Catalyst for Peace (formerly Catalyst Peacebuilding)

Click here to read this story online:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0924/p09s01-coop.html

Headline: Respect Uganda’s brand of justice
Byline: Claire Putzeys
Date: 09/24/2007
Gulu, uganda - Uganda has enjoyed relative calm since the rebel Lord’s Resistance
Army (LRA) joined the government in peace talks last year. The talks
have been on-and-off at best, with the third round just starting this
month.

At stake is whether peace will continue. The people of northern
Uganda believe it can, if the international community allows them to
practice their own cultural traditions of justice.

In dealing with war crimes, the West has emphasized criminal
proceedings and punishment, including use of the International
Criminal Court (ICC); anything less, advocates say, leads to impunity
and possibly future violence. Without justice, the adage goes, there
is no peace.

But the people of northern Uganda, the Acholi, are convinced peace
talks will fail if Western-based standards of prosecution prevail.
“An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind,” says Ojara Bosco
(quoting Gandhi), a member of the peace committee at Unyama camp for
internally displaced persons (IDPs).

The LRA will leave the negotiating table, they believe, and continue
the violence that has touched virtually every family in Acholi-land.
Already they have endured two decades of atrocities: mutilation,
rape, murder, the forced relocation of 1.6 million people into camps
for IDPs, and the abduction of 30,000 children turned into combatants
by the LRA.

Thus, the Acholi want this round of talks to prioritize their
traditional systems of justice over what the West prefers. “Since the
wrongs were committed on the Acholi people, we want to deal with them
in the Acholi way,” says Okiedi Raymond, chairman of the peace
committee in Unyama camp. Indeed, it is imperative that the Acholi be
able to confront issues of accountability and reconciliation not as
the West deems acceptable, but as their culture dictates.

For northern Ugandans, without forgiveness, there is no peace;
justice is achieved through the restoration of relationships. And
they have a cultural tradition in place for achieving this: mato
oput, a longstanding practice that involves truth-telling and
accountability, forgiveness, and reparations.

The traditional Acholi mechanism seeks to attain peace, justice, and
reconciliation for perpetrators and victims. Its practice developed
long ago, according to Acholi legend, after a disagreement between
two brothers led to escalating levels of retaliation and violence.

In mato oput, alienation of a perpetrator through punishment and
incarceration only further ruptures broken relationships in
communities – and communal harmony is paramount to the restoration of
peace. Justice is peace, and “peace is when you can live and eat
together,” said Bishop Macleord Ochola, a founding member of the
Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative, in an interview. “If
justice is punishment, then the victim is left with bitterness and
the perpetrator is left with guilt,” he concluded.

The limitations of mato oput will certainly be tested, given the
extreme scale of atrocities. A vital component of mato oput is the
coming together of communities from both sides of the offense;
unfortunately, most victims and perpetrators are unable to identify
their offenders or the offended due to the rampant violence.

Still, while mato oput may not be the only mechanism for peace
recognized at the peace talks, it should be a vital and central
component. The international community should help the people of
northern Uganda find justice through mato oput by contributing to a
victims’ reparations fund or making material contributions.

It should also confront the well-meaning but harmful attitude that
Africa needs to be “saved,” a theme in much of today’s social
activism. It is not for Western societies to determine what justice
is or looks like – that would, in fact, do a great injustice to the
victims of northern Uganda. This is the moment for them to stand
behind an African people and tradition, to demonstrate that Ugandans
hold the key to their own future and that the rest of the world may,
in fact, have much to learn from the Acholi.

Claire Putzeys is a research fellow for Catalyst Peacebuilding’s
Voice to Vision project (catalystpb.org) , which tells stories of
forgiveness and reconciliation in post-conflict Africa.

(c) Copyright 2007 The Christian Science Monitor. All rights reserved.