Tag Archives: Women’s Advocacy Network

Returning from the LRA

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“The international community appears to be more interested in the infamous Kony and his LRA outfit than in their many victims in CAR and other countries in the region. The LRA threat will hopefully diminish and eventually disappear – with Kony and other LRA leaders brought to justice – but the victims will remain.” – Godfrey Byaruhanga, Amnesty International Central Africa Researcher in a 2012 report.

It is believed that in the coming months the numbers of those leaving the LRA will steadily increase. It is time to look at some of the challenges that come with reintegrating into society.

Recently, Invisible Children sent out an update to its subscribers with the following headline “Top LRA commander killed in combat.” Finding news sources that confirm this was an unexpectedly difficult task. However, not because it is not true, but because in large the media seems to take little interest in this recent development as our television screens focus on efforts to regain control in Mali.

A Ugandan newspaper does report on the death of Binani – according to them “Kony’s chief bodyguard.” While that sounds essentially different from “Top LRA commander”, it is clear that Binani had been at the centre of LRA structure. The source further reports that in the last 6 months, 200 women and children had been freed from the LRA. In addition, the hopes are high that the death of the commander will lead to more people leaving the LRA.

With this in mind, we want to delve a little into some aspects of the process of reintegration into society of those that had been abducted, because the story does not end when they return home…

The 2000 Amnesty Act and “Justice”

While the LRA is now mostly in the Central African Republic (CAR), and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), it is still worthwhile to look at Ugandan legislation, because many of the rebels have been abducted within Uganda as children.

“Amnesty” means a pardon, forgiveness, exemption or discharge from criminal prosecution or any other form of punishment by the State” – Ugandan Amnesty Act, 2000

In an effort to end the atrocities, the Ugandan government enacted Amnesty in 2000. This basically meant that any LRA rebel would be forgiven by the State, so long as they turned themselves in and renounced rebellion. The idea behind this was that if the rebels knew that they had no punishment to fear, they would return to society. So Amnesty was supposed to bring peace.

And it proved successful. This statement by the Enough Project laments that the Act has not been renewed after it expired in May 2012. Roughly 26,000 rebels from over 25 different armed groups had received the Certificate of Amnesty.

But as things usually go there is a ‘however’… Many Ugandans were not satisfied with the Amnesty Act. Grace Acan, who had talked about this matter at an event in the Liu Institute in UBC Vancouver, has denied the government’s amnesty offer. As a former LRA abductee, she finds that it is not her that needs to be granted forgiveness, but the government, for failing to protect her and many others who were then children.

The UN has also released a report on the impacts of the Amnesty Act. While recognizing a state’s sovereign right to grant amnesty, they are critical of the long-term impacts of such a policy. “Experience has shown that a culture of impunity and a legacy of past crimes that go unaddressed are likely to undermine a lasting peace.”

Reintegration into the military

After having been pardoned by the government, some former LRA members choose to become part of the army and help track down those who used to be their comrades, as the UN organization IRIN reports. This may sound like a good plan from a military perspective, but there are grave concerns with this strategy. The above article points out the negative effect this can have on LRA victims. It specifically mentions a woman that recognizes the man who raped her among those that had been pardoned.

The role of the International Criminal Court

It is not just Ugandan law that has failed to provide the justice that people seek – some regard the decision of the International Criminal Court (ICC) as even more controversial.

The ICC has indicted 5 of the LRA’s top commanders (the first indictments ever of this organization). Joseph Kony, Vincent Otti, Dominic Ongwen and Okot Odhiambo are all on the list (Raska Lukwiya deceased in 2006). These indictments were a wake-up call to the international community and raised hopes locally that the problem could soon come to an end.

Of course things are more complicated than that…

The ICC decisions made the LRA less willing to have peace talks. It was more difficult to bring the LRA to the negotiation table, since they had little incentive to leave their hiding places. This has attracted critiques, stating that the ICC indictments would interfere with local efforts. Indeed, the ICC contradicts the Amnesty efforts of the Ugandan government. On the other hand, as we saw earlier, that system is also problematic. There is also the argument that the LRA had more than enough time to come to a peace agreement and chose not to.

