go to a restaurant, they all waited to hear what I was ordering, and when drinks came, they waited for me to take the first sip.

Even now, they spoke cautiously of Kony, as if uncertain whether he could still read their minds, as he told them he could. When I asked whether they thought he was true to the Ten Commandments, they were not sure. Then I asked whether they were certain that Kony's powers -- if he has them -- were benevolent.

They puzzled about this. ''We know he's serving a spirit,'' Grace said after a minute. ''We just don't know if it's a good or a bad spirit.''

''Now I'm feeling he has a bad spirit,'' Caroline declared suddenly. ''Before, when I was under his captivity, I thought he had a good spirit.''

''We became confused,'' Grace said. ''When there was a good spirit, he was so friendly and so merciful and so encouraging. When there was a bad spirit, he was very rude and very cruel and gave orders to kill.''

All the girls said they think that Kony, their commander-husbands and the other rebels should be forgiven in accordance with traditional Acholi jurisprudence, which polls of northerners show has significant support. Though peace negotiations began a few months ago, they have stalled over the issue of amnesty because Museveni has recently invited the International Criminal Court to investigate Kony and the high commanders. But Kony wants assurances that he can share the fate of his role model, Idi Amin, who enjoyed luxurious exile in Saudi Arabia.

Charlotte told me that if the rebel commanders are put in prison, ''they will think they are paying for it, so they won't feel it so much. I think someone who has done wrong, carries his shame.'' In the L.R.A., commanders did not ''develop consciences,'' she added. If they returned to see the internment camps, however, created by the war, where ''the suffering is very strong,'' they would ''see their mistakes and be sad.''

Behind the girls' desire for the rebels to be forgiven is their own longing for absolution. One day, as we sat around Grace's living room while her daughter, Mercy Beatrice, chased chickens, Caroline said, ''My future is black.''

''With God everything is possible,'' Grace insisted with bravado.

Although the girls attend church services often, participating in cleansing and healing rituals, and Janet -- who says she wants to be an evangelical preacher -- attends a daily noon service, they seem anxious about their spiritual status. Whether they can make a new life for themselves in difficult circumstances -- study with classmates almost a decade younger, raise children they didn't choose to have and perhaps even realize their shy hopes to remarry -- depends in part on whether they can reconcile themselves to their memories and believe their faith's promise of forgiveness and rebirth.

We were idly chatting when Janet blurted, ''I beat a 10-year old boy to death.'' The boy had been caught trying to escape, and Janet had been chosen to kill him because the commanders knew that she liked him. Janet is large -- both muscular and tall; the rebels praised her for her strength. ''There was blood coming out of his ears and nose,'' she said in a voice almost inaudible. She kept beating him with a big stick; he looked at her ''straight'' as he died.

''I ask God to forgive me,'' she whispered, burying her face in her hands.

A pall fell upon the room.

All the girls looked at me and someone -- Grace, I think -- said, ''What do you think?'' as if my opinion were very important. The girls kept staring, their eyes large and frightened, so I repeated what the counselors at the rehabilitation center in Gulu told me they tell the children: that nothing they did when they were rebels was their fault.

Then the moment was over, and they were light and gay again. Grace asked if I knew a certain hymn, and they sang it for me again and again until I caught each of the words:

Could the Lord ever leave you?
Could the Lord ever forget his love?
Though the mother forsakes her child,
He will not abandon you.

Even though as rebels they were forbidden from singing, ''We sang it,'' Grace said. ''We sang it in our minds, so we knew we were not abandoned.''

They seemed happy as they chattered about preparing to begin at the British boarding school in Kampala next month. But I could hear behind their words an impossible longing that the strict school, with its neat uniforms and fresh notebooks, would turn back the page to their former schoolgirl lives and that all the difficult polarities that followed -- injury and healing, childhood and parenthood, good spirits and bad spirits, guilt and innocence, punishment and forgiveness, pity and judgment -- would be not so much reconciled but, in Charlotte's word, ''erased.'' Then they asked questions about the United States (''Do you have a stove?'' and ''How many tribes are there in America?''), and we walked to the marketplace to buy pineapples.

Melanie Thernstrom is a contributing writer for the magazine. Her last article was about high-end matchmaking.

Correction: May 29, 2005, Sunday:

An article on May 8 about the return of kidnapped teenagers to civilian life in Uganda referred imprecisely to a center where rescued children are taken. It is World Vision's Children of War Rehabilitation Center, not World Vision.

Urbane commentary: Ms. Thernstrom should have received the Pulitzer Prize for reporting based on this article.

Just a Little Power Grab

2009-10-31T13:42:00.000-07:00

Dow Constantine’s latest attack ad crosses a line with journalists. It is (at last) becoming clear, even to the professional journalists in our region, that there is no bridge Constantine won’t burn in his quest for power. In a post on the Seattle Times’ editorial page staff blog, Ed Cetera, Kate Riley sounds an ominous warning regarding Constantine’s tortured use of out of context material from the state public affairs network TVW. In doing this, Constantine does something that no other politician (save the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s similar violation on behalf of Darcy Burner). It is made quite clear: this is the lowest of the low for politicians.

But if you thought Constantine couldn’t sink lower, there’s more. On the same blog, Bruce Ramsey calls out Constantine for LIBEL against the Washington Policy Center in yet another ad by his campaign. Ramsey says: “It's election time, and Constantine is running the ads his political advisers figure will help him win. And if the Washington Policy Center is ideologically libeled, well, they don't care much about that.”

The question is, do you?

Why don’t you take the time today to send this post to your friends? After Tuesday it will be too late.

Time to Get Real About Ending Poverty in Africa

2009-03-21T17:39:00.001-07:00

Does she have your attention yet? Her name is Dambisa Moyo. She's got mine. She is smarter than me. I know. I read her book.

From the Wall Street Journal:

By MATTHEW REES

It is one of the great conundrums of the modern age: More than 300 million people living across the continent of Africa are still mired in poverty after decades of effort -- by the World Bank, foreign governments and charitable organizations -- to lift them out if it. While a few African countries have achieved notable rates of economic growth in recent years, per-capita income in Africa as a whole has inched up only slightly since 1960. In that year, the region's gross domestic product was about equal to that of East Asia. By 2005, East Asia's GDP was five times higher. The total aid package to Africa, over the past 50 years, exceeds $1 trillion. There is far too little to show for it.

Dead Aid
By Dambisa Moyo
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 188 pages, $24)

Dambisa Moyo, a native of Zambia and a former World Bank consultant, believes that it is time to end the charade -- to stop proceeding as if foreign aid does the good that it is supposed to do. The problem, she says in "Dead Aid," is not that foreign money is poorly spent (though much of it is) or that development programs are badly managed (though many of them are). No, the problem is more fundamental: Aid, she writes, is "no longer part of the potential solution, it's part of the problem -- in fact, aid is the problem."

In a tightly argued brief, Ms. Moyo spells out how attempts to help Africa actually hurt it. The aid money pouring into Africa, she says, underwrites brutal and corrupt regimes; it stifles investment; and it leads to higher rates of poverty -- all of which, in turn, creates a demand for yet more aid. Africa, Ms. Moyo notes, seems hopelessly trapped in this spiral, and she wants to see it break free. Over the past 30 years, she says, the most aid-dependent countries in Africa have experienced economic contraction averaging 0.2% a year.

America's policy toward postwar Europe is often cited as the model for African assistance, but Ms. Moyo reminds us that the vaunted Marshall Plan was limited to five years and was focused on reconstructing societies ravaged by war. In Africa, she says, the aid spigot never stops flowing. "There is no incentive for long-term financial planning," she observes, "no reason to seek alternatives to fund development, when all you have to do is sit back and bank the cheques."

Inevitably, "Dead Aid" will offend the pieties of the World Bank and the foreign-aid sectors of the U.S. government. But Ms. Moyo is not alone in asking tough questions about good intentions gone awry. Rwanda's president, Paul Kagame, has said of the $300 billion in aid given to Africa since the 1970s that "there is little to show for it in terms of economic growth and human development." Senegal's president, Abdoulaye Wade, has expressed similar sentiments.

Given that aid has been, in Ms. Moyo's words, "an unmitigated political, economic, and humanitarian disaster," why has it continued? One reason, she says, is that there about 500,000 people "in the business of aid," and their livelihoods are dictated more by the size of their lending portfolios than the effectiveness of their programs. There is also the Bono effect. Along with other celebrities, the U2 frontman has become a powerful voice calling for still more aid to Africa, not less. The result is a kind of moral bullying. "Honest, critical, and serious dialogue and debate on the merits and demerits of aid," Ms. Moyo writes, "have atrophied."

Much of "Dead Aid" outlines an agenda for Africa's economic development, such as expanding its trade and developing its banking sector -- that is, creating a reliable system of credit that will allow individuals to earn interest on their savings and businesses to receive the loans they need to grow. Ms. Moyo argues for African countries to create bond markets -- a reminder that her instincts are closer to Goldman Sachs (where she worked for eight years) than to Jeffrey Sachs (the Columbia professor who wants Western governments to pour more money into Africa). She notes that, in the past 10 years, 43 developing nations have issued international bonds but that only three -- South Africa, Ghana and Gabon -- were from Africa.

While criticizing outsiders for their misguided ideas, Ms. Moyo does not ignore Africa's self-inflicted wounds. There are, she notes, steep obstacles to doing business there. According to the World Bank, nine of the world's 10 most hostile business environments are in Africa.

Unlike many experts in international affairs, Ms. Moyo does not believe that democracy is a key to solving Africa's problems. What poor countries need, she writes, is a "decisive benevolent dictator to push through the reforms required to get the economy moving." Economic growth, she says, is a prerequisite for democracy. She cites a study showing that democratic governments survive longer as per-capita income increases.

It is too bad that Ms. Moyo did not stop now and then to draw directly on her personal experience -- not only on her work as an investment banker but on her early life in Zambia. (Her mother is chairman of a Zambian bank; her father runs an anticorruption organization.) First-person accounts might have made her argument even more vivid.

Even so, it is vivid enough. She closes her book with a fascinating question: What would happen if African countries were told that in five years all financial aid would end? She doesn't try to answer the question in any detail, other than to dismiss the notion that living conditions in Africa would grow worse. She points to Botswana and South Africa as examples of countries that have prospered precisely because they haven't allowed themselves to become heavily dependent on aid.

Some of us remember Live Aid, the music festival held in 1985 to provide relief to Ethiopia. It was a noble effort and perhaps did some good, but "Dead Aid" reminds us that noble efforts are not enough -- that "help" can often do harm.

Mr. Rees is the founder of Geonomica, a consulting firm, and a former speechwriter at the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The Race

2009-03-19T14:04:00.000-07:00

People often ask me, what will do the most to end global poverty - education, health or trade?
My response is simple - what we are really doing is inviting people to sit with us at a table.
I believe that at that table there should be a banquet: of nutrition, of health, of opportunity, of freedom.
One thing shouldn't go without the other.

We are in a race against time to give people health and strength enough to even make it to the table. Its going to take all of us. If you feel there is a role in that involving your time and talent, then we just might make it.

photos: St. Mary Kevin Orphanage Motherhood, Uganda

Pacific Lutheran Soccer

2009-02-08T22:34:00.001-08:00

PLUSoccer1978.jpg
Originally uploaded by spumonibiscotti

Can you pick out yours truly from this line up of n'er-do-wells and scurrilous roustabouts?

There is a Bell in Palotaka

2008-12-19T21:08:00.001-08:00

There is a bell in Palotaka. And one day it will ring again. It will ring for the child soldiers. The children of Uganda. And Congo. And Sudan. Children - tens of thousands of them, kidnapped, brutalized, turned into killers. Fighting for a cult leader. Joseph Kony - on the lam for more than twenty years - a tragic symbol of modern Africa.

One day the bell in Palotaka will ring for Sudan. For Darfur. For justice in the Nile Valley. For worldwide awareness and resolve that in Africa's Great Lakes and Nile Valley a series of wars has raged for decades. Wars of extreme poverty. Wars of hopelessness. Wars of orphans. Wars of disease. Palotaka is in Sudan - a country as cracked as the great bell of Palotaka. The country of a silent bell.

The bell in Palotaka longs to ring for peace. To ring a song of peace. To ring as beautiful people sing and dance in joy - because they now know what hope feels like. Hope. A feeling never experienced before. Hope, like love, is a verb. Why should it have to be a suppressed? Held down, never explored or experienced. Suppressed into fear, and anger, and rage.

The bell in Palotaka resolves to ring for freedom. Freedom of speech, and of worship. Freedom from want. And freedom from fear. What do those freedoms sound like? You have them. What is their song? What is their dance? The bell in Palotaka wants to ring them. The bell in Palotaka wants to know.

The bell in Palotaka knows places nearby. A wide spot in the trail called Ri-Kwangba, and a few round huts made of mud and cow dung called Owiny Ki-Bul. These places, like Palotaka, are just down a red dirt road from Juba, a town that marks a crossing of the Victoria Nile, the "White Nile" in southern Sudan. These places are where the fate of hundreds of child soldiers has been debated by diplomats. Do they know the ring of freedom? Will they dance with the children of Uganda, Congo and Sudan?

Its in the wide spots of the trail that the lives of these children will be decided. The beautiful, fertile Nile Valley provides an ocean of jungle. A bell wants to ring out into that jungle, to ring for justice and freedom in Congo, Uganda and Sudan. Across all of Africa. For children. For you and me.

Only we know that the bell in Palotaka has a sister. A bell for us. A bell that thought it was for everyone on earth. But we have hoarded that bell and kept it only for ourselves. We look at that bell in Philadelphia and only remember the celebration of freedom and justice it represents. Or do we remember the sacrifice of our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor - which made that bell ring for us?

Peace. Freedom. Justice. They are not always comfortable classroom concepts. Debating points. Prostituted on protest banners. Platitudes. Can we understand what they mean if we keep them in a vacuum?

The bell in Palotaka wants to ring. For children. And for you and me.

(Palotaka is a village in southern Sudan near the Uganda border, the jungle locations of Ri-Kwangba and Owiny Ki-Bul have been identified by participants in the Juba peace talks regarding the Lord's Resistance Army child soldier crisis in that region as the only location where child soldiers can turn themselves in. Palotaka has been the crossroads of conflict between the LRA and government regimes for many years. Even with the armies of three nations attacking the Lord's Resistance Army, a general turn-in by child soldiers to end the crisis has yet to happen.)

photo: jdscenicphotography

A Day of Many Blessings

2007-10-10T20:50:00.000-07:00

A Day of Many Blessings
There wasn't any secret about how excited I was about the World Vision Experience Village at the Puyallup Fair. My church will be hosting the traveling exhibit next spring, and a couple of years ago the impact of going through the original exhibit deeply moved me (I have been to Africa twice since experiencing the original exhibit). Bringing such an experience to one of the nation's largest fairs really got my attention. I knew doing this was not without risk. But God was clearly in this project. I couldn't wait to get there!

I arrived a couple of hours before my shift was scheduled - mainly because I wanted to see the village - but also in order to have time to take in the fair. When I walked up to the main entrance of the village, the first person I saw was a great friend from law school. Somehow we had lost touch for about ten years. Mike was greeting people at the entrance to the exhibit. He greeted me warmly, and we both began to welcome people to the exhibit. The time passed very quickly. Mike was perfect for the role of greeter. An attorney, he also works as a motivational speaker about safety. You see, Mike is a hero among us. As a state trooper before becoming a lawyer, he was run off the road during a high speed pursuit. His miraculous recovery from third degree burns over virtually his entire body is in the annals of medical history. Mike just feels that every day he walks in grace as a gift from our gracious and loving God.

An attitude like Mike's is "catching" - soon I was reaching out to people from clear across the midway, just as he was. Hundreds of people were pouring in to see the exhibit and experience Africa in the way offered to them. Oh, and did I mention, the rain was pouring too! Mike explained to me that a small percentage of the people would leave the exhibit - they wanted to be there - but it was too emotional an experience on that particular day. That's okay, he assured me - they tried and their heart is in the right place. They will come to this when God has prepared them to act and respond.

I thouroughly enjoyed my shift as a greeter at the Village. Being there with Mike made it extra-extra special - he "trained" me as a greeter in the lightning-fast couple of hours prior to my shift. He poured out love and warmth to the crowds on a wet day. And just by spending time with him, showed me (again) what it means to walk in grace as a follower of Christ. See you at the fair!

Blessings and all the best to you!

Scott

Uganda to become Africa's Bangalore

2007-03-28T17:56:00.000-07:00

Uganda could out-compete India on price for call centres

Commonwealth Business Council taking initiatives for setting-up of an IT Park

by R Jai Krishna

NEW DELHI: The Commonwealth Business Council (CBC) is working on a proposal for developing Uganda as Bangalore of Africa.

The CBC is also taking initiatives for setting-up of a state-of-the-art IT Park in the African country, apart from drafting an IT Policy framework.

According to a recent CBC report, Uganda is best bet for IT companies as it has a strong English-speaking young workforce, who constitute over 40 per cent of the overall population like India.

Moreover, the country has a strategic Time Zone of GMT+3 hours, which enables the country to serve companies in the Middle East, Europe and African countries, and also offers lower cost of labour, for the IT companies.

Though not a proven location like India, Uganda has a high-end IT talent base which could be expanded. The country is also in the process of formulating IT policies and developing infrastructure, apart from a body equivalent of Nasscom to be set-up.

The CBC report states that companies moving into Uganda will have a first mover advantage in Africa, especially in the context of a good Tax holiday, grants and other benefits being extended by the government there.

With these benefits in mind, the CBC is in the process of setting-up a state-of-the-art IT and Business Services Park within the Kakungulu satellite city, situated about 18 kms from the airport.

The IT Park, will constitute of offshore development centres, call centre, back office/ data processing centre, and data centres. The proposed park is to be enabled by high speed Wi-Fi internet access and data connectivity, IP telephony, high security and controlled access infrastructure. With transport links to and within the park, Uganda government will be offering single-window clearances for the interested companies.

The Ugandan government also plans to have residences comprising of studios, apartments and luxury condos. Hotels, and convention centres, schools, colleges and also hospitals and medical centres, will also be part of the proposed park.

The CBC has also formulated a draft for Uganda’s IT policy, and has proposed 100 per cent tax exemption for lease income, capital gains and services provided in the IT parks, apart from 100 per cent tax compensation for companies and their staff located within the premises for 20-years from commencement.

The CBC has urged for a simplified and quick clearance of work permits, and dependent permits for IT park staff.

© CyberMedia News

Urbane Analysis: Broadband is going to change everything in Africa - but it is up to Ugandans themselves to finally break the chains of corruption. Otherwise this very good idea will remain only that...

Uganda: No Peace Without Justice

2006-11-22T09:15:00.000-08:00

"To insist on international prosecution when peace is at hand... is to allow one idea of the perfect to be the enemy of the good."

by Katherine Southwick
Washington Post

JOSEPH KONY, the rebel leader in Uganda who rapes, murders, and abducts children has been indicted by the International Criminal Court. He says he'll help restore peace if charges against him are dropped. Can this work?

I say no, peace must come with justice, but justice takes many forms.

The twenty-year long war in northern Uganda is one of the world's longest-running conflicts. The Lords Resistance Army (LRA) is a splinter group of a rebellion that sought to defend northern interests after a southerner, current President Museveni, came to power in 1986. Although a peace agreement was signed in 1988, LRA leader Joseph Kony continued attacks against the government, initially seeking to create a regime based on the Ten Commandments. Civilians were caught in the middle: the LRA punished those who didn't support it by burning villages, murdering, and abducting thousands of children to train as fighters.

Meanwhile, the Ugandan Army committed rape, torture, and murder. As many as 1.6 million people subsist in displacement camps, where nearly 1,000 people die per week from disease or violence. After commencing an investigation in July 2004, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued its first indictments for five LRA leaders in October 2005.

Then in July 2006, peace talks in Juba, Southern Sudan, began. They are widely seen as the best opportunity for peace ever. The new Government of Southern Sudan acting as mediator. But LRA members being investigated by the ICC demand the cases against them be dropped if they are to negotiate peace. Yet it is a mistake to characterize the northern Ugandan dilemma simply as a peace versus justice debate. This could prolong the plight of two million people and impair the potential of the ICC. More sensibly, our discussion should be about bringing peace with justice.

Anyone who has been to northern Uganda can grasp that peace is the overwhelming priority for the people there, who have suffered the brunt of the conflict and face enormous challenges ahead. But the imperative of accountability has not been lost on anyone, including the LRA leadership. ICC indictees Joseph Kony and Vincent Otti have publicly expressed interest in finding ways to atone for their crimes.

I met the LRA delegation in Juba last July as the talks began. We spent hours discussing accountability mechanisms, such as truth and reconciliation commissions, public apologies, and victim compensation. These concepts are rooted in Ugandan culture and the transitional justice experiences of several other countries, including South Africa. In collaboration with Ugandans such as traditional leaders and Parliament, the Liu Institute at the University of British Columbia is doing important work exploring these mechanisms.

The fact remains that ICC prosecution is not obviously among the accountability options in the event a peace agreement is reached. LRA indictees will not voluntarily surrender to the ICC. They could only be brought by force, if not shot on the spot. And in the process, as history demonstrates, efforts to capture the leaders would result in killing child captives and renew attacks on civilians, worsening security in Uganda, Congo, and Sudan, where the LRA is present. To avoid more violence, exile, or some form of accountability apart from ICC prosecution appears to be the only option for the indictees under a peace agreement.

Either the United Nations Security Council or the ICC Prosecutor can legally defer prosecution under Articles 16 or 53 of the Rome Statute, the document constituting the Court, "based on new facts or information" or in the interests of peace, victims, or justice (such as local justice). These provisions convey that under certain conditions, arguably at play in the northern Uganda case, deferral would neither "sacrifice" justice for peace, nor reflect the triumph of realpolitik over rule of law.

Indeed, the ICC indictments, while partially blamed for scuttling a previous peace effort led by Betty Bigombe in 2004, have no doubt helped pressure the LRA to come to the table this time. ICC pressure has also strengthened commitment on all sides to acknowledging the need for justice. But these "contributions" cannot be realized unless the ICC credibly holds out deferral as a carrot. The LRA leaders will not strive to meet the conditions implicit in the Rome Statute if there is no real possibility of deferring the indictments or otherwise ensuring the indictees' security.

