In the run-up to the African Union (AU) sponsored Special Summit on Refugees, Returnees and Internally Displaced People in Africa held in Kampala last month, Uganda’s Chief of Defence Forces, Gen. Aronda Nyakairima, was quoted by The Observer to have declared that confining non-combatants to camps in conflict zones was “an effective military tool for counter-insurgency.”

Gen. Nyakairima’s straight-faced revelation is surprising, coming after years of equally blatant denial that the government deliberately created the camps and drove civilians into them, as a conscious military strategy, and with full knowledge of what the strategic military, as well as social and economic consequences were for the northern and eastern Ugandan population. Other than strafing villages to drive the population into the camps and establishing military garrisons to restrict population movements in and out of the camps, the military and the Ugandan state did nothing to provide the basic needs of the population, but left them to the vagaries of filthy conditions, hungry, sick, unproductive and dependent on international humanitarian organisations.