One example is El Salvador. ”In order to receive official assistance,”
the commission`s report said, ”displaced Salvadorans must register with authorities and provide details of their personal background. Many refuse to do this, fearing that those details will be used by the military and death squads to identify and eliminate relatives or fellow villagers. In response, the government considers that the . . . unregistered people are by definition `subversive.` In some areas they have been bombed, strafed and mortared, sometimes while waiting to collect food supplies from nongovernmental relief organizations. Safe havens run by the church and voluntary organizations are kept under surveillance. Any displaced person leaving the refuge runs the risk of arrest, torture and even death.”
Calle Real is a camp of low-slung, dormitory-style buildings built by the Salvadoran Catholic Church nearly four years ago on a steep hillside half an hour`s drive from San Salvador, the nation`s capital. The camp, like many others near the city, was constructed to house the overflow of campesinos from San Salvador, where the rural peasants, their homes and villages destroyed in the ongoing civil war, had flocked.
The camp is surrounded by a high wire fence, and its one gate is under constant guard. The 325 people living there last May seldom left the compound, though they are allowed to do so if they ask for permission. Outside the camp gate, they risk being stopped and detained by military patrols, whether they have written passes or not.
”Because we came from conflicted areas in the war zones,” said a camp leader, ”we are accused of being guerrillas or helping the guerrillas. If your home district is listed on a pass and a soldier stops you outside the camp, they become suspicious of you as soon as they look at it.
”Last November (1987) some women went outside the camp to do some shopping in San Salvador and were stopped by soldiers on the highway. They were kept blindfolded for 24 hours and taken to a cemetery, where they were held and questioned. If you want, you can go outside the camp and look for work, but five days later you might be arrested and detained because the military is suspicious of the village you came from. People fear going outside the camp, so most remain here all the time.”
The Calle Real inmates make most of their own clothing and shoes and at least partially feed themselves with their own garden plots. The rest of their food is supplied by the Salvadoran Catholic Church and by international voluntary agencies. They are looked after by volunteer doctors and nurses, most of them American with strong church affiliations.
The mood in Calle Real is one of quiet defiance. If most of the inmates aren`t rebels, their sympathies probably lie with the rebels. Every adult in the camp lost his or her home in government ”sweeps” of the Salvadoran countryside. Nearly every adult has had at least one close relative killed in the civil war, usually by indiscriminate government aerial bombing or artillery fire in their native villages.
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The utter savagery of civil war in a place like El Salvador stymies even the best relief organizations. The atmosphere is so politically charged that the mere act of providing the most basic aid to the internally displaced is interpreted as helping one side or the other. The Independent Commission`s 1986 refugee report noted the cynical exploitation of Red Cross assistance by the Salvadoran government:
”In order to retain a good working relationship with the government, the ICRC has provided the authorities with details of its food deliveries to displaced people. In 1983 and 1984 this information was used by the military to organize attacks on the displaced people as they assembled to collect their rations. As a result, many were deterred from seeking further assistance, and the ICRC was forced to make a substantial cut in its feeding program. Not surprisingly, the ICRC has refused to take on the task of coordinating assistance to the displaced in El Salvador, believing that this would inevitably lead to conflict with the government or charges of collaboration from the guerrillas.”
For internally displaced refugees, the most dreaded situations occur when governments or rebel groups completely draw curtains around their borders, keeping journalists and humanitarian workers away. The total denial of outside access to a country or a rebel-held territory is usually telling. It often means that the people in charge are busy committing atrocities on their own people.
It took years for the rest of the world to learn of and accept as fact the mayhem Pol Pot inflicted on his people in Cambodia. Hundreds of thousands of people in rebel-controlled areas of Mozambique today are being held in a state of slavery by threat of death. A similar orgy of violence wiped out more than half a million people in Uganda in the early 1980s. But the curtains were so tightly drawn by Uganda`s dictator of that period, Milton Obote, that few people outside Uganda even today are aware that anything happened. In Uganda, however, the horror of Obote`s reign is evoked simply with the mention of one place: the Luwero Triangle.