That peace cannot last without some form of justice is a plausible assumption. Yet equally true is that peace is unsustainable without some deference to local priorities and approaches, including those that bear on factors, such as international indictments, that will ultimately be a major issue in making peace.

To insist on international prosecution when peace is at hand (a determination to be made largely by the parties) and when an alternative vision for accountability is emerging on the ground is to allow one idea of the perfect to be the enemy of the good. Having long failed to help resolve this brutal war, the international community, including the ICC, now has an opportunity to help Uganda achieve -- through peaceful means -- lasting peace with justice. This would be a result that is democratically based, refuses to condone impunity, and in the end, is not a bad deal.

Formerly of the Refugee Law Project in Uganda, Katherine Southwick is a lawyer in New York and lived in Uganda in the 1990s. She has worked for human rights organizations in India and Thailand, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the Hague, and the Office of the Legal Adviser at the U.S. State Department. She has commented on the northern Ugandan crisis in the International Herald Tribune, YaleGlobal, NPR, and Voice of America.

A Time for "Mataput" in Uganda

2006-09-15T21:36:00.000-07:00

Uganda Peace Hinges on Amnesty for Brutality
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Published: September 15, 2006

GULU, Uganda — In the beginning, it was simply called the Acholi war, and despite its brutality, few people outside Uganda paid attention.

In Gulu, residents say they hope a cease-fire brings lasting peace.

The Lord’s Resistance Army, a messianic rebel group, was exploring a new dimension of violence by building an army of abducted children and forcing them to burn down huts, slice off lips and pound newborn babies to death in wooden mortars, as though they were grinding grain.

“I killed and killed and killed,” said Christopher Oyet, an 18-year-old former rebel who was kidnapped at age 9. “Now, I am scared of myself.”

But, for the first time in 20 years, the killing has stopped. The rebel leaders, boxed in and with dwindling support, signed a cease-fire agreement on Aug. 26. Whether it lasts depends on whether Joseph Kony, the phantom rebel commander who is said to live deep in the jungle with 60 child brides, and his top deputies are given amnesty.

That is uncertain, because they have been charged with crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Still, this is the furthest any peace deal has come, fueling hopes that one of Africa’s most grotesque and bizarre wars, which cost tens of thousands of lives, may finally be over.

White flags are already fluttering in Gulu, the hub of Acholiland, even from the antennas of government trucks. People are no longer night commuting, the signature north Ugandan exodus from villages to towns every evening for safety’s sake. Instead, they are returning to the carpeted green hillsides to plant cassava, corn and beans, and this time their hoes and machetes are being swung to make things grow, not to destroy them.

The victims of this war are so desperate to put the nightmarish days behind them that they want to forgive, just as much as they want to forget. Typical is Christa Labol, whose ears and lips were cut off by bayonet-wielding prepubescent soldiers she now says she would welcome home.

“Only God can judge,” Mrs. Labol said through a mouth that is always open.

Of course, the rebels are not out of the bush yet. Many still hide in a remote, lawless corner of northern Congo. Some people wonder if Mr. Kony, who has told his troops he is possessed by spirits, will ever give up.

Mr. Kony has said he will but only if he is not prosecuted.

The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Mr. Kony and four of his commanders. Ugandan government officials have said they will ensure that the rebels get amnesty if they surrender. But the rebels have said the amnesty must come first. It is an impasse that possibly only the international court can break, but the court, established in 1998, has not indicated what it will do.

“We’ve never had such a situation,” said Claudia Perdomo, a court spokeswoman.

The Acholi people have their own solution. It is the mataput — the word means drinking a bitter root from a common cup — and it is a traditional reconciliation ceremony. Peace is more important than punishment, Acholi elders say, and they would rather have Mr. Kony return to Gulu for a mataput than rot in some European prison. Although the fighting may be over, it seems a new battle has begun: tradition versus modernity.

“In our culture, we don’t like to punish people,” said Collins Opoka, an Acholi chief. “It doesn’t really get you anywhere.”

The Acholis know something about punishment. For decades, it was customary for members of southern tribes to get the prized university spots and good office jobs, while northerners like the Acholis were stuck in the fields. The Acholis were known as superstitious — and tough — and filled the ranks of the national army. They fought rebel forces led by Yoweri Museveni, and after Mr. Museveni seized power in 1986 — he has been president since — the Acholis were marginalized and persecuted.

Enter Mr. Kony, a former Catholic altar boy revered in his village near Gulu as a prophet since he was 12. He smeared himself with shea butter, said his body and those of his Acholi followers were impervious to bullets and vowed to overthrow the government.

“We saw him as our savior,” said Mary Olanya, who knew Mr. Kony growing up.

Mr. Kony claimed to be guided by the Ten Commandments but soon his army was violating each and every one.

From about 1988 on, the rebels terrorized their own people, raping, robbing and killing across Acholiland. According to former rebels, Mr. Kony communed with spirits and his rules became stranger by the minute — anyone caught bicycling had to have his feet chopped off; all white chickens were to be destroyed; no farming on Fridays.

After the Acholi War Few adults wanted to join his cultish, bloodthirsty movement, and soon the only recruits were children, most against their will.

Mr. Oyet said he was snatched one night nine years ago from his hut near Gulu and forced to march miles into the bush. The boys whose feet swelled and could no longer walk were clubbed to death — by other boys. All new recruits had to help with the killing. It was called registration. The population responded to the rebel violence by seeking safety in numbers. Nearly two million people abandoned their villages and crowded into government camps. “It was a desperate time,’’ said Quinto Otika, a Gulu elder.

And it continued for years, nourished by the Arab-led government of Sudan, which gave the rebels arms and sanctuary as payback for Ugandan support for the Christian rebellion in southern Sudan.

But by 2002, the Sudanese government was making peace with southern separatists and no longer supporting the Lord’s Resistance Army.

Mr. Kony — and his bodyguards and harem — fled to Congo, where, according to Ugandan military sources, they set up a slave kingdom, living off the land and slaughtering wildlife. By then, the elusive rebel army had shrunk to a shadow of a shadow, with fewer than 2,000 fighters left. The West mostly ignored this war, more focused on Rwanda, Somalia, and Darfur, Sudan. But in 2005, the Ugandan government persuaded the international court to issue arrest warrants against rebel leaders, despite pleas from Acholi elders.

In Acholi culture, killers are accepted back into the community after they have paid compensation, admitted to their misdeeds and shared a meal, usually a roasted sheep, with the relatives of their victim. This is the mataput ceremony, and it comes from the days when clans were tightly intertwined by marriage and trade and could not afford to alienate one another.

The Ugandan government eventually warmed to the idea and signed a cease-fire with the rebels that took effect on Aug. 29. Since then, some rebel soldiers have emerged from hiding. They plan to assemble at collection points in southern Sudan, where they will wait until a full peace agreement is reached.

Though some United Nations officials have bristled at the idea of granting immunity to Mr. Kony and his top commanders, Ugandan officials say they are confident a deal can be reached.

“We can go to the judges and say there are new circumstances and that the indictments are no longer needed,” said a Ugandan government spokesman, Robert Kabushenga.

People are already beginning to wonder what Mr. Kony will do if he comes home a free man.

“He never aspired to be a politician,” said Florence Adokorach, now in her early 20’s, who was kidnapped at age 14 and forced to be one of Mr. Kony’s brides. Instead, he told his young wife, he just wanted to return to spreading God’s word.

Back to Africa

2006-08-02T10:36:00.000-07:00

Wow, I'm leaving for the airport in a couple of minutes - and so must say "I promise" to get more information out on this trip in the days ahead. For the background, watch the three video clips found here. And then watch this.

Because I'm off for northern Uganda, and will let you know more in the days ahead.

Watch "Invisible Children" Here

2006-05-03T16:14:00.000-07:00

Tell everyone you know: click here to watch Invisible Children on Google Video. Please help raise awareness about this - in order to make headway against this crisis we need your help. Help in raising awareness. Help for these children. Your help. Oprah Winfrey and Larry King are correct: we can no longer look away from this holocaust.

Osama bin Laden calls for Jihad in Sudan

2006-04-23T17:28:00.000-07:00

"I call on mujahideen and their supporters, especially in Sudan..."

Osama bin Laden's latest gambit: war in the southern Sudan. Media sources all over the world, including this front page report from the left-leaning Guardian Online, have reported on the latest recording aired by al-Jazeera.

In extracts from a tape broadcast by al-Jazeera television, a voice sounding like Bin Laden's said the western public shared responsibility for the actions of their governments, particularly for what he described as "a continuous crusader-Zionist war on Islam".

And then he gets specific:

"I call on mujahideen and their supporters, especially in Sudan and the Arabian peninsula, to prepare for long war against the crusader plunderers in western Sudan," he said.

"Our goal is not defending the Khartoum government but to defend Islam, its land and its people," he added.

Perhaps out of concern for Islamo-facist apathy and indifference (toward what he calls "long war") he went on:

"I urge holy warriors to be acquainted with the land and the tribes in Darfur."

Or maybe, just maybe, he is aware of the usual tendencies toward lapses in geographical comprehension. People are people, after all. Anyway, the Guardian offers this backgrounder on the conflict, though I don't pick up on any of the paper's usual anti-American virulence (he said in astonishment):

The Darfur conflict erupted in 2003 when mostly non-Arab tribes revolted, accusing the Arab-led government of neglect. Khartoum retaliated by arming mainly Arab militias, known as janjaweed, who began a campaign of murder, rape and plunder that drove more than 2 million villagers into squalid camps in Sudan and neighbouring Chad.

And surprisingly, the Guardian is willing to report on the religious demarcation which frames the conflict. Will wonders never cease...

Bin Laden, who was based in Sudan for several years during the 1990s, also denounced the peace accord between Khartoum and the mainly Christian and animist south, which was signed last year. "This agreement is not worth the ink it was written with and does not bind us," he said, adding that southern Sudan was "part of the Islamic lands".

"It's very dangerous," said Abdel Bari Atwan, editor of al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper and author of a book on al-Qaida. "The timing is extremely important. He's sensing that there's a failed state in Sudan and he would like to extend his bases."

Or maybe Osama is banking on that folks in Sudan are still upset about that Bill Clinton cruise missile attack thing, whatever that was...

The combination of a weak government in Khartoum and the prospect of UN forces being sent to Sudan was creating "an atmosphere that he loves", Mr Atwan said.

And that sums it up. As far as what Osama loves - and fertile conditions for his brand of hate - don't forget the usual crushing poverty, as well as the absolute absence of democracy and rule of law. And let not your hearts be troubled, comrade crusaders, Osama is also mad at our Buddhist fellow travelers:

In the summarised sections of the tape, Bin Laden denounced the UN security council for giving a veto to "the crusaders of the world and the Buddhist pagans". He also mocked King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia for promoting a "dialogue among civilisations" when - according to Bin Laden - it was the west that had launched an assault against Islamic civilisation.

GNC - A New Generation of Leaders

2006-04-22T22:35:00.000-07:00

David Porter Orlando Sentinel

No longer invisible

Help put a face on grim risk facing Uganda's children

Forty-three years ago, thousands of black children walked out of their schools in Birmingham, Ala., to protest racial segregation. Television news images of authorities using police dogs and fire hoses to attack black children forced mainstream America to confront racism. Through their courage, Birmingham's children made this nation better.

Next Saturday, thousands of teenagers and young adults across America, including Orlando, will take an equally profound stand to stop the brutal exploitation of Uganda's "invisible children."

Bet you never heard of the "invisible children." Don't feel bad. I didn't know much about them either.Earlier this week, I saw Invisible Children: Rough Cut, a documentary by three young guys from California who went to investigate the result of 20 years of fighting in Uganda -- Africa's longest running war.

There's part of me that wishes that I didn't see the documentary because it's very grim and difficult to forget. It showed that thousands of children -- many younger than 10 -- have been abducted and turned into killing machines by the rebels trying to topple Uganda's government.

The rebels torture and kill kids in front of the abducted children. Then rebels tell the abducted children they will get the same treatment unless they pick up AK-47s and start slaughtering people.

Children in northern Uganda don't want anything to do with the rebels. So every day before the sun sets, more than 20,000 children leave their villages and walk to larger towns to avoid being abducted when rebels sweep through after dark. Children crowd into bus stations and other buildings for protection while they sleep. The next morning, they return home. That's why they are called "night commuters."

The documentary has had a powerful effect on many who have seen it. One 16-year girl sold her horse so she could send money to help the children. Another young woman whose soldier-fiancee was killed in Iraq donated the money she had saved for her wedding.

The documentary actually has been making a circuit through high schools and colleges for a couple of years. Next Saturday, young people throughout the country will be holding a "global night commute" to demonstrate their solidarity with the Ugandan children who don't want to be turned into weapons.

The goal is to put pressure on the United States and United Nations to stop the ruthless slaughter and exploitation of children in northern Uganda. Certainly the past colonization and exploitation of Africa by European countries contributed to much of the fighting in Africa, but that's no excuse for the brutality that is now inflicted on children, which includes the systematic rape of girls younger than 10.

No doubt some Americans would just as soon shrug off the horror. After all, it's just Africa. Why should Americans care?Let's take the selfish point of view. Homeland security demands that we care. The military slaves in the rebel army can easily be shaped into human bombs by terrorists with grudges against the United States.

We should care because "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life liberty and the pursuit of happiness." (Those words are from our Declaration of Independence.) Pessimists certainly will dismiss the young adults who built this campaign as naive idealists. Surely, the same was said of the men who founded this great nation.

Orlando is playing a key role as one of 130 cities selected to host a "global night commute." City leaders are letting organizers hold it at Trotters Park, formerly known as Ben White Raceway. That is on Lee Road, just east of the North Orange Blossom Trail. The event will begin at 7 p.m. next Saturday and end at 7 a.m.

Participants will spend the time writing letters to Washington leaders and creating artwork that expresses American values of freedom and the significance of the "global night commute." Then they'll sleep together under the stars. I'm excited to think about all the positive energy that will be put to work for a great cause. (For more details on what participants should bring, go to Invisible Children .com, or call 407-719-7060. Organizers encourage participants to pre-register on the Web site.)

I'm proud to report that my 16-year-old daughter will be there. The 17-year-old daughter of one of my co-workers will be there, too. They knew about this movement long before me. I applaud them.I hope that other parents and adults will encourage the teenagers in their lives to participate, too.

If the pastor or youth minister at your house of worship doesn't mention this event on Sunday, I would ask why not.

Most people, if they're lucky, get only a few opportunities to make a real difference. This is one of them.

What these young people are planning to do is important work. By standing up for this cause, they will help make the world safer for us and African children who are hunted down by monsters.

It's noteworthy that mostly white kids are driving this movement, and they deserve credit. Black kids cannot afford to relax on the sidelines. We're talking about Africa here.Hopefully Central Florida's predominantly black institutions, including Jones and Evan high schools, and Bethune-Cookman College, will be strongly represented.

You don't have to be an adult to be a leader. That was proved in Birmingham four decades ago.

Anyone looking for Central Florida's future leaders can find them next Saturday night at Trotters Park.

David Porter can be reached at dporter@orlandosentinel.com or at 407-420-5533

PIN codes vrs. fraud in Uganda education

2006-04-19T12:33:00.000-07:00

Uganda: Education ministry introduces PIN numbers to stop ‘ghost’ pupils

African News Dimension ANDnetwork .com

(Kampala) The ministry of education has introduced Pupils’ Identification Numbers (PIN) to fight ‘ghost’ pupils in primary schools.The campaign is to start in 20 districts in eastern Uganda.

Addressing over 180 teachers at Jinja Town Hall during a training workshop last week, PIN coordinator George Ouma Mumbe said the system would save the government from unnecessary spending.

He said some headteachers were getting large sums of money under the Universal Primary Education programme by inflating the number of pupils.

The district assistant inspector of schools and PIN technical officer Alice Nabeta said the system would also control the movement of pupils from one school to another. She said the PIN would operate in government-aided and private schools which are registered and licensed.
Nabeta said the PIN would assist the Government to establish the actual number of pupils and plan appropriately.

The district education officer Abraham Were cautioned school heads against embezzling school funds.

He cited Bufuula Primary School headmaster Charles Kikuni, who was reportedly jailed for embezzling school funds.

Source: New Vision

Why Kony must be taken alive to end the LRA

2006-04-17T17:01:00.000-07:00

Acholi People Trapped Between Vicious Cult And Vengeful Army

by Richard Dowden allAfrica.com
Kitgum

It was one of the deadliest encounters United Nations troops had ever engaged in. Guatemalan Special Forces, operating under UN command in northeastern Congo, made contact with 300 Lord's Resistance Army fighters who had crossed from Uganda into the Garamba National Park.

Authorised to use maximum force against the warlords and militias, the Guatemalans closed in for the kill. But the LRA unit laid an ambush. After a fierce gun battle, eight Guatemalans were dead. The terrorists beheaded the commander and escaped. How could one of the world's most experienced special forces be outfought by what is usually described as a cult of half-crazed cannibals whose tactics are murder, rape and pillage? How could their leader, a dreadlocked psychopath called Joseph Kony with no military training, lead such a successful army?

The LRA is portrayed as a mindless terror gang, so evil it makes political or military analysis unnecessary. But the difficult truth is that, although the LRA controls no territory, it has also been one of the most effective guerrilla armies in Africa. Supplied until recently by Sudan, it moves fast and undetected for hundreds of miles in days, breaks into small groups and re-forms.

Many people had assumed the sheer virulence of the LRA would quickly burn itself out. Surely no human could maintain such appalling brutality for long, let alone win a guerrilla war with it. But it has lasted 20 years. It grew out of the Holy Spirit Movement, another bizarre cult, led by Alice Lakwena, a priest who claimed that her fighters were protected from bullets by butter. She was defeated by the Ugandan army, but Kony, said to be her cousin, took up the cause.

Its origins go back to the defeat of the Okello regime by the army of now-President Yoweri Museveni in 1986. Tito Okello, a former British army sergeant, was an Acholi, the ethnic group which formed the backbone of the Ugandan army. The 1986 defeat traumatised the Acholis, but they did not abandon their fighting skills. A former UK soldier who interviewed captured LRA fighters was appalled to find that they use standard British army orders, handed down from colonial times.

In the Nineties, Sudan gave the LRA refuge and supplied it with weapons in retaliation for Ugandan support for southern Sudanese rebels. For a while it had anti-aircraft missiles, mortars and a battlefield communications system. Western governments have pressed Sudan to end its support, and a new plan is to get the Sudanese to arrest Kony or drive him into Congo, where the UN could hand him to the International Criminal Court.

Accepted wisdom is that the LRA is a mad cult led by a lunatic: kill Kony and the problem will go away. But a young Anglican church worker in Kitgum said: 'Kony has a spirit. It is in a sheep which leads him around and tells him what to do. When the spirit comes into him, his face changes, his voice changes. It is someone else. You must never look into his eyes. What we are worried about is this: the spirit was in Lakwena and when she crossed the Nile it went into her father and then to Kony. If anything happens to Kony, maybe it will leave him and move to someone else in their clan.'

The Acholi live in squalid camps where 1,000 people die each week, according to the World Health Organisation. A separate report last week by 50 charities in northern Uganda said 41 per cent of the dead are children under five. The violent death rate is estimated to be three times higher than in Iraq and the study says that the war is costing Uganda $85m a year. All this puts the region in the UN emergency category.

The official line is that these camps were formed voluntarily to protect the people from the LRA, but in the past five years the Ugandan army has placed a free-fire zone outside them. People out after sundown are regarded as rebels. When the Burundi government used similar tactics against its rebels a few years ago, international donors moved quickly against it, but, protected by Britain, which needed Museveni as a rare African success story, Uganda gets away with it. The camps exist only because the UN and the charities feed the inmates.

At Labuge camp on the outskirts of Kitgum, some 18,000 people live in traditional grass-roofed huts packed tightly together. Sanitation is minimal and rains make the camp a fetid swamp. If a fire starts, thousands of huts burn in minutes. Disease spreads more quickly. There is nothing for men to do but drink. Women are left with childcare, cooking and brewing beer. Ragged youngsters run wild.

'Children think food is something that comes off a UN lorry,' said a local priest. Fly over the once-rich farmland and you see an abandoned landscape.

Urbane Analysis: This story goes to the heart of what so many Ugandans have told me: Joseph Kony must be taken alive - and kept alive - in order that the "spirit cult" not "pass over" to a desperate Kony follower. As was stated, it happened before when Kony himself proclaimed the same spirit taken from its original progenitor, Alice Lakwena (for more about this, watch the documentary Invisible Children). The LRA problem is bigger than most people realize. It needs more attention than Western governments are paying. And it needs more careful handling than the Ugandan government is capable of providing. The UN Security Council simply must place this crisis among its most immediate priorities alongside Iran, North Korea and the like. The death count in Uganda alone, due to violence as well as preventable disease and malnutrition caused by the violence, demands this immediate course of action.

Oh, and though it is obvious, let us be clear: military might is a non-starter regarding the LRA. While rooted in a bizarre cult, the LRA is conducting a classic insurgency against an unpopular ruling authority. This crisis can only be addressed by improving overall living conditions throughout northern Uganda - so that even the LRA lieutenants can see that they are pursing a false agenda. Right now they are so isolated, and continually confronted with desperate conditions to deal with (yes, even as they further the desperation around them); so from where they are at - the "line" that they hear from Kony often continues to make sense to them.

The obvious means to deal with the LRA is to lessen their isolation (not increase it as the Ugandan army and UN is attempting), and improve overall conditions throughout the region to increase the demand among the lower level LRA commanders to "come in" - for twenty years they have been trying it the other way and it hasn't worked. Now it is time to establish a propaganda war, even as quick (footed and witted) negotiators begin to cut deals with LRA units on an individual basis to turn in their arms. The goal here is to finally make the LRA "whither away" due to defections. Basically, what this means is trying the Betty Bigombe "approach" but with about 10,000% more effort. Former LRA fighters and commanders who have escaped back to the "real world" need to be carefully "played" as communicators of the truth. But that is only part of the work to be done.