While institutions struggle to find a way to bring justice, civil society fights for reconciliation.

Civilian Efforts

Regardless of the justice system, those who return from the LRA or other armed groups often face other challenges or strong stigmas upon returning home. Many grassroots and civilian organizations have formed. We would like to highlight one group who we are partnering with.

The Women’s Advocacy Network (WAN)

The WAN is a local grassroots organization composed of several advocacy groups in Uganda. These women support each other in many ways: together they raise the money for their children’s school fees, they approach the government with a unified voice and they support each other with everyday challenges of post-conflict northern Uganda.

Being in a network of others that have had same or similar experiences has helped many of the women to process their time in the LRA. Many of them also face the same daily challenges – such as illiteracy, if they were abducted before receiving an education.

In the end justice remains a vague and difficult concept. The international community and the Ugandan government have been contradictory in their approaches. However, more recent developments show that joint efforts are on their way.

And as the Women’s Advocacy Network initiative (and many others) shows, there is progress. And there is hope.

Women & Justice – A night of inspiration, complexity, and solidarity.

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“As you can see, there are more questions than answers in this respect, but thinking about the different ways in which women find themselves within conflicts will then allow us form analyses that are not based on dichotomies, but that tackle complexity, particularities, and possibilities” – Eliana Pinto Velasquez

Last Thursday, November 29, 2012 AfricaCanada.org hosted “Women & Justice”, a cross-cultural discussion on the role of women in building peace and searching for justice and reconciliation.

In particular, the night was made by the contributions of our three panelists:

Juliane Okot Bitek, an award-winning writer and scholar at the Liu Institute for Global Issues who works with Dr. Erin Baines and the Women’s Advocacy Network on using stories of survivors of captivity in the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) to remember and heal.

Veronica Fynn has earned a BSc (Ghana), BA (UBC), MPH (Nottingham), LLM (York), and is an adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia, teaching public health law. As the founder of EV Research Inc. and the Journal of Internal Displacement, she has authored several publications. Veronica’s blog on the rights of women in war can be found here.

Eliana Pinto Velasquez is a social worker and holds a Master in Gender studies from the National University of Colombia. She is a researcher in the University Initiative Program for Peace and Co-existence at the same University. She works with the University Javeriana in a project about access to justice of indigenous women and peasants in Colombia and Guatemala. She worked in the area of land and conflict in the Historical Memory Group of the National Commission for Reparation and Reconciliation.

Each panelist had thoughtful perspectives to share on the struggles of women in the different contexts of Colombia, Liberia and Uganda.

Social Work – Colombia

Eliana shared her research on the experiences of women and girls demobilized from the diverse armed actors in Colombia’s civil conflict such as the ELN and FARC guerrillas and the paramilitaries or the AUC under the auspices of The Colombian Institute for Colombian Welfare (El Insituto Colombiano de Bienestar Familial) programs.

Pertinent points were how in Colombia a number of forced combatants or ‘child soldiers’, are not forcibly recruited. Eliana also emphasized reintegration into civilian life for women, particularly those who became mothers during their time with illegal armed groups. For demobilized women and girls, Eliana said, the violence they experience within the armed group is gendered, evidenced by how armed groups would regulate romantic relationships and dress codes within communities in addition to practicing forced abortions and sterilizations for women within armed groups. Moreover, the experience of civil integration for females is also marked by gender as the program focuses on, for example, making sure that women “are proper mothers”.

A very interesting point surrounding the ‘voluntary’ nature of female recruitment in Colombia was how, according to Eliana, women often took up arms in order to create a space of agency in their lives. Often, women who join armed groups are fleeing social exclusion, poverty, or intra-familiar violence, and by becoming a part of an armed group they can show that as women they can not only manage life, but also be agents of death.

A highlight of Eliana’s presentation was how -through quotations- she integrated the voices of 6 women she had personally worked with who had been demobilized from Colombia’s largest insurgent group, the FARC, ending with a note from a woman from the Caribbean coast of Colombia:

“The transitional process is not just a judicial one, it is a process of social and political reorganization, and the reconstruction of the personal, familial, and communitarian institutions for women”

Law – Liberia

Veronica, for her part, spoke of the challenges of indigenous Liberian women in the post-conflict context, particularly focusing on the challenges of seeking justice for victims of sexual and gender based violence (SGBV) from a judicial point of view.

