covered relief deliveries (food, clothing, seeds and tools), health and sanitation services, education, sources of income, information flows (from LRA), visitors to the camp (e.g. politicians, religious leaders, journalists, cultural and recreational activities (in particular dances), deaths/burials/funerals. This was supplemented every three months with a price list of all items available in their local market. Information collected included cost of the item, and its origin, allowing us to demonstrate, for example; the sale of relief items, the importance of access to urban markets, and also the wide range of items produced, hunted or gathered locally, despite the ongoing insecurity.
To capture people's subjective experience and interpretation of the dynamics within the war zone, and for the fieldworkers to bring their own subjective view of what was significant to bear, they were given event and incident report sheets on which to write about any incident or event or issue they felt would be of interest to someone who knew nothing about life in the protected villages. This resulted in reports on a whole range of issues which it would have been impossible to specify in a pre-formulated questionnaire. In identifying incidents and events of interest, the fieldworkers became ‘co-investigators’ in the Freirean sense of taking an active attitude ‘to the exploration of their thematics’ (see Freire, 1996: 87). I subsequently clustered the reports as demonstrated in Table 2.1.
I have drawn heavily on these in providing qualitative evidence for the arguments made in the thesis. Wherever quotations have been used they seek to be as representative of the wider set of stories as possible. At the suggestion of one of the fieldworkers, these accounts were enhanced and supplemented through the use of cameras. Again, I did not specify what should be photographed, but requested that each photo be dated and given a brief explanation of what it depicted and where. In many cases the fieldworkers used such photographs to corroborate their written accounts and thus strengthened the quality of the incident and event data.
Over and above the monthly reports the fieldworkers also provided hand-drawn maps of their village, and on occasion filled in supplementary questionnaires related to the research, for example on HIV and conflict and on livelihoods. Each fieldworker also provided a history of the origins of his particular protected village. When the security situation allowed I would also visit their villages with Komakech. This allowed a degree of mentoring, corroboration of the findings they had already presented, and the development of relationships of trust with the fieldworkers, whom, in addition to their role as data gatherers, I also considered as among my key informants.
Table 2.1 Number of Reports by Subject Matter over the Six Months July–December 1999, from 10 Protected Villages in Gulu District
It is difficult to overstate the importance of developing such trust; I still remember the tension of the initial meetings, and how over the months this tension was replaced by what felt like a high degree of mutual confidence and trust. My sense was that the key elements in this evolution were regularity of contact, regularity of payment, confidence over time that their reports were not being shared with the authorities, and the visible influence of their opinions on both the content and methodology of the research. As this happened, so the nature of what they were prepared to document changed; reports became more critical and the material more sensitive. With a more rigid approach I would have expected the findings of the fieldworkers to become more homogeneous; with this very flexible approach each individual's reports became more rather than less distinctive as each individual felt more able to bring his subjective concerns to bear.
The diversity of the fieldworkers was also a major advantage in dealing with the political ambiguities of northern Uganda. Although it is impossible to verify, it is probable that by having this range of people involved, those parties with an interest in knowing exactly what was being done were in fact informed and updated by our own research staff. From a methodological point of view I was more interested in capturing a wide range of perspectives than in the consistency of data across villages, and again this was well met by the diversity of the team. In presenting data drawn from the fieldworkers’ accounts, the village of the fieldworker and the date of the incident referred to are given in the endnotes.
In-Depth Key-Informant Interviews
In parallel to the ongoing monthly reports I also carried out numerous key informant interviews, generally together with Komakech, who would also translate when necessary. We began with interviews on the issue of refugees, the diaspora and remittances. These early interviews were the least successful, perhaps because they touched on too many sensitive questions, or because we were not familiar enough to ask them correctly, or because our identification of key informants was poor.4 Later interviews, which in some cases involved interviewing the same person several times over, focused more on issues such as the peace process led by the then Minister for the North, Mrs Betty Bigombe, from 1993 to 1994, the creation of ‘protected villages’ from 1996 onwards, and the teaching and role of traditional dance.
The most in-depth key informant interview, which bears some discussion as I draw on it extensively in Chapter 4, was one conducted by myself over a ten days period with a returned LRA soldier. This was unplanned and resulted from our both attending a meeting in Kitgum in late March 2002. By this point, notwithstanding the problems of researching the LRA and the fact that documentation on LRA abductions and other atrocities already existed, I had realised that, given the central position accorded to the LRA in mainstream accounts, I would have to make my own assessment of its relative importance in the overall situation, and that this would require some insight into the LRA's internal dynamics and motivations. I therefore asked him if he would be prepared to tell me his story. Although he agreed to do so he then avoided me throughout the rest of the meeting and I assumed he did not really wish to. However, when I was subsequently in Kampala he telephoned to say he was coming to tell me the story there. In the event his story, from the day he was abducted in 1996 aged 19, to the day he returned to Uganda under the Amnesty in late 2001, took eight days to tell and a further two days to check through. Rather than taping it I typed it straight onto my laptop with him looking over my shoulder, and we ended up with a transcript of forty-four pages.
Against the backdrop of numerous accounts given by returned abducted children, this account is important because, at nineteen years of age, Jacob was already an adult when abducted, and he spent his six years mainly within the LRA's headquarters. His story confirms many of the elements of the feedback given by younger abductees, but adds a whole layer of information about the day-to-day running of the LRA and the gradual changes in political climate and their influence on the LRA – at least as he was able to perceive them. I have included the entire transcript as Annex A so that readers can assess the account for themselves.
For several reasons I did not prioritise key informant interviews with NGO or IGO staff. As an NGO staff member myself, I felt I would have numerous opportunities to engage in participant observation of NGO activities, such as weekly NGO security meetings. Most of the international and many local NGOs operating in Gulu district participated in the September 1999 conference,5 and several international NGOs participated in meetings with the Government following the eviction of ACORD from Kitgum district. More importantly, I wanted to capture their role as institutions as perceived by their ‘beneficiaries’, rather than the opinions of individuals within them. As such I decided to rely to a large extent on the observations of their work as seen throughout the fieldwork, together with their own documentation and statements to the media. However, in the course of my eighteen months fieldwork and subsequent visits I had opportunity to have conversations with many aid workers and to get a sense of how they saw the problem and how they justified their approaches. I have tried to give an overview of those conversations, notably in Chapter 8.
Audio-Visual