There is a role for the military here. Though it is an undercover one. The Allies employed very successful "Psy Ops" during World War II, as did NATO during the Cold War; today there are many more refined and updated techniques that can be employed against the LRA. But this approach will only work if measures are implemented to dramatically (and suddenly) improve health, living conditions, nutrition and economic opportunity (have I said that enough?). Overall, it is frustrating that this is not already being undertaken by the Ugandan government with the assistance of specialist advisors in the British and American military who know how to get results.

Pass the word and talk it up: that is the only way to move toward peace in Uganda. And let us be mindful of what Senator James Inhofe said on February 2:

"I urge President Bush to examine every aspect of his executive authority to relieve the suffering in northern Uganda. I also urge far more action from the United Nations. These significant steps can shed light into the darkness that has cloaked this ongoing tragedy in Uganda and can begin to affect change for peace."

UN Floats Northern Uganda Peace, Recovery and Development Plan

2006-04-07T15:40:00.000-07:00

Northern Uganda has been the scene of one of the most brutal civil wars, pitting the government against the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), which has held the Acholi subregion in a stranglehold for almost 20 years. The LRA is best known for abducting young children to serve as fighters, porters or sex slaves to rebel commanders.

Source: United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs - Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN)

Uganda: Survey reveals grinding poverty in war-affected north

Kampala, 7 Apr 2006 (IRIN) - Seventy percent of the population in war-affected northern Uganda live in absolute poverty, with each adult's consumption expenditure at about 20,000 Uganda shillings (US $11) per month, according to a survey released this week.

A government study of the living conditions and social welfare of people living in northern Uganda, many of whom have been displaced by civil conflict, revealed a dire humanitarian situation in the region. Dwellings were substandard, and most of the population lived on less than $1 a day.

Christopher Laker, executive director of the Northern Uganda Social Action Fund, said the survey analysed the state of education, health, labour, housing and household expenditure, vulnerability, welfare and community characteristics.

Its findings will be used to guide a Peace, Recovery and Development Plan (PRDP), a new initiative by the United Nations, the World Bank and the Ugandan government to address the economic and social disparities between the north and the rest of the country. "The statistics are going to form a good pillar for building up the new and existing programmes," said Laker.

Northern Uganda has been the scene of one of the most brutal civil wars, pitting the government against the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), which has held the Acholi subregion in a stranglehold for almost 20 years. The LRA is best known for abducting young children to serve as fighters, porters or sex slaves to rebel commanders.

According to relief agencies, as many as 25,000 children have been abducted. Up to 2 million people have been displaced from their homes by the civil conflict. Some 1.6 million people live in scattered camps for internally displaced people, prevented by insecurity from cultivating their fields or engaging in any economic activities.

People live hand-to-mouth in the north. Half the working-age population, especially in Acholi, is a redundant labour force, as there are no job opportunities in the camps. The survey found that food, alcohol and tobacco consumed about 70 percent of household income.

Other expenditures included 11 percent for rent, fuel and power; 7.6 percent for health; and 4.4 percent for transport, the report said. Only 0.8 percent of household income went towards education.

The Acholi region had one of the lowest literacy levels in Uganda. "Literacy rate in the region stands at 54 percent compared to the national average of 68 percent," the survey said. Fourteen percent of people between six and 25 years of age had not been formally educated.

Sanitation is still precarious, according to the report, with 33 percent of households having no toilets." In Karamoja subregion, 88 percent of the all the households still use the ‘bush’ as a toilet facility," the report observed.

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Uganda: Northern situation worse than Iraq’s - NGOs

2006-03-31T15:16:00.000-08:00

(ReliefWeb) The rate of violent deaths in war-ravaged northern Uganda is three times higher than in Iraq and the 20-year-long insurgency has cost $1.7b (£980m), said a report yesterday from 50 international and local agencies.

The violent death rate for northern Uganda is 146 deaths a week, or 0.17 violent deaths per 10,000 per day.

This is three times higher than in Iraq, where the incidence of violent death was 0.052 per 10,000 people per day, says the report published by the Independent on-line, a British newspaper.

“The Ugandan government, the rebel army and the international community must fully acknowledge the true scale and horror of the situation in northern Uganda,” said Kathy Relleen, a policy adviser to Oxfam, one of the organisations behind the report.

But yesterday, the army said life and work in northern Uganda was steadily returning to normal and the LRA rebels were decimated and not worth talking about.

In a statement, army spokesman Maj. Felix Kulayigye, said in the last six months, 46 people were killed by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebels .
“There are no more LRA to talk about so those who talk about up-scaling our engagements with the LRA are simply daydreaming,” Major Kulayigye said.

Public transport in, out and within the north is very normal and brisk, he said, adding that commercial traffic to southern Sudan and Kotido through Patongo, Adilang up to Abim, was bustling.

Kulayigye dismissed reports that the army killed civilians in Agung displaced people’s camp.

“We escort all civilians to their gardens as well as hunters but these two did not move with UPDF escorts. They could, therefore, have been murdered by LRA,” he said.

The army, he said, is on record for capturing and not killing LRA rebels and wondered why they would kill civilians. He cited the LRA’s Lt. Col. Francis Okwonga Alero who he said was treated for four months by the army.

The report, by the Civil Society Organisations for Peace in Northern Uganda, puts the cost of the war in the north at $1.7b over the 20 years. It said this is equivalent to the US’s aid to Uganda between 1994 and 2002.

“Twenty years of brutal violence is a scar on the world’s conscience. The government of Uganda must act resolutely and without delay, to guarantee protection of civilians and work with all sides to secure just and lasting peace,” Relleen said.

The report was released ahead of the arrival of UN’s humanitarian chief Jan Egeland in Uganda yesterday. Egeland will hold meetings with NGOs, ministers and Uganda-based UN officials.

Northern Uganda death rate higher than Iraq

2006-03-31T15:11:00.000-08:00

(ABC News) A report by more than 50 charity groups says the rate of violent deaths in northern Uganda is three times higher than in Iraq.

The report has been prepared by Civil Society Organisations for Peace in Northern Uganda (CSOPNU).

It says nearly 150 northern Ugandans die every week due to the rebellion waged by the group the Lords Resistance Army (LRA).

CSOPNU demands the UN Security Council add its voice to their call for peace talks to end the violence.

"It should express its conviction the crisis ... can only be ended via a process of political engagement, diplomacy, and peaceful negotiation," the coalition said in a statement.

The United Nations coordinator for humanitarian affairs, Jan Egeland, says the Ugandan Government must act to stop further bloodshed.

"We now need to see them realise the very encouraging statements that have been there from the Foreign Minister and also very positive signals from President Museveni that a different, renewed more systematic effort of the Ugandan Government to provide security for their own citizens will now take place," he said.

Living conditions Mr Egeland calls the war one of the world's most neglected humanitarian disasters.

Camps in the Uganda's north are home to more than 1.6 million people sheltering from fighting between troops and LRA rebels.

One study last year estimated that 1,000 people died every week in the north as a result of poor living conditions.

In its new report, CSOPNU says the main war victims are children.
Some 25,000 have been abducted by the LRA as fighters and "wives", while tens of thousands more trudge into towns every night rather than risk being kidnapped from their beds.

Half of all camp residents are under the age of 15.

A quarter of all children over 10 have lost one or both parents.
"This is a catastrophe that is fuelled not only by terrible acts of war and violence. It is also fuelled by a shameful litany of failure," CSOPNU said.
Uganda's Government says the LRA has been greatly weakened by a combination talks, amnesty and military operations.

But the aid groups accuse the Government of pursuing a military victory against the LRA at the expense of protecting civilians.

The Government denies the charge.

- BBC/Reuters

The Corrupt Will Inherit the Ugandan Kingdom

2006-03-29T12:10:00.000-08:00

"I can't import honest Ugandans" - President Yoweri Museveni

by Charles Onyango Obbo AllAfrica.com

Appearing before the inquiry into the swindling of Global Fund money last week, Health minister Maj. Gen. Jim Muhwezi all but told Justice James Ogoola that Movement leaders were entitled to be corrupt because they "fought".
While most sensible people wouldn't freely choose to live in a country governed by people who think like Muhwezi, the general shouldn't be held responsible for this political line. For those who have forgotten, Maj. Gen. David Tinyefuza said the same thing when he appeared on the Tonight on Andrew Mwenda show at the height of the election campaigns in January.

He said the judges had no business criticising the Black Mamba's armed invasion of the High Court, because their bewigged lordships were hiding under their beds when Tinye & Co. were fighting in the bush. This is a line Ugandans have heard since the NRM came to power in 1986, and Muhwezi and Tinye are not its authors. They are just the messengers.

After the NRM took power, within a year it became clear that it wouldn't deal with corruption. When asked why there was no action on what Kenyans call "old corruption", President Yoweri Museveni would answer that it was better to leave the thieves to continue their business, as it was cheaper for the country than cracking down on them and in the process force them to go to the bush and fund rebellion with their ill-gotten wealth.
In reality, the old corrupt class had wormed its way into the NRM, and they were the closest of friends with the new big men.

When it became clear that NRM leaders were involved in corrupt deals too, the answer from President Museveni was that; "even Movement cadres are from this same corrupt Ugandan society." In one of his more famous comments on this matter, Museveni was to say; "I can't import honest Ugandans".

However, as the economic liberalisation that started in 1988 showed, many Ugandans were growing rich through honest work. It was no longer tenable for even the most blinkered politician to argue that Ugandan society can also thrive through stealing.

So the argument changed, and Mr Museveni would argue that "at least the thieves were investing their money at home, not taking it abroad like they used to do in the old primitive regimes."

In short order, that too became an insufferably ridiculous story. First, if corruption was excusable if the money was invested locally, then everyone in a position of responsibility could steal public funds, as long as they spent it domestically.

Secondly, by the beginning of the 1990s big time embezzlers in the NRM were not investing their money home, but stashing it abroad. And thirdly, and more crucially, why should taxpayers be diligent in paying their taxes if the purpose was so people in government could steal it? Taxpayers would be better off investing the money themselves.

In limbo

At this point, the NRM was sliding in both ideological and moral limbo. So to reclaim the moral high ground, the government threw itself into refurbishing its anti-corruption credentials with the creation of bodies like the Inspector General of Government, and during the making of the 1995 constitution supported giving Parliament committees more authority than they had ever had to probe government expenditure.

However, from 1998 everything went into reversal, and last year's amendment of the constitution effectively stripped Parliament of its clout, and took a few more teeth of out the IGG's mouth.

The practice of invoking the bush war to justify white collar robbery by government leaders and state functionaries and its agents, is now happening as part of the wider movement to reclaim the ground for impunity that the crooks had lost.

Fallout

But there's a difference today from the situation in the late 1980s and early 1990s. For starters, the NRM has grown, and most of its rank and file were people who weren't in the bush. There have also been two major fall-outs in the Movement (in 2001 when Dr Kizza Besigye first challenged Museveni, and last year over the presidency for life project).

The number of people in government who can claim to have fought is easily today less than one-third what it was in 1986. For this reason, while 15 years ago the argument of "we fought" was made to rationalise the exclusion of Ugandans who weren't with the NRM in the bush from the high table, today it's made to establish the "eating pecking order" within the wider NRM. That is why Minister of State Mike Mukula, accused of similar transgressions by Justice Ogoola can't fall back on the "we fought" argument, but Muhwezi can do so comfortably.

Once that order has been established, it means the next people in line (the heirs) to eat both the groceries and politics are not NRM party members, but the relatives of the remaining "fighters" - i.e. their wives, and children. The implications of this for political succession inside the NRM are written on the wall for all those with eyes to see.

© 2006 The Monitor. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com)

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UN: Fear in Northern Uganda

2006-03-21T12:08:00.000-08:00

Child Soldiers have created a climate of fear

UGANDA: Too scared to return home

KITGUM, 21 Mar 2006 (IRIN) - Wilson Akera hates living in Padibe camp for internally displaced persons because life is generally unbearable but he is even more scared of the prospect of returning home soon as he believes insecurity is still rife in the villages.

"We are willing to go home and end this cycle of despair, but we are uncertain of our security," Akera said. "The area a few kilometres out of here is a den of the unknown. Groups of rebels still loiter there."

Akera is one of the 1.6 million-plus people who have been displaced by two decades of war between the Ugandan government and the rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) in northern Uganda. He has lived in Padibe camp for years, relying on aid agencies to survive. The camp is located in the northern Kitgum district - one of the areas worst hit by the rebellion.

Rose Agiro agreed that in spite of the bad conditions at Padibe, returning home, some 6 km away, was not a viable option. "We have no land around here for cultivation. I would prefer to return home and access my field, but there is no security. If I go back, the rebels are there and will abduct my children," she said. Conditions in the camp are tough for Agiro, 46, and her family of six. Water is in short supply, and there are not enough classrooms, creating overcrowding and putting pressure on the few available teachers.

Residents complained that their needs remained great. "More boreholes are needed, more classrooms, provision of agricultural implements is required," said a memorandum read to Dennis McNamara, head of the UN Inter-Agency Internal Displacement Division, who led a team of donors to evaluate the situation between 15 and 17 March. "There is need for the decongestion of the camps and more security," the memorandum added.

McNamara told reporters: "We need to break out of this prolonged humanitarian crisis. The conditions these people are living in are totally below any standards. They are unacceptable in terms of lack of assistance, lack of protection."

Ugandan authorities said the problem of decongesting the camps was being addressed through the creation of "satellite villages". Through this programme, military units have been established and people are encouraged to settle alongside them. However, local residents said the transition was very hard, as not enough supplies were available at the new locations.

Dure camp, further south of Kitgum town, is one new location, where aid workers are trying to cope with the situation. "This translates into changing our operations and increasing the logistics to deliver supplies to these new locations, a change that takes time," said one relief worker at the camp, where the European Union had just set up a solar-powered borehole in response to the water problem there.

Prepare to go home, says government

McNamara warned that any returns of the displaced to their villages must be voluntary. "We can only support that return if it is voluntary, if it is safe and if it is viable. If it is not, we will not be able to support if," he said.

Vincent Okongo, 60, who lives in Dure camp, insisted there had been no guarantee that the rebellion was ending. "Two days ago, we got reports of rebels passing nearby the camps, so we do not know what this means. The only good thing is that many are continuing to surrender to the army," he said.

Ugandan authorities insist that the rebellion is at its end and the displaced should prepare to start going home in April. "The army has defeated the LRA terrorism in the north and the peace prevailing now in southern Sudan has paved way for the return of the displaced persons to their homes," President Yoweri Museveni told a delegation from the United States that visited him over the weekend. He said that only 120 rebel fighters were remaining, and even they had fled from southern Sudan to Garamba National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

Asked in an interview with the Ugandan Sunday Vision newspaper whether he thought the camps should be dismantled, the president answered, "The IDPs [internally displaced persons] are going home." Days earlier, his government said it would buy 259,000 roofing sheets to be distributed to returnees in the war-affected districts of Gulu, Kitgum, Kaberamaido, Apac, Katakwi, Pader, Kumi and Amuria. Each household would get 30 sheets to rebuild their home – a small start given the number of displaced families living in the camps.

Children most affected

At Padibe, according to 19-year-old Alex Akena, four children who had gone to gather mangoes had disappeared - most probably having been abducted by the LRA - one week before the UN delegation’s visit. They represent only a tiny fraction of a particularly vulnerable group that has borne the brunt of the conflict. Children, perhaps more than anybody else, will live longest with brutal memories of the terror and abuse they suffered as captives of the LRA.

Irene Ajok, nine, is afraid to sleep at night. She said that if she slept, she might be abducted and forced to eat a human being, as her sister was almost made to do when the rebels abducted them. "They killed a person and ordered the freshly abducted children, including my sister, Lillian, to eat the body. They refused to eat that body, and she was made to carry a heavy load of sorghum for a long distance as a punishment," Ajok told IRIN at a night commuters’ centre at a school in Kitgum. She is one of 400 children who seek refuge there every night.

Night commuters are children who, out of fear of LRA abduction, flee their home villages each night to sleep in the relative safety of larger towns. In the morning, they return to their villages. There are an estimated 40,000 night commuters in northern Uganda. The children said life as a night commuter was difficult, but better than living with the cruel treatment meted out by the rebels.

For many former abductees, the memories of atrocities committed by either their peers or LRA rebels torment them the most. Twelve-year-old Walter said he was never tortured or made to kill when he was abducted two years ago, but he had seen people having their heads cut off when they tried to escape. "Their eyes were looking at me," Walter remembered, speaking quickly in a monotone.

Rights groups and relief agencies estimate that the LRA has abducted at least 25,000 children to serve as fighters, porters and sex slaves since the rebellion started in northern Uganda in 1988.

The war drags on

The war, often described as the world's worst forgotten humanitarian crisis, has dragged on despite on-and-off attempts to pursue peace talks. Over time, the Ugandan military offensives have driven the rebels further underground and into neighbouring countries.

Last week, the Ugandan army claimed that LRA leader Joseph Kony had fled from bases in southern Sudan into eastern DRC. If true, said army spokesman Maj Felix Kuraigye, the elusive guerrilla leader's drawn-out violent campaign - ostensibly to replace Museveni’s government with one based on the Biblical Ten Commandments - is waning.

Pressure on the rebels has also grown since 2005, when Kony and four top commanders were indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, among them the "brutalisation of civilians by acts including murder, abduction, sexual enslavement (and) mutilations".

Sustainable Development Network on rights of the poor

2006-03-20T13:08:00.000-08:00

In Nairobi, where government-subsidised water is provided by government kiosks, the kiosk operators charge up to 18 times (1800%) more than the subsidised price.

The single most important factor in improving Africa’s water and sanitation problems is to extend a formal legal existence to all poor people.

- Franklin Cudjoe - Imani Institute

19 MARCH 2006, MEXICO CITY -- A new study published this week by the Sustainable Development Network has studied urban water and sanitationissues in Africa. It criticises Africa’s governments for denying the poor basic legal rights which could massively improve their access to water and sewerage services.

“The fundamental problem across urban Africa today is that Africa’s national and local governments do not recognise the legal rights of the poor,” explained Kendra Okonski, co-author of the new study and Environment Programme Director at International Policy Network, a London-based NGO.

Ms. Okonski has been participating in the Fourth World Water Forum in Mexico City. She explained, “Governments deny the poor a legal existence – especially to those people living in slums and peripheral urban areas. These governments then deny the poor water by making property ownership a prerequisite for connection to municipal water systems. At the same time, while cities across Africa are growing, municipal governments refuse to extend their urban boundaries – and thus their public services -- to recognise slums and shanty towns as legitimate dwellings.”

Franklin Cudjoe, co-author of the new study and a representative of Imani, an NGO in Ghana, today highlighted the fact that the small-scale private sector operators are filling the water and sewerage gap caused by governments. “Informal entrepreneurs, operating at the lowest level of society, are addressing water scarcity and lack of sanitation caused by Africa’s governments,” said Cudjoe. “They sell water and sewerage services to their fellow slum-dwellers, in exchange for payment.”

Cudjoe added, “The activities of these informal entrepreneurs show how human initiative and creativity can be harnessed for the benefit of the poor to solve water scarcity and poor sanitation in urban Africa.”

However, he explained that governments are perpetuating water problems in urban Africa: “A fundamental problem is that Africa’s governments consider the economic activities of small-scale providers to be ‘illegal’. Hence, government officials use their political power to exact bribes out of these small-scale businesses, otherwise their owners are fined and their meagre possessions are confiscated.”

Cudjoe concluded that “The single most important factor in improving Africa’s water and sanitation problems is to extend a formal legal existence to all poor people. This means enabling poor people to own their dwellings and property, and allowing them legally to operate small-scale businesses free of the need to bribe government officials and bureaucrats.”

Key facts from “The reality of water provision in urban Africa” -

• Governments have failed abjectly in achieving universal access to water in Africa’s cities. Hardly any African city has a sewerage system.
• Municipal water systems in Africa are failing. Public provision is characterised by poor water quality and thus a failure to recover costs. Thus, municipal systems can barely keep up with maintenance, let alone invest in extending their networks.
• Most of Africa is urbanising. 27% of Africa’s urban population live in dwellings on the outskirts of urban areas – referred to as slums or shanty towns.
• Subsidised water rarely reaches or helps the poor. In Nairobi, where government-subsidised water is provided by government kiosks, the kiosk operators charge up to 18 times (1800%) more than the subsidised price.
• Poor people in slums and shantytowns are not allowed to own their property, yet this is considered a prerequisite by governments to obtain a legal connection to a water system.
• Many people in urban areas have benefited from privatised water provision (in the form of contracts between government and multinational companies). These include Conakry, Guinea and Dakar, Senegal.
• Cote d’Ivoire has had a private water system since 1959.
• A little-known but important phenomenon is that informal entrepreneurs supply water and sewerage services, for a price, to their fellow poor residents of slums and shanty towns in nearly every African city.
• They run small-scale businesses and earn profits, which are generally reinvested in their businesses and local communities.
• Government barriers to doing business prevent these entrepreneurs from addressing water scarcity on a wider scale.
• At the same time, government officials harass informal entrepreneurs and use their political power to exact bribes from these poor people.
• The single most important policy change that African governments could undertake to improve access to water and sanitation is to grant poor people a formal legal existence – including enabling residents of slums and shanty towns to own their property.
• This policy change would effectively enable entrepreneurs to continue to deliver water and sewerage in a decentralised, innovative manner.

CRISIS PROFILE-What’s going on in northern Uganda?

