When I finally met Adyera, the founder chairman, I was surprised he was a middle-aged man. Having interacted with Eng. Opwonya’s group of fairly elderly people in their late 60s or early 70s, I had expected Adyera to be in a similar age range, but no. He told me in an interview that when he and six others initiated the Association in 2005, he was in his early 30s and did not even have any cows to claim. So, what motivated him, I asked. He said he initiated the Association to actualise his father’s dream. His father, who had a terminal illness and was bed-ridden at the time, asked him to organise the victims so they would not be cheated out of their lost livestock resources. Adyera told me that his father had viewed the organisation as a bridge (peace-building) between the government and the people of Acholi at a time when there was a lot of mistrust between the two. In his writing, Gersony (1997) points out how the people blamed the loss of their livestock on the army, while the army was convinced the people collaborated with the rebels. Acholi War Debt Claimants Association was finally initiated at a public meeting held at Gulu Public Primary School on July 9, 2005 with Adyera as its first chairman. He stressed that the pioneer team were so committed and prepared to volunteer; they worked for free to ensure the Association took off.
He said that as pioneers, they were convinced the benefit to the community would not stop at being compensated for their lost resources. It would also help rebuild their self-esteem as Acholi people, which was important in motivating them to fight poverty and food insecurity in the immediate aftermath of the war rather than depend on the ever-dwindling donor handouts. The government, on the other hand, he said, would benefit by, among other things, winning back the confidence of the Acholi people, especially those who were convinced their livestock had been ‘looted’ deliberately in order to impoverish them.
On his part, the pioneer secretary of the Association explained the difficulties they had to endure at the beginning. He narrated how the state had viewed them with suspicion and was not willing to cooperate with them. At the same time, no foreign agency funded their activities. So, unlike other community-based organisations at the time, the Association did not access any donor funding. Even the letter they wrote to the president in 2006 appealing for a negotiated settlement remained unanswered for a full year. It was not until they went to court that he finally responded. Adyera emphasised that it was their spirit of voluntarism and sheer commitment that motivated them to continue the struggle. In the end, they were able to establish an infrastructure within the Association that enabled them to mobilise and organise claimants from the grassroots in the entire Acholi subregion to claim for their rights.
In the next sections we examine and try to make sense of the Association’s role in the struggle for war reparations for Acholi people in view of the absence of a transitional justice policy.
War Reparations and Transitional Justice
In the context of transitional justice, the concept of war reparations comes as part of the process of peace building aimed at sustainable post war economic recovery (van Boven 2009). The theory holds that when administered in conjunction with other elements of transitional justice such as a truth and reconciliation commission, reparations can foster peace and development, especially when they address the economic imbalances that may have contributed to the conflict in the first place (Nkurunziza 2008).