Category: Conflict

Freedom of expression and peace deals; a chat with Congolese journalists and activists

by Rosebell's Blog, posted in Africa, Conflict

Congo is also like a little child, everybody thinks that they can bring us a solution without even properly reflecting on it, everybody on the outside.

Last week  I was in Congo to train a group  of journalists and activists in social media and activism. During this trip I interviewed 2 Goma-based journalists and a youth activist on the challenges of working in an area with conflicts that have no permanent front lines  Conflicts, in which often civilians pay the highest price as different armed groups fight over ever-changing political interests.  Late last year, Oxfam released a report that showed there were more than 25 armed groups in North and South Kivu provinces.

The latest conflict to hit Goma, the capital of natural resource rich North Kivu province in Eastern Congo, was last year when M23 rebels temporarily occupied the capital over disputes with government regarding their integration into the national army.

Often in these times, we mostly feed on reports from international media, written by journalists who fly in and out and can be fairly protected. In the case of Uganda we had most reporters covering the conflict from M23 frontline at the rebels invitation.

For Congolese journalists who are part of these communities who have suffered the wars for over a decade, the conditions are different. They often don’t have the protection of a large media house and they can make enemies with any groups no matter how ‘objective’ their reporting can be. Also in a country where the government troops commit crimes just like the militias do, the work of a local journalist or activist is tougher in Congo.

For instance, last year DRC government banned broadcasts on the conflict in eastern part of the country.

Continue reading “Freedom of expression and peace deals; a chat with Congolese journalists and activists” →

“No such a thing as a rape culture” – Bangura.

by Rosebell's Blog, posted in Africa, Conflict, Justice

While in Addis Ababa,  I met an amazing women and leader from Sierra Leon. She is also the UN Special Representative of Secretary General on Sexual Violence. Zainab Hawa Bangura opened my eyes on what I usually read in both studies and media reports – they call it culture of rape. I suspect i could have regurgitated such words before.

Listening to Bangura, her zeal, passion and dedication caught me. I am finishing this post coincidentally in Goma, Eastern DR Congo a place which one the high UN ranking officials dared to call the “rape capital of the world.”

And the words of the Bangura were directed at the continued description of African regions where there’s sexual violence in conflict as having “rape culture.” Often a description slapped on Eastern Congo where more than 5 million lives have been lost in wars since 1990s.

Continue reading ““No such a thing as a rape culture” – Bangura.” →

#I6Days: No justice as Uganda female journalist commits suicide after gangrape

by Rosebell's Blog, posted in Justice, Uganda, Women

It is that time of the year when we dedicate 16 days to remind the world of the endless need to eliminate violence against women.
November 25 is the International Day for the elimination of violence against women. In Uganda various organisations have done a good job using different media to pass the message that ought to be the everyday message to the population.

Tweetups, SMS campaigns, radio talkshows are all on to get Ugandans to understand that violence against a woman is violence against humanity too! That you can judge a society by the way it treats its women.

A week before November 25th, I read a thread on Facebook group that I am part of. It was about a female journalist from Bukedde who had died during childbirth.

We didn’t discuss much. It was just condolence messages although I felt this was time for us to reflect how close issues we cover are to our own lives. In Uganda everyday 16 mothers die due to childbirth. This is due to complications that could be prevented. In many ways maternal health is a social justice issue.

Just as this news was sinking in, another disturbing post came up. A female journalist had committed suicide. Moreen Ndagire, whom I didn’t know personally, was a Sub-editor at a Red Pepper, a leading tabloid in Uganda. At the age of 24, she had achieved quite a lot that not many youth can do in this country with a high unemployment rate.

Moreen Ndagire at her graduation in last year. Photo from Observer.

Continue reading “#I6Days: No justice as Uganda female journalist commits suicide after gangrape” →

Uganda threatens to withdraw troops from missions, UN distances self and Congo circus continues.

by Rosebell's Blog, posted in Africa, Conflict

On Friday, Uganda’s Premier announced Uganda would pull its troops out of all peacekeeping mission over accusations that Uganda and some generals were backing M23 in Eastern DRC.

But like most people said, the threat was politicking which Uganda seems to gain an upper hand since the UNSC president has already said the report doesn’t necessarily reflect the views of the UN.

Could the views of UN be far from the contents of the report or could they be closer but UNSC will play safe in light of Uganda’s threats?

The UN Group of experts report will be out in about two weeks and seems by that time, Uganda and Rwanda and UN will have reached a settlement. This leaves the people of Congo in watching the same of old games.

Mineral looting vs security concerns

Uganda called the allegations in UN report baseless and complained that the UN wasn’t giving them credit where they have done well but this isn’t convincing. Our history in Congo shows that for every warlord that comes out strong, there’s a godfather in the neighbouring country.

