How Acholi People in Northern Uganda Produce and Manage Truth about Conflict-induced Death at the Local Level

Abstract

Reconciliation is regarded as one of the most essential elements of peace building. In order to materialize reconciliation, programs to investigate what happened during the conflict, such as Truth Committee, were implemented in many societies worldwide. Often, those who implemented these programs were assumed to be either offenders or victims; however, this binary opposition overlooked complex conflict situations, in which offenders could also be victims and vice versa. When attempts to discover the “truth” were carried out under the above-mentioned simple assumption, they could not comprehend the intricate contexts in which people talk and, thus, create multiple truths.

In northern Uganda, brutal conflict between the government and rebels, mainly composed of Acholi people, began in 1986 and continued through 2000s. Many Acholi lost their family members in these attacks, but in the years since, several international actors have intervened to achieve reconciliation between the former rebel soldiers and ordinary citizens. They attempted to utilize local methods of conflict resolution, such as “traditional justice.” In particular, they focused on a ritual called mato oput, which is performed to deal with murder cases, and emphasized one particular part of the ritual, in which people confess truth and pay compensation. These attempts, however, were not carefully designed to be applied to the local situation. Meanwhile, local people carried out mato oput for another purpose in which they created their truth. This paper shows how people contextualized and interpreted deaths that had occurred at the time of disorder, and created a truth in order to understand the disorder that they had experienced.