Storm clouds loomed just above the air strip a few kilometers from Moroto town in the remote Karamoja region of Uganda, bordering Sudan to the north and Kenya to the west just as I was about to go back to Kampala. Sunflowers are some of the only interruptions in an otherwise barren and usually arid climate and a patch nearby shook in the brisk breeze, threatening to teeter over at any minute.

The Karamojong are just as tall, skinny and sparse in the meagerly populated area and it seemed that they too might topple should the wind blow any harder.

I stood nearby the airstrip waiting for the United Nations plane that would fly us back to Kampala, along with a few UN workers, a driver, some boys from town they’d brought along to help lift a heavy generator they were taking along on the flight, and a few Karamojong kids who didn’t have anything better to do than sit by our car and wait with us. They looked eight or nine, but they could have been as old as sixteen. Puberty comes late when malnutrition is rampant.

They chatted with the UN staff in a combination of Swahili and Karamojong.

“They are saying they are hungry and they want a coin. I’m saying I’m hungry too,” the UN lady said when I asked what they were saying.

Though she may have skipped lunch, she surely wasn’t hungry the way these kids were. But she spent every day while we were in Moroto working on a project to benefit kids just like them. Or that you can’t give everyone a hundred shillings, because that’s a lot of shillings.

An old man with a long tree branch for a walking stick hobbled by. Just the way lack made the kids look younger than they were, it made the old men look older. The bottom half of his left leg was curved into a semicircle from an injury sustained long ago. Men here herd cattle, and other men try and steal their cattle, and every man is armed with an AK-47. Things are starting to change with a UPDF program for disarmament. But change comes slowly. Even now, they shoot one another in the leg so as to immobilize the other and steal his cattle, or just kill him.

The man said he’d broken his leg in a fall, but that seemed unlikely. He said he had malaria, and asked for 100 shillings, and shuffled away towards the sunflowers, titling this way and that with every step as much as flowers quivered in with the coming storm. It wasn’t clear which was more likely to weather the storm standing.



So some news…

Uganda police raid doomsday cult born from floods

Ugandan police have arrested 12 leaders of a doomsday cult that believes floods swamping large parts of the north and east of the country herald the end of the world, state media said on Sunday.

Apocalyptic sects are a particularly sensitive subject for the east African nation, where another group killed nearly 800 followers in massacres and a mass suicide after its prediction the world would end at the start of 2000 failed to come true.

Rwanda ‘most improved’ in Africa

Rwanda is the most improved sub-Saharan nation according to a survey looking at performances over the past five years.

The Ibrahim Index, financed by Sudanese mobile phone magnate Mo Ibrahim, names Mauritius as the best-governed and Somalia as the worst-governed state.

Flood of refugees amid Congo conflict

MUGUNGA, CONGO – In a field of dried lava outside of Goma, some 20,000 Congolese villagers arrived en masse in mid-September, building huts in clusters and sending children in search of food and firewood. They had fled their homes after a new bout of fighting between government troops and ethnic Tutsi rebels.

The political crisis has challenged the international community and the new Congolese government for solutions, but has also created a humanitarian emergency that has propelled an estimated 65,000 displaced civilians from their homes.

The timing is particularly bad. It is the start of the rainy season, a time when most of these villagers should be out planting crops of beans, maize, and cassava. A lost planting season means hunger and could spur civil unrest.

“This was the planting time, and I didn’t have the time to cultivate,” says Ngulu Kishigho, who fled his home in Kimoka a few weeks ago, just days after fighting erupted on Aug. 27. Speaking of the ethnic Tutsi rebel, Gen. Laurent Nkunda, he shouts, “Nkunda made us flee. If you kick his men out of there, we will go back. We don’t want to stay even one day longer in this place.”

Ugandans battle the flood waters

They brave the water in small groups, moving forward slowly and carefully, sometimes holding hands.

This is what it takes to get in or out of Katakwi district in eastern Uganda, where more than 140,000 have been cut off by the floods.

The main highway into the area – usually packed with cars and trucks – is now hidden beneath a fast-moving torrent.

Crossing the road means battling the waves.