This is done either by top generals in the armies with a blind eye of the presidents or big companies and agents who are trading in guns for minerals.  And many times the companies have a link to the top leadership in east African countries. However this is not to ignore role of western and Chinese companies in this conflict.

Continue reading “Uganda threatens to withdraw troops from missions, UN distances self and Congo circus continues.” →

Uganda withdraw from peacekeeping missions would threaten regional peace

by Rosebell's Blog, posted in Africa, Conflict

When UN report on Congo was first leaked in July 2012, Uganda’s support for M23 was largely ignored. So it appeared like Kampala had gotten away with as the world attention was drawn to Rwanda’s involvement and support for M23. Neither did we hear of the role of Kabila in this conflict.

Following the leak, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in August came to Uganda and met president Museveni.

In the wake of the M23 military advances, the AU summit tasked the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region (ICGLR) to look at the renewed Congo conflict. President Museveni offered to broker the talks between government and M23 rebels, the offer which President Kabila’s government was against. Nonetheless Uganda hosted three summits.

Three months down the road, it was revealed that Uganda has not been a spectator as M23, a group of former fighters from CNDP- an ethnic Tutsi rebel movement, marched taking over territory with much more advanced arms.

Who are M23?

The report says Bosco Ntaganda, a former Congolese general nicknamed the Terminator, who is wanted by the international criminal court, controls the rebellion on the ground while Sultani Makenga is in charge of operations.

M23 fighters had been folded into the army three years ago but they walked out and started the fresh fighting “to force the government to honor its agreement.”

Continue reading “Uganda withdraw from peacekeeping missions would threaten regional peace” →

Escaping military service and kidnap, one Eritrean woman’s Ordeal

by Rosebell's Blog, posted in Africa, Conflict

By Reem Abbas

When Fatima (not real name) escaped Sawa, a military camp in Eritrea, she had already been there for two long years doing the compulsory military training that is supposed to end after 18 months.

For many young Eritreans, the service never quit ends. The months become years and many youth, men and women, find themselves stuck in the military service for over a decade.

Fatima and five of her friends escaped one night from the camp without any sense of direction. They walked for three days until they reached the border with Sudan, digging up mud to drink water and having nothing to eat.

There, they found themselves face-to-face with Sudanese soldiers who detained them for two days. The rest escaped except Fatima. She was left behind and remains in Sudan, ten years later.

Fatima was then taken to a military outpost and not long after, late at night, she was rapped by one of the soldiers.

I met Fatima through a friend who found out about her story through another Eritrean in Khartoum. I didn’t even hesitate for a minute when I read my friend’s email and agreed to meet her the next day. My friend thought her story was worth telling, I felt humbled by the opportunity to tell her story.

I opened the door to find an Eritrean man David (not real name) who is probably in his 50s. And inside there was Fatima. Although I’ve read a guideline to interviewing victims of violence online at the Dart Center’s website, all of a sudden, I didn’t feel like I could do this. How could I remain composed through all of this? This was a huge challenge, but I felt a responsibility to tell this story and look for other women who have suffered a similar ordeal.

First, I chatted with Fatima and David about Sudan. In fact we talked about if they liked tea sugary or not too sweet. The conversation flowed smoothly and Fatima began telling her story and answering my questions without hesitation.

As Fatima spoke, her thin body drowned in her Sudanese toub (a cloth worn by Sudanese women) and her face testified to years of suffering endured. At 24, Fatima entered Sudan in 2000 and until now, in her 34th year she’s still stuck in Sudan.

At the military outpost, after her brutal rape, the soldier took Fatima to live with him in his tent.

“I later became very sick and I found out that I was pregnant,” said Fatima. She said she tried to escape at least three times, but was always caught and returned to the soldier, a man she had two children with.

After she had her first child, she says she halfheartedly accepted her reality and realized it is very difficult to escape. She stayed there, raising her two children with a man who verbally abused her and sometimes, beat her.

Their house was a tent inside the military camp with no access to electricity or the basics. She cooked with coal or wood and never left the tent.

“He worried that I would get to know people if I left the tent, so I never left, I never went to the market, I know I was in Kassala, but never saw it,” said Fatima.

For 10 years, Fatima was forcibly living with a Sudanese soldier. As time passed by, she learned Arabic, a language she did not speak a word of when she came from her homeland.

“When I was alone, I cried until my eyesight was almost gone,” said Fatima who was holding her glasses.

Continue reading “Escaping military service and kidnap, one Eritrean woman’s Ordeal” →

Uganda women protest topless against Police public groping of female politician

by Rosebell's Blog, posted in Justice, Uganda, Women

On Friday, Ugandans witnessed another episode of police brutality. It wasn’t just the brutality we are used to seeing.  In this video ran by NTVUganda  a police officer was, publicly before the cameras, groping an opposition politician Ingrid Turinawe.

