Project Trip: LRA and the Conflict in Gulu

To give you a background of the work that we did in Gulu, I wanted to give you a brief history of Gulu and the LRA.

Ever since Uganda became an independent nation in 1962, there has not been a peaceful change in power. While Uganda is considered a democracy, no leader has come to power without a military coup or a rebel group overthrowing the president. Even though the current president, Yoweri Museveni, has been in power since 1986, this has actually happened several times in the short history of independent Uganda. The most recent military coup happened when Museveni came to power. Museveni is from the Buganda tribe (central Uganda). The president that he overthrew was from the Acholi tribe (northern Uganda – including Gulu). Out of this change in power, Joseph Koney, among others from the Acholi tribe, became upset and began to rebel against the government. This is the start of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) which began to fight the government and civil war ensued for the next twenty years.

People from Gulu (Acholi people) began to inform the government about the LRA activity which then led to LRA to turn on its own people. They would do unspeakable things among their own people. They would rape young girls. They would cut off the lips and nose of people that they assumed to be informants. They would take young boys as children soldiers and then force them to kill their own parents and siblings so they would have no family to which to escape. I even heard a story of the LRA forcing one child to bite another child to death. When he wouldn’t bite hard enough, they would then shoot another boy to show that this is what would happen to them if they didn’t obey. I am so sorry to be so graphic, but I am just trying to show the horrors that people had to live through while the LRA was active.

To make matters worse, as the LRA gained momentum, the government began to place people in IDP (internally displaced people) camps. The government then assumed that anyone not inside an IDP camp was a rebel and would treat them with deadly force, doing some of the same things the LRA was doing, killing, raping, and stealing from many innocent people.

There is a lot more that happened and a lot more detail that I skipped over. Unfortunately, I just don’t know enough to speak intelligently about it. Eventually, however, Koney and the LRA were chased out of the country in 2006. There has been peace for the last five years but the city is still recovering from the aftermath of the war. Many have been left fatherless and scarred. Not many have enough to support themselves and some young girls have been left little children as a result of being raped with no means to support them. This is where Watoto and many other organizations come in to the picture. I will pick up the story in the next post.