Kuc Mito Dyere

In Luo, the local dialect of the Acholi people of northern Uganda, this phrase translates to "peace requires sacrifice" and is the mantra of my program. Yet, in the course of a brutal twenty-three year war against the Lord Resistance Army (LRA) that has killed tens of thousands and displaced hundreds of thousands more, haven't people sacrificed enough?

I'm conducting an assessment of a conflict mitigation program based out of Pader district in northern Uganda along the border with the notorious Karamoja pastoralist warriors. Pader is extremely remote with the nearest market a two-hour drive away. There's no electricity or running water, but the organization's guesthouse is solar-powered providing light in the evenings unless my colleagues get carried away watching football matches.

The program aims to prepare the internally displaced communities for the reintegration of former LRA combatants through the formation of local peace committees equipped with training on conflict resolution, transitional justice and reconciliation methods. Complementary radio broadcasts on gender-based violence, land disputes and other issues of concern identified by the communities seek to reach a broader audience.

The program, like many nongovernmental initiatives, is fraught by common problems of dependency. My supervisor, who is from Sierra Leone and was himself abducted by the rebels in his own country's devastating war, attests firsthand to enduring truth of the program's mantra. He extols the virtues of voluntarism and reminds the communities that this is ultimately their peace to forge and to keep.

At present, however, the peace that exists is tenuous at best. The LRA's elusive leader Joseph Kony has repeatedly failed to appear at the Juba talks to sign a final peace accord with the Ugandan government and there have been recent massacres along the southern Sudanese border. Rumors of child abduction and rearmament abound. The Ugandan government, in a recent joint announcement with the DRC and MONUC forces, the Central African Republic and Sudan, vowed to wage regional war to eliminate the LRA dissidents.

Last week, I interviewed a local peace trainer with our program whose husband had been killed by the LRA and who had been subsequently abducted while she was pregnant and beaten so badly that she went into early labor. Her premature infant son died several days later from severe brain damage. Nearly a decade later, she was at the local hospital to visit a relative and encountered the rebel who had beaten her so many years before. She recalled that he was alone and starving in the hospital. Without recognition of their previous connection, he implored her to help him. She visited him to bring him food and keep him company everyday for a month until he recovered. Only then did she remind him of their fateful shared history and he asked for forgiveness. They remained friends until he perished of complications from AIDS last year. 

Her story reminded me that ordinary Ugandans are creating peace even in the absence of a formal peace agreement. The capacity for forgiveness is astounding. I'm not sure what a lasting peace requires, but at a minimum it does seem to require sacrifice.