Dennis Tushabomuhangi’s first military deployment soon after joing the UPDF late last year was in the volatile Karamoja region. As one of the UPDF soldiers, he was charged with  guarding cattle kraals against armed Karimojong cattle rustlers. These communal kraals were set up all over Karamoja to check the cattle raids as one of the strategies in the Karamoja disarmament programme. Under the system as many as 5000 cattle would be brought every evening for the UPDF to guard and their owners would get them in the morning.

Everything had been going well for the 24-year-old soldier and his comrades as there had been few clashes between the army and the warriors. On June 2 all that changed.

“We were at a kraal on the foothills of the Moroto Mountains,” Tushabomuhangi recounts to The Independent at a hospital bed at St. Kizito Matany. “It was the 15 of us guarding a kraal and then we heard a group of warriors approaching.”

At first Tushabomuhangi and his colleagues shot in the air to scare away the warriors just in case they were not prepared for the UPDF presence but they didn’t budge.

“We never expected them to be very many but before we knew it we were overpowered and they killed three of my colleagues,” he said. Tushabomuhangi escaped, but not unhurt. He was shot in the right arm as he fled. “They could have been about 100 warriors and most of them armed.”

Tushabomuhangi, who had been in Karamoja for less than nine months, comes from Kabale. He was brought to Matany Hospital a month ago where one of his colleagues is taking care of him as he recovers. It is not clear how long it will take for him to recover or if he will be able to go back to his job.

Of recent Matany Hospital has seen a reduction in the number of patients seeking treatment for bullet wounds and the Medical Superintendent believes it signifies a reduction in the number of violent encounters either inter-tribe or between the Karimojong and UPDF.

Between 2006 and 2007, the hospital treated about 200 people with war wounds and these were probably just a few of those who survived in the fighting.

“Most of them would actually come when wounds are already rotting, about a week after they were shot,” said a doctor at the hospital, “The hospital currently admits about 12 gunshot wounded people per month but the past data shows that before the forced disarmament started, for every two days two wounded people would be admitted.”

At Matany, Tushabomuhangi stays at the War Wounded Patients’ ward. Ironically he spends time in this room together with warriors injured either in inter-tribe raids or in crossfire with Tushabomuhangi’s fellow UPDF soldiers.

Sleeping in the bed next to his was a Karimojong warrior whose foot was almost shuttered in a raid and had to undergo several surgical operations. Yet in this ward all of them are patients and no one is an enemy. It is each person with their own story.  But outside this hospital the battle for the guns goes on.

The UPDF has been deployed in Karamoja since 2001 to disarm the warriors who raid each other for cattle and sometimes food and personal belongings.

The Karamoja’s insecurity is as old as the region’s history. Armed cattle rustling in Karamoja has always been a problem for even the past regimes and this government simply inherited it. Past governments unsuccessfully tried to forcibly disarm the Karimojong.

In the face of increasing raids and attacks on Karamoja neighbouring tribes in December 2000, parliament passed the Disarmament Act among whose objectives was to stop inter-clan clashes within Karamoja and to restrain the armed Karimojong from terrorising their neighbours in Uganda, Kenya and Sudan. In 2001, the army started the disarmament exercise and eight years later the exercise is still on but with little success.

Indeed it’s difficult to point to the real achievements of the exercise or whether tranquillity can be restored in armed society through disarmament.

The UPDF 3rd Division Spokesman Capt. Henry Obbo says there’s been improvement in the security situation in Karamoja.

“By this time in 2006, we had registered 31 fatal ambushes on roads across Karamoja but this year we haven’t had any,” Obbo says.

In the last eight years, the UPDF has collected close to 30,000 guns from the hands of the Karimojong. Although there’s no estimate on how many guns remain in the Karimojong area, Obbo says the progress in demilitarising the region is still little because “of the civil-military approach that the government has taken.”

Frank Muhereza, a social science researcher told The Independent that the gun problem in Karamoja has been misunderstood.

“There’s lack of understanding of the society. Taking away guns from the Karimojong which they can acquire again is not the best way. We must move to disarm their minds and we aren’t doing much in this area.”

Muhereza argues that the breakdown of the livelihood system in Karamoja and the lack of proper government programmes to address this lacuna render the disarmament exercise a temporary solution.

“In the society of about 1.2 million people, one million live on food aid from the World Food Programme and the supply intervals have increased because of the increase in drought seasons and therefore hunger.”

He says that lack of alternative livelihood will continue to drive Karimojong to own guns. “The increase in hunger and factionalism of the society has increased intra-clan raids and internal strife among many Karimojong tribes.”

Muhereza further says disarmament without substantial steps in developing the area will not yield sustainable peace in Karamoja.