2006-03-06T19:14:00.000-08:00

Tim Large Reuters AlertNet

Some 25,000 children forced to serve as soldiers and sexual slaves. Gruesome massacres and mutilations. Up to 2 million people driven from their homes into camps where they live in fear and squalor.
Few horror stories rival the humanitarian crisis in northern Uganda, where a cult-like rebel group has been terrorising local people for a generation. It’s a tale of astonishing suffering and massive displacement – and all taking place in a country hailed as one of Africa’s development success stories.
Yet northern Uganda’s nightmare has been largely ignored by the international community, even as the humanitarian crisis in neighbouring Sudan generates hand-wringing worldwide and a steady flow of headlines.
In an AlertNet poll of experts conducted in March 2005, northern Uganda emerged as the world's second-worst "forgotten" humanitarian hotspot after Democratic Republic of Congo.
Extreme brutality
For almost 20 years, a religious group called the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has been waging war against the Ugandan government and carrying out horrific attacks on villages, towns and camps for the internally displaced.
The group’s modus operandi is to abduct thousands of children, forcing them to fight, carry supplies and serve as sex slaves to LRA commanders in camps across the border in neighbouring Sudan.
Rights groups say the children live in constant fear for their lives. Many are forced to perform terrible acts of cruelty, including the slaughter of other children, or be killed themselves.
About 25,000 children have been kidnapped to date. Child soldiers are estimated to make up 80 percent of the LRA’s fighting machine.
It’s not only the children who live in fear. In addition to battling government forces, the rebels are targeting the wider Acholi population, the largest group in northern Uganda. Sexual violence, mutilation and massacres are common. Up to 100,000 people have been killed in attacks since the conflict began.
In its war against the rebels, the Ugandan army has ordered almost 90 percent of the population of Acholiland – made up of the Gulu, Kitgum and Pader districts – into camps. The camps lack food and clean water and are vulnerable to LRA attacks.
In this way, between 1.6 million and 2 million people have been uprooted from their homes, according to aid agencies. That's about the same number as are displaced in Sudan’s Darfur region.
No clear objectives
Aside from trying to overthrow the government, most analysts say the rebels have no clear political objectives.
The group is led by a former altar boy and self-proclaimed prophet named Joseph Kony, who managed to turn resentment towards the national government into an apocalyptic spiritual crusade that has sustained one of Africa’s longest-running conflicts.
But there’s more fuelling this disaster than far-out religious beliefs. Take Sudan’s involvement. In 1994, Uganda’s northern neighbour began backing the LRA with weapons and training and letting it set up camps on Sudanese soil.
It’s probably safe to assume Khartoum had little interest in Kony’s spiritualism, which, according to a report by relief group World Vision International, superficially blends elements of Christianity, Islam and traditional Acholi beliefs to psychologically enslave abducted children and instil fear in local people.
Sudan’s real interest lay in getting back at Uganda for allegedly supporting southern rebels during its own 20-year civil conflict, which came to an end in 2005 with a fragile peace deal.
In October 2005 the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Kony and other LRA leaders, accusing them of multiple war crimes. Since then, Sudan has allowed Ugandan troops deeper into its territory in pursuit of the rebels.
LRA commanders have also sought refuge in neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo, renewing historic tension between Kampala and Kinshasa.
Hopes for peace
The LRA has long targeted the Acholi people despite the fact that the group’s leaders are themselves Acholi. Flash back to 1986 when President Yoweri Museveni, a southerner, seized power at the head of a guerrilla army. The northern conflict actually started as a response to the coup and loss of Acholi power on a national level.
But it didn’t take long for the LRA to lose local support. Analysts say rebels then switched focus from fighting Museveni to targeting the Acholi population as a whole, both to discredit the government and force local people into submission.
Ugandan held its first multi-party election for 25 years on Feb. 23. Museveni won, extending his two-decade rule.
He will have few options for restarting peace talks with the rebels now that the ICC has issued arrest warrants, although a Ugandan government amnesty remains in place.
Many analysts say the “iron fist” approach adopted by the government in recent years has done more harm than good.
In 2002, Museveni launched a military campaign aimed at wiping out the LRA for good. Rebels responded by scaling up child abductions and attacks on civilians. Some 10,000 children were seized in about a year. The number of displaced people more than tripled from around 500,000.
It was around this time the phenomenon of “night commuting” came into being. Relief groups estimate that every evening some 50,000 children, fearing abduction, walk from rural areas to towns such as Gulu to find relative safety in bus shelters, churches or on the streets.
Humanitarian disaster
There’s no doubt the humanitarian crisis has worsened since the launch of “Operation Iron Fist”. More than 800,000 Ugandans in government-run camps now rely solely on aid from groups such as the World Food Programme and Médecins Sans Frontièers.
Almost 1,000 people die every week as a result of violence, disease and poor conditions, according to a July 2005 survey of internally displaced people in Gulu, Kitgum and Pader districts by Uganda’s health ministry, New York-based aid agency International Rescue Committee and several U.N. agencies.
In January, Olara Otunnu, a former U.N. representative for children in war, described Uganda as the worst place in the world to be a child today.
Meanwhile, the enduring conflict, which has spread to the east, threatens to undermine gains made in Uganda after the bloodshed and economic chaos of the Idi Amin and Milton Obote years.
At stake are Uganda’s dramatic reductions in poverty and HIV/AIDS rates, and possible instability in a part of Africa with no shortage of destabilising forces. HIV/AIDS rates in war-affected areas are almost double the national average, while malnutrition rates are soaring. World Vision estimates malnutrition rates among displaced children at 7-21 percent.
Some analysts say Museveni has used the conflict to subdue political opposition in the name of “the war on terrorism”. Here’s how Belgian-based thinktank the International Crisis Group (ICG) put it in a recent report: “As long as the situation in the north is dominated by security matters, the monopolisation of power and wealth by southerners is not put into question.”
At the end of 2005, several foreign donors cut development aid to Uganda amid growing concern about the waning democratic credentials of Museveni, once a darling of Western governments. Britain slashed $26.1 million of aid and redirected it to humanitarian relief efforts in the north.
Museveni banned political parties in 1986 but under international pressure, lifted restrictions ahead of the Feb. 23 elections.
In the run-up to the poll, support was running high in the north for the opposition, particularly Kizza Besigye’s Forum for Democratic Change.
In November 2005, Besigye was charged with treason for conspiring with rebels, including the LRA. He denies the allegations.
Spilling over borders
Kampala has long maintained it was close to defeating the LRA, but the massacres and abductions by the rebels have continued.
Both sides stepped up attacks following the breakdown in early 2005 of landmark peace talks aimed at ending the conflict.
Uganda’s military says recent attacks on LRA camps in southern Sudan have forced Kony to cross the Nile and head for the jungles of Democratic Republic of Congo, where he may be trying to rejoin his deputy, Vincent Otti.
In January, eight Guatemalan soldiers on a secret U.N. mission to catch or kill Otti died in a four-hour battle with LRA rebels in eastern Congo.
Meanwhile, aid groups say the government has not done enough to protect civilians in northern Uganda. They accuse Ugandan forces of using gunships indiscriminately and failing to rescue rather than kill children abducted into LRA ranks.
Human Rights Watch says the Ugandan army and allied paramilitary groups have recruited children as fighters and arrested and tortured civilians on suspicion of collaboration with the LRA.
Analysts say it’s hard to know whether killing or capturing Kony would end the conflict. ICG says Kony’s centrality to the LRA’s tactics and purpose, along with reported leadership tensions, means the insurgency could perhaps be split if he is isolated or removed. But World Vision’s recent report warns that a new leader could easily take his place, accessing secret weapons caches.
Further reading
For health and mortality figures for internally displaced people in Gulu, Kitgum and Pader districts, see a July 2005 survey by Uganda’s health ministry, the International Rescue Committee and several U.N. agencies.
A web special by IRIN News on life in northern Uganda, When the sun sets, we start to worry, gives good multimedia coverage of the plight of more than a million children, women and men.
The International Crisis Group’s Northern Uganda: Understanding and Solving the Conflict provides a comprehensive overview of the conflict and makes concrete recommendations to all parties.
Human Rights Watch provides essential background and rights reports in its Uganda section.
For a focus on children, see the International Rescue Committee’s Children Targeted in Uganda’s Horrific, Overlooked War.
See also the World Food Programme's Huge numbers facing food shortages amid violence in northern Uganda.
World Vision’s new report, Pawns of Politics details the historical roots of the conflict and examines the human and economic costs of the crisis.
Read more:
EXPERTS TALK: Nightmare in Uganda
Uganda donors urged to turn up pressure for peace
EYEWITNESS-An aid worker's diary in northern Uganda
FILM: 'Rebels Without a Cause'
PHOTOS: Northern Ugandans terrorised by conflict
PHOTOS: Life goes on for Uganda's displaced
QUIZ: What do you know about northern Uganda?

John Bolton calls out Uganda, Rwanda for plunder of Congo

2006-02-15T16:46:00.000-08:00

Rwanda, Uganda must help end Congo plunder

By Irwin Arieff Reuters AlertNet

UNITED NATIONS, Feb 15 (Reuters) - U.N. Security Council members pressed Uganda and Rwanda on Wednesday to cooperate with U.N. experts seeking to end the illegal trade in minerals plundered from neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo.

Council members "were disturbed that a number of countries were still not fully cooperating with the experts," U.S. Ambassador John Bolton said following a closed-door council briefing on the four U.N. experts' latest findings.

"We think that cooperation is critical," Bolton, the council president for February, told reporters. "We urge the experts and others to do what they can to get cooperation to acceptable levels."

Bolton named no names, but the experts, in a Jan. 27 report, had accused Uganda and Rwanda of refusing to provide them with straight answers about their role in the exploitation of Congo's mineral resources.

Three years after a peace agreement ended Congo's five-year civil war, which drew in most of the vast central African nation's neighbors, some of those neighbors are still believed to play active roles in the illegal export of its resources including gold, diamonds, medicinal barks, cobalt and copper.
Until Congo's industry, mining and transport networks are brought firmly under state control, "it will be impossible to ensure peace and security" in the country, the report said.

Uganda is suspected of facilitating the illegal export of Congolese gold while Rwanda is believed to be helping smuggle out tin ore, the experts said.

When asked about their activities, both countries provided erroneous and unreliable information, they said.

Their responses were "not only erroneous but lack basic logic that cannot be solely attributed to a lack of capacity," the experts' report said.

"A few hours of work by Ugandan and Rwandan officials, for example through the collection of data from the relevant companies involved, would immediately reveal the inconsistencies in the information supplied thus far to the group," they said.

World Vision Thanks Senate for Northern Uganda Resolution

2006-02-03T16:53:00.000-08:00

Senate Unanimously Passes Resolution on Conflict Targeting Children in Uganda

WASHINGTON, Feb. 3 /PRNewswire/Yahoo.com -- The president of Christian relief and development agency World Vision thanked Senate members today for last night's unanimous approval of a resolution calling for increased U.S. engagement to end a 20-year civil war in the northern region of Uganda that viciously and deliberately targets children.

Since 1986, northern Uganda has been plagued by a conflict between the Ugandan government and a rebel group called the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). The LRA has become internationally reviled for its practice of attacking civilians and abducting children, forcing them to serve as soldiers and sex slaves within its ranks.

"We are gratified to see this kind of bipartisan attention and action focused on helping northern Uganda's children," said World Vision President Richard E. Stearns. "It's a signal to us, and to other organizations advocating on their behalf, that the political will is there to help end this war."

Sponsored by Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) and co-sponsored by a bipartisan group of 43 Senators, the resolution calls for the governments of Sudan, Uganda and the United States, as well as the international community, to better engage in efforts to promote peace in northern Uganda.

"This resolution is long overdue and is only the beginning," said Inhofe. "I urge President Bush to examine every aspect of his executive authority to relieve the suffering in northern Uganda. I also urge far more action from the United Nations. These significant steps can shed light into the darkness that has cloaked this ongoing tragedy in Uganda and can begin to affect change for peace."

Inhofe visited northern Uganda in April 2005 and toured World Vision's Children of War Rehabilitation Program in Gulu, which has helped nearly 14,000 formerly abducted children recover from their traumatic experiences in LRA captivity.

World Vision is a Christian relief and development organization, dedicated to helping children and their families worldwide reach their full potential by tackling the causes of poverty. For more information, visit www.worldvision.org/childrenofwar.

Bono & Bush at National Prayer Breakfast

2006-02-02T17:08:00.000-08:00

whitehouse.gov
George and Laura Bush met last summer with Bono and Bob Geldof at the G-8 Summit.

Christianity Today talked-up the appearance today of President Bush at the National Prayer Breakfast - but it was really all about Bono:

"After 9/11, we were told America would have no time for the world's poor. We were told that America would be taken up with its own problems of safety. … But America has not drawn the blinds and double-locked the doors." Bono said. "You have doubled aid to Africa. You have tripled funding for global health. And Mr. President, your emergency plan for AIDS relief and support of the Global Fund, has put 700,000 people onto life-saving antiretroviral drugs and provided 8 million bed nets to protect children from malaria. … But here's the bad news. There is so much more to do. There is a gigantic chasm between the scale of the emergency and the scale of the response."

Bono, clearly, is showing no inclination whatsoever of sounding like a politician.

"While the law is what we say it is, God is not silent on the subject," Bono said. "There are the laws of the land, and then there is a higher standard. We can hire experts to write them so they benefit us, so that they say it's okay to protect our agriculture, but it's not okay for African farmer to protect their agriculture to earn a living. As the laws of man are written, that's what they say. But God will not accept that."

Bush, meanwhile, may well have recalled what getting the Bono "treatment" is like from go-rounds on debt relief and health funding, and perhaps measured his words accordingly:

"Over the past five years, we've been inspired by the ways that millions of Americans have answered that call [to love your neighbor just like you'd like to be loved yourself]," Bush said. "After Katrina, volunteers from churches and mosques and synagogues and other faith-based and community groups opened up their hearts and their homes to the displaced. We saw an outpouring of compassion after the earthquake in Pakistan and the tsunami that devastated entire communities. We live up to God's calling when we provide help for HIV/AIDS victims on the continent of Africa and around the world."

Bush has got credibility when he says this - no matter how his critics try to spin. As reported by Newsmax, Bush was not shy in his praise for Bono:

"The thing about this good citizen of the world is he's used his position to get things done," Bush said. "You're an amazing guy, Bono. God bless you."

There's only one thing to say to that: Amen.

United States of Canada?

2006-01-24T10:04:00.000-08:00

Maybe it is because my thoroughly American family is replete with Canadian relatives and ancestors, but I have never had trouble differentiating between the two countries. Canadians, it seems, haven't had it so easy. Yesterday's national election in Canada (Election? What election? Ask 99% of the U.S. population) will no doubt stir up the identity-crisis-clinical-depression-induced-paranoia-all-wrapped-up-in-navel-gazing that Canadians call their "relationship" with this country. My Canadian "cousins" were folks that climbed into Sopwith Camels in one war, and fought in North Africa (long before us Yanks) in the next. I have always seen them as heroes. I wish Canadians could discover those elements in their heritage to celebrate.

Sydney Morning Herald

So yesterday there was an election in Canada. A parliamentary election. Meaning the party with the most seats gets to have their leader as premier. Meaning a head of the central government with a few more powers of appointment than an American-style president. If the American president had the kinds of powers of a Canadian premier, the president would hold some of the perogatives of the states' governors and a few of the oversight (advise and consent) powers of Congress. All wrapped up in one leader. From the Conservative Party. By the name of Stephen Harper.

As you can see, the new ruling Conservative Party has a bare majority. The BBC reports, "(i)n the run-up to the 23 January vote, the 46-year-old Conservative leader succeeded in transforming his image, from that of a hardline right-winger to a progressive conservative, and moving his party to the centre."

Meanwhile Michael Moore - remember him? Yeah, that's right, the guy who owns Halliburton stock, can't resist the opportunity to whip up some left wing hysteria:

"These are no ordinary times," Moore proclaimed. "And as you go to the polls on Monday, you do so while a man running the nation to the south of you is hoping you can lend him a hand by picking Stephen Harper because he's a man who shares his world view?" For more, see the article in Newsmax. One can easily see where Moore is going with this, fueling already rampant Canadian sentiment: "Do you really want to help George Bush by turning Canada into his latest conquest?"

NotAColony.ca

The great news is that enough Canadians didn't fall for it. And that enough Canadians see themselves in the same image of how I viewed my Canadian relatives from childhood onwards - and Canada has a chance to move forward in that vein.

Liberal Canadian commentator Anthony Westell describes how it happened:

"For years the Liberals coasted to victory in election after election because the centre-right vote was split between the Progressive Conservatives and the Reform, later Alliance, party. In yesterday's election the position was reversed. The right was unified in the new Conservative party while the centre left was split between the Liberals, the NDP and the Greens –not to mention the Bloc Québécois which claims to be social democratic. It's really as simple as that. Final vote totals will show that the majority of Canadians remain center-left in their politics, and Liberal and NDP MPs will outnumber the Conservatives in the new House. However, government in Ottawa may well remain in Conservative hands until their opponents can get their act together."

FiscalStudy.com

Not to worry, though - a significant enough portion of the Canadian population is into the self-loathing that master manipulators like Michael Moore require in order to make their millions.

NotAColony.ca

But as conservative Canadian columnist Mark Steyn said in his column in The Australian: it is a sad day for Michael Moore. Steyn knows how to unload a sweet rant:

"For the past century, Canada's ruling Liberals have been the democratic world's most consistently successful political party. This time round, mired in a series of scandals that were turning Canada into the G7's first Third World kleptocracy, the flailing Trudeaupians adopted an even more ferocious version of their usual strategy: scare the voters back to Nanny. As the Liberals warned Canadians - or, rather, shrieked at them - Stephen Harper will take away "a woman's right to choose"! The unwanted boys you'll be forced to have will grow up to be Bush cannon fodder in Iraq, and the unwanted girls will be sold as white slaves for Halliburton corporate cocktail parties round the pool at Dick Cheney's ranch."

It sounds like Michael Moore knows where to go for his talking points.

Stanford Progressive: Coherent Policy Needed on Northern Uganda

2006-01-18T11:27:00.000-08:00

In a sign that the Northern Uganda crisis is inching toward appearance on news media radar, the student-run, non-partisan Stanford Progressive has published an essay setting forth the issues. The article Ignoring Northern Uganda: A Coherent US Policy? boldly calls for U.S. leadership on the Uganda crisis:

The United States should take the lead in increasing international attention to the conflict and should begin its increased engagement by appointing a senior-level Special Envoy for Northern Uganda who reports directly to Secretary Rice or President Bush. At such a delicate but critical point, an entity with a continuous focus on the conflict, providing ongoing information and analysis, will help to identify the best next steps and to see them through; a high-level appointment will encourage other nations to take similar actions. The Envoy would be able to advise the National Security Council in coordinating the diplomatic and military elements of a solution. Also, appointment of a senior-level Envoy makes an important statement about the United States' commitment to stability, rights and the rule of law in Uganda and in the region more generally, and a statement to the regional governments. (italics added)

This is, after all the responsibility of the U.S. - as agreed to with Britain, amidst all the many crisis challenges in that very neighborhood - a very small area encompassing Uganda, Sudan and Congo, an area that has been called the worst humanitarian situation on the planet. Even the CIA World Factbook, in discussing the Ugandan economy, states "(c)orruption within the government and slippage in the government's determination to press reforms raise doubts about the continuation of strong growth."

It is refreshing to see Uganda under consideration on campuses. No doubt the screenings of Invisible Children on campuses around the country can play a role in this awareness. The Stanford Progressive's call for the appointment of a special envoy, as has been done next door in Darfur, is the least we can do to help Uganda's invisible children:

The appointment of an envoy will demonstrate a commitment from the U.S. government to peace stability and human rights in Uganda while simultaneously allowing for careful consideration of next steps. In a political environment where ineffective humanitarian interventions are harshly criticized, caution in constructing a solution is merited; but in an era of American democracy promotion and condemnation of transnational terrorism, non-engagement in northern Uganda is morally discordant and gives further grounds to accusations of US hypocrisy. (italics added)

In fact, why not simply expand the charge of the U.S. Special Envoy, Ambassador Robert Zoellick, to encompass both Northern Uganda and the related lawlessness in Eastern Congo? Everyone knows I am a unabashed fan of Ambassador Zoellick. He is the right person for the job of connecting the dots which inter-connect crisis points in all three countries.

Needed now are journalists to do the same. It is clear that the ruling oligarchy in Kampala is afraid of the conclusions to be drawn from the evidence. Ingrid Jones of Uganda Watch reports that the crackdown is already underway against journalists in Uganda, part of a continuing pattern we have observed in Uganda for some months now. Canadian journalist Blake Lambert, who writes for The Washington Times, Christian Science Monitor and The Economist - has had his journalist accreditation pulled by the Museveni regime. South Africa television News 24 quotes BBC employee Will Ross saying: "We were told not move beyond a radius of 100 kilometres from Kampala until we had sought clearance from the media centre."

This is a typical attempt at media blackout prior to pulling the dirty tricks necessary to rig an election in Uganda - and has been seen before. As the pre-election tension ramps up, it is time for everyone in Uganda to be mindful of appropriate levels of personal security. When one studies history, it is clear that tyrants - from Josef Stalin to Saddam Hussein - require crisis in order to smokescreen their activities. That lesson has not been lost on tyrants in Africa.

Ron Christie: Hillary should apologize or resign

2006-01-17T13:54:00.000-08:00

Ron Christie
photo: Greater Talent Network

At an event in Harlem honoring the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, Senator Hillary Clinton denigrated all Americans with words that go beyond vicious - that sink to the lowest of the low.

Forbes.com quotes her saying that the House "has been run like a plantation, and you know what I'm talking about," said Clinton, D-N.Y. "It has been run in a way so that nobody with a contrary view has had a chance to present legislation, to make an argument, to be heard."

Senator Trent Lott resigned from Republican leadership after apologizing for making a pandering racial remark that was soft by comparison. Former senior White House aide (and author of the new book "Black in the White House") Ron Christie says Hillary should apologize, or resign completely, from the United States Senate.

Speaking on CNN moments ago, Christie stated that likening a branch of our government to a slavery era plantation - where human beings were subjected to systematic brutality and sexual violence, is beyond the pale and should not stand. Just yesterday Christie gave this interview to FrontPage Magazine - an appropriate and fitting tribute to Dr. King which I commend to you in full. Ron Christie is a leader - and as an American who is proud of his African heritage, deserves to be heard. The question is about moral leadership, and whether our country will let stand extremist "race card" politics. Senator Clinton has lowered us all into the muck and mire - exactly what Dr. King raised us out of. That she cannot perceive this fact says something very sad about who she is as a person. But our countenancing such a remark in the name of politics only compounds the damage done to our system of government. Her sentiment is stunning in the callow way she would stoop to such pandering for hopes of raw political gain.

