UGANDA

COMPENDIUM OF CONFLICTS IN UGANDA
distributed to different parts of the country. They said that the north of the country
was disproportionately poor, causing tribal hatred towards those who come from the
current President’s region, Mbarara. They said that this unequal resource distribution in
the country prevents national reconciliation.
The fact that participants focused, amongst all other impediments to peace, on poverty
as an injustice, has important implications for transitional justice and post-conflict
recovery. It calls into question the traditional focus of transitional justice on the violation
of civil and political rights at the expense of social and economic rights. It raises doubts
with regards to Uganda’s current focus on prosecutions, at the expense of reparations
and institutional reform. If transitional justice is to help prevent reoccurrence of violent
conflict, and poverty and marginalisation are identified as structural causes of conflict,
then any transitional justice approach that neglects social and economic rights seems
diluted at best, and complicit in perpetuating citizen disempowerment at worst. One
participant in Bundibugyo summed this up best by asking us
“How do we have heroes of wars, and not those who fight
poverty?”
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