by Sam Dubal
Bearing visible war scars, Ocira still thinks of himself as a rebel. Once a fighter of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), he was unwillingly returned home, captured by the national army, the Uganda People’s Defense Force (UPDF), in combat years ago. Like most LRA fighters, he was abducted into the rebel force while still a boy. At the time of his abduction, though angered by the sodomy and rape he saw committed by the UPDF[1] against people in his area, he was not sure that he wanted to join the rebels. But today, it is clear where his loyalties lie. Boycotting elections and convinced that Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni will only leave power in the manner that Gaddafi did, he wishes he were back with the LRA, with whom he spent more than a decade. Despite reports suggesting that the LRA is a spent force, Ocira is convinced that they will successfully overthrow the government, whether in two or twenty years’ time. A new LRA government, he envisions, would redistribute wealth, improve schools and clinics in rural areas, and promote sound moral conduct and national unity.
When he (was) returned from the LRA, Ocira found a job – with Invisible Children. Invisible Children, producers of the much-criticized “Kony 2012” video, have worked to defeat the LRA through a range of strategic programs, including lobbying the US government to supply “military advisers” for anti-LRA operations – the majority of whom Ocira suspects the LRA will easily kill in battle. They have also employed “formerly abducted” persons like Ocira to handcraft merchandise like jewelry for sale, the profits of which support the organization’s mission of eliminating the LRA. Ocira made bracelets for a few years with Invisible Children before returning to his village home as a peasant farmer. Although Ocira suggests that his employment with Invisible Children was partly terminated because of his “straight talk” with foreign visitors to the office (he told them that it would be difficult to find Kony), he liked his work and says he cannot hate people who were helping him. He speaks nostalgically of his time there and of the salary that helped him live an easier life in town compared to the daily drudgery of digging with a hoe on his village garden today.
Ocira’s situation is one among countless others. During the course of my current ethnographic fieldwork among ex-LRA members, I have come to know many people like Ocira who strongly support the LRA and its politico-moral visions while finding employment with NGOs who see them as “victims,” “formerly abducted persons” who were “traumatized” by their time in “captivity” and need to have their “lives,” “hope,” and “dignity” “restored.” These are people who, at least discursively, have been transformed from rebels into charity cases, their political subjectivities humanitarianized, neutralized, and pacified. As many scholars have argued, this kind of move perpetrates a discursive violence that creates suffering victims, denying them political agency and in turn, a particular kind of humanity. Without refuting the importance of this kind of structural argument that focuses on discursive uses and effects[2], I find that this subjectivity-centered approach abstracts from and largely neglects Ocira’s own perspectives and actions, and those of others like him. Their rebellious subjectivities not only remain intact after passing through humanitarian institutions and discourses, but they also harbor no ill-will towards these seemingly counter-rebellious institutions that scholars might theorize as pillagers of humanity and political meaning.
Shifting focus to Ocira’s own views, an alternative approach could suggest that Ocira is in a state of, employing one of Museveni’s favorite catch-phrases, “ideological disorientation.” From this particular Marxist perspective, anti-LRA NGOs would function as dominant spaces in which “false consciousness” is nurtured among “unprincipled” rebels. This argument might claim that ex-LRA are not sufficiently educated or politicized to make ideological distinctions and commitments that rebels like the Sendero Luminoso – who attacked NGOs for being reformist colluders with the Peruvian state – do.[3] My work suggests that this analysis may be inadequate since the LRA is not and has not been a group driven by a singular, static ideology (much less a Marxist one). Even Ocira has difficulty clearly stating the “goals of the LRA,”[4] and while there are undoubtedly elements of liberation and salvation within the group, many of them are based on faith in the guidance of holy spirits and notions of purity. Taking this into account, and given the postcolonial malaise in which the path to “liberation” has itself become an uncertainty since (at least) the failures of Pan-Africanist socialists (among whom Museveni once and perhaps still considers himself), the very notion of “ideological disorientation” suggests, misleadingly I suspect, that there is a correct, singular, and readily identifiable “ideological orientation” that one simply has to adopt in order to achieve liberation.
