A few cases where collective demands for reparations have been made similarly include the victims of the massacres in Herzegovina in 2014, and the unfair detentions of Iraqi citizens in 2016. The two cases involved the Netherlands armed forces and Danish soldiers respectively. In both cases, collective justice was demanded of foreign powers. Similarly, they were not asking for restorative justice because that would be impossible in both cases given the foreign elements as perpetrators in the claims. In the rulings in favour of the victims in both the Netherlands and in Denmark, the issues revolved around the armies of the two countries having been involved in violations of the rights of the indigenous people in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in Iraq respectively— countries where they had been deployed as peace keepers (Terzieva 2019).
Whereas the two cases largely highlight claims for retributive justice, the case of Burundi where military coups were experienced almost every two years between 1966 and 2006, is different. The local population did not take the initiative to ask for reparations; but neither did the government take the lead. Hence, the discontent continued and so did the revolutions. According to Nkurunziza (2008), reparations can play a big role in peace-building, especially when they correct economic imbalances that may have contributed to the conflict in the first place. He opines that had the state taken the initiative to address the imbalances using reparations, there would have been less political upheaval. In contrast to these examples, the Acholi reparations case was rather unique as a non-state bottom-up initiative that filled a gap that neither the state nor the international community had planned to act upon.
The implementation of transitional justice in northern Uganda has been rather slow if not lacking (Macdonald 2019). For example, the government was reluctant to implement compensation for lost cattle, just as it was reluctant to put the policy on transitional justice in place. (The policy was only approved by cabinet in June 2019). Instead of working on the policy, the government tended to apply ad-hoc methods by representing transitional justice and war reparations as covered by the projects that development assistance provided. The main project was the Peace, Recovery, and Development Plan (PRDP), but this would not respond to the individual victims’ concerns; and according to Magarrell (2007) such projects cannot be considered as part of reparations programme.
Although ‘reparative options’ in transitional justice include ‘collective, symbolic and other forms such as social services for the affected communities’ (Macdonald 2019: 245), symbolic reparations such as erecting memorials or infrastructure projects are not targeted at individual victims whose form of reparation requires lists of names, number of animals lost, and the value attached. Moreover, these material resources can be converted into cash that can in turn be invested in other resources other than the ones lost, to facilitate faster economic recovery. During the negotiations with the Attorney General in 2008, a monetary value was assigned for each animal: a cow at UGX 600,000, and a goat at UGX 150,000. These were later revised to UGX 1 million for a cow and UGX 250,000 for a goat. Thus, throughout, compensation has been paid in the form of money, which is far less visible than the living animals. As a consequence, it easily evoked speculation and suspicion; and as we shall see, conflicts quickly emerged within the Association itself, and between the Association and the government; sometimes culminating in unconstitutional change of leadership.
Research Tools and Data Collection
My initial object was to investigate what appeared to be the acrimonious relationship reported in the media between AWDCA and the government regarding reparation claims. I wanted to understand the compensation delays that seemed to drag on endlessly.