Edwin Nuwagaba
8 November 2008
The peace film festival came with many surprises. First, the films that were projected in the auditorium of the National Theatre were less entertaining and more depressing. Secondly, most panel discussants were either politicians or activists.
The films may not have been professionally made but they conveyed the message. In the auditorium, most of the people had been affected by the conflict in northern Uganda and Karamoja.
While all the films were able to deliver on the theme of images of conflict and imaginations of peace, the film that generated much debate was Ekisil, a Karamojong word for peace. Even those who haven't been to Karamoja got a vivid picture of the situation there.
Ekisil is a docu-drama on the culture and values of the Karimojong and their struggle to find lasting peace in the region. So many people have died due to the abundance of guns in this region. The movie stands out because the characters in it are real.
In fact, Giovanni Dall'Oglio, the filmmaker says that he did not have to take the actors through rehearsals.
"They were acting as themselves. The problem I had was convincing some of them to give me their cattle to be raided. They were scared and thought that this would serve as a bad omen, and that their cattle would actually be raided," he says.
The motive behind the movie, he says, was to offer the community an instrument to address a message of peace.
As soon as the film ended, panellists led by David Pulkol, the director of the African Leadership Institute addressed the audience. While reacting to the images painted by the movie, Pulkol convinced the audience that the problems in Karamoja were due to the negligence and sidelining by the government.
"For us in Karamoja, we believe that we died a long time ago. We can no longer succumb to intimidation. We have survived all these odds of life," he said to cheers from the audience.
He went on to explain how the colonial system and post-colonial regimes had grabbed Karamoja's land and sent off people to unproductive lands where there was no water and grass.
While there are several places where guns have been taken away, Pulkol said that there are still areas with a number of guns. Unfortunately, there is no community-based security to protect these people.
If people's real needs are not solved, the more guns they will disarm, the more they will buy. "The challenge now is how to draw our people from conflict and poverty. We really have to go back to our roots so we can be able to solve the problems in Karamoja.
First, people have to learn their rights. You can take the gun but respect the lives of people. We have to transform these raiding routes into corridors of peace," he said, adding that Karamoja is in such turmoil because of the many policies and wrong decisions in the region.
"Generally, it is a leadership problem, arginalisation, segregation and Karamoja's closure to the entire world.
Lack of development in Karamoja was deliberately neglected because some people wanted it to be a wildlife attraction. As of now, the wildlife authority is the landlord of Karamoja with 27 per cent of our land," he said.
Trapped in Anguish another movie that generated debate is an informed account of the war in northern Uganda, its humanitarian implications and the process of return and reintegration of former combatants. The movie paints sad pictures of the results of the conflict in the northern region and the traditional cleansing of former rebels.
While reacting to this movie, Stephano Severe an official from UNHCR said that the process of northerners returning to their homes is not only an issue of transportation. "More needs to be done.
Most of all, there is need to restructure the local leadership. Most of the programmes on the ground are community-based programmes. No one has money to give out return kits to individuals," he said.
Some of the other movies that were screened include, Uganda Rising, a multiple award-winning film, featuring interviews with Betty Bigombe, Samantha Power, President Yoweri Museveni, Mahmood Mamdani and many other politicians.
The film features several opposition politicians like Hon Reagan Okumu who excited the audience when he was quoted saying that when coming into power, Museveni said he would put all Acholis in a bottle; they would be able to look outside but would not be able to move out and in the end, would start eating themselves.
What about us is a product from the Refugee Law Project. The one-hour documentary concerns Urban Internally Displaced Peoples and their exclusion from IDP policy.
In We didn't know, the process of truthtelling is unravelled in this insightful documentary on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa.
The two-day festival was organised by the refugee law project under the faculty of Law at Makerere University.
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