In 2005, Liberia established its first criminal rape law. However, there are struggles of applying this law with respect to the customary law that exists in Liberia as well as the corruption within the legal system. Veronica provided specific examples of perpetrators during the war who had yet to be brought to justice.

Veronica also touched on the extremely problematic nature of unequal power relationships within international development projects and social justice activism in general. She poignantly and frankly critiqued uncritical Western ‘saviour’ complexes, as well as spoke of the complexities of her own positionality with respect to her work, as she is both a survivor of Liberia’s conflict but at the same time enjoying the privilege of graduate education at a Western institution.

Building on the theme of supporting grassroots women’s groups, Veronica shared the courageous work of three local grassroots women’s NGOs in Liberia working to reduce the extremely high levels of impunity for SGBV crimes.

Storytelling – Uganda

Juliane Okot Bitek spoke of the power of storytelling. Juliane spoke of her work trying to rebuild the stories of female survivors of captivity in the LRA and how she has worked along with Dr. Erin Baines to help the women tell their stories.

Juliane made clear the immense difficulty with respect to ethics of trying to create artistic expressions which reveal truth without defining it, and the fragile nature of dealing with the stories of others.

Since many of the stories she works with are stories of suffering, she also spoke of the second-hand trauma/anxiety that can come with reading such powerful, vivid, and at times disturbing accounts from survivors of their experiences in the LRA. Juliane then read an eloquent piece of writing that worked with strong and original symbols and metaphors to characterized one such experience.

The night did raise more questions than answers and more complex issues than an hour and a half could do justice to.

The diverse approaches – through law, through storytelling, through grassroots initiatives and much more – show that there is not one way to go about these challenges. Each of them is essential in processing the past and thus creating a hopefully better future. In all of these places, during and after the war, there was great pain and injustice. With even greater courage and resilience women struggle with the ongoing fight for reconciliation, justice and peace.

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The Women’s Advocacy Network (WAN) in northern Uganda has displayed great courage and agency, despite tremendous challenges. They were our inspiration to host this event. They created a mutual support network, fight for support from the government and make their voices heard.  For more information on these grassroots initiatives please see some of our earlier posts.

Finding the Right Language…

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When talking about delicate issues, there is always the difficulty of finding the right way to frame one’s message. Too boring? Too sensationalist? And is there a way to do justice to what one wants to say and still maintain the reader’s attention?

You tell me…

The award-winning writer Juliane Okot Bitek and the women’s advocate Grace Acan have set themselves a challenging task: They composed a book of stories, poetry and reflection on justice in and after the war in Northern Uganda. All that under the humble of “Stories from the Dry Season.”

Out there are already too many narratives that victimize, criminalize, disregard the agency of locals, simplify, … the list is long. And why concentrate on the bad examples, when there are good ones to turn to?

On October 2nd, Julie, Grace and Kalina Kojwang held a reading of some already finished pieces. The audience was positively surprised by what they heard – an alternative narrative.

So how did they do it? (in a nutshell)

Firstly, they provided a balance in the stories they chose to share. They did speak of the hardships and difficulties of abduction, but they also provided us with heartfelt child memories that made the audience laugh. This was not to ridicule the serious matters, but to provide a more well-rounded understanding of their lives and thus counter the victimizing tendency.

Secondly, some pieces were presented in Luo to acknowledge cultural diversity and beauty. Short summaries of the contents were provided for the audience.

Thirdly, the danger of a single-narrative was avoided by collecting stories from different people. In the news, justice and war might be covered within a couple of articles, in reality though, there is multitude of stories.

So, did they find the right language?

This question assumes that there is a “right” language – and if there was, the search would probably not be that difficult. However, these artists have understood that they cannot create one truth about justice and war in Northern Uganda. But by collecting diverse insights, they have found the right framework.

Several members of the audience expressed their deepest admiration at the end. We have a good book to look forward to.