I join in Christie's call for Senator Clinton to publicly apologize to the House of Representatives and the American people for such outrageous remarks - or, absent that, for her resignation. Senator Clinton betrays her true self with these remarks. She is by nature a divider, and a hater. A drumbeat regarding accountability is needed. Get on the GOP Blog and speak out about this, let our leaders know how you feel. We have to counter the liberal mainstream media, who will do their best to ignore this - we have to force them to cover this story - and blogs are the way to do it.

Ugandan opposition Members of Parliament cleared of murder charges

2006-01-09T13:08:00.000-08:00

Reagan Okumu MP (FDC Uganda)
MPs Ocula, Okumu acquitted - Court calls charges "a pack of lies"

by Julian Amutuhaire The Monitor Online

MPs Mike Ocula and Reagan Okumu, held on charges of murder, have been acquitted by the High Court. The two were freed along with another of their co-accused, Steven Otim Oulanya. The three had been accused of murdering Alfred Bongomin, an NRM mobilizer, in 2002.

Delivering his judgement on the matter, Justice John Bosco Katutsi referred to the evidence adduced by the state as "a pack of lies." He consequently ordered the immediate release of the three men.

Urbane Analysis: Opposition presidential candidate Dr. Kizza Besigye has called for an investigation into who brought the charges - and the men have vowed to sue for wrongful prosecution.

A former Lord's Resistance Army officer, meanwhile, has confessed to carrying out the murder.

You've gotta love the judge in this case, who called the government's charges "a crude and amateur attempt at creative work."

It appears that Dr. Besigye now has two more genuine celebrities to join him on the campaign podium in the big push toward the upcoming election, care of the fumbling starmaker machinery at State House - who are so focused on dirty tricks that they cannot see how their mindset has become their undoing. The people of Uganda, judging from the growing support for change there, know better.

Sir Bob Geldof - The Brave Knight

2006-01-08T19:05:00.000-08:00

Last summer I was busy-busy-busy talking up the Live 8 Concert and all the efforts to focus attention on Africa. I even got to sit in on a conference call co-hosted by Powerline's John Hinderaker with political analyst (and former Howard Dean campaign manager) Joe Trippi.

Pretty heady stuff, all told.

And very ecumenical, this coming together of a right wing sink-Senator-Kerry's-chances blogger with a bona fide cable news left wing talking head. All on behalf of Sir Bob Geldof's efforts to keep Africa in the collective consciousness (and conscience) of the average mortgage and car payment-obsessed worker bee in the Northern Hemisphere.

All the while Bob Geldof, excuse me, Sir Geldof was holding court on that conference call - he continually made it clear that he wanted people to come together on this issue. That playing politics, or being afraid of what your friends might think because this work had no partisan edge to it - was simply unacceptable.

My, how well Bono has trained you, I reflected, while listening to Geldof.

Now Geldof's agreement to advise on global poverty issues - British Conservative Party leaders like David Cameron (shown above with his family) demonstrates how seriously Geldof takes this work. Geldof's heart for Africa is so huge, he simply doesn't care about your politics in order to achieve results.

Conservative leader David Cameron feels that Geldof will help the Tories "go in the direction that he and we both want to go."

Cameron and his new leadership group are ecstatic:

"This summer, millions of British people took part in the Make Poverty History campaign. A new generation of concerned citizens want prosperity for themselves and progress for the poor, whether living on the other side of the street or the other side of the world."

It sounds like Cameron has hit his stride.

The global poverty policy group is chaired by former Conservative cabinet minister Peter Lilley. "He (Geldof) has an enormous knowledge and expertise. He's been working on this area for 20 years," Lilley said. "He knows more people, he's got access to more expertise than almost anybody else in the world and that's why I'm thrilled to have him as an advisor to the group".

Geldof, meanwhile, has been feeling the heat from the Left about this decision - but has held firm: "That's my job, to be used so long as I can help steer the policy towards those who are dying. I've said I'll shake hands with the devil on my left and the devil on my right to get to where we need to be."

Geldof may yet feel the devil, through anger from Left Wingers who turn their back on him for doing this.

I know how he feels. It is clear that the Right will work with anyone to make progress on this issue. Conservative Christians are increasingly involved there, and (in a great read), The Economist thinks it knows why:

The teachers and bankers flocking to the megachurches want to spend their political capital on more than just abortion and gay marriage. Second, Christianity has shifted to the developing world. In 1900, 80% of the world's Christians lived in Europe and in America; today, 60% live in the developing world. More Presbyterians go to church in Ghana than in Scotland.

But there is another factor, one which Sir Bob certainly understands. As do correspondents for CNN and the BBC. And it is unassailably clear: George W. Bush has never invaded Africa, nor launched a single cruise missile there. While Bill Clinton invaded Somalia, fired missiles on Sudan - and let Rwanda immolate - Bush has served Africa very well by comparison. His leadership on debt forgiveness was a historic achievement. And Bush Administration pressure on Sudan to ward off genocide in Darfur is textbook in comparison to Madeline Albright's policy on Hutu-Tutsi violence in the 1990's. The Bush Administration has afforded its official representative in Uganda - former Ambassador Jimmy Kolker - extraordinary and completely unprecedented leeway in direct communication, completely over the head of the regime there, straight to the Ugandan people. These are wondrous efforts to promote peace and end conflict. Yet to this day, Clinton is lionized as a hero to Africa - while Bush is pilloried by African regimes parroting BBC-speak.

Nor will hearts be softened from those who disagree. I am passionate about promotion of voices from Africa, through blogging - in efforts to help people in the so-called "developed world" understand what they need from us. And let us be clear: they don't need hand-me-down clothes and other cast offs. Conversely, what we all need is just as important: understanding, engagement, connection and commitment between us (everywhere) as brothers and sisters . It has been said much better: "Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me—put it into practice. And the God of peace will be with you." Philippians 4:8-9

Despite this, there are those who possess the heart for outreach - but cannot for fear of reprisal - make any overture or communication with anyone connected to the world of Bush. Having recently implored (and I will be incredibly nebulous to protect privacy) a person living in Uganda (not from there) to encourage voices from Uganda on behalf of the understanding, engagement, connection and commitment mentioned above. I received this turn-down:

As a general comment here I would like to congratulate you for taking the effort to apply your time and insight to the issues affecting this region of Africa. I am sure very few people outside of this continent read the African press to be aware of the general state of affairs in Uganda and it's neighbours.

Regarding your request to write something about Uganda on a regular basis - I would love to, but cannot believe that by doing so I would not be putting my family at risk in some way, not to mention the organisation I work for and it's employees. I considered writing under a pseudonym and emailing my posts to you so they would not be traceable to my location in Uganda, but I am certain that anyone reading them would in short order narrow the field of possible employers/locations. I thought also about recommending your site to some of my Ugandan friends and colleagues, many of whom would certainly have something to say, but my referral would rightly be interpreted to be my endorsement of your site's political colour - again placing me in the political arena, jeopardising my company and employees.

By similar (perhaps paranoid) reasoning I would rather keep a close mouth about my location, family and work in Uganda, much as it grieves me to respond to your open-handed interest in such poor style.

Now, in defense of this writer - I am a vociferous critic of the Ugandan regime and would be doggedly trailed anytime I were to touch down at Entebbe - and in light of the allegations of genocide against the Museveni regime from Olara A. Otunnu, the former UN Under-Secretary-General and Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, the regime is more than a little bit touchy. Given the nature of the Ugandan police state - the writer has every reason to be careful. But look at what motivates me: Christian faith, and conservative political action.

Some things are just too hot to handle.

Another page from the Museveni playbook

2006-01-07T23:03:00.000-08:00

It is time to wake up about what is going on in Uganda. Prior to the last presidential election, suddenly there were shadowy groups causing unrest in the capital city - and bombs were being thrown from boda-boda's in the city - something totally unique which had rarely happened before or since. But the government "knew" who did it - and made it quite clear that more unrest would occur if the status quo were not maintained. Below you will find a January 2001 report from CNN.com that gives the facts related to these "attacks" - but given the way CNN has created a major conflict of interest regarding their coverage of issues in Uganda - it will be the responsibility of new media bloggers to connect the dots regarding what motivates unrest in Uganda. Or to put it quite plainly: no one is going to fall for the "shadowy splinter group" spin if bombs are (once again) going off in Kampala just in time for this year's election. Because all eyes are on State House, President Yoweri Museveni, and his tactics. Expect to hear more about the Allied Democratic Forces as the election draws closer - what we need now is balance, and for news media to cover the real story about what is going on between Uganda and the situation in the Congo. Because it too points back at Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni.

Uganda blasts injure six
January 29, 2001 Web posted at: 5:45 AM EST (1045 GMT)
KAMPALA, Uganda (Reuters) -- Six people were injured in three separate bomb attacks in the Ugandan capital Kampala, a police spokesman said.
"The bombs went off nearly at the same time, at about 8 p.m. (1700 GMT) on Sunday," police spokesman Asuman Mugenyi said.
"All we know right now is that they were home-made devices."
The first two bombs went off near the city's main bus terminus while a third exploded in a southern suburb.
Among those injured were two drivers of motorcycle taxis who were hired unknowingly to transport the bombers, police said.
The bomb attacks were the first in Kampala since October when unknown assailants threw a grenade into a market killing one woman.
In 1999 at least 11 people were killed and 73 injured in a spate of bombings in Kampala which security officials blamed on the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) group.
The ADF, which has bases in the Rwenzori mountains of western Uganda and across the border in the Democratic Republic of Congo, has been fighting the government of President Yoweri Museveni since 1996.
Museveni is the front runner in presidential elections scheduled for March 6.
Mugenyi said police had no information about who carried out Sunday's attacks.
Reuters contributed to this report.

Let's get this straight...

2006-01-07T22:43:00.000-08:00

I recently received an e-mail saying that it was people like me who are causing the unrest in Uganda. That I was responsible (in part) for the growing unrest in Uganda.

Hey, I will stand up and take responsbility for anything I have said. But let us be clear, it is the government of Uganda which has created the conditions there. But don't take my word for it, read (if you dare, this is sick, graphic stuff) this report from Human Rights Watch and learn for yourself. Here is the backgrounder:

Patterns and cases of torture

In Uganda, government authorities frequently employ torture against government opponents, ordinary civilians accused of supporting rebel groups, as well as suspected common criminals. Members of the opposition Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) and civilians in northern Uganda in particular have often become victims of torture and ill-treatment.
Victims have been severely beaten with rifle butts, sticks, electric cables and other objects. Other methods of torture include tying the hands and feet behind the victim (“kandoya”), keeping detainees in pits in the ground; exposing the victim with mouth open to a water spigot, and inflicting injury to the penis and testicles. Withholding or denying necessary medical attention has resulted in more severe, even permanent, injury.
Human Rights Watch and FHRI have described a pattern of torture and ill-treatment in Uganda in previous publications.1 As of March 2005, torture and ill-treatment continued in Uganda, as documented in this submission.
There is a confusing array of security organs in Uganda that have detained and tortured suspects. In many cases agents carrying out the arrest wear civilian clothes with no identifying insignia. Under Ugandan law, only the police are authorized to routinely arrest and investigate crimes, and the only authorized places of detention for civilians are police and sometimes prison facilities. Among the agencies against which credible allegations of torture have been made are the following:
- the Uganda Peoples’ Defence Force (UPDF) and its military intelligence branch, Chieftaincy of Military Intelligence (CMI)
- Internal Security Organization (ISO) and its District Security Organizations (DISO)
- Joint Anti Terrorism Task Force (JAT), a joint body of CMI, ISO and other security agencies
- Violent Crime Crack Unit (VCCU), a special unit comprised of CMI, ISO, and other security agencies, replacing Operation Wembley, tasked with stopping common crime
- the police and its Criminal Investigation Department (CID)
The most serious abuses seem to occur when suspects are arrested and held by the army and its intelligence service, the CMI, as well as JAT and the VCCU. The regular police – i.e. police with no special military or security brief – have a slightly better record and do not seem to torture suspects as a matter of course. However, the regular police and other security agencies have also committed acts of torture and ill-treatment.
When suspects – such as political opponents or alleged ‘rebels’ – are held by the army, CMI, JAT or VCCU, they are often held in “ungazetted” or unauthorized places of detention or “safe houses”, where torture can and does take place without any observers. The government has repeatedly denied the existence of safe houses. In a meeting with Human Rights Watch on April 14, 2005, Defence Minister Amama Mbabazi stated that there are safe houses which are used by security services to do their intelligence work. He conceded that suspects may be interrogated in safe houses but denied that people are detained there.2 However, field research by Human Rights Watch and FHRI has found that detainees were frequently detained in safe houses for days, weeks, and months at a time. For example, civilians have been and continue to be held at an unauthorized JAT detention centre in the Kololo neighborhood of Kampala and at other safe houses. Civilians are also often held for prolonged periods in army barracks in different parts of the country, especially the north and west, although by law the army is allowed to carry out arrests only in emergency situations and should promptly transfer the suspect to police custody. On some occasions in recent years, the security agencies and CMI have transferred detainees for the night in a police station and kept them all day at a safe house where the interrogation and torture takes place. This may be an effort to create a veneer of legality.
Human Rights Watch and FHRI have also found that the army, CMI, JAT and VCCU torture or ill-treat suspects frequently. As illustrated below, suspects are often detained by one of these agencies incommunicado in a safe house or barracks, and tortured or ill-treated to make a confession or to punish them for refusing to confess. Later, they are taken to a police station where they often suffer less abuse, and where the confession is taken again, sometimes in front of those who conducted the torture. Suspects are then charged by the police and produced in the Magistrate’s Court and judicially charged with treason or terrorism.
Under the Ugandan constitution, treason and terrorism suspects can be detained for 360 days without trial and without bail. In many cases charges are dropped when the suspects are released on bail after the 360 days. In other cases, defendants seek amnesty for treason or terrorism, which requires a confession of guilt. The defendants sometimes seek amnesty because of the extreme slowness of the judicial system and the protracted time they must await trial.
Human rights observers have been denied access to unofficial places of detention. While the government readily allows independent observers to visit regular prisons and police stations, it is very difficult to get access to military barracks, CMI facilities, and other “ungazetted” and thus illegal places of detention such as the JAT detention facility in Kololo, Kampala, where many victims claim to have been tortured. During a recent visit to Uganda, Human Rights Watch was denied access by army officials to the military barracks in Gulu and Makindye to interview detainees in private.3 Human Rights Watch was offered the opportunity to interview detainees in front of their guards, but decided not to do so as this is not conducive to an open discussion with the detainee.

Torture of alleged common criminals by the VCCU

Suspected common criminals are frequently tortured, in particular when they are detained by the VCCU. The VCCU is the successor of Operation Wembley, which was tasked with cracking down on crime in Kampala starting in 2002. Many victims interviewed reported that they had been severely beaten and were still suffering the results.
In December 2003, Michael K., a forty-year-old man traveling by car from Masaka to Kampala was stopped by VCCU officers and told, “Black should come out.” (Black was a notorious robber; this man denied that he was Black.) He was held at VCCU headquarters in Kireka, to the eastern edge of Kampala, for three weeks and then transferred to the Central Police Station in Kampala. He related that during his detention at VCCU, he was beaten with batons, wires, and sticks on the back, chest, knees and ankles. The torture resulted in swollen and deformed knees and many scars on his ankles.4
Brian L., a thirty-two-year-old man from Luwero, was arrested in January 2004 and accused of stealing a motorcycle. He was arrested by four plainclothed men in a white car, who immediately beat him to extract information about the stolen motorcycle. According to the man, his captors hit the back of his knees, his ankles and genitals. This caused the victim to become incontinent. Brian L.’s itinerary shows how many agencies can be involved in a case, even when it concerns a minor crime: He was held briefly at CMI offices in Kitante, Kampala, then at Luwero police station, then at the VCCU headquarters and then at the Central Police Station in Kampala.5
In April 2004, Ben T., a car washer in Kampala was arrested on allegations of car theft. According to Ben T., he was first brought to Central Police Station in Kampala where he spent five days. As he was about to be released on police bond, the police Criminal Investigations Department objected. He was then taken to VCCU headquarters, Kireka, Kampala, where he spent eight days. He was beaten with a baton and electric wires after his hands were tied around his legs. Ben T. had swollen legs and could not move his legs as a result of the beatings. When he was brought back to the police station he sought medical attention but was only given a pain killer. As a result of the torture, Ben T. had difficulty walking. He was released in June 2004.6
In some cases, suspects were not only beaten, but subjected to other types of torture. In November 2003, John W., a twenty-two-year-old man from Mengo, Kampala, was eating lunch when VCCU officers came to arrest the person sitting next to him. He told a FHRI researcher that he asked where they were taking the man, which angered the officers so that they arrested him as well. During his one week detention at VCCU headquarters, he had his right small finger chopped off by a VCCU officer. VCCU agents also beat him with wire on the chest, and he still has scars from the beatings. Later John W. was transferred to the Central Police Station in Kampala, where he had been held for four months at the time of the interview.7
In early May 2004, Martin O., a twenty-seven-year-old man was arrested in Kampala by security agents, most likely CMI agents. He said the agents beat him with metallic bars around the knees and toes while asking about a motorcycle that had allegedly been stolen. Martin O. was taken to the JAT safe house in Kololo and later taken to CMI offices on Kitante Road, Kampala. During interrogations, those detaining him threatened to squeeze his genitals so hard that he would never have children. They further threatened to beat him if he did not confess to having stolen that motorcycle.8
Owino New taxi Park, Kafumbe Mukasa Road, Rubaga Church , Muzaana , Lungujja, Na

Torture of political opponents

Political opponents have frequently been threatened, arrested, detained, ill-treated and tortured. Particularly targeted are those who supported Kiiza Besigye in the 2001 presidential election, and who subsequently formed a political group called Reform Agenda. Besigye was President Museveni’s strongest opponent in that election and fled the country in 2001 after harassment. In 2004 Reform Agenda merged with other groups to form what is now a registered political party, the FDC.9
Security agencies claim that members of Reform Agenda – now in the FDC – are actively involved with the People’s Redemption Army (PRA). The PRA is a rebel group based in the Ituri district of the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.10 While dozens of political opponents and others have been arrested in connection with the PRA, no criminal trial has shown the link between the PRA and Reform Agenda or the FDC. Many observers believe that it poses little threat to security, law and order. Others have questioned the existence of the PRA because it has not conducted military operations inside Uganda. Some detainees have “confessed” PRA links to the press while in military custody and later said these confessions were made under duress. These detainees have been charged with treason or terrorism and detained for prolonged periods. A few have been amnestied and released.
Patrick Biryomumeisho, a Besigye campaigner and an elected official (LC-3) in Kabale district, southwestern Uganda, was arrested on May 2, 2003 and taken to an illegal detention centre run by CMI in Kampala where he was held for several months. He was accused of supporting Besigye and the PRA. According to Biryomumeisho, he was tortured during his detention at the CMI detention centre. CMI agents beat him with an iron bar and other instruments, and kicked him, injuring the testicles, left clavicle, and right back shoulder. They also hit his big toe with a hammer, causing the nail to fall off after several weeks. He had a red chemical substance poured into his eyes that made him blind for several weeks and impaired his vision for months afterwards. In July 2003 he was charged and sent to Kigo Prison. When Biryomumeisho’s detention exceeded the legal limit of 360 days, and after his lawyer brought a habeas corpus, he was released on August 2, 2004. The Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) then withdrew the case against him. He has filed a civil suit before the Uganda Human Rights Commission, seeking damages for torture.11
On January 12, 2003, security officials arrested Pascal Gakyaro, a retired civil aviation engineer and supporter of Reform Agenda. He was held in unofficial places of detention for eight days and beaten during that period. On January 20, 2003, after the intervention of an MP and a High Court order, Gakyaro was charged with treason before the High Court. He was released on bail in July 2003, but re-arrested and only released in January 2005. The charges against him were dropped.12 Pascal Gakyaro sought legal action, and on June 2004, the High Court ordered the government to pay thirty million Ugandan Shillings (about U.S. $ 17,000) compensation for unlawful arrest, detention and torture. However the damages have not been paid yet.13
In January 2003, Francisco Ogwang Olebe, a Reform Agenda activist, was detained and tortured in a CMI safe house. His neck was dislocated as a result of the torture. He was charged with treason along with four others. After he was released on bail, he brought legal action in 2004 against the Attorney General for his torture and illegal detention. The High Court ruled in his favor, as the Attorney General did not appear, and awarded him eighty million Ugandan Shillings (about U.S. $ 45,000) as compensation. His bail was revoked on January 17, 2005, on the grounds that the case was ready for trial, and he was detained again. By March 2005, Francisco Ogwang Olebe was still in Luzira prison awaiting trial. The award of damages has not been paid by the Ugandan government.14
There have been a number of arrests of government opponents in late 2004 and early 2005. Among them were FDC officials as well as many other less prominent political figures. Those arrested in early 2005 and held on terrorism or treason charges are likely to be unable to campaign during or participate in the March 2006 presidential elections, unless they are tried unusually fast.15 As the testimonies below indicate, there is a risk that political opponents are held on treason charges merely with the aim of punishing them and instilling fear.
On November 24, 2004, soldiers arrested Steven K., a businessman and known government critic in Koboko town, Arua district in northwestern Uganda. They accused him of being a rebel and illegally possessing guns. According to the victim, he was carrying out a government-managed demobilization process with members of a former rebel group and had been authorized to buy back arms in that context. The soldiers tied his hands and legs together behind his back (“kandoya”) and cut him with a bayonet. He was held for one day in a pit at Koboko army barracks. After eight days of detention in Arua barracks where he had to suffer further abuse, he was transferred to the JAT safe house in Kololo, Kampala. Steven K. was again accused of being a rebel. They tied a stone to his penis with a short rope while he was in a squatting position, then forced him to jump in the air. He was forced to stand under a tap which jetted out water onto his head at such high pressure that he fainted several times and was eventually taken for treatment. At the time of this writing he was being held on treason charges in Luzira Prison. Steven K. told researchers that he saw other detainees in Kololo who were tortured “worse than me” and “who could not move”.16
In December 2004, Robert M., a leading member of the FDC, was arrested by CMI agents at Makerere University in Kampala. He told a Human Rights Watch researcher that he was accused of having links with the PRA rebel group and told, “We are going to throw you into Luzira for a year. We shall see whether you shall not reduce that noise. You are on treason.” Robert M. was detained for three days at the JAT safe house in Kololo where his torturers stripped him naked, severely beat him, mutilated his penis with a razor blade, and threatened to kill him. Following his ordeal he was taken to the Criminal Investigations Department where he signed a statement under duress; he did not know the contents. He was being held on treason charges at Luzira Prison at the time of this writing.17
In late January 2005, Godfrey G., an opposition politician was arrested by ISO officials and held by CMI at the army barracks in Arua for almost two weeks. He was accused of planning “military activities” with Kiiza Besigye. According to his testimony, he was kicked and beaten badly, and he had a weight tied with a short rope to his testicles and penis while he was squatting; he was then forced to lift up, which was so painful that he declared he would rather be killed. Godfrey G. also had several liters of dirty water poured down his nose and mouth, the “Liverpool” treatment. The man was then taken to the JAT safe house in Kololo where he was beaten very severely on the chest, causing him to collapse. After almost two weeks, he was sent to court to be charged. As of the writing of this report, he was held at Luzira Prison and is charged with involvement in the PRA.18
High-profile politicians are not exempt from ill-treatment. On November 22, 2004, soldiers of the Ugandan People’s Defence Force beat three members of parliament in Acholi Bur, Pader district, northern Uganda, as they arrived to have a meeting with residents to discuss the government’s White Paper on the constitution. The victims, some of whom had wounds from the beatings, were Ministers of Parliament (MPs) Odonga Otto, Prof. Morris Ogenga Latigo, Michael Nyeko Ocula and their drivers. Odonga Otto had swollen arms and legs, Prof. Latigon suffered from head injuries and Michael Nyeko Ocula had swelling on the head and back.19
In November 2004, Reform Agenda’s Secretary for Information and Publicity, Dennis Savimbi Muhumuza, was reportedly caned sixty-five times by an intelligence officer because he was distributing Reform Agenda magazines and campaigning for the group without police permission. According to an FDC spokesperson he was also held at gunpoint, kicked and beaten.20
Torture of alleged rebels in northern Uganda
Northern Uganda has been wracked by armed conflict between the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and the government UPDF army over the last eighteen years. The LRA has committed gross human rights violations against civilians, such as massacres, sexual slavery, abduction of children, mutilation and torture. Some of the crimes committed by the LRA amount to crimes against humanity.21 In 2005, LRA rebels continued to commit abuses against civilians in northern Uganda. For example, Human Rights Watch interviewed several women whose lips were cut off by the LRA because the women were allegedly talking to government soldiers.22
While not on the same scale as the LRA, government forces in northern Uganda have also committed abuses against civilians, including torture. In some areas, the majority of the civilians live in camps for internally displaced persons. The camps are controlled by the army. Civilians in the camps are often accused of being “rebel collaborators” and then ill-treated or tortured. This happens frequently in certain areas when civilians breach the curfew, even if by only a few minutes. The local military battalion imposes a curfew on the civilian population; it sets a time by which they have to return to the internally displaced persons camp, and another time by which they have to be inside their huts. Beating of civilians by soldiers outside of the camps is prevalent in northern Uganda. In some cases civilians have been beaten even when they returned before the curfew has begun. Civilians also are beaten up regularly by soldiers for being out of their huts at night, although they are inside the camp. These abuses are occurring most frequently in two camps, Cwero and Awac in Gulu District, where the 11th Battalion is stationed. Although many have complained about this situation, as of late March 2005 no corrective action had been taken.
On February 17, 2005, Patrick W., a farmer near Cwero camp was arrested by soldiers. He had gone back to his old home outside the camp and built a fire break line around his house to protect his fruit trees, so that he could provide his family food to supplement the skimpy rations in the camp. The soldiers accused him of working for the rebels, caned him, and tied a rope around his testicles and pulled on it. Patrick W. fainted and was taken to nearby Cwero army barracks. He was released the next day and told never to go back to his home.23
Odang Binoni, in his seventies, was beaten to death by soldiers on February 19, 2005 in Cwero camp, Gulu district. He was out late at a funeral – funeral wakes usually continue the whole night – and was hence breaching the curfew rules. He had gone to the latrine, and when he returned, a soldier hit him with the butt of his rifle several times in the chest until the old man fell to the ground. Then several soldiers told the mourners to leave. Odang Binoni died shortly after of his injuries.24
In other cases, the army arrests and detains people accused of links with the LRA. Soldiers, similar to other security and intelligence officials, seem to use ill-treatment and torture as methods of interrogation; questions would be asked during the beatings about the suspects’ links with the rebel LRA. In several cases victims have been detained in a pit within the barracks.
For example, in August 2003, Bob O., Charles B., James K. and Lucius O. were arrested by the army at Paicor camp as alleged rebel collaborators and taken to Paicor military barracks, Gulu district, where they were held in a deep, mud-filled pit. They were tied back to back to each other until the next morning. Afterwards, they were detained in a storage building close to the Acholi Inn in Gulu, where they were interrogated about LRA links, and severely beaten with sticks in front of the Military Intelligence Coordinator for northern Uganda, Col. Charles Otema, a senior commander. The following day the four men were transferred to the police, and shortly after they were charged with treason and transferred to Gulu Central Prison. After one year, they were released on bail; the charges are still pending.25
On April 2004, Theodor O. was arrested at Paicor camp on accusations of being a rebel and owing a gun. During the five days of his detention at Paicor military barracks, he was held for one day in a pit. During this time he witnessed severe abuses against other detainees:
There were other people in the pit who were … taken out of the pit and beaten individually. The way the pit was constructed it had roofing you could peep through. I saw people beaten on the buttocks, beaten strictly on the buttocks until the stick was broken, until the buttocks were so swollen the person couldn’t sit. I wasn’t beaten but was tied up with rubber – it has ruined the circulation in my veins in my arms.26
In February 2005, Julius L. was arrested at Pabbo camp, Gulu district, on accusations of collaborating with the LRA and boasting about being a relative of Vincent Otti, a senior LRA leader. He was taken to Olwal military barracks and then forced to go out with soldiers to “show where the rebels were”. At one point the soldiers stopped and hit Julius L. severely on the head, put a rope around his neck, sat on him and started strangling him. He fainted but survived, and eventually made it back to his camp. He continues to have body pain and feel very weak, and has a fracture in the waist.27
[1] See for example Foundation for Human Rights Initiative, The Bi-Annual Human Rights Reporter 2004, Kampala, Uganda; Human Rights Watch: State of Pain. Torture in Uganda (New York, March 2004).
[2] Human Rights Watch meeting with Amama Mbabazi, Minister of Defence, Sam Kutesa, Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Moses Byaruhanga, Secretary of the President. London, April 14, 2005.
[3] Human Rights Watch was told that it could interview the detainees only in the presence of army officials. Human Rights Watch conducted interviews of officers in Gulu barracks and in April 2004 visited the waiting area of Makindye barracks, only to be refused permission to see any detainees or prisoners at all.
[4] FHRI interview with Michael K. at Kampala Central Police Station, May 27, 2004.
[5] FHRI interview with Brian L. at Kampala Central Police Station, May 27, 2004.
[6] FHRI interview with Ben T. at Kampala Central Police Station, May 27, 2004, and after release in Kampala, June 2004.
[7] FHRI interview with John W. at Kampala Central Police Station, May 27, 2004.
[8] FHRI interview with Martin O. at Kampala Central Police Station, May 27, 2004.
[9] FDC brought together Reform Agenda and several other political groups. Reform Agenda is now part of the FDC and does not exist any more as a separate group.
[10] The PRA has at times fought with other armed groups in eastern DRC, such as the Union of Congolese Patriots (UPC).
[11] Human Rights Watch interview with Patrick Biryomumeisho, Kampala, March 18, 2005. Patrick Biryomumeisho is his real name.
[12] FHRI interview with Pascal Gakyaro, Kigo prison, March 2003. See also press reports: “Three PRA suspects cleared,” New Vision, January 18, 2005; “I was arrested over a woman, says Gakyaro,” New Vision, January 20, 2005. Pascal Gakyaro is his real name.
[13] “Shame that We Pay Millions for Torture,” Monitor, June 18, 2004.
[14] Human Rights Watch interviews with Francisco Ogwang Olebe, Luzira Prison, June 13, 2003, and March 19, 2005.
[15] The Uganda Constitution forbids bail or bond for 360 days after charges are brought in court in capital cases, which include treason and terrorism.
[16] Human Rights Watch interview with Steven K., Luzira Prison, March 19, 2005.
[17] Human Rights Watch interview with Robert M., Luzira Prison, March 19, 2005.
[18] Human Rights Watch interview with Godfrey G., Luzira Prison, March 19, 2005.
[19] Human Rights Watch interview with witness, Kampala, March 3 and March 9, 2005. The names of the MPs are their real names.
[20] “FDC appeals to Amama over torture of supporter,” New Vision, November 12, 2004. Dennis Savimbi Muhumuza is his real name.
[21] See Human Rights Watch, Abducted and Abused. Renewed War in Northern Uganda (New York, July 2003); Foundation for Human Rights Initiative, The Bi-Annual Human Rights Reporter 2004, Kampala, Uganda.
[22] Human Rights Watch interview with victims, Kitgum Hospital, Kitgum, Uganda, March 2, 2005.
[23] Human Rights Watch interview with Patrick W., Cwero camp, Gulu District, Uganda, February 26, 2005.
[24] Human Rights Watch interview with relative of Odang Binoni, Cwero camp, February 26, 2005. Odang Binoni was his real name.
[25] Human Rights Watch interviews with Bob O. and Charles B., Paicor camp, Gulu District, February 27, 2005.
[26] Human Rights Watch interview with Theodor O., Paicor camp, February 27, 2005.
[27] Human Rights Watch interview with Julius L., Pabbo camp, February 25, 2005.

More warnings of civil war for Uganda

2006-01-06T22:27:00.000-08:00

American NGO predicts instability in 2006

by Kakaire A. Kirunda The Daily Monitor Uganda

UGANDA is set for civil turmoil as next month's election is seen to be tainted, a United States based NGO, Power and Interest News Report (PINR) has said.

Based in Chicago, PINR is an independent organisation that utilises open source intelligence to provide conflict analysis in the context of international relations. PINR's forecast is contained in a report titled 'Uganda: Museveni on the Ropes, Instability Ahead' that was released yesterday.

The report said, "With early polls showing Besigye with substantial lead over Museveni in Uganda's major towns, the state is set for civil disorder as the election is seen to be tainted."

The report, which heavily emphasises that President Yoweri Museveni's grip on power is failing, bases its assertions on recent political developments that led to foreign aid cuts. It also cites the desertion of Museveni by his former colleagues and loss of confidence before the donors.

The report said as the Besigye affair unfolded, Uganda was hit by the International Court of Justice's ( ICJ) judgment that Museveni's invasion of the DR Congo and occupation of Ituri violated the norms of non-use of force and non-intervention. The ICJ further ruled that Uganda's invasion led to numerous violations of international law (burning villages, recruiting child soldiers, looting and appropriating natural resources, among others), and owed the DRC reparations."

With a debt of $4 billion and yearly revenue collection at $700 million, Uganda would be crippled by a reparation payment anywhere near the DRC's demands," the report reads. It adds: "He (Museveni) also faces a continuing insurgency in the north from the Lord's Resistance Army rebels, which he has not been able to quell and rising unemployment and poverty rates." However, in the same analysis, PINR said there was no reason to believe that the opposition would be able to heal Uganda's divisions if it won the presidency and a parliamentary majority.

This, according to PINR, leaves few donor countries promising alternatives as a slide toward instability gains momentum.

“With similar scenarios unfolding in Kenya and Zanzibar, East Africa appears to be poised for a period of civil conflict,” the report sums up.

Urbane Analysis: See this report from May 2005 where the World Bank makes a very similar prediction - and don't miss this touchstone 1999 report where the World Bank illustrates how official corruption created this problem. Citizens of donor countries simply have to insist that their governments stop toadying to corrupt governments in developing countries - and similarly insist that their governments prosecute its citizens (and corporations) which engage in bribery overseas. Unless and until we do that, our money is punishing the very people (the poor) we most want to help.

Blake Lambert asks the big question about Uganda

2006-01-04T20:59:00.000-08:00

'What kind of democracy is this?'

By csmonitor.com staff
Blake Lambert – Correspondent
The Christian Science Monitor
photo: Uganda Watch

A percussive chant filled my ears as I edged toward the swarm of Ugandans on Kampala Road, the unavoidable path of all political demonstrations in Uganda's capital, Kampala.

"Besigye, candidate," they jubilantly shouted and danced.

A few ecstatic souls even laid a poster of Kizza Besigye, presidential candidate for the opposition Forum for Democratic Change (FDC), on the not-so-clean street and kissed it.

Dozens of police, including some in riot gear, and red-capped military police eyed the crowd suspiciously.

After weeks of legal wrangling between civilian and military courts since his Nov. 14 arrest for treason, Mr. Besigye, who presents the most credible challenge to President Yoweri Museveni in the Feb. 23 presidential election, had gained his freedom on bail.

Thousands of Ugandans wanted to show Besigye their support.

"If we didn't love Besigye, we wouldn't even be here," John Bosco Omara, a self-employed printer.

He complained about too much corruption, sectarianism, poverty, and Museveni's failure to stop the Lord's Resistance Army, a brutal rebel group in northern Uganda.

The riot squad stood maybe 15 feet from where we talked.

A few minutes earlier, I watched one of its members threaten someone who was handing out water to demonstrators who had been tear-gassed so they could wash their eyes.

"You give them more water. You will see what will happen," the policeman snapped.

That blue-tinged tear gas, fired from a mobile cannon, carries a fierce sting, far worse than any variety I'd encountered before in Kampala.

I too needed water to clear my eyes.

Oddly, getting hosed down by the water cannon, as also happened to demonstrators and observers, seemed, to me, to be more benign.

As I walked along the street with Ugandan colleagues, I saw a military policeman use a wooden baton to beat a demonstrator.

It all seemed a bit harsh given that the celebratory crowd didn't appear to pose a threat to anyone either.

At one point, I swiveled my head and watched endless waves of people moving along Kampala Road.

Even when Besigye finally emerged from the High Court sitting atop a car and flashing his two-fingered victory salute, supporters wanted to follow their man back to FDC headquarters.

From 1986 to 1996, one of them told me, crowds of this size would meet Museveni wherever he went and whomever he was with.

A decade later, a growing number of Ugandans wonder why their president doesn't seem ready to emulate his colleagues in East Africa and leave power peacefully, as Benjamin Mkapa of Tanzania has done.

No amount of tear gas or water can erase the doubts about Museveni, but using them often seems to increase public anger.

"Museveni says he has democracy," Julius Otema, an electrician, remarked. "What kind of democracy is this?"

Many Ugandans and Western countries, which have lavished aid on Museveni's government, seem to be asking themselves the same question.

And, if Britain's decision last month to cut $26.5 million in aid to Uganda due to concerns over Besigye's arrest is any indication, some donor countries may have decided the answer.

Urbane Analysis: If we humans have learned nothing from Rwanda in 1994, it is that our media - both print and television - should (right now!) be shining the light of reports from excellent Ugandan journalists like Blake Lambert and Andrew Mwenda all over the globe. Here in America, these two should be booked as commentators on FOX News, National Public Radio, Meet the Press, Today - you name it. The one person who can kick this into motion - can do so with one hour of her time.

Okay Oprah?

Journalists HAVE to do what armies can NEVER do - and that is: bring truth to bear against insidious attempts by tyrants to manipulate. We can potentially save a lot of lives in Uganda, and bring democracy to a whole new level - if the news media would stop it with the laissez faire cynicism about whats going on in Uganda, Sudan and the Congo. If they REALLY looked, it would be easy to see that it all comes back around to a master manipulator by the name of Yoweri Museveni.

O'Reilly's enjoyable night out on Letterman

2006-01-04T12:30:00.000-08:00

Maybe one reason liberals are so afraid of Bill O'Reilly is that he genuinely enjoys them. Liberals, meanwhile, can't stand the fact that O'Reilly confounds their stereotypes and is (among other things) outspoken against the death penalty - or makes it clear that while abortion should be safe and legal, it is moral murder.

Liberals will make a lot of hay about Letterman's passive-aggressive crack: "I have the feeling that about 60 percent of what you say is crap." (video here.) But they won't say a word about Letterman's earlier admission regarding O'Reilly's desire to talk about the war on terror: "I'm not smart enough to debate you point to point on this."

Indeed. On the other hand, this is what O'Reilly said about Letterman all the way back in 2001:

The late-night program hosted by David Letterman is the toughest interview show on television. That's because Mr. Letterman is a smart guy who can spot a phony with telescopic accuracy and expects his guests to bring something to the table. If a guest begins to sink on this show, the bottom is a long way down.

Nothing passive-aggressive about that. Or O'Reilly's most recent appearance on The Late Show. Here's how Newsmax called it:

Letterman seemed to turn downright hostile, however, after O'Reilly defended U.S. soldiers and attacked Cindy Sheehan. "The United States, particularly the military, is doing a noble thing - the soldiers and Marines are noble," the Fox host insisted. "They're not terrorists. And when people call them that, like Cindy Sheehan called the insurgents 'freedom fighters,' we don't like that. It is a vitally important time in American history and we should be very careful of what we say." The comment prompted Letterman to admonish O'Reilly, "Then you should be very careful about what you say, also . . . I'm very concerned about people like yourself who don't have endless sympathy for a woman like Cindy Sheehan. Honest to Christ, honest to Christ."

The fear, as they say, is palpable. Not to worry Letterman, I'd be happy to debate "point to point" with you about the war on terror. Have your people call my people.

Ohio Governor speaks up for Intelligent Design

2005-12-27T10:19:00.000-08:00

The Cincinnati Enquirer reports that Ohio Governor Ernie Fletcher is not afraid of the controversy regarding Intelligent Design.

"The foundation of our nation was based on inalienable rights endowed by a creator. And so the very foundation of democracy is based on intelligent design."

A provocative statement in this day age, to be sure. Downright incendiary.

"It's important to have local districts with the option of providing instruction on all theories," Fletcher stated.

He's taking the correct tact, since the issue really does boil down to freedom. And unlike the Dover School Board, appears to be rooted in mainstream attitudes.

Its time to boot the Creationists from the ID Tent, and be brave enough to focus on the issues in the way Fletcher is leading.

Uganda's Spirituality Beckons

2005-12-25T22:30:00.000-08:00

West seeks spiritual refuge in war-torn Uganda

Daily Telegraph Mike Pflanz in Luweero, Uganda

Churches in the United States are turning their backs on religious liberalism at home and looking 9,000 miles away to "biblically orthodox" Uganda for a spiritual refuge.

In November, Anglicans at South Riding Church in Fairfax, Virginia, became the latest congregation to break from their roots and join the Church of Uganda instead.

A dozen others have done the same, a symptom of religious conservatives' deep discomfort over scriptural revisionism and the Church's growing acceptance of homosexuality.

It is a further sign of the widening schisms threatening the Anglican communion and comes as reforms implemented last week allow homosexuals in Britain to get "married".

The trend to turn to Africa was started by three Californian churches outraged that their leader, the Rev J Jon Bruno, the Bishop of Los Angeles, supported the ordination of the homosexual canon Gene Robinson and reportedly said that Jesus did not rise from the dead.

These traditionalist congregations felt betrayed and trapped, says the Rev Dr Alison Barfoot, originally from Kansas and now working with Uganda's most senior clergyman, Archbishop Henry Orombi.

UgandaPartners.org
"They were looking to their leaders for guidance and were hearing things like Jesus is not the only path to salvation, that anyone can write scripture, that the resurrection was not a fact," she said from the shaded veranda at the Archbishop's palace, high on a hillside in a Kampala suburb.

"Then they look to Uganda and see that there is the spiritual vitality here that they long for, where they can have confidence to express the view that God is a reality, not an intellectual construct.

"Believers in the West see religion being rationalised, psychologised and demystified. Here they feel that weight lifted from their shoulders and they can breathe easier."

The first three churches to break away, St James in Newport Beach, All Saints' in Long Beach and St David's in North Hollywood, chose to link with the Diocese of Luweero, 60 miles north of Kampala, after long correspondence with its Archbishop, the Rt Rev Evans Kisekka.

It is a long jump from California to Luweero. The main road leading to Uganda's war-ravaged north separates twin rows of shuttered shops, selling torch batteries, beer and cut-price mobile phones.

Occasional white and blue minibus taxis trundle past, overloaded but still honking their horns hunting for customers. Cyclists dodge cows with 4ft horns grazing in unkempt shrubs.

The Anglican St Mark's Cathedral, once a modest single-storey structure, is now wreathed in scaffolding undergoing a radical upgrade optimistically due for completion by May.

It may seem sleepy and backward, until church services start at seven on Sunday morning. "Here people are very happy to be going to church and singing and praying and praising the Lord," said Jimmy Lubanga, 22, the guitar-playing leader of the congregation's youth wing who wears an Everton shirt to church.

"I have heard there [the US] people will say God does not exist or other things which we see written in the Bible."

The Rev Barfoot says members of the US congregations regularly visit for spiritual rejuvenation. Sermons are compared by e-mail and several priests and deacons have been ordained at St Mark's.

The cathedral's renovation is being part-funded from across the Atlantic.
The Ugandan churches' magnetic pull on American Christians is, officials say, due to packed pews, booming congregations and a faithful interpretation of the Bible rather than its opposition to homosexuality.

Uganda has 9.2 million practising Anglicans, compared to fewer than one million in British churches on Sundays. Nigeria, where Christianity is growing fastest worldwide, has 17 million.

"It is not only about sexuality," says the Rev Andrew Quill, the son of a priest from Ulster, who has lived in Luweero for six years with his wife and three children.

"That is a symptom, and cannot be ignored, but this is equally about wholesale rewriting of Biblical facts, of breaking Articles of the Bible.

