Kitgum, and to a lesser extent Gulu, have been my homes for
the last week, as I was attending an international institute on transitional
justice in Africa. It was a beautifully humbling week, as I realized how
generally ignorant I am on issues I had previously considered myself fairly well-versed
in. I suppose that’s what happens when you spend a week debating with scholars,
professors, lawyers, politicians, UN workers and various other intellectuals.
At one point in the conference, Norbet Mao – Presidential candidate and key
figure in the peace talks between the LRA and government of Uganda – noted that he doubted there was, at that time,
a space anywhere in the region containing a higher density of “cerebral matter”.
I can only assume he was excluding me from that statement, but it was wonderful
to be involved in discussing transitional justice through a Ugandan context
with various activists and academics from Kenya, Burundi, Zimbabwe, Morocco,
and elsewhere.
The week also provided some of the more surreal moments of
my time in Uganda that are more entertaining than financial matrixes in
international transitional justice funding mechanisms –one of my favorite
panels, however - so I’m sure those
moments will be more entertaining to write and read about.
- I stayed up for the entire first night in Gulu with friends, mainly because I still have no sense of mature decision making. Consequently I felt like I was on another planet the next morning, and opening remarks and lectures were more or less a blur that I was tasked with taking notes on. Later on in the day we made the trip up to Kitgum on the second worst road I’ve encountered in Uganda; I had been on it before, but you can never really mentally prepare for a few hours of misery in motion. I sat next to a good friend and colleague and David Pulkol, a former travel partner and the former head of Uganda’s external security. My friend and I stared at him in sense of privileged shock as he described his thought processes behind committing troops to various East African war theatres during the years; it seemed almost cathartic for him to describe. At one point, when discussing the proxy wars Uganda and Sudan waged against each other and his decision to go on the offensive, he said, “Where I come from in Karamoja, if you disrespect us, we are prepared to respond, and if we have to die, the vultures will pick at our bodies on your doorstep, not ours.”
- By a stroke of dumb luck I was able to stay at the Kitgum Royal Hotel for free with two other friends. Kitgum - or as co-workers who live there jokingly referred to it as “Shitgum” – is a rather forgotten center of the LRA insurgency. While the epicenter of the conflict was in Gulu, thus the large amount of NGOs and subsequent infrastructure, Kitgum was the site of some of the most prolonged and brutal fighting, but it was never deemed as ‘sexy’ by the NGO community and can feel rather bleak. The hotel, however, was easily one of the nicest I’ve ever stayed at in Uganda. Every night I came home my bed had been made, everything had been folded, new sheets were provided daily, the generator kept the power on all night, and I had a hot shower in a town that rarely has running water. All of this in a place where, less than a decade ago, leaving your door at night would have been risking your life.
- At one point during the conference, the former head justice of Uganda was asked a question by the former head of external security (Pulkol), and Norbert Mao threw in his opinion as well. It was the American equivalent of the former head of the CIA asking a question to a former Supreme Court Justice, while Ron Paul (no offense to Norbert, he’s much more practical and probably more intelligent and likeable than Paul) added his two cents. It was one of those moments in my life where I questioned how the hell I got so lucky for being one of 40 people to have such an experience.
- On Thursday night a group of us went to a bar called, I swear to god, Facebook. As all young, fresh-faced expatriates tend to do, we had our share to drink. At Facebook. After leaving Facebook at 3AM, my buddy and I got in the bed of the pick-up truck giving us a ride to the hotel, and the group of girls sat inside. While we were racing down dirt roads, my friend started yelling and slamming on the roof of the truck, while the driver slammed the breaks as the motionless body of a man in the middle of the road was picked up in the headlights. Our driver was adamant we keep going, leading to a fairly heated and drunk debate as to the moral dilemma we faced: Leave the man to his fate; check on him and hope his friends weren’t waiting in the bushes next to the road to attack us, a common tactic; check on him and hope he wasn’t dead, as we would be charged by the police, another common occurance; tell the police and hope they weren’t too drunk to give us a hard time; or wake up and deal with a man drunk enough to pass out in the middle of the road. My friend and I decided to take the matter up with the nearby police, who seemed sober but definitely didn’t care about the man waiting to be turned into mince meat by a less observant car. While we did this somebody in our party got the man up and over to the side of the road, where he passed out. We later asked our fellow attendees from Kenya, South Africa, Burundi, and Zimbabwe what they would have done. All of them said ‘keep going’ and told us how foolish we were for trying to help.
- On the last night of the conference we went to the Acholi Pub, where drinks were provided for free. At one point I was sitting next to Mao, sharing swigs off the bottle of wine he had hidden under the table so nobody else could have it. He didn’t want to be bothered with my political inquests, so we made small talk and joked around about Manchester United’s recent Champions League game against Real Madrid and how Nani needed his own transitional justice for the ridiculous red card he was shown. If Mao is ever President, however unlikely, I will tell that story to at every possible moment I can.