Between 1982 and 1985, Milton Obote`s army very nearly succeeded in depopulating the Luwero Triangle of its 1.6 million people. Any males between the ages of 14 and 50 were automatically considered opposition. If they were caught with their families, all were summarily shot. Women, children and the elderly caught in the army sweeps were herded into government enclaves run like slave camps, with no medical attention and very little food provided. When starvation began to set in, the ICRC tried to run food convoys out to the camps, but Obote stopped them, claiming the food was intended for opposition guerrillas. Within three years, 300,000 persons in the Luwero Triangle were dead either by gunshot or by enforced starvation. Another million were held in government camps, had fled to neighboring provinces or had joined the guerrilla army fighting Obote`s regime.
In early November, 1987, I spent a day touring the southern districts of Luwero Triangle, just an hour north of Kampala. My driver-interpreter, Joseph, is in his early 40s. He is, I soon learned, a national celebrity who once had been the first-string goalie for the All-Africa soccer team. In the wreckage of Uganda`s economy, he now makes a living with his battered old car guiding journalists and foreign delegations in and around Kampala.
The Luwero Triangle is one of the lushest areas of Uganda, a country so blessed with rain and land so rich you half-expect a broomstick left out overnight to sprout branches. Under good leadership Uganda could have been the most prosperous nation in black Africa.
As we drove along the fractured pavement of roads that obviously hadn`t seen repairs since the British left, Joseph talked about the everyday terror everybody felt during the Obote regime. He had lived through it in Kampala.
”For a long time everybody went to bed wearing all their clothes, even their shoes,” he said. ”You wanted to be prepared in case the soldiers came to your home. You had to be ready to move fast. You wouldn`t dare play a radio or a tape in your house. If soldiers came by and heard music in a house, they`d figure, `Aha! Somebody has tapes in there,` and they`d force their way in to rob you. You didn`t even want to keep a light on. Many people just didn`t bother to stay in their houses at night, sleeping instead outside in their gardens or yards.”
We had left Kampala early in the morning, and in my haste I had forgotten a notebook with directions to some places in Luwero that a diplomat had recommended I try to see. Joseph couldn`t recognize anything from my fuzzy recollections, so he turned into a small village churchyard to consult the local priest.
I noticed as we walked toward the rectory that the church was overflowing with 300 or 400 women dressed in their finest. It being a Thursday morning, I was curious about the gathering.
”Ah,” said the genial priest of Kiziba Parish, Father John Baptist Kkonde, ”you have chosen a very good day to visit us. Today is the first Thursday of the month, the day we have the meeting of the Widows Club.”
Father Kkonde wanted me to stay and watch the meeting. I was worried about a gathering storm. The roads would soon be impassable and my day would be wasted if I did not see and photograph some of the evidence of Obote`s brutality.
We left the priest standing in the churchyard, and two minutes later Joseph stopped the car. He walked across a gully, motioning me to follow him through a 6-foot-tall barrier of grass and reeds. On the other side, neatly stacked on a platform, were perhaps 500 skulls and the bones that once belonged to them.
Many of the skulls had bullet holes through the forehead, others were horribly crushed. There was no way of identifying the remains, so the bones were just stacked up as a memorial. They were, Joseph said, Father Kkonde`s former parishioners, all that was left of the husbands, brothers, sons and daughters of the Widows Club I had just left.
We hurried back to the church. The widows were of all ages, but most seemed to be in their 50s, 60s and 70s. Father Kkonde said many of the village families were wiped out except for older women and very young orphans. Returning survivors were causing great problems.
Families with surviving males were doing all right, but the widows, especially the older ones left to care for orphaned grandchildren, could not cope with the heavy farm work needed to support their households.
”After Obote was defeated, I found my nephew`s children, a 5-year old girl and a 6-year old boy,” said Federesi Walana, 70. ”My nephew and his wife had been killed, so I have taken them in. We eat what little we can cultivate, and I make a little working as a casual laborer, but it is not a very good life.”
Erunesi Ddumba, a 50-year-old primary-school teacher, lost her husband, a daughter and two sons. ”When the troops came,” she said, ”they looted the houses and forced the men to carry to the trucks tin roofs, foodstuffs and whatever they found valuable, which they sent to Kampala to sell in the markets. They killed most of the men who were captured. Some were shot, some were beaten to death.
”The rest of us they forced to go with them to camps they had set up. There was no food, no shelter, no medicines. There the soldiers forced us to become their wives. This life continued until July, 1985, when Obote was defeated. Now I am caring for the orphans of three of my children, two boys and four girls. We have no house, so I`m living in a small room I rent. We`re able to grow some food, but it`s a struggle. So much of it gets eaten at night by monkeys and pigs that grew wild during the war.”
