Concy Aciro
27 October 2008
opinion
Anyone following government's muddled resettlement programme in northern Uganda will have by now known that residents should not expect any meaningful assistance in their quest to return to their homes.
Camp dwellers are returning to their villages amidst uncertainty - an exercise that is again bound to test the victims' resilience and determination to start afresh.
These are interesting times for the people of especially Acholi and Lango sub-regions. First they were haphazardly herded into a situation of desperation, fear, hopelessness, deaths and uncertainty in the camps. In September 1996, the government created Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), and forced people to leave their homes for the camps.
The UPDF participated in the exercise and in October 2002, it issued an order requiring all 'law-abiding citizens in the villages to vacate with immediate effect'. This evacuation order displaced more than 500,000 civilians. The Army said that forty-eight hours after the order, any person found in the villages would be presumed to be a rebel and would be killed.
This is contrary to what Disaster Preparedness State Minister Musa Ecweru said that the government never woke up one day and decided to set up camps, and that people voluntarily went to the camps (New Vision, July 14). Now the government is urging people to return but without any meaningful support given to them. People are going back to their villages on their own.
While addressing the Soroti disaster management committee members and selected IDP leaders at Soroti Lukiko in 2006, Disaster Preparaness minister Tarsis Kabwegyere, cynically told IDPs not to wait for government supports "but go back home the way they went to the camps". This was in response to camp leaders demand that the government supplies relief items to the IDPs to enable them resettle (New Vision of July 18, 2006.
The UN's 30 guiding principles on IDPs, developed in the late 1990s, identify the rights and guarantees relevant for the protection of IDPs and their assistance during displacement as well as return, resettlement and reintegration.
One of the principles states: "Competent authorities have the primary duty and responsibility to establish conditions, as well as provide the means, which allow IDPs to return voluntarily in safety and with dignity to their homes or places of habitual residence. Such authorities shall endeavour to facilitate the reintegration of returned or resettled."
The people who were forced out of their homes decades ago need homes but government says it "will provide mabaatis for every household on condition that a structure has been erected".
A letter from the Office of the President's dated August 22, addressed to the Office of the Prime Minister, criticised people in IDPs for being reluctant to return to their homes.
That one of the best ways of attracting them to resettle in their home areas is to equip 54 local chiefs in Acholi with iron sheets and cement using the PRDP Funds for them to put up permanent structures.
Sadly, resettlement programmes do not address the issue of compensation for landowners, where IDPs and army detachments are located. Minister Kabwegyere is quoted to have said that the government will not compensate people in northern Uganda for property destroyed and land degraded.
"Landlords' demands are unrealistic as the landowners have instead benefited from the IDPs." (Sunday Vision, October 28, 2007). As a result of creation of IDPs and army detachments, almost 25 per cent of the population in Acholi are landless. One wonders what kind of benefit the minister talked about!
Ms Aciro is a development expert and Woman MP Amuru District
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