Reasons why Uganda’s good refugee policy could change

Armed conflict explodes. The shooting sides don’t play by any known rules of military engagement. They kill, they rape, they maim, they abduct, they torch homes and gardens, they pillage.
To stay put as a non-combatant in these circumstances is no option. You can’t work, you can’t take your children to school, you can’t even eat. You could be killed or raped or maimed.

You up and go, flee for your life. You are forcibly displaced overnight from the quiet, predictable life you know. Just like that, you end up either as an internally displaced person (ask people in northern Uganda), or a refugee if you across the border like the South Sudanese are doing running over into Uganda.

Never having been forcibly displaced, I can only imagine how annoying, traumatising this situation can be to individuals, to families, even communities.

According to a Daily Monitor report on Friday, a South Sudanese mother of 11, Joyce Napesa, told some of the delegates attending the just-ended solidarity conference on refugees how she and her children still cry and shake at night many months after fleeing their home in Yei because of the on-going civil war.

“Soldiers stormed our village… They rounded up the men and killed many of them. My husband was taken; I don’t know whether he is alive or not.”

Ms Napesa, who now lives at a refugee community centre in Kampala, also said: “Women and girls were raped and many of us are now carrying unwanted pregnancies while others have contracted HIV. We’re in a hopeless state, traumatised…”

We read and hear about these human-made horrors yet they never end. Those whose quest for power leads to these nightmares have blood on their hands. President Salva Kiir and Dr Riek Machar, the power-hungry key protagonists in the current iteration of the South Sudan bloodletting, have rivers of blood on their hands.

We can theorise about the roots of the current phase of the conflict, blame everyone we can in the world, but it boils down to the decisions and choices Gen Kiir and Dr Machar have made. So, would the conflict end if the two men were removed from the scene, as they should have been like yesterday? I have no idea, but it could be a good start. Who wants to bell this South Sudanese cat?

Uganda intervened after the war broke out in December 2013, but it was a partisan act in favour of president Kiir.

Eventually, the UPDF was hounded out of there and the tenuous stability it had enforced fell apart and the shooting, which had never fully died down, continued with urgency.

Once that happened, it was obvious that the viciousness of the conflict would lead to an even accelerated flow of refugees mainly into Uganda. Thanks to the South Sudanese, small Uganda is now a top-five refugee-hosting country in the world. Which explains the international conference in Kampala.

But, let’s beware. Forward-looking as Uganda’s refugee policy is — where refugees can freely live amongst the host communities — things could change. It is a possibility worth considering.

At 1.2 million refugees from 13 countries, just how many more refugees can Uganda — with its rapidly growing, poor and unemployed population — host before the communities in West Nile and elsewhere feel overwhelmed and turn against them?
Whereas Uganda has generally welcomed refugees partly because Ugandans themselves were once refugees in large numbers, the current very welcoming environment is also the work of President Yoweri Museveni, the self-proclaimed pan-Africanist.

Have people like UN boss António Guterres, a former head of the UN refugee agency, contemplated Uganda having a new leader sooner whose policy may be less charitable than Mr Museveni’s?
I see a lot of headache for the big people who make big decisions in the world. So far in this neighbourhood they have failed in South Sudan, Burundi, Somalia. Yet we know the cost of failure. People like Joyce Napesa of Yei, South Sudan, could do with a different reality.

Mr Tabaire is the co-founder and director of programmes at African Centre for Media Excellence in Kampala. [email protected]
Twitter:@btabaire