Last year, I found myself watching an early round of the African football cup finals on the television at the Acholi Inn in Gulu, Northern Uganda. Next to me was a former senior leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army who had said he might give me an interview about civilian protection after the match.
The game was extremely “physical” and the LRA man was getting quite heated about the conduct on the pitch. Eventually, one deeply cynical tackle was too much for him. He leapt from his chair, shouting at the referee:
“Hey, that’s unfair, that’s terrible, send him off!”
I was gob smacked. Here was a man who had been the official spokesman for one of the most vicious armed groups in the world (whose troops think nothing of the murder and mutilation of unarmed civilians) bitterly complaining about a tackle that went for the man rather than the ball. But he was genuinely outraged. I had obviously got him wrong. After the match, he turned to me and said:
“Why do you want to talk to me about civilians?”
“Because your organization has killed and terrified so many of them and I want to understand why.”
Accusing him of a foul so soon after the match was not a good idea. He grew angry.
“You want to write a book about our war” he said “but you and all the other white people have only just turned up. We have been fighting this war for years but only now are you interested. You talk about civilians. But what is a civilian? Go around this area for a bit and then, if you can tell me what a civilian is, I will talk to you about it.”
Read the rest of his piece on the ODI Online Exchange. His new book, Killing Civilians: Method, Madness and Morality in War, is on its way to the BRC library - it's being published in November.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment