KAMPALA, UGANDA – Karmela Kasule, 54, waddles through her two-room mud-and-wattle house, steaming cornmeal and water to make “posho” for her family. She winces after gripping the hot saucepan with her bare hands.
Kasule heads a household of 22, including her daughter, Ayu Alali, 37, her niece and 19 grandchildren. Gray hairs cover her head, deep scars mark her face, and she barely retains her sight and hearing.
She lives in Acholi Quarters, a former camp for internally displaced people near Kampala, the capital. It is now a densely populated and poorly ventilated slum housing people who still can't or don't want to return home.
Women sit close to filthy gutters on verandas of closely built mud-and-wattle structures, carving beads out of paper. Children’s laughter filters through the air. The men drink, play board games and heckle passing women.
Acholi Quarters, located in south-central Uganda, is considered a safe haven for many Acholi people who fled from conflict in northern Uganda.
Kasule says she first fled her home in Palabek, a town in northern Uganda, during the late 1970s from the dictatorship of Idi Amin, Uganda’s third president who seized power in a military coup in 1971 and ruled until 1979. He became known as “the Butcher of Uganda” for his brutal rule. Human rights groups estimate that as many as 500,000 people were killed during his regime.
Kasule stayed in Kampala because Joseph Kony, the rebel leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, a guerrilla group in Uganda, began terrorizing the north during the mid-1980s. The International Criminal Court indicted Kony on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity in 2005, but he remains at large.
“I was already running from Idi Amin Dada’s terror in 1978 when [Kony] murdered my first husband,” she says. “Running away from the insurgency of Kony was just another race for my life. This is my life. I consider myself lucky!”
Kasule says she bore six children in Palabek – two daughters and four sons – but lost all but one daughter to Kony’s war or to HIV and AIDS. One of her sons, David Nyeko, was in seventh grade when the Lord’s Resistance Army killed him in Palabek in 2001 during a clash with the Uganda People’s Defence Force, the country’s armed forces.
The rebels forced Kasule’s only surviving daughter to join their ranks.
“I was forced to cook for the rebels as I watched them slay my brother and rape my community,” Alali says.
Kasule watches silently as Alali struggles to contain the pain on her face.
“I cannot go back to that place,” Alali says of Palabek.
Although most of Uganda’s camps for internally displaced people have closed, many women living in Acholi Quarters say they refuse or can’t yet return home to the north, where they watched rebels slay their family members. A scandal during October 2012 involving the misappropriation of funds by the Ugandan government has hampered its Peace, Recovery and Development Plan. The region still lags behind the rest of the country in key socio-economic indicators, such as housing, health care and education.
At the height of the conflict in 2005, the U.N. Refugee Agency reported 1.84 million people living in 251 camps throughout northern Uganda. Some 30,000 people remain in four camps across the region.
John Moro Mutto, the area’s local council chairman, says Acholi Quarters derives its name from northern Uganda’s Acholi people, who constitute the majority of residents. Acholi Quarters houses more than 400 Acholi and Lango families from northern Uganda.
Mutto says Acholi people began moving south during the 1960s as low-cost laborers for an Asian tea estate in central Uganda. When Amin expelled the Asian business community from Uganda in 1972, many Acholi laborers stayed instead of returning to northern Uganda to find alternative work. When the Lord’s Resistance Army’s insurgency started in the north during the mid-1980s, relatives joined these workers in Kampala.
The rebels and the government signed a cease-fire in 2006.
But many displaced women living in Acholi Quarters say they don’t want to or can’t yet return north.
Some say it would be unsafe and emotionally difficult to return while Kony is still at large.
“When he is dead and I see his head and poke into his eyes,” says Cecilia Amal, Kasule’s neighbor, “then, and only then, ask me and talk to me about resettling in Palabek, my former home.”
Amal says Kony’s forces abducted her for one month in 1991 and tortured her for being married to a prison guard. They considered prison guards to be traitors because they kept rebels in jails.
Her brother-in-law, who was part of Kony’s army, arranged her escape on the day set for her execution. She swam through a river back to her village then joined her husband, who had fled to Kampala. Kony rebels executed her husband a year later in 1997 when he returned north to prepare their home for their return.
Amal says she wants justice for Kony before she considers moving back.
“Until the day I taste the blood and flesh of Kony, probably ground with salt and shared amongst all victims as some form of retribution for what he has done,” she says, “I cannot find a sense of peace and security.”
Christine Okello Lawino, 35, settled in Acholi Quarters in 1996.
She says Kony’s forces hacked her first husband to death before her eyes in 1995 when he tried to protect her. They abducted her and forced her to be a rebel leader’s wife. Pregnant with her first husband’s child, she gave birth in captivity.