As much as the path to liberation is itself uncertain and uncharted, perhaps in the terrain of a new global politics taking shape[5], then it is equally possible that the importance of anti-LRA NGOs is already overstated. To see them primarily as vectors of militarization, state-building, and depoliticization is to give them powers they may not have, recognizing them as actual political players when they are perhaps better seen from Ocira’s eyes as mere businesses, operating a capitalism whose surplus is extracted almost entirely from an unnuanced pity at distant suffering. If Ocira sees no contradiction working with Invisible Children, it may not be because they have exercised a hegemony that consents him to his own domination, or that their multifaceted, transnational operations are too flexible or dynamic for him to perceive them as a threat to his political identity; rather, he sees them as a toothless dog[6]. From his perspective, the American soldiers they lobbied for will die, and the LRA will outlive Invisible Children. For him, they were just a good source of cash income for a few years.
When LRA supporters like Ocira seek employment at an NGO like Invisible Children or join the UPDF or for a salary and a better life, their employment rarely unhinges them from their own political understanding of how social change should work – in this case, via the LRA overthrowing the government. That such employment does not even stir bitterness in Ocira, who views Invisible Children favorably, suggests that he does not consider the organization to have any meaningful political power. In this case, I would propose that it is not Ocira whose consciousness has been falsified or distorted. Rather, once people begin joining NGOs or the UPDF “for the money,” perhaps it is the organizations themselves that have already been evacuated of their political power and meaning. In other words, it is not the politicized rebel who has been transformed by the experience of working at Invisible Children, but perhaps Invisible Children itself that has been revealed as internally rotting through these contradictions. Indeed, this institutional malfunction is precisely what sparked government fear following the recent announcement of mass desertions from the UPDF, explained by the lament that soldiers are more interested in money than service.[7] Such a symptom points to the disease of a hollowed institution rather than hollowed soldiers, raising speculation about a possible coup.
What I am suggesting in these preliminary thoughts is that, beyond examining Ocira’s situation as a case of the re-subjectification or depoliticization of a rebellious subject through a discursive behemoth like “humanitarianism,” we should also ask: what do individual subjects do to or reveal about NGOs? What do their silences or complicities – themselves important discourses to consider – say about the fullness, or lack thereof, of humanitarian discourses that speak of “victims” in need of “hope” and “dignity”? When rebellious subjects see no contradiction in improving their own lives through these organization-businesses, who in fact is “disoriented”?
Sam Dubal is a PhD candidate in the Joint Medical Anthropology program at the University of California-Berkeley and University of California-San Francisco, and an MD student at Harvard Medical School. He can be reached at sam_dubal(at)berkeley.edu.
[1]Prior to 1995, the UPDF was known as the National Resistance Army (NRA). At the time of the acts mentioned here, the NRA had recently been transformed from a rebel group into the national army, following Museveni’s successful overthrow of Tito Okello.
[2] This is not to belittle the effects of this discourse, which, as Adam Branch, Sverker Finnström, and Ayesha Nibbe, among others, have argued, include in northern Uganda: contributing to American militarization of the region through AFRICOM; de-legitimizing the LRA’s political goals; and creating global life-meaning for young, do-gooding Americans.
[3] This argument would perhaps also have to overlook past evidence of LRA rebels targeting humanitarian workers and expatriates in resistance to the magical, apolitical imaginary of the LRA perpetuated by world media, among others, and accusing them of being masked accomplices of Museveni and/or the International Criminal Court (ICC). See Sverker Finnström’s chapter in Virtual War and Magical Death: Technologies and Imaginaries for Terror and Killing, eds. Neil Whitehead and Sverker Finnström.
[4] Of course, “stating” the “goals” of a group is an inherently hyper-rational exercise in itself.
[5] See, for a good example of this kind of epistemic diagnosis, Faisal Devji’s The Terrorist in Search of Humanity.
[6] Thanks to Odong Jimmy for this metaphor.