In the time we spent at the waters edge, three men were almost carried away by the current.

Congo hopes hi-tech ID cards will tame unruly army

KINSHASA (Reuters) – Congo hopes a new biometric identity card scheme backed by the European Union can help overhaul its undisciplined armed forces, branded by campaigners as the central African state’s worst rights abuser.
…

The identity card scheme, relaunched last week after running into problems earlier this year, should allow President Joseph Kabila’s government to determine the exact size and whereabouts of its armed forces, a first step towards protecting civilians.

“The only sure way of reducing and eventually stopping these abuses of power is to put the soldiers in barracks, to make them lead a normal military life,” Congo’s top military commander General Dieudonne Kayembe told Reuters.

“With the improvements that will result from this biometric control, we’ll be able to envisage building barracks.”

Not much posting this week since I’m in Karamoja….

This lady cooks for the school I visited. She also sleeps in this little wood shack. Isn’t she lovely?

Last week, Human Rights Watch released a report documenting abuses by the Ugandan Army (UPDF) in Karamoja, Northeastern Uganda. The report is here. I wrote an article about it for Monitor which you can find on AllAfrica here.

This is what the New Vision article quoted the Defense Minister as saying:

“Their report is abusive and provocative,” Kiyonga told journalists. They seem to be working as someone’s agents.

Human Rights Watch seems to be looking for something to use against the army,” said the minister, who was flanked by his colleague for Karamoja, Aston Kajara.

The Christian Science Monitor has a nice piece today on Congo’s child soldiers,

Ranks of child soldiers swell again in Congo

Seventeen-year-old Noel Ruabirinda, a wispy thin kid with a baby face who avoids eye contact, joined the Rwandan rebel group FDLR in 2003 at the age of 13. He traveled to Congo to be with his father, who had been a member of the FDLR, the armed group led by Rwandan Hutu extremists who carried out the genocide of 1994 that killed some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda.

But when Noel arrived, his father fled back to Rwanda, and Noel was forced to become a soldier in his father’s place.

“When I was in the refugee camps here in Congo, I knew that the Tutsi is my enemy, and my father told me we have to fight the Tutsi wherever he is,” says Noel.

He was not a porter but a fighter, he says, and in early September, Noel was sent by his commanders to fight in a battle he couldn’t win. On his side, there were two companies of some 200 soldiers commanded by FARDC officers. His enemy, the CNDP, had a battalion of nearly 500.

“I got my weapons and ammo from the government, and then we were told we had to fight the Tutsi,” he says.

He grows silent. “Since I have been captured, I feel like the Tutsis are like my parents. They keep me safe. They don’t strike us. They feed us and give us clothes.” It’s much better treatment than he received from the FDLR, he says. In four years, he’s never been paid.

As dusk falls in Kitchanga, a town without electricity, the young boys are marched off to the barracks. There, they will spend another night as prisoners of war.

From the New York Times, (thanks for sending me the link Zhanna)

From Staten Island Haven, Liberians Reveal War’s Scars

“People are saying to move forward,” he said. “But when you sweep everything under the rug, the rug will be uneven.”

If the war is not an easy subject in Park Hill, there is a good reason for it. The Liberians who found homes in this neighborhood — local leaders estimate there are 3,000 to 4,000 of them — were on different sides of it.

…
Mike Monway rose with the opposite concern. He recalled a young soldier at a checkpoint who singled him out for smiling and gave him a beating. Mr. Monway, 39, said he bore no ill will toward that soldier, who he believes had no choice but to fight.

“The moment I turned my back, I forgot his face,” he said. “If I go and say, ‘Bring him to justice,’ to some extent I would be doing him injustice.”

The story does some of the usual journalism of recounting lots of horrific stories of violence, but it also does more: it tells of a community trying to mend itself after years of war and conflict, even a community that has moved half way across the world. Even when the scars have faded or healed, the memories remain. It just goes to show that Northern Uganda has quite a distance to traverse.

I spent Rosh Hashannah in Eastern Uganda with some Ugandans who are Jewish. More to post on it later, but some photos for now…