This is not a land dispute

On Monday I went to a mourning in Palwong parish deep in the village near Pabbo. The occasion was related to a land dispute. I’ve been at the helm of an effort to mediate a conflict over land that turned deadly last month when neighbors attacked each other and a person died. With me on the team are some local officials from Amuru District and a project manager at Ker Kwaro Acholi. We decided that before we could ask the sides to meet and mediate, we needed to visit the family of the man who died.

I was nervous about going. I’m always nervous. I worried about details of the trip, getting stuck in the bush, having enough water, enough biscuits, contracting malaria, etc. etc. To tackle at least the first worry, I called Patricia at 8:30am to make sure everything was ready for our 11am take off. She said that her boss was blocking the trip. (Unanticipated worry…of course.) After I called her boss’s boss and we got the green light, we traded several more calls before we finally took off. Our first stop was to buy salt, soap, sugar and posho to give to the family. We then set off on the Juba, Sudan road. The road to Pabbo is horrendous at the moment and we were in a very old vehicle with no shocks. We felt every single bump for 40 km and could not drive faster than 40km. We arrived at the sub-county headquarters about 2 hours late and yet no one was ready. After another hour, the mourning delegation set off into the bush. We turned off the main road, onto a secondary road and then on to a tertiary road, which was teeming with mud and puddles. We skidded and slid our way for about 45 minutes. Maybe we were in Sudan, I had no idea. Amazingly, we still had network. I was praying my mother would not call. What would I say, “no worries mom, I’m in the middle of the bush with nearly complete strangers attending a funeral of someone stabbed to death and it’s getting dark…” Probably not.

We reached the family and I was amazed to find many people, children, babies, puppies and a ginormous pig in what seemed to me to be the absolute middle of no where. Greetings were made and the priest we brought with us opened with a prayer. We first assembled under a mango tree, as is tradition in the village. But then we moved to stand by the grave, which was an informally dug site about 10 feet from the huts. The mother and brother of the deceased were there and everyone looked so sad. The sadness was clear when the speeches started. The patriarch of the family, the deceased’s uncle, told his version of the events and choked up several times. The mother, and the other women, sat on a mat some distance away from us and said nothing but naturally looked very distraught. The brother, who has been accused of marauding in the area with spears and knifes since his brother’s death, spoke at length and was very “bitter” to use a Ugandan description of his state. He recounted the events of his brother’s immediate death, as well as the historical rift between the families. The rift went back to the LRA days when his father had first been accused of being an army informant, then accused of being a rebel collaborator and finally was tortured to death by one side or the other. Somehow the family responsible for this most recent killing were involved in his father’s death too.

As I listened to these very painful accounts I wondered why I was there. I was somehow pleased when they appreciated our presence and particularly that they appreciated that our chief purpose was for mourning. A lawyer had visited them a couple of weeks ago and the brother said today, “if you had brought that lawyer with you I would have killed him.” For all my worrying, this didn’t alarm me. But I was trying to figure out why the traditional and local authorities were not really leading this. Yes, we had come with some people, but it was because my project had paid for it. I, nor anyone I brought with me, truly had the skills and knowledge needed to unravel and quell this generational conflict. So we listened. And we listened. We spoke some too. Since I obviously stood out and rather embarrassingly, the white person is always given the highest honor, I was asked to speak. I meekly tried to explain my presence. I thought I would start by explaining why I was there, our work on land, etc. I then of course expressed my deepest condolences.

The brother, who would not look at me, retorted that “this is not a land conflict.” And he was right. It was clearly a feud between families, exacerbated by war, displacement and time. A dispute over land was simply the latest manifestation of the feud. The look on his face brought that into strong relief. Suddenly I remembered the Paramount Chief talking about this in DC a couple of years ago. We were discussing what would happen when people went home after years of conflict and displacement. The PC stated his fears that once people go home, as they meet again at water points in the village for example, retributions will begin. A ha! Perhaps all of these land disputes plaguing northern Uganda are really manifestations of retribution. The land disputes are a way for people to exact revenge and return the favor anguish.

This is not a news flash for people here, but it is for me and I suspect it is for other outsiders. As I sloshed back and forth on the way back to the main Juba road, I had epiphany after epiphany. I pondered how amazing it was that I’ve learned so much living here that I would have never known from the periphery and yet how much I have yet to learn. I pondered this Prado’s terrible shock absorbers. I learned that mediation takes copious patience, empathy and nimbleness that I wondered if I could muster enough of to help the mediation team navigate this dispute. Finally I learned that the largest current destabilizing factor in northern Uganda, the land dispute, may really be a proxy for pain and suffering from the conflict.