Widow Rose Luboyera, 60, lost most of her relatives during the war and now helps one surviving daughter, also a widow, take care of six children.
”They just destroyed everything,” she said. ”All of my relatives`
houses are gone. All of my brothers and sisters have been killed. When the soldiers came, we prayed for our lives, begging them to take our property but to spare our lives. They mocked us with a song they made up, `Take anything, but spare our lives.` ”
The church was trying to help, Father Kkonde said, but because little outside aid had yet arrived in the Triangle, some of the widows were having extreme difficulties.
”That is why we organized this club,” he said. ”They just come together to talk about their problems and help each other with their grief.” As the meeting ended, the women lingered in the churchyard. Village children came racing over as word spread that Joseph, the soccer hero, was in town. The ladies of the club wanted me to photograph the gathering to commemorate the occasion. As they organized themselves, one of them began singing. Soon all had joined in, swaying rhythmically to the tune, serenading me as I tried to focus my camera through my tears. Joseph, as moved as I, hurriedly groped through the trunk of his car and tossed to the awestruck children two brand-new $45 soccer balls he could ill afford to give away.
Joseph had seen the evidence of the Luwero Triangle carnage many times. Still, as we resumed our journey, he seemed as stunned and repulsed as I was. Two years after the carnage ended, the Luwero Triangle had become its own monument to inhumanity. Wherever there were more than half a dozen houses clustered together, there was the same macabre display along the road-a little platform piled with bleached skulls and bones. Each village and settlement we passed through was more than half-empty, a collection of roofless houses with gaping doorways and smashed windows.
”The empty houses will never be used again,” Joseph said. ”Their people are all gone, dead.”
That is the legacy Milton Obote left Uganda, a benighted, fractured forlorn land.
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Obote and his predecessor Amin were leaders of a sovereign state, and, as such, were courted by other nations wishing to gain favor and an ”edge” that would serve specific geo-political interests. In the name of Uganda, these nations were given grants, loans and gifts of modern weapons-and advice on how to use them. To serve their own personal interests, Obote and Amin used the weapons to destroy nearly all that is productive in Uganda.
In all the years that Amin and Obote ruled, from 1971 to 1985, no roads were constructed, no schools were built, no hospitals opened, while millions of acres of once-productive farmland fell fallow. Even the game parks, once the finest in Africa, were emptied of game, suffering a ghoulish parallel to the fate of so many Ugandans. Thousands of elephants, hippos, rhinos and other wild game were machine-gunned to death by marauding soldiers for sheer sport. Surviving herds, sensing the danger, migrated to neighboring countries. Strangely, the animals, too, are now returning gradually to the spectacular parks.
In his 1982 book, ”Ideology and Development in Africa,” Crawford Young, a University of Wisconsin political scientist, referred to Uganda as a phenomenon of our time. ”Regimes might not only fail to achieve development,” he wrote, ”but might transform the state itself into a predator upon society.”
Certainly one can fit Amin and Obote`s names into that description, and Pol Pot`s, too. All three currently live comfortably in exile. There are others straining to get on the list, sovereign rulers and guerrilla leaders of ”liberation” armies, predators feeding upon their own societies. That most sacrosanct international law, national sovereignty, lets the predators go about their work.
But the rest of the world, particularly the key industrial and military powers, often has had a hand in creating the Amins, Obotes and Pol Pots of our sanguinary age. It is a time of remarkable advancements in conventional weapons, enabling even illiterate bush soldiers to kill unprecedented numbers of people. It is a time when a trillion-dollar-a-year arms business supplies proxy wars in the world`s most impoverished, least-developed societies.
Milton Obote, Idi Amin and Pol Pot are perhaps not aberrations but the logical extension of an age that has seen 13 million people thrown into the miserable oblivion of refugee camps to rot in their own despair and grief for years and decades at a time.
Since World War II, persistent conflicts have spread refugees like malignancies in the body politic of all the world. The hatred, sorrow and misery engendered in these refugees only deepens the probability of more war, more instability, more global insecurity.
”We consider around here environmental impact statements,” Sen. Edward Kennedy said during a 1987 congressional debate on U.S. funding of the rebel side in Angola`s civil war. ”Shouldn`t we consider refugee impact statements as a result of our foreign-policy decisions? I think it would be good guidance to all administrations to consider the impact of our policies, particularly military aid, on the creation of refugees.”