Gravel pits provide refuge from civil war
By Matt Brown, The National, June 4, 2008
KAMPALA, Uganda – Alex Opoka came to the Kawanga quarry to work. For 12 hours every day, he hauls large chunks of quartz and slate up a hill to a pile where women and children as young as eight use hammers to crush the stones into gravel.
At the end of the day, Mr Opoka, 26, takes home US$2 (Dh7.3) to feed his wife and four children. His hands are cracked and calloused from eight years of mining gravel, which is sold to construction companies to make houses and roads.
But as well as work, the quarry provides Mr Opoka with safety.
A member of the Acholi tribe, Mr Opoka comes from northern Uganda, which has been engulfed in a 22-year civil war. When he was 16, Mr Opoka was abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a rebel group that has fought a guerrilla war against the Ugandan army. He was on his way home from school when the rebels took him at gunpoint into their ranks.
Mr Opoka was forced to serve in the rebel army for three years until he escaped during a gun battle. He fled south, away from the war zone, and he did not stop until he reached Kampala and the security of this informal Acholi work camp.
“I came here for protection,” he said. “If the rebels catch me again, they will kill me.”
Uganda’s civil war has displaced roughly two million people, many of whom live in squalid camps in the north. Malnutrition and disease are rife. The camps are routinely raided by the LRA. The Ugandan army too is accused of abusing camp dwellers.
Some of the displaced preferred to migrate to Kampala, where they have set up their own settlements. Unlike the camps in the north, they do not receive any government assistance and are forced to take what work they can, often in such dangerous jobs as gravel mining.
Labaga Jovino, 46, has worked in the quarry since he fled the fighting in the north 15 years ago. His brother was killed when a rock slide crushed him while he was mining gravel.
Mr Jovino regrets that he was not able to take his brother’s body back to his home village for a proper burial.
“He wasn’t taken back to be buried because it was not safe to go back due to the war,” he said. “We should be living back in our villages. We are really struggling here.”
The Acholis have set up a slum community near the quarry and live in mud-brick houses with corrugated metal roofs. They live and work alongside members of other tribes, who, for the most part, have welcomed them.
“They are just trying to feed their families,” said Bakali Mugawa, a member of the Busoga tribe, who works in a gravel quarry across the road.
“We don’t have any grudges. Their work is fine.”
The LRA, led by self-styled mystic Joseph Kony, has been trying to overthrow the government of Uganda and replace it with one based on the Ten Commandments. The rebels have abducted thousands of children, using the boys as soldiers and the girls as sex slaves.
A truce in 2006 brought peace to most of northern Uganda. Some of the displaced are starting to return home.
But a final peace deal has been repeatedly delayed.
Kony, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, has refused to sign a peace deal until the court drops its warrants.
Human Rights Watch said the LRA is still actively terrorising villagers in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Central African Republic, where Kony and his rebels have been hiding during the two-year peace negotiations.
“International action is needed to end the Lord’s Resistance Army’s reported new spree of abductions and sexual violence and to help execute arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court for the group’s leaders,” the rights group said in a report last month.
Until Kony signs a final peace deal, many of the displaced people in Kampala are too scared to return home.
“Let Joseph Kony come out and negotiate and we can make peace,” said Simon Ochwo, an Acholi gravel miner. “If he does not come out, the war will come again.”
Mr Opoka is one of the few here who met Kony during his time as a conscript in the LRA. He desperately wants to go back home to his village in the north, but he wants Kony to face justice first.
After Mr Opoka escaped from the LRA, the rebels went back to his home to track him down.
When they could not find him, they killed his mother and burnt her hut. He said it is too late for Kony to negotiate an end to the war. “Kony should be caught dead or alive; then there can be peace,” Mr Opoka said. “When there is peace, I must go back to my mother’s land.”