Ingrid has been at the forefront of various pressure groups in Uganda for the last 5 years. She was one of the leaders of the Activists for Change (A4C), a pressure group that led the famous Walk to Work protests that took place in many parts of Uganda for the greater part of 2011 as the Arab spring was going on.

The group has been banned because in our country where we still use very colonial laws to the advantage of a dictatorial regime, the attorney general has powers to declare a group illegal even without evidence of  the need to ban them. This law threatens even a blogger or writers who mention A4C as government could claim that they are  promoting an illegal group  with intention to ‘incite violence’. Already two journalists have been summoned by the police over an interview had with the head of the group. Human rights groups have warned on the dangers of the government-increased crackdown on freedom of speech, expression and assembly in Uganda.

Once the group A4C was banned, some of its leaders rebranded it into For God and my Country (4GC), taking after the country motto. It was after the launch of the new group that Uganda police brutality came back to our living rooms.

This time a male police offer publically groping Ingrid as another pulls her leg out of the car. The police officer didn’t grope her once, he did it repeatedly and in the video we hear Ingrid asking why the police officer was doing that. One other police officer warns his colleague but does nothing to stop this.

Continue reading “Uganda women protest topless against Police public groping of female politician” →

Hunting Kony; View from former Uganda advisor on LRA ICC case

by Rosebell's Blog, posted in Africa, Conflict, Uganda

Dr . Payam Akhavan, is a former UN Prosecutor at The Hague, he advised the Ugandan Government on the LRA case before the ICC as part of a broader strategy of isolating and defeating Kony in 2003-2005. He is now a professor of international law at McGill University n Montreal. I have known Payam  for a few years. Here is what he told me about KONY2012

“The video is ten years too late.  Watching it, one imagines that nobody was ever involved in this struggle before they started filming.  Back in 2003, we devised a brilliant strategy with highly competent Ugandan officials on how to eliminate the LRA by depriving them of rear-bases in southern Sudan.  Within two years, the war in Uganda was over and Joseph Kony’s force of several thousand was reduced to a few hundred fugitives in the Congo.

The failure to capture him thus far has nothing to do with lack of funds. It is a complex intelligence operation against a cunning and ruthless adversary who knows how to survive in the jungle.  The millions in funds gathered so far are needed for rehabilitation of former child soldiers and their communities, not to pay overhead for NGOs in America.  The video may be useful for public education since the world is woefully ignorant about Africa.  But its content is at best uninformed and at worst deceptive.  Exploiting other people’s suffering for self-promotion is unethical.

Had the Ugandan communities directly affected been consulted, the video would have had a very different focus, and the millions of dollars in funds too would have reached those that need it most.”

More perspective on Kony2012

by Rosebell's Blog, posted in Africa, Conflict, Uganda

I know Glenna Gordon from her time in Uganda and she was one of the few American journalists who covered the later stages of the Kony war in northern Uganda. She was part of a group of journalists who travelled well with Ugandan and South Sudan officials between 2005-2009 as they went into the jungles to try and secure a peace deal with Kony. In fact she’s the one who took that photo of Invisible Children  founders holding guns among SPLA soldiers. She lived in Uganda for years and worked in West Africa too. She’s the kind of journalist and voice that I wish viewers of this video would hear more often. This was her take on the video when she spoke to the Washington Post.

 I can’t bring myself to watch the video. I found all of their previous efforts to be emotionally manipulative, and all the things I try as a journalist not to be. After the peace talks in 2008, they put out another video, and I saw the footage used in these videos blending archival footage with LRA and SPLA and videos of them goofing off. It was the most irresponsible act of image-making that I’d seen in a long time. They conflated the SPLA with the LRA. The SPLA is a government army, holding weapons given by the government, and yet they did not create any division between them and LRA. That’s terrible.

And for that Ms Gordon got a response from filmmaker defending Invisible Children with the worst of all narrative of three boys trying to save Africans instead of playing Angry Birds.

Continue reading “More perspective on Kony2012” →

Kony2012; My response to Invisible Children’s campaign.

by Rosebell's Blog, posted in Africa, Conflict, Uganda

For the last many hours i have followed a campaign by Invisible Children NGO called KONY2012 that has gone viral getting more than 20 million hits on Youtube. I am a story teller and i know the danger of a single story  . It is something many people can easily ignore especially if we are outsiders to the story.

This is the video i recorded late in the night. It’s longer than i would have wanted but i just wanted to put my views out there on a conflict I have covered as a journalist and a people I have worked among as a communications officer at Isis-WICCE. I don’t in any way think I represent views of Uganda like some comments i have seen. This is me talking about the danger of portraying people with one single story and using old footage to cause hysteria when it could have been possible to get to DRC and other affected countries get a fresh perspective and also include other actors.