After four months, her brother-in-law, who served in the rebel ranks, helped her and her baby to escape. She fled to live with a relative in Acholi Quarters. The rebels discovered this and executed her brother-in-law two weeks later.
Lawino and her new husband, a local church leader, are both from Kitgum, a district in northern Uganda. She says she hopes to return one day to his land to till the soil, eat the food of her sweat and taste the rain of her homeland. She forgives Kony and his rebels for what they did to her.
“I hope and pray for the day when I can work side by side with Kony tilling the land, even if from a distance,” Lawino says. “Maybe if he experiences true community life, he can heal from whatever demon sits in his soul. I don’t know, but I pray for that day.”
Until then, she calls Acholi Quarters home.
Adding to the painful memories that prevent these women from returning home is a troubled rebuilding process in northern Uganda.
The government’s Peace, Recovery and Development Plan aims to stabilize northern Uganda and encourage recovery by alleviating poverty and promoting socio-economic development in eight districts in the north and east. Its second phase began in 2013.
“Defining justice within the context of the northern Uganda conflict and realizing resettlement for those who have been internally displaced is proving challenging to all involved,” says Pius Ojara, the recovery and development adviser for the Department for International Development, a U.K. government department, in Kampala. “Especially given that northern Uganda, while in a transition process, has to somehow find and exert a self-defining peace for itself.”
The challenge intensified after five Western donor countries, including the U.K., cut aid to Uganda’s government during October 2012 after an embezzlement scandal involving the mismanagement of funds for the plan.
An October 2012 special investigation report by Uganda’s Office of the Auditor General found a widespread network of corruption and collusion within and among the Office of the Prime Minister, Ministry of Finance, Planning and Economic Development and the Bank of Uganda. It cited the misappropriation of 38.35 billion shillings ($15.5 million).
The Uganda government agreed to repay all misused funds to the Peace, Recovery and Development Plan and is continuing the investigation, according to the Office of the Prime Minister website.
Still, Samuel Odonga Otto, a Parliament member for Aruu, a county in northern Uganda, says the distribution plan for allocating the funds is illogical.
“The problem with PRDP is that it was fused with the local government systems and to embrace more districts instead of the most affected ones by the Lord’s Resistance Army,” Otto says.
The money is spread thin among more than 50 districts, while the core conflict areas miss out, he says.
“And this is before it even gets compounded by the corruption in its management by a government that does not care for northerners,” Otto says.
Lawino says that the mismanagement of funds isn’t new.
“This is how it has always been,” Lawino says. “What is meant for us is always blown away by the wind. But still, we are here. These things, they do not break us anymore. But one day …”
Otto says government officials should face charges at the International Criminal Court.
“Many of these government officials, starting with President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni himself, should be answering for gross crimes against humanity in relation to the northern Uganda conflict before the ICC,” he says. “How could they fail – with all their popular military resources – to protect and rehabilitate the people of northern Uganda for the past 26 years?”
Pius Bigirimana, the permanent secretary for the Office of the Prime Minister, declined to comment on the misappropriation of funds. During a second attempt to obtain comment, Bigirimana referred requests to the office’s northern desk. But officials at the northern desk said they did not receive permission from the central office to speak to the press and referred questions to the government’s midterm review of the Peace, Recovery and Development Plan.
The review states that although northern Uganda is no longer immediately post-conflict, it still lags behind the rest of Uganda in key socio-economic indicators, such as rebuilding the region, empowering communities and revitalizing the economy.
Lawino says she is reluctant to return home to northern Uganda because even though schools reopened, the quality hasn’t recovered.
Many women also fear that if they move back north, they will lose the free and quality HIV and AIDS care they have in Acholi Quarters.
“I live in a slum here,” Kasule says, “but I can never afford or guarantee this level of health care in my village – even if I had the money to afford it. Here, I get it for free.”
Kasule, who has AIDS, says she receives free care from Reach Out Mbuya Parish HIV/AIDS Initiative, a faith-based nongovernmental organization in Kampala.
Kasule says northern Uganda doesn’t have similar programs apart from public hospitals, which are understaffed and understocked. Her former house in northern Uganda was a two-hour walk to the nearest hospital, which rarely had the medicine she needed.
She wouldn’t be able to access the treatment she needs if she moved back north.
“I will die within a year!” Kasule says.
Kasule, who supports her family by breaking stone in a nearby quarry, says she also can’t go back because she has no home or land to return to. She lost the right to manage her first husband’s land in the north when she remarried.
“What do I return to?” she asks, staring blankly in the distance. “Whom should I return to? What, where is my home?”
