Data
Another major item, which informed my view of the LRA (and Government), was a video recording of the 1994 peace talks, which my research assistants transcribed and translated (see Annex B).
I felt that our findings would be stronger and more accessible if supported with visual documentation. In addition to photographs, a digital video camera was used to document a whole range of activities; food distributions, political occasions (e.g. NRM day), ceremonies (e.g. the installation of Archbishop John Baptist Odama, the anointment of a local chief), celebrations (e.g. World Women's Day, World AIDS day). These were dubbed onto standard VHS tapes and then edited. Again, while basic guidance was provided on how to use the digital camera, the decision about what to film in a given place or situation was generally left to whoever had the camera. Where it was not possible to use video recording, audio recordings of public functions and cultural activities were made. The team also taped radio broadcasts – covering occasions such as the District Council meetings and including the LRA's own ‘Radio Voice of Free Uganda’ for the few weeks that it succeeded in broadcasting to northern Uganda (see Chapter 4).
Media Monitoring
In the event I made relatively little use of the transcriptions of these recordings, and drew instead on newspaper clippings to give a sense of the kind of information circulating inside the ‘war’ zone. Newspapers were a constant feature of daily life in Gulu town. The two dailies, the New Vision and The Monitor, arrived with the first bus in the morning and by mid-morning were sold out. They were eagerly scanned and their contents fed into numerous discussions. On the one hand they were the only regular source of news, and provided some record of events as they occurred. On the other hand, they could not be consumed unquestioningly, the New Vision because it was Government controlled, The Monitor because it was subject to constant harassment by the Government. They also seemed inconsistent in the tone adopted, at times expressing a critical voice, at times simply reflecting official positions. The ambiguous space thus created contributed substantially to my own sense of being in a surreal environment in which nothing was quite as it seemed. To try and get an insight into this phenomenon I employed two part-time documentation assistants to go through these daily papers (including local language papers), clipping and filing those items of concern to the project (e.g. Sudan, LRA, Gulu and Kitgum districts, Diaspora, International NGOs, Human Rights, Gender, West Nile Bank Front, ADF).
Some of these (e.g. Sudan) were a useful source of information on ‘linkages’, others were more useful as a control of the quality of reporting as a whole (e.g. we could compare our own accounts of events in Gulu district with those given in the media). Analysing the discrepancies found through this juxtaposition of public information and our own primary data allowed some conclusions to be drawn regarding the manipulation of public information and thereby of public opinion (see Chapter 4).
Throughout the thesis I have quoted from these news clippings. In some instances I have used them as references for particular events, in others to demonstrate the biases in the opinions expressed in them, and in others to give readers a sense of the extent to which the media contributed to peoples’ sense of disorientation and could thus be integral to the dynamics of situation.
Research Integrated with Programming – The Use of Focus Groups
To engage existing programme staff in the research process I was keen to establish joint research exercises with my colleagues in ACORD's Gulu office. These had to emerge during the course of the work rather than being cast in stone before I had even arrived. The opportunity to make a connection emerged around ACORD's involvement in a Belgian-funded project concerning traditional leadership, as it was agreed that some assessment of how this leadership was generally viewed should be carried out. From January 1999 we therefore embarked on research into the roles and responsibilities of traditional and modern leaders, as seen by the members of ten community-based organisations with whom ACORD had longstanding relationships. These included youth, subsistence farmers, women victims of conflict, and people living with HIV/AIDS (see Chapter 6). In each discussion we first drew up a timeline for the period 1986–1999 and asked people to remember one or two incidents which had happened in each year as a result of the war at national, district, community levels, and, finally, to them or their immediate family. It was a very simple but extraordinarily powerful method, which left the respondents to determine what to mention or to keep silent about. In each group, regardless of its composition, a litany of unceasing abuse and violation emerged. In addition to the better documented LRA abuses, this stage of the research revealed heavy levels of sexual abuse by the military, as well as rampant destruction of peoples’ livelihoods by different forces at different points in the history of the conflict (see Chapter 3 for findings from one women's group). Had the exercise just been conducted with one group it might have appeared exceptional; when it became clear that such experience of violation was consistent across groups with very different profiles and in very different parts of the district, it was shockingly unanswerable.
These findings led us into a second phase of research with the ACORD programme on HIV and AIDS.6 The main objective was to explore the perspectives of the military on issues of HIV and of sexual relations with civilians, again using focus group methods with groups of ordinary soldiers, officers, and military wives, both in Gulu barracks and in a number of rural detaches. Again, ACORD's existing relationships greatly facilitated this otherwise potentially problematic exercise. In most military sites where we carried out the research we were the first NGO to have visited. A third stage involved gathering data on livelihoods (see Chapter 5). Fieldworkers completed a questionnaire designed to supplement studies carried out previously by programme staff as part of their earlier work in this area (for discussion of findings see COPE Working Paper 32).
The work on traditional leaders involved all of us participating in and documenting numerous meetings in local communities, as well as the higher levels of local and central government policy-making. The latter also allowed close observation of some of the NGO/donor politics behind the stated aims of interventions related to the traditional leadership issue.
A further important source of data, which helped to shape the thinking of Chapter 7, was an in-house planning workshop conducted with all ACORD's staff from northern Uganda, including the COPE fieldworkers and documentation assistants. The proceedings of that workshop, conducted in early 2000, both corroborated and significantly added to my understanding of various forms of discrimination and humiliation. Indeed, it was an object lesson in how certain types of information (in this case the question of negative and derogatory racial and ethnic stereotyping) only emerge if the right questions are asked.
Dealing with Findings
Quite apart from the political challenges of conducting research in a politically charged environment and on potentially sensitive topics, there was also the problem of how to present the findings. The original proposal to DFID suggested that this be done in a small dissemination workshop at the end of the field-work period. There were a number of problems with putting this into operation; London was not an ideal venue since many people who could contribute to and draw from the discussions would have been excluded, and it risked accusations of ‘extractive research’ or worse; Kampala, given Uganda's north-south divide, presented similar problems, although access would have been easier.
At the suggestion of the ACORD Gulu co-ordinator, therefore, the workshop was held in Gulu, to allow much fuller participation by all those who had been involved in the research, and by people most directly affected by the situation. This demanded a