Africa-Canada will keep you posted on how it “Stories From the Dry Season” progresses.

 

What do grassroots advocacy groups hope to accomplish?

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The third in a series of reports from Tanja Bergen about her time in northern Uganda.

“We want to change our lives to a new level. We want to see a brighter future for our children.”

Why do the grassroots bother forming advocacy groups? Even well-resourced advocates from wealthy countries get frustrated with the too-often tenuous connection between advocacy and results – and they’re not the ones who have to worry that their efforts will detract from their ability to pay for their food for the day.

Yet the host of active, locally-led groups across Africa (and the world!) show the depth of investment that thousands of conflict or poverty-affected people have in advocacy. Some examples include the Association des femmes des médias in the eastern DR Congo that makes women’s issues visible in Congolese media, the Green Belt Movement that fights poverty by bringing local communities into the process of protecting Kenya’s biodiversity, and the Women in Peacebuilding Network in West Africa that played a lead role in ending civil war in Liberia.

In northern Uganda, the emerging Women’s Advocacy Network (WAN) is yet another example of a group of under-resourced and conflict-affected people who have come together against the odds in the hopes of seeing their circumstances changed:

“We want to change our lives to a new level. We want to see a brighter future for our children.”

“In 5-10 years, we hope to get education or technical/life skills. We want our children to go to school and get educated too.”

“In time we want to be self-reliant. We do not want to ask others for school fees and support.”

“We want our group to be a good example to other groups because people think that staying in a group isn’t important [and we can show them otherwise].”

 
The members of WAN dream big. They are also pragmatic about what it will take to realize their futures. Most members of WAN live off of a few dollars a day and barely have the resources to cover their family’s basic necessities. In an attempt to overcome this, many WAN groups have adopted a strategy to increase their access to funds:

“We came together to identify what we could do to generate income.”

“We created a rotating group savings circle. Each member of our group contributes 1,000 UGX (approximately 40 cents CAD) each Sunday. Every week we disperse the lump sum to a different group member.”

 
These loan circles are sustained by the many income-generating that the groups have attempted: jewelry making, crop growing, and tailoring. They have enabled some individuals to pay for a year of school fees or to rent more land for crops.

Unfortunately, the investment possibilities made available by a loan of $5-10 a few times a year are finite. The members of WAN know that if they are to significantly improve their families’ quality of life, they will need help. Many of these women cope with debilitating injuries from their captivity with the LRA and struggle to keep pace with physical demands of subsistence agriculture:

“All of our members are Formerly Abducted Persons (FAPs). We have had lots of difficulties since we returned. But we have to provide for our children. So we borrow from each other so that we can send our children to school.”

“Many of us still have pains up today in our hands, legs, heads, chests, and elsewhere.”

“During the time of the insurgency, many of us had narrow escapes (during battles etc.). As such, our health is not great.”

“As our injuries were often from battles, it is hard for many of us to farm or plow.”

Some of the support that members of WAN need is significant. Access to affordable and competent medical care is scarce, there is an immense need for more clinics that are staffed by personnel who are trained to be responsive to the specific needs of survivors. Many of the women are also single mothers – even when funds are made available for their children to go to school, a lack of child-care options often makes this impossible. Yet, in the face of these obstacles, when I asked the group what they would do if they had access to move funds they answered back thoughtfully and firmly:

“We hope to get access to a small mill or to oxen for plowing. We would use the profits to pay for our children to go to school and to generate capital to put into further business opportunities.”

“We would want to boost our savings and loan circle so that we could loan more money to a group member and receive it back with interest.”

“We would buy produce at the market and sell it off to earn profit for the group. With the accumulating profit we would buy oxen. This will make ploughing the land easier which will change the lives of each of the group members (especially as some members of the group were injured in the bush and are not healthy and strong enough to dig).”

As Canadians, our experiences typically don’t encourage us to see the connection between an oxen and a path out of poverty for a survivor of war. Even though an enormous body of research overwhelmingly demonstrates that development only works if local ideas lead projects, it is tremendously difficult to partner with grassroots organizations when our common experiences and assumptions differ so greatly.