“Why do you think local political leaders are involved in the cattle rustling in the area? Muhereza questioned, “The biggest problem is that they have tried to solve the Karamoja problem without giving development a try. It used to be military-led. Now it’s more political yet most political leaders especially are trapped in the Karamoja cattle rustling culture themselves.”

An evaluation of the justice in Karamoja funded by DANIDA showed that in order to reap electoral advantage local leaders are bound to support Karimojong traditional gun ownership and cattle raiding.

“Tradition and culture have effectively maintained a stranglehold on all these different forms of elites mainly through the age-set and generational set system of the Karimojong. The symbolic as well as real power and authority derived from being an initiated Karimojong have ensured that all the elite maintain respect for the system, and strive to generate approval.” Muhereza says.

Therefore local council leaders are often caught in a dilemma of a choosing between snubbing the cultural practice or supporting it and thereby withhold their cooperation with the UPDF during the disarmament.

 “Even elected leaders to the local government are answerable to the Akeriket, the elders who still see the possession arms as survival matter,” Muhereza concurs.

In recent weeks the army has arrested LC III chairpersons for involvement in cattle raids and supporting the warriors. Many argue that this portrays the dilemma between the modern leadership as the rest of the country knows and the Karamoja traditional power demands.

The disarmament has faced many challenges beyond just cultural attitudes.

 Corruption hampered the voluntary disarmament where warriors would surrender their guns in exchange for ox-ploughs and maize. Many of the ploughs ended up in the hands of many relatives and supporters of local politicians. Ultimately, the UPDF received just a few guns. Consequently, the government was forced to resort to a forcible disarmament which saw the army employ a ‘cordon-and-search’ tactic where soldiers would comb every household and also ambush warriors to recover guns from them.

The strategy yielded many guns from the locals but it also attracted a lot of public outcry over alleged gross human rights abuses, forcing some donor agencies to withdraw from the joint development plans for Karamoja.

Though the UPDF justified the introduction of the ‘Cordon, Search and Disarm’ strategy, there were reports of the army rounding up people in marketplaces and villages and detaining all the adult men who would be required, in exchange for their freedom, to hand over guns in their possession.  Many Karimojong families were forced to sell their cattle to buy guns either in Uganda or across the border to hand them to the army to have their relatives released. Also some UPDF soldiers have been implicated in selling arms, ammunitions and sometimes uniforms to warriors. As a result, some soldiers have been prosecuted in the army court martial for such crimes. Cases of torture during interrogation and detention were reported across Karamoja.

But this is not to say the UPDF haven’t had a share of their own troubles. Many soldiers have lost their lives serving in the volatile region.

Capt. Obbo said the army had no official figure of the soldiers that have been killed since the forcible disarmament began but admitted the warriors have inflicted many casualties on the army.

 “In the beginning the warriors caused [us] big losses because we had few soldiers on the ground, said Obbo, “and that was because of the LRA problem but now we have increased the numbers and the attacks aren’t many.”

The biggest loss was when the warriors attacked a UPDF unit in Nabilatuk, Nakapiripirit in 2003 and killed about 30 soldiers.

In October 2006 the soldiers of Yankee Battalion of the 3rd Infantry Division were ambushed by Karimojong warriors in Lopuyo, Kacheri in Kotido District killing 16 soldiers including Maj. Kahamu Rwashande. The UPDF has since increased deployments in Karamoja, an area that covers about 27,200 square kilometres to four brigades - each brigade consists of about 3,000 to 5,000 soldiers.

This has reduced the warriors’ capacity to carry out big attacks on the army although a few raids on military units have been reported.

But even with the heavy deployment, many experts believe a peaceful Karamoja can’t be attained by only disarmament.

Many say the UPDF and government need to find a way to achieve stability in Karamoja with minimal deaths and human rights violations. In the last six months, the UPDF has killed 80 warriors who defy orders during the cordon-and-search operations in villages.

There’s also need to tackle the root causes of the proliferation of guns and cattle rustling beyond Karamojato cover the neighbouring tribes in Kenya and Sudan.

Although Uganda signed the Nairobi protocol with neighbouring countries to tackle arms trafficking to the Karamoja region, Sudan has not carried out a similar disarmament programme and Kenya has not done much to disarm the Turkana and the Pokot.

This means the UPDF disarmament results may take long to be realised as arms from as far as Somalia continue to flow in the region.

According to Karamoja Integrated Disarmament and Development revised programme for three years by the Prime Minister’s Office, the plan was to reduce the number of raids, road ambushes and gun-related crimes in Karamoja by more than 50% by December 2010.The current situation shows they are on track but with many development indicators worsening this could naturally force the Karimojong to re-arm. Ultimately, the government’s efforts to have a gun-free Karamoja are far from being achieving the intended objective unless seriously economic plans are undertaken to develop the region.

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