"That is what is driving people away and it will continue to happen until some sense returns to the way their supposed church leaders are thinking."

Time Magazine Persons of the Year

2005-12-18T15:02:00.000-08:00

time.com

Time names Gateses, Bono ‘Persons of 2005’

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The richest man in the world, Bill Gates, and his wife, Melinda, were named Time magazine’s “Persons of the Year” along with Irish rocker Bono for being “Good Samaritans” who made a difference in different ways.

“For being shrewd about doing good, for rewiring politics and re-engineering justice, for making mercy smarter and hope strategic and then daring the rest of us to follow, Bill and Melinda Gates and Bono are Time’s Persons of the Year,” the magazine said in its Dec. 19 issue, made public on Sunday.

Managing Editor James Kelly said the three had been chosen as the people most effective at finding ways to eradicate such calamities as malaria in Africa, HIV and AIDS and the grinding poverty that kills 8 million people a year.

Time also named former Presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton as “Partners of the Year” for their humanitarian efforts after the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, and the unlikely friendship that developed from that work.

“Natural disasters are terrible things, but what defines us is not what happens to us, but how we react to it,” Kelly said.

“When you look at the number of people who die from the kind of diseases and poverty that the Gates’ and Bono are fighting, the death tolls are far greater than what occurs in natural disasters or wars,” he told Reuters.

The founder of computer giant Microsoft Corp., whose personal fortune of $46.5 billion topped Forbes magazine’s list of the world’s richest again this year, and his wife were named for their work in the Gates Foundation, the world’s biggest charity with a $29 billion endowment, while Bono was described as the “rocker who has made debt reduction sexy.”

The rocker and the geek

“The rocker’s job is to be raucous, grab our attention. The engineer’s job is to make things work,” Time said, describing the unlikely alliance that developed after the three met for dinner in 2002. They were reunited on Friday in Omaha, where Bono was performing with U2, to be photographed for the cover.

The Gates Foundation funds hundreds of projects around the world primarily focused on public health, from vaccinating children to developing new drugs, as well as educational programs and scholarships in the United States and abroad.

Bono and fellow musician Bob Geldof spearheaded a popular campaign to tackle poverty in Africa through canceling the debts of the poorest countries in the world, raising global awareness through the Live 8 concerts in July.

Partly due to popular pressure, the world’s industrialized nations agreed in July to double aid to poor countries by 2010, adding $50 billion a year, and to cancel poor countries’ debt.

“Bono charmed and bullied and morally blackmailed the leaders of the world’s richest countries into forgiving $40 billion in debt owed by the poorest,” Time said.

Kelly said he expected the choice to surprise some people, but the unlikely alliance of the richest man in the world and a “hell-raiser” like Bono was an inspiring example of how different approaches could be effective.

Kelly said the “odd couple” of former Presidents Bush and Clinton had been among the contenders for “Person of the Year,” which ranged from talk show host Oprah Winfrey, for her influential campaigning for hurricane relief, to Mother Nature, encompassing the tsunami, hurricanes and earthquakes.

'Choice for the history books'

Time has been naming its person of the year since 1927 and the tradition has become the source of speculation every year, as well as controversy over unpopular choices such as Adolf Hitler in 1938 and Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979.

The aim is to pick “the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or for ill, and embodied what was important about the year, for better or for worse.”

Time’s 2004 Person of the Year was U.S. President George W. Bush while “The American Soldier” graced the 2003 cover in the year when U.S. troops invaded Iraq.

“You want to make a choice for the history books as well as one which is fresh and interesting,” Kelly said.

Urbane Analysis: People try to put us d-down...

High School Journalist Breaks Story of "Invisible Children"

2005-12-16T11:53:00.000-08:00

Filmmaker Jason Russell San Diego Union-Tribune

A poignant exclamation point on the issue of the news media's inability to discover the crisis of the Acholi people of northern Uganda: it has taken a high school newspaper to "break" the story about the documentary Invisible Children to the wider news audience. This underscores outstanding work being done by young (very young!) journalists - and demonstrates (once again) the wonderful propensity of young people today to reach out as a technological generation - with empathy and caring toward one another's challenges.

The 'Invisible Children' of northern Uganda
Informed Blazers try to raise awareness about guerilla war

Alex Abels, Page Editor
Silver Chips Online Print Edition: Volume 68, Issue 3

It is 4 p.m. when the doors to the broken-down hospital swing open. Small children rush in and search for a spot on the dusty floor where they will spend the night. Within a few hours, the ground is completely covered in squirming bodies, and not one square foot of space remains vacant. This is no slumber party- it is the nightly survival technique of the youth of northern Uganda.

Juniors in Social Studies teacher Jim Mogge's second period AP World History class sit, entranced by the images of African children flashing by on the television screen. Mogge has just played a rough cut of Invisible Children, a documentary film about northern Uganda started in 2003 by three young Californians who, on a trip to Africa, stumbled upon a humanitarian disaster they never knew existed. The teens sitting in the classroom continue to stare, eyes fixed on the television.

Before dawn, the crowd of children in the documentary wakes up to wash, pray and begin their daily routines. Some go to school, but most simply roam the streets. Their parents are nowhere to be found- they are either dead from the growing AIDS epidemic or in the outskirts of town where it is too dangerous for children. When 4 p.m. rolls around, it's back to the hospital, bus park veranda or dirty basement for- hopefully- another safe night. Though it is a monotonous and tiring routine, it is necessary.

According to Rachel Santos, an editor for the University of California at Davis International Affairs Journal, a guerilla war that has displaced over 1.5 million people and killed hundreds of thousands has been raging across northern Uganda for more than 19 years. The dissenting group, called the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), has abducted about 30,000 children to add to their ranks as soldiers since the war began. For this reason, children sleep together in masses in highly populated towns where the Ugandan People's Defense Forces (UPDF), soldiers associated with the Ugandan government, offer them some protection.

In spite of the war's great impact on Uganda, most Americans remain unaware of it. In a survey of 100 humanitarian professionals by AlertNet in 2005, the crisis in Uganda was rated as the second most under-publicized emergency of present day. Blair's lack of awareness of the situation reflects this rating well. According to an informal Silver Chips survey of 100 students conducted on November 22 during 5A lunch, 93 percent of Blazers said they were unaware of the guerilla war in northern Uganda. The war has also been largely ignored by the U.S. government and outreach organizations. It wasn't until this year that Congress passed the Northern Ugandan Crisis Response Act, the first American legislation to address the disaster in northern Uganda yet. United Nations Humanitarian Assistant Chief Jan Egeland has described the guerilla war in northern Uganda as "the world's greatest neglected humanitarian crisis." The disaster in northern Uganda has been invisible to most for years, but the passionate few who are informed in America, and even at Blair, are working to change that.

The forgotten crisis

In 2003, Bobby Bailey, Jason Russell and Laren Poole decided to go Africa for the summer to capture startling footage of the genocide in Darfur, Sudan. But when they arrived in southern Sudan, they were discouraged by the lack of action they found and decided instead to make their way to northern Uganda. They were introduced to a society of Ugandan children, called "night commuters," on one of their first nights in Uganda. A local woman took Bailey, Russell and Poole to a nearby bus park at night, where they saw over 1,000 children lying packed side by side on a tightly spaced veranda, guarded by a single armed soldier. They were touched by the Ugandan children and decided to record their story in a documentary film that has not yet been released to theatres, entitled "Invisible Children."

The first thing Bailey, Russell and Poole needed to learn about to create their documentary was the history of the war. Uganda has had tension between its northern and southern regions since it gained its independence from the United Kingdom in 1962. According to the United Nations, the south has always held most of the country's wealth and power, leading to a sense of neglect and inequality among the Acholi people that populate the North.

According to the documentary, the rebel movement can be traced back to one woman in the 1980s- Alice Lakwena, who believed the Holy Spirit spoke to her and ordered her to overthrow the Ugandan government for being unjust to the Acholis. Lakwena and her followers gained momentum with the growing resentment of the Acholis toward the government.

When Lakwena died, however, there was no clear leader of the movement, so Joseph Koney, who claimed to be a cousin of Lakwena's, took control of the conflict and transformed Lakwena's rebel army into the LRA. Soon, the rebels lost most of the support for their cause, so they resorted to abducting children, usually between the ages of five and 12, from their schools, homes and villages, according to Santos.

Children are considered the best option for building the LRA's ranks because they are impressionable enough to brainwash, big enough to carry a gun and plentiful enough to create huge masses of fighters. What began as a quick solution to fill the ranks has become the LRA's main method of "recruitment"- 90 percent of their troops are now children, according to the documentary.

Junior Tim Nicklas, who viewed "Invisible Children" in one of Mogge's classes, is appalled by that statistic. He believes that a rebel army predominantly made up of children his age and younger should be of more concern to Americans. "I think it's pretty messed up that no one in America knows about this," says Nicklas.

Once the children are abducted, they are brought to the "bush," as the children call it in the documentary, and the soldiers randomly choose one or two children to mutilate and kill in front of the others as an example. After the children are initiated as soldiers by means of fear tactics and attempts to break emotional attachments to their homes, the LRA teaches the children what it is they do best: kill.

According to a 2003 study of 301 former child soldiers conducted by Ilse Derluyn at the University of Ghent, 77 percent of child abductees had seen someone murdered and 39 percent had been forced to kill someone with their own hands. Most other children had also been beaten brutally and forced to burn down towns and houses and abduct other children. Furthermore, 35 percent of female soldiers had been sexually abused, according to the study.

Those who manage to escape the rebel ranks hide from the LRA during the day, because otherwise they are hunted down by name and brutally murdered for betrayal. In light of violent tactics like these, the Ugandan government is often blamed for not working harder to defeat the LRA. While there have been many attempted peace talks, either the LRA or the government has backed down on all of them. It wasn't until July 2005 that the government of Uganda finally put out five arrest warrants for LRA leaders, including head Joseph Kony.

Making them visible

When Bailey, Russell and Poole returned to California, they did not forget the children they met in Uganda. They founded Invisible Children, an organization to help raise awareness and money for the children in northern Uganda.

Bailey, Russell and Poole hope to build a safe community for the people of northern Uganda, but such a feat would cost $20 million. On the DVD of their documentary, they ask for people's time, talent and, of course, money to help the cause. They suggest that viewers throw house parties where they show the documentary to raise awareness about the crisis, because "when people know, they will act," says Russell in the documentary. They also suggest bake sales or selling bracelets inscribed with the name of one of the highlighted children in the documentary, like the ones being sold at local Target and Starbucks shops this holiday season.

People across the country have taken an interest in Invisible Children's safe community campaign, with over 60,000 money donations made to the organization, according to the Invisible Children web site, as well as a few walk-a-thons, bake sales and public viewings of the documentary. Nicklas says he plans on educating more people in his community and possibly raising some money by creating and showing a trailer of "Invisible Children" during services at a few local churches. He also plans to organize a public viewing of the documentary as soon as he finds a venue in the area.

Students for Global Responsibility (SGR) has given some attention to the crisis. The group plans to donate the money it earns from the SGR Spectacular to Invisible Children, according to junior Avi Edelman, an active member. Amnesty International also plans to raise money for the cause. While these efforts are meant to help the disaster in northern Uganda, they bring no immediate aid or solution to the victims. Mogge believes no dramatic steps have been taken to solve the problem in Uganda because this humanitarian disaster is in many ways still unseen.

As it says on the Invisible Children web site, "These innocent children are invisible: because they roam distant battlefields away from public scrutiny, because no records are kept of their numbers or age, because their own armies deny they exist." Russell's solution to the problem, as he states in the documentary: "Let's make them visible."

Urbane Analysis: Follow the example of our youth. And while you're at it, check out this backgrounder on the Invisible Children team.

How Instability Benefits Museveni

2005-12-13T10:27:00.000-08:00

In May, Christopher Ringwald wrote in the National Catholic Reporter about linkages in the humanitarian crisis - the triangle of horror - between northern Uganda, northeastern Congo and southern Sudan. That report, and now this by Italian journalist Stefano Liberti for the French newspaper Le Monde dipolmatique, will help you Discover the Unseen about what Ringwald calls the region of most deplorable humanitarian conditions on the planet.

The pillage of former Zaire - Congo and Uganda: a rush of gold
Le Monde diplomatique

In November the UN Security Council adopted sanctions, which include freezing assets and travel restrictions, against anyone breaking the arms embargo on the Democratic Republic of Congo. The east of the country is rife with smuggling, especially in gold. Regional conflict that left 3 million dead between 1998 and 2003 has exhausted the country, and general elections that were due this year have been pushed back to June 2006.

By Stefano Liberti

MONGBWALU, a desolate village in Ituri district in the northeastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), looks like something out of an old western. A single dusty road runs through it, with cafes on either side that resemble saloons, a squalid hotel with a broken-down sign, and groups of youths observing passersby as though they were expecting a shoot-out any minute. The comparison with the Wild West isn’t fanciful, for here, as in the towns that mushroomed in the United States during the gold rush, everything revolves around gold.

Ituri is right in the middle of one of the most important gold deposits on earth (1). Several hundred kilograms are extracted every month from the primitive mines around Mongbwalu. The gold is taken illegally to neighbouring Uganda, from where it is exported to Europe, usually Switzerland. Because of the enormous profits generated, the gold is much coveted - and the cause of the bloody conflict that has plagued the DRC and this region since 1998 (2).

The subsoil of this huge African country - formerly Zaire - is so gorged with minerals that it’s sometimes called a geological outrage. From 1982, when the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko (in power from 1965 to 1997) liberalised gold mining in parts of the country, Mongbwalu became a sort of tropical Klondike. Thousands of small-scale miners threw themselves into a business that continued through the worst moments of the war. The miners still leave the village every day at dawn in battered old 4x4s and follow the earthen tracks to the mines. There they split into teams and start digging. The open pit mine resembles an enormous hive in which thousands of people busy themselves inside mud combs. Some men stand waist deep in water, digging feverishly and putting the earth in plastic crates that are passed along by men pressed against the sides of the embankment.

Each team works for itself. The soaked earth and stones are placed on a sieve above a pool of water. The first stage is to look for gold dust. Then the more promising stones are broken with clubs in the hope of finding veins of gold. “You have to know where to dig,” says Etienne, who spent 10 months in the hills of Mongbwalu. Around him a group of young men are examining stone chips in a sieve, hoping to find a few specks of gold. “No luck today,” says Etienne, “but I’m sure it’ll get better later. If we find a good chunk, we’ll manage to get $5 each.”

At the top of the embankment you can make out the ruins of a building. It is all that is left of the “factory”, the public enterprise set up for gold extraction in the Kilo-Moto region to which Mongbwalu is the gateway. Gold mining was in full swing during Mobutu’s time, when Ituri was under the control of the Kinshasa government. In those days the profits went straight into Mobutu’s pockets, enabling him to amass a fortune in foreign banks. The battle to gain control of this rich piece of land was triggered immediately after his fall in 1997.

Africa’s largest gold seam

Kilo-Moto is one of the most unstable areas in the Great Lakes region. Because of its extraordinary potential - it has the largest gold seam on the continent - it has been coveted by the main players of what has been called “the first African world war” (which pitted government forces supported by Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe against rebels backed by Uganda and Rwanda).

In 1998, when the country was invaded by Rwanda and Uganda, the region was occupied by the Kampala forces, which flew the gold straight back to Uganda. After the 2003 Sun City agreement in South Africa, foreign troops were obliged to leave the country. The area then became the scene of fighting between the Union of Patriotic Congolese (UPC), supported by Rwanda, and the Front for National Integration (FNI), backed by Uganda. Sixty thousand people are thought to have died in these conflicts, despite timid intervention by Monuc, the UN observer mission in the DRC, set up in 1999. After falling to the UPC, the region was taken back by the FNI.

The militiamen stand accused, among other things, of subjecting workers to forced labour. According to a report by Human Rights Watch (HRW), the FNI takes a percentage of the mined gold and extracts one dollar a day from the workers in exchange for allowing them to work the mines (3). The soldiers hotly deny this. “It’s peace, our men are unarmed. All the men here work for themselves and for the good of the country,” says Iribi Pitchou Kasamba.
This small, stocky man became head of the front after its leader, Floribert Ndjabu, was arrested in Kinshasa for killing nine Bangladeshi Monuc troops in Ituri in February. Flanked by his “lieutenants”, Kasamba inspires fear and respect in equal measure in the zone around the mine. He describes the accusations by HRW as “total rubbish”, adding that “the only money we’ve received is the $8,000 that AngloGold Ashanti paid us quite voluntarily.”
This major South African company obtained a 10,000sq km mining concession around Mongbwalu and has recently been accused of bribing the rebel forces.

Since 2003 the UN embargo prohibits any support to armed rebels in the DRC (4). The company claims that it was obliged to pay to guarantee the safety of its employees. But the scandal has tarnished its image - particularly since it boasts an ethical policy inspired by a commitment to “corporate social responsibility” (5). In any case AngloGold Ashanti has not yet started to mine gold in its concession.

Shovels and sieves

Mining continues the primitive way, with shovels and sieves. Near the site a crowd of men equipped with scales gets ready to start buying. The luckier gold-washers crowd around them clutching handfuls of their precious find. This is the start of the transaction. The gold dust in placed on a coal heater and mixed with nitric acid to separate any impurities. The remaining gold is then weighed and sold. The price is about $10 a gram. The rate depends on the market and increases the further you get from the mining area.

In Bunia, Ituri’s main town, gold fetches $11.5 a gram. The small-time buyers at the source, as well as the dozens of others who gather in Mongbwalu’s main street, are the middlemen for traders in Bunia and Butembo in the neighbouring province of North Kivu.

Numerous small jobs are grafted on to the business of the mine itself. Women sell fruit, potatoes and rice; young motorcyclists ferry people to and from the mining sites and the centre of Mongbwalu. There is also a motley crew of musicians who seem more comfortable with guns than guitars and seem to monitor the comings and goings. The mere presence of Kasamba is enough to deter anybody from speaking.

Only later, and anonymously, does someone from Mongbwalu agree to give us his view: “In the factory and the other mines near the village, the FNI’s control is limited. Since the Monuc forces arrived the militia have had to be more discreet. But you only have to go a few kilometres further out to see them back in their old ways, forcing people to work for them, harassing them and confiscating gold.”

The 140 Pakistani soldiers from Monuc (6) who arrived in April, and who are in charge of disarming the militia, are even more discreet than the rebels. They are confined to their camp outside the village and their actions are limited to a few patrols. One of the leaders of the contingent admitted that he didn’t really know what went on in the mines.

At the Bunia headquarters, this state of affairs is confirmed. “In theory Monuc could supervise the gold traffic,” says Karin Volkner, the mission’s political affairs officer, “but in reality we don’t have the means to carry out that kind of control. There’s only one military contingent in Mongbwalu. We’re thinking of sending a group of civilians but so far we’ve only carried out exploratory missions.” The Monuc forces are occasionally called in for heavy operations and to support the elections that should end to the transition period (7), but they scarcely bother with the gold smuggling that goes on under their very noses.

In broad daylight

In Bunia gold dust is sold in broad daylight. In this village, ravaged by war and poverty where thousands of refugees are crowded into a camp by the airport, the gold trade is the only commercial activity possible. Almost everyone seems to be at it, in one or other of the two markets.

According to the new DRC mining code established in 2002, government authorisation is required for wholesale gold purchasing (8) but nobody bothers about that in a region where the state is totally absent. “Ituri suffers from government failure,” says Volkner. “The Kinshasa government is very far away and has never bothered much about the people to the east. On top of that, some ministers are directly involved in raw materials trafficking and have no interest in establishing peace in the region.”

The entire trade rests on a well-organised network of small-scale miners, buyers and intermediaries. The town’s traders sell the gold to a handful of middlemen, who smuggle it to Kampala. They use a variety of vehicles (trucks, jeeps, motorbikes), or canoes to cross Lake Albert, making the most of a total absence of controls at the Congolese border. As the process advances, the number of people involved is reduced. In Kampala only three companies buy the gold; all are managed by Indian entrepreneurs. The largest company, Uganda Commercial Impex Ltd (UCI) (9), has its headquarters in the suburb of Kamutckia.

According to Jamnadas Vasanji Lodhia, the owner of UCI: “We buy approximately 350kg of gold for a total of $5m. Our suppliers are always the same six or seven people, all Congolese from Bunia and Butembo.” The best known of these is Kambala Kisoni, owner of the Congocom Trading House. Kisoni also owns a small Antonov plane that flies between Mongbwalu and Butembo almost daily under the name of Butembo Airlines. According to UN experts, Kisoni has breached the arms embargo many times and has transported arms and FNI personnel to Mongbwalu (10).

When we reached Kisoni by telephone, he denied the accusations. “They consider us accomplices or rebels but, in fact, we’re hostage to the FNI people, who behave as though they run the area. They charge us $60 every time we land at Mongbwalu. We’d like the Congolese army to regain control of the region and establish some order.”

Kisoni did not deny exporting gold without authorisation from the mining ministry in Kinshasa. “It’s become dangerous to export with a licence,” he explained. “Given the level of corruption in the government, we’d risk losing everything. We used to have a licence but our gold cargo was stolen three times. And we know that the thieves were connected to the government.” Kisoni added that Congocom is simply an unofficial bank. “Gold is the currency here. With our clients’ gold we buy merchandise, which they sell in Congo.

The Kampala buyers like UCI open lines of credit for the big companies that supply our clients with the products. We restrict ourselves to working as middlemen between the Ugandan companies and the traders in eastern Congo.”
The gold bought by UCI is melted down in the company’s Kampala headquarters. The small ingots are then sent every month to Metalor Technologies SA in Switzerland, a leading European dealer in precious metals. But since June the market has apparently ground to a halt.

Following the publication of the HRW report, the Swiss company decided to stop gold imports. The UCI boss, Lodhia, was furious. “This trade has carried on for a century,” he said. “I don’t understand why they are making such a fuss. They accuse us of stealing wealth from Congo, but our suppliers are Congolese. With the money they earn from us they buy goods to sell in their country where there is nothing. They don’t buy arms, but sugar, coffee, blankets and clothes. What’s the point of buying arms anyway? Congo is full of them. That’s what earns the least money.”