This blog attempts to show the human side to the research that shows how important it is for ‘us’ to check our assumptions about what ‘they’ need and to reframe our interactions and relationships with grassroots organizations around the concepts of partnership and mutual learning. At the end of the day, we must recognize that ideas and solutions must start with those at the grassroots who have the most to gain and lose from efforts to help.

 

The Women’s Advocacy Network: Voice, strength, unity and community

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The second in a series of reports from Tanja Bergen.

“As individuals, our voices won’t be heard. So, we come together as advocates to amplify our voices”

Why is it that those who are most impacted by human rights abuses are so often absent from the advocacy and media campaigns that are supposed to help them?

In Northern Uganda there are hundreds of individuals and communities who are impacted by the conflict between the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and the Ugandan People’s Defence Force (national armed forces) and who have mobilized to see their circumstances improved.

One glowing example is the Women’s Advocacy Network that is active throughout Northern Uganda. In January I visited each of the nine affiliate groups that compose the network. Each group has a specific mandate and reason for forming. Several have welcomed male members. Despite their differences, some common threads unite these groups and explain why they formed – here is just a sampling of what they had to say:*

“Each one of us experienced some sort of problems during the war so we came together as a group to forget our problems.”

“It is important to form a group because when we are together we can forget our past problems and help each other.”

Each of WAN’s affiliate groups are composed of members who are struggling to overcome the legacies of the conflict between the LRA and UPDF.

“Our group initially joined together while we were together in the campus. While we were in the camps or while others in our group were returning from the bush, many of us were raped and became pregnant. Some of us contracted HIV/AIDS.”

Many of the women were abducted and forced to stay ‘in the bush’ (captivity). During this time, they were forced to marry and bear children to commanders of the LRA. When they escaped captivity, were captured by the UPDF, or were released by the LRA they returned home with battle-scars: literal and emotional. They returned to communities and families that were reeling from the suffering they experienced at the hands of the LRA – often with children that they bore with LRA commanders. Other women avoided abduction but were forced by the Ugandan government to live in squalid and insecure Internally Displaced Person camps. During this time, societal safety nets disintegrated and many women were raped (exposing them to unwanted pregnancies and HIV/AIDS). The members of WAN cope with the legacies of conflict like trauma, stigma from their communities, and limited livelihood options that are caused in part by the education that they were prevented from accessing.

“Each member of our group faced challenges during the war and now that we are in town, we have new challenges. Without God’s mercy, we would not survive.”

“Our group came together because the majority of us have survived battles. We stay together, share our troubles and look forward to see how our lives can change.”

“Our group started because we suffered in the bush and felt that we should unite to work as a team.”

“Our group came together for solidarity: to come together and share our problems. We also want to teach and help each other to bring our children up in the best way.”

“As a group we want to strengthen ourselves so that we can stay comfortably with others in our community.”

“If we lived alone it would be harder to fend for ourselves. When we are together we can seek support as a group.”

“By uniting we hope to encourage each other to stay strong. We feel okay and relieved when we are together.”

“As a result of the war we had problems. Now that we have peace, we sat down together as women to organize ourselves and advocate to see if we could get help with our problems.”

Themes of voice, strength, unity and community echo throughout these responses. What’s more, the statements above illustrate just who the WAN and its members hope to reach: the members of their communities who stigmatize them and shun their children. Throughout my discussions with the different groups, other audiences and issues also emerged, particularly in relation to international NGOs working in the region:

“Our local leaders do not support us because of their corruption. This prevents us from developing and from paying our children’s school fees. Many NGOs come to offer support by our officials are corrupt and swindle them.”

“The members of our group hate how the NGOs hate us. Some of the smaller NGOs that started out small with our group have been picked to be supported by donors and they have grown. When this happened, these organizations ran away from us at the grassroots and stopped partnering with us. They see us as stupid and ignorant and write about us as such. However, we survived the bush! We are not dumb!”

These quotes offer deeper perspectives into the question of why women and men across Northern Uganda have come together to advocate. They want to be heard by all the players who shape the process of conflict-recovery in Northern Uganda: communities, government officials, and NGOs. They want their perspectives on the issues that matter to them to be heard.

