“I Forgive to Forget”: Implications for Community Restoration and Unity in Northern Uganda

Abstract

Northern Uganda has experienced over ten years of relative peace since the beginning of the peace talks and cessation of hostilities between the incumbent government and the Lord’s Resistance Army in 2006. Although a final peace agreement has not been signed, the internally displaced persons’ (IDP) camps were decommissioned and people told to return home. The war in northern Uganda has been well documented – its causes and the actors (see Allen 2006; Allen & Vlassenroot 2010; Atkinson 2009; Finnstrom 2008), as well as the untold suffering that unarmed civilians, men, women and children have gone through as a result (see de Temmerman 2001; Dolan 2009; Eichsraedt 2009; Green 2008; Ovuga, Oyok & Moro 2008). In the aftermath of the war, stability and unity appear to have returned to communities as a result of the relative peace in the region. The shared experience among the people of northern Uganda of having been wronged by, or having wronged others could be one of the reasons that stability has been achieved. During the two decades war the people of northern Uganda were wronged in various ways at personal and community levels. Many were wronged as a direct result of the war: e.g. death of loved ones, abduction, maiming and separation of family and social networks, while others continue to experience wrongs in their day to day interaction with family, partners, friends and relatives, e.g. domestic violence and abuse, verbal insults and betrayal and today, land conflicts being fought between kith and kin. There is therefore an urgent need to overcome experiences of harm in order to break the cycles of violence. We believe that one way of achieving this is through forgiveness, a practice that has come to be accepted and embraced by the people of Acholi.