Offshore bank accounts

Lodhia said he knew nothing about the supposed links between his suppliers and the armed rebels in Ituri. He confirmed visiting Bunia and Butembo, but denied ever having been to Mongbwalu. “I’ve occasionally been to see clients in the east of the country,” he admits, “but I’ve never visited the mines.” He showed us the company accounts that record transactions with Congolese clients worth millions of dollars. Most of the money is stored in offshore bank accounts in places like Mauritius or Hong Kong. “Our clients don’t trust local banks,” he explained, “so we pay the money into the accounts they choose. Which is totally legal.”

Indeed, the trade is legal. The Ugandan government does not require certificates of origin. It merely levies a 0.5% duty on gold exports and an annual licence fee of $1,200. In theory imported metals should be declared at the border, but it is so easy to cross the Congo-Uganda border that nobody bothers with customs declarations.

The numbers reveal the extent of this vast trade. In 2003 local gold production was worth $23,000. Officially imported gold totalled $2,000 while exported gold reached $45bn. The same data, supplied by the ministry for energy and development in Kampala, reveals that Uganda’s gold production totalled 40kg for that year, yet exports were more than four tonnes. In 2002 official production stood at 2.6kg with exports of 7.6 tonnes (11).

As a result of this vast legalised smuggling operation, gold is the second biggest Ugandan export after coffee. “That’s no secret,” said Lodhia. “Everybody knows that the gold in Kampala comes from Congo. In any case the government is virtually non-existent in former Zaire, especially in the east, and there are no controls. It’s been like that since the Mobutu era.”

Uganda has been the hub for Congolese gold since 1994, when the Kampala government decided to withdraw the central bank’s monopoly in buying precious metals, to scrap high export duties (of between 3% and 5%), and to make the regulations on trading companies more flexible.

Previously, gold from Ituri transited through Kenya where the trade had already been liberalised. Lodhia admits to having switched from Nairobi to Kampala. “From a logistical point of view, it’s much easier to work out of Uganda,” explained the Indian entrepreneur. “The country is nearer to the DRC and security is excellent.”

The value of the gold increases as it travels from the Congolese towns to the Ugandan capital. UCI buys at $13.5 per gram. The selling price abroad depends on fluctuations on the international markets. “But we work on the basis of a profit margin of 0.5%,” explained Lodhia. “Gold mining is a living for thousands of people in eastern Congo.

Those Human Rights Watch militants are lobbying intensively to stop it, but their ideological thinking will end up hurting the very people they think they’re defending. I’m losing money myself, but I’m not going to starve. If the Swiss stop buying and I don’t find other outlets, then sooner or later I’ll have to stop buying.”

There are thousands of people involved in gold smuggling, from the miners in Mongbwalu to the big traders in Kampala and the middlemen in Bunia and Butembo. Although there is no doubt that gold mining has supported - and continues to support - the rebels in the east of the country, it would be difficult to prevent this through embargoes or other means.

UN experts believe that, given the size of the country, a total export ban on natural resources would be an extremely costly measure and hard to enforce (12). For them the ideal solution would be to set up a “traceability” process that would prevent smuggling to Uganda. But a system like the Kimberley process for diamonds (13) has not yet been devised for precious metals.

According to Enrico Carisch, a UN finance expert: “The only way to stop the warlords from making money would be to put pressure on the region’s governments to end this regime of impunity. The Ugandans, in particular, should normalise bilateral trade with Congo. But to do that, the Kinshasa government must regain control over the east of the country with the help of the international community.” In a region where the state is notable for its absence and gold is the only source of revenue for the majority of people, it is hard to imagine how the gold mining business could be changed at one stroke - particularly with the strong international demand for gold.

Click on the map to see more details

Translated by Krystyna Horko
Stefano Liberti is a journalist

(1) Article 2 of the 2005 constitution makes provisions for dividing the 11 regions of the DRC into 26 provinces. Ituri, part of North Kivu province, would then become a separate province with Bunia as its provincial capital.

(2) See Colette Braeckman, Les Nouveaux Prédateurs. Politique des Puissances en Afrique Centrale, Fayard, Paris, 2003, and “Congo: a war without victors”, Le Monde diplomatique, English language edition, April 2001.

(3) “Democratic Republic of Congo. The Curse of Gold”, Human Rights Watch, 2005.

(4) See “Gold group admits militia cash ‘errors’”, Financial Times, London, 2 June 2005.

(5) www.ashantigold.com

(6) On 30 June 2005 Monuc forces stood at 15,490 troops, 703 military observers, 231 police, 747 “international civilian personnel”, 1,209 “local civilian staff” and 436 UN volunteers. Monuc’s mandate was due to expire on 1 October 2005 but has been extended to 30 September 2006. See www.monuc.org

(7) The general election that should have marked the end of the transition period was set for 30 June 2005 but was postponed and will certainly not be held before June 2006.

(8) See Human Rights Watch, op cit.

(9) The other companies are Machanga Ltd and Bhimji Ltd.

(10) Report to the UN security council of the Group of Experts on the Democratic Republic of Congo, New York, 25 January 2005, S/2005/30.

(11) Figures supplied by the Ugandan Bureau of Statistics, mentioned in “Banks ‘handling smuggled proceeds’”, Financial Times, London, 2 June 2005, and in Human Rights Watch, op cit.

(12) Report to the UN security council of the Group of Experts on the Democratic Republic of Congo, New York, 26 July 2005, S/2005/436.

(13) Set up in 2003, the Kimberley certification scheme obliges all diamond-exporting countries to produce a certificate of origin for the stones.

Urbane Analysis: This is happening in Uganda, even as President Museveni locks up his political opponents, and thousands of children are kidnapped for soldiering - yet CNN puts on travelogues about African wildlife. This needs to change.

Discover the Unseen

2005-12-12T16:52:00.000-08:00

CRISIS PROFILE - What’s going on in northern Uganda?
By Tim Large

CRISIS PROFILE-What’s going on in northern Uganda?

LONDON (AlertNet) - More than 20,000 children forced to serve as soldiers and sexual slaves. Gruesome massacres and mutilations. Up to 2 million people driven from their homes into camps where they live in fear and squalor.
Few horror stories rival the humanitarian crisis in northern Uganda, where a cult-like rebel group has been terrorising local people for a generation. It’s a tale of astonishing suffering and massive displacement – and all taking place in a country hailed as one of Africa’s development success stories.

Yet northern Uganda’s nightmare has been largely ignored by the international community, even as the humanitarian crisis in neighbouring Sudan generates hand-wringing worldwide and a steady flow of headlines.

In an AlertNet poll of experts conducted in March 2005, northern Uganda emerged as the world's second-worst "forgotten" humanitarian hotspot after Democratic Republic of Congo.

So what’s going on in this neglected emergency?

Brutality and more brutality. For almost 20 years, a religious group called the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has been waging war against the Ugandan government and carrying out horrific attacks on villages, towns and camps for the internally displaced.

The group’s modus operandi is to abduct thousands of children, forcing them to fight, carry supplies and serve as sex slaves to LRA commanders. Rights groups say the children live in constant fear for their lives. Many are forced to perform terrible acts of cruelty, including the slaughter of other children, or be killed themselves.

More than 20,000 children have been kidnapped to date. Child soldiers are estimated to make up 80 percent of the LRA’s fighting machine.

It’s not only the children who live in fear. In addition to battling government forces, the rebels are targeting the wider Acholi population, the largest group in northern Uganda. Sexual violence, mutilation and massacres are common. Up to 100,000 people have been killed since the conflict began.

In its war against the rebels, the Ugandan army has ordered almost 90 percent of the population of Acholiland – made up of the Gulu, Kitgum and Pader districts – into camps. The camps lack food and clean water and are vulnerable to LRA attacks.

In this way, between 1.8 million and 2 million people have been uprooted from their homes, according to aid agencies. That's about the same number as are displaced in Sudan’s Darfur region.

What on earth is the LRA trying to achieve?

Aside from trying to overthrow the government, most analysts say the rebels have no clear political objectives.

The group is led by a former altar boy and self-proclaimed prophet named Joseph Kony, who managed to turn resentment towards the national government into an apocalyptic spiritual crusade that has sustained one of Africa’s longest-running conflicts.

So it’s all down to a bunch of religious fanatics?

That’s the easy explanation, and one that helped the international community ignore the crisis for almost 20 years. But there’s more fuelling this disaster than far-out religious beliefs, and it’s important to understand the dynamics.
Take Sudan’s involvement. Since 1994, Uganda’s northern neighbour has been backing the LRA with weapons and training and letting it set up camps on Sudanese soil.

It’s probably safe to assume the Sudan government has scant interest in Kony’s spiritualism, which, according to a report by relief group World Vision International, superficially blends elements of Christianity, Islam and traditional Acholi beliefs to psychologically enslave abducted children and instil fear in local people.

Sudan’s real interest lies in getting back at Uganda for allegedly supporting southern rebels during its own 20-year civil conflict.

But why is the LRA targeting the Acholi people?

It’s confusing, especially when you consider that LRA leaders are themselves Acholi. Flash back to 1986 when President Yoweri Museveni, a southerner, seized power at the head of a guerrilla army. The northern conflict actually started as a response to the coup and loss of Acholi power on a national level.
But it didn’t take long for the LRA to lose local support. Analysts say rebels then switched focus from fighting Museveni to targeting the Acholi population as a whole, both to discredit the government and force local people into submission.

How is the government responding?

With an iron fist. In 2002, Museveni launched a military campaign aimed at wiping out the LRA for good. Rebels responded by scaling up child abductions and attacks on civilians. Some 10,000 children were seized in about a year. The number of displaced people more than tripled from around 500,000.

It was around this time the phenomenon of “night commuting” came into being. Relief groups estimate that every evening some 50,000 children, fearing abduction, walk from rural areas to towns such as Gulu to find relative safety in bus shelters, churches or on the streets.

Sounds like the government crackdown isn’t helping…

There’s no doubt the humanitarian crisis has worsened since the launch of “Operation Iron Fist”. More than 800,000 Ugandans in government-run camps now rely solely on aid from groups such as the World Food Programme and Médecins Sans Frontièers.

Meanwhile, the enduring conflict, which has spread to the east, threatens to undermine gains made in Uganda after the bloodshed and economic chaos of the Idi Amin and Milton Obote years.

At stake are Uganda’s dramatic reductions in poverty and HIV/AIDS rates, and possible instability in a part of Africa with no shortage of destabilising forces. HIV/AIDS rates in war-affected areas are almost double the national average, while malnutrition rates are soaring. World Vision estimates malnutrition rates among displaced children at 7-21 percent.

The country’s move towards democracy could also hang in the balance.

Museveni banned political parties in 1986, but government officials, under pressure from international donors, have vowed to lift restrictions ahead of elections in 2006.

Now some analysts say Museveni is using the conflict to subdue political opposition in the name of “the war on terrorism”.

Here’s how the International Crisis Group (ICG) puts it: “As long as the situation in the north is dominated by security matters, the monopolisation of power and wealth by southerners is not put into question.”

For its part, the government says it is close to defeating the LRA, but the massacres and abductions by the rebels have continued.

Both sides have stepped up attacks following the breakdown in early 2005 landmark peace talks aimed at ending one of Africa's longest-running conflicts.
Aid groups say the government is not doing enough to protect civilians. They accuse Ugandan forces of using gunships indiscriminately and failing to rescue rather than kill children abducted into LRA ranks.

Human Rights Watch says the Ugandan army and allied paramilitary groups have recruited children as fighters and arrested and tortured civilians on suspicion of collaboration with the LRA.

Would capturing or killing Kony end the crisis?

It’s hard to say. The ICG says Kony’s centrality to the LRA’s tactics and purpose, along with reported leadership tensions, means the insurgency could perhaps be split if he is isolated or removed. But World Vision’s recent report warns that a new leader could easily take his place, accessing secret weapons caches.

So what’s to be done?

Rights groups are adamant that all parties must agree that no solution can be purely military.

The ICG recommends combining a military and negotiating strategy, while recognising the limitations of both. It says northerners’ grievances should be addressed to make the Acholi feel more integrated into Ugandan society.
In the meantime, relief and rights groups say the Ugandan government and international community must give priority to protecting children and civilians. They also urge greater pressure on Sudan to stop giving the rebels a safe haven.

The International Criminal Court can also play a role by investigating crimes committed by any party in the conflict, although some experts say this could discourage LRA leaders from giving up arms.

The world court is currently probing massacres blamed on the LRA, such as a February 2004 attack in which 200 people were shot, hacked and burned to death.

Where can I read more?

The International Crisis Group’s Northern Uganda: Understanding and Solving the Conflict provides a comprehensive overview of the conflict and makes concrete recommendations to all parties.

Human Rights Watch provides essential background and rights reports in its Uganda section.

For a focus on children, see the International Rescue Committee’s Children Targeted in Uganda’s Horrific, Overlooked War.

See also the World Food Programme's Huge numbers facing food shortages amid violence in northern Uganda.

World Vision’s new report, Pawns of Politics details the historical roots of the conflict and examines the human and economic costs of the crisis.

Read more:
EXPERTS TALK: Nightmare in Uganda
ANALYSIS: Fear and apathy feed war in northern Uganda
Uganda donors urged to turn up pressure for peace
EYEWITNESS-An aid worker's diary in northern Uganda
FILM: 'Rebels Without a Cause'
PHOTOS: Northern Ugandans terrorised by conflict
PHOTOS: Life goes on for Uganda's displaced
QUIZ: What do you know about northern Uganda?

Regular Ugandans Tell Donors to Take Their Medicine

2005-12-10T20:43:00.000-08:00

WITHOUT MINCING WORDS
Andrew M. Mwenda
The Monitor

Poor donors! Grasp your role in Museveni’s Uganda

Since opposition presidential candidate Kizza Besigye was arrested and double charged in the High Court and in the General Court Martial, Uganda's "development partners" have looked confused. Their ambassadors, who turned up at the High Court to listen to Dr. Besigye's case, found themselves held hostage by the Black Mambas Urban Hit Squad.

And when the Danish ambassador, Stig Barlying, sought to attend the military court martial hearing of Besigye's case, he was rudely ordered out; his letter of "accreditation" literally thrown back into his face as "useless".

Mr. Barlying and all other diplomats who were locked out of the military court martial did not know that in President Yoweri Museveni's Uganda, civilian institutions are subordinate to military ones. A letter of "accreditation" to a military court martial from a civilian minister has no authority when a military general like Elly Tumwine is "in charge". Do these donors ever learn?

Suspension of aid
The Dutch have since suspended a small portion of their aid, and many others may consider this option. Will donors, who finance nearly half our budget, quit? Less likely! And if they do, will they meaningfully alter the tragic path on which Museveni has placed Uganda? Hardly!

The donors are caught in a catch 22 situation: if they cut and run, they will have removed the remaining source of restraint on Museveni, crippled their influence in Uganda and their "model" African economic performer will come tumbling down like a pack of cards - this time only faster!

Should they stay? A stay will delay, but cannot stop Uganda's descent back to its tragic past. On the contrary, their money will continue to be used to prop an increasingly nepotistic, incompetent, corrupt and brutal regime.

Every time they tolerate one macabre act by Museveni, they embolden him to do worse another time - and limit their capacity to restrain him the next time.

Initially, there was a convergence of different but compatible interests between Museveni, the people of Uganda and donors: Museveni needed money as a political resource to consolidate his power; Uganda needed stability and economic recovery, donors needed a country where they could pursue economic policies favourable to international capital, but which they also thought could produce an "economic success story" in an otherwise distressing African continent - and thereby shower-up a highly discredited international aid regime.

When he captured power in 1986, Museveni inherited a collapsed state and economy, and a country where violence and impunity were widespread. Most people either fought or avoided the state. To legitimise his rule, Museveni needed to establish stability in the south and stave off armed insurgents in the north.

He also needed to ease acute scarcities of basic essential goods and deliver basic social services. In other words, what was good for Museveni to consolidate his power was coincidentally good for Uganda, but also good for the donors who were searching for an African success story.

Thus, Museveni gave donors almost complete control of the economic policy making process, and in return the donors allowed him a free hand to pursue his preferred political and security machinations like banning political party activities in the country and pursuit of military adventures at home and in the region.

It was the perfect division of labour. Here is the paradox: by giving donors unlimited control of the economic policy making field, Museveni found himself in a more favourable position financially and diplomatically to pursue his preferred political and military agendas.

What we have been witnessing since 1996 is an increasing divergence of needs. What Museveni needs to stay in power today - increased patronage, more repression and corruption - is not necessarily what Ugandans need to sustain the reform momentum on the late 1980s and early 1990s, and it is certainly not what donors need to sustain the illusion of an African success story.

In other words, what is good for Uganda, or the donors is no longer what is good for Museveni and the National Resistance Movement.

Consolidating power
This is my point: whatever compromises he made, whatever appearances he faked, and whatever donor arrogance he put up with, Museveni's objective was to win one strategic objective - power.

During most of this time, Museveni's position at the helm of the state in Uganda was not under any serious challenge - and whenever it did like in northern Uganda, his propensity to depict military muscle was always on display. Among many examples is the brutality with which then Brig. David Tinyefuza handled Operation North in 1991-92.

Museveni wants to continue consolidating his position in power. Should the donors stand in his way to this goal, their role in Uganda will come to a sad end. The same applies to a significant section of Ugandan society which wants continued economic progress and democratisation.

So, dear donors, this is just to let you know that your historical function under the NRM regime was not so much to develop Uganda; that was your own fancy. It was to consolidate Museveni's position as President. Should you threaten that goal, your role will no longer be needed in this country. I wish you a good weekend!

Urbane Analysis: Okay, time for some movie references to help everyone get on the same page. Donor nations, journalists and NGOs might want to head down to Blockbuster and rent "The Grifters" - because despite all your intelligence, sophistication and goodwill - you have all been "played" by Museveni. The sad part is that most of you haven't yet realized the grift - and it has been going on for decades in Africa. The tragic part is that even those of you that have, won't do a damn thing about it.

Uganda is heading for a conflagration (again), and you want to feel bad about it. Well sorry, the people there don't have time for your emotions. They need your action: to get off your comfortable G8 fundaments, and get your mechanicals of democracy working in Africa. "Hotel Uganda" may soon be open for business, some World Bank analysts have predicted as much.

What to do? Easy. Donor nations should end all general, budgetary and military support for the Museveni regime. Now. They should only operate with trusted on-the-ground agencies working directly with people in need (in Uganda, that is more than half the population of 25 million).

Private sector, right? As in transparent and accountable.

You NGOs should be ashamed for having turned a blind eye to this problem for so long. You should immediately hold a donor summit - and via an umbrella organization - start reporting on those stories which for so very long have been talked about (and, increasingly, blogged about) from your own employees, volunteers and contractors. The stories that tell what really is going on in Africa.

The world needs to understand that the "Hotel Rwanda" genocide in Rwanda and Burundi didn't really end: 1995 was the boiling over of a simmering stew of hatred that continues to bubble up in ethnic hatred and "informal" systematic killing.

The world needs to understand that throughout this decade almost a million people per year, on average, have died in the Congo - in a horrible hell-on-earth existence for the people there. A situation that makes every leader in the West as complicit as King Leopold's nineteenth century courtiers - by their mutual silence of a hundred years.

The world barely understands the nature of the Darfur crisis in southern Sudan. Darfur-Darfur-Darfur: they hear the word on NPR and a few specialized programs on cable news. But the systematic displacement, isolation and leaving to desert ravages of hundreds of thousands of people - systematically and purposefully by the government there. Is a holocaust. It is evil as learned from the Balkans - in other words, the purveyors of this madness have learned how to do just enough to get people efficiently killed - without attracting satellite trucks.

And then there is Uganda's own bit of the Devil's Kingdom: the situation in the north - which continues to worsen. And is something that the government in Kampala, mysteriously, cannot seem to improve one iota. Yet the goverment in Kampala can use it to scapegoat every problem with which they also cannot seem to grapple. One U.S. Embassy official in Kampala told me that the LRA "problem" suits the needs of the Museveni government perfectly - it draws attention away from the its failings, over-reaching and corruption - even as the situation allows the government to play the role of victim to western donor nations.

And that, quite simply, has to stop. The long-standing, Cold War inspired Euro-American view of Africa must rapidly evolve and mature. The abject failure of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) is all the proof needed that what we are doing there does not work.

It is unacceptable to opine that Africa cannot be our focus - that the war on terror supercedes our ability to focus on Africa. First of all, the western powers are far too rich, developed and capable for that excuse to hold validity. But more importantly, if "Blackhawk Down" taught us anything - it was that it is far cheaper to win wars economically, socially and politically. And quite frankly, nigh-on impossible to win them militarily.

Africa security expert Kurt Shillinger, himself from South Africa, warns in this essay that the same folks throughout the Muslim world cheering for Islamo-facists would like nothing more than Africa, with all its numbing poverty and disease - to become the next battleground against Euro-American ideals. It is vastly in the selfish interests of the West to see that democratic institutions (like an independent judiciary, a responsible military, a transparent and accountable civil service) are empowered - and despots like Museveni are outed, investigated, recalled from power by their own people, and prosecuted with fairness - then punished if warranted. In order to head off widening fronts in the war on terror, it is vastly in the selfish interests of the West to deliver on the dream of life without poverty to people in Africa. And in order to deliver on prosperity (or even the hope of prosperity), those who care (donor governments, news media, NGOs and churches) must also deliver on requiring accountability, transparency and democracy by those who govern. They can no longer sit back and see what happens in Africa. The stakes are simply to high. Those who care must risk, sacrifice and be outspoken.

If the socialist Europeans' darling boy Museveni is allowed to take his country down with him, their blame in it will be matched by U.S. State Department intransigence - in the face of overwhelming evidence about his regime - with evidence spanning several decades and going back to even before he seized power.

But quite frankly it is the news media who deserve the most criticism, for caring so little about Africa that they have allowed the western powers to be "At Play in the Fields of the Lord" for so long without even the slightest curiousity. It is time for the media to look at the real situation, at what a growing number of Africans want to do about it, and what complicity the media shares in allowing this to deteriorate without comment or coverage.