What can we take away from the thoughts that WAN shared? We can start by acknowledging that the women and men who are impacted by the conflict in Northern Uganda as legitimate stakeholders in the conflict-recovery process. We will need to be open to hearing their ideas when they don’t align with ours. It will take patience to learn how to share our capacities and knowledge in an accessible manner and it will also take patience to learn how to hear experiences that are radically different from ours and to connect these experiences to the insights and perspectives that they offer on ways of moving forward.

Advocacy is often discussed in terms being a voice for the voiceless. Yet as a member of one of WAN’s affiliate organizations pointed out:

“As individuals, our voices won’t be heard. So, we come together as advocates to amplify our voices”

What would happen if we altered our advocacy paradigm to include a responsibility for ensuring that ALL voices are heard – especially those that are the easiest to silence or exclude? Members of WAN join together to amplify their individual voices. What possibilities would open for sustainable and meaningful partnerships with local-led initiatives if we committed ourselves as advocates to listening, echoing and amplifying rather than speaking, directing, and leading?

For more thoughts from the Women’s Advocacy Network, see this recent piece in the Daily Monitor, a Ugandan publication.

*For security reasons, individuals’ names and the names of their specific member groups have been removed.

Reports from the Field – Connecting with the Women’s Advocacy Network (WAN)

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Photo credit: Tanja Bergen. Taken at Palero, prior to the meeting with Rubanga Matwero.

 

For the next few weeks, the ACAC blog will feature several reports from one of our members, Tanja Bergen, who recently returned from a 25-day trip to Gulu, Uganda.  Her visit was supported by the Justice and Reconciliation Project.

Since 2008, Tanja has worked with ACAC researching ways for Canada to constructively engage with grassroots advocates and community organizers in the Great Lakes Region of Africa.  Her recent visit to Gulu was comprised largely of consultations with a variety of community-based groups that make up the Women’s Advocacy Network (WAN) in Northern Uganda.

Tanja’s experiences speaking with the women from WAN largely reinforce ACAC’s key recommendation that actors involved in international development in the Great Lakes region Invest Locally.  The details of ACAC’s position on this matter will soon be released in a policy paper, published later this month.  Stay tuned for the paper launch – in the meantime, follow Tanja as she reflects on the significance of local investment in a place like Gulu, and what such a strategy means for the women of WAN.  Take it away, Tanja….

* * *

The Women’s Advocacy Network is a coalition of grassroots organizations that have emerged in post-conflict Uganda. In many ways it can be seen as a microcosm for the entire Great Lakes Region.  Although each group has its own unique challenges and specific strategies for overcoming their hardships, there are also commonalities that run between them: individuals in the network face stigma from the rest of their community for their involvement (forced or otherwise) in armed groups; they consistently have access to fewer resources than their male counterparts (this is compounded by the fact that, too often, they are the sole care-givers to both their biological and adoptive children); and they have frustratingly few options to finish their education and find employment that offers sufficient wages and dignified working conditions.

I visited each of WAN’s affiliate organizations to learn about their history as well as the challenges they currently face. As a collective, ACAC was curious to know if our approach to advocacy resonated with that of the WAN members, so I asked them the following questions:

Why did your group form and what are your goals?

What have your successes been as a group?

What are the biggest challenges that you face in realizing your goals?

If Museveni (the president of Uganda) or his representative was here, what would you tell him?

What would you want Canadians to know about your group?

As with any collective, each individual group’s level of engagement with the questions and discussion differed, as did the level of support and time each WAN member organization had to develop their advocacy capacities. Despite the individual and group differences, a clear and over-arching theme emerged: women and men in the WAN have strong ideas about what needs to happen for justice to be done for the wrongs that they experienced as well as what meaningful support looks like from international supporters. They want their ideas to be heard and they want to be active decision makers in the processes that will decide what their communities’ development path will look like. They want opportunities to provide a dignified life for their children and kin.

During the course of the Reports from the Field series, I will aim to capture how the members of WAN answered these questions, and what ACAC’s prime policy recommendation – invest locally – means to them.