Are the Acholi mum for fear of rocking the boat?

By Opiyo OloyaThere are New Vision readers who write to thank me for an article that touched them in some manner. There are also those who write to complain about my position on an issue or another. There was a flurry of angry letters almost three years ago when I took a stand on the Acholi land issue. After almost eight years of writing for the New Vision, no reader had ever chastised me for neglecting to write about a specific subject. That changed last week when I received an e-mail from a reader who minced few words in letting me know that I was derelict in not focusing attention on the issue of Protected Villages in Gulu and Kitgum districts. He specifically castigated me for writing about soft issues like meeting Nelson Mandela, reading to my son and spending Christmas holidays with a nice book, while ignoring the dire situation facing the entire Acholi population. To rub it deep, he pointed out that a journalist from southern Uganda had recently condemned the inhuman conditions in the Acholi camps. If a southerner could feel the pain of the Acholi people, what was wrong with me, an Acholi writer who is directly affected, he asked. My first reaction was absolute anger. Who the hell was this guy to tell me what I should or should not write in my column? Did he think that Acholi issues are more important than other issues? What rights does he have for suggesting that I have been negligent? Have I not focused enough on this issue?However, I have learned that when under fire, take a few hours to think through the whole scenario. I read the printed e-mail again and again. There were moments when it seemed like the most prudent thing to do was to say, heck, forget about the reader. Who cares what he thinks anyway? Slowly, with time, something in the letter rang a bell. It became clear that the e-mail was not a personal attack aimed at making me look like a turncoat who does not care about his people. This was a letter from a frustrated reader watching centuries of culture and tradition melt away toward oblivion. More devastating for him, was the fact that the media is totally focused on issues in Kampala and elsewhere in the world. While Acholi children continue to starve in the protected villages, we in the media are busy speculating about whether Joseph Wasswa Ziritwawula or Ssebaana Kizito wins the Kampala mayoral race. Non-events like President Museveni visiting a Kampala suburb garner lion-share of the newsprint, while poor academic performance of PLE candidates in Acholi camps are glossed over. Surely this could not be mere oversight by the media, of which I am a part. No, we in the media have become accomplices in the systematic sidelining of the people of Acholi in their sufferings. We have, by our silence, given blessing to what is surely one of the gravest situation facing Uganda today -the extinction of a people with a distinct cultural identity. We have signed out and turned away to pursue sexy stories while our backyard burns and children die. More important, we have accepted as normal the usual government explanation that the camps are temporary solutions to insecurity in the north. How long is "temporary" —nine years, 20 years or 50 ?Never once have we in the media, asked whether these protected villages truly provide the wretched residents with security. What security are we talking about if people are still being abducted and killed within five hundred metres of UPDF detachments as happened last year? Who is benefiting from this arrangement, the residents of the camps or those who have begun to till abandoned land? These are critical questions that we will not ask because we are afraid to rock the cradle. Instead, we console ourselves by pretending that there are more important issues that require urgent media coverage. And so after more than a decade and a half of being refugees in their own backyards, the people of Acholi continue to watch school-age children waste away without the benefit of education. They weep for the new generation of Acholi children born in a culture of fear and abject poverty, and for whom the rumour of peace is the distant sound of thunder in the Kalahari Desert. Our collective silence on the conditions of the people of Acholi is similar to that of New York residents who, on the night of March 13, 1964, heard the desperate cry for help from 28-year old Kitty Genovese who was being attacked by a knife-wielding assailant. Many residents opened their windows, peered into the street below, saw the woman staggering away from the attacker, then promptly closed their windows and did nothing. Kitty Genovese died an hour later. It dawned on me that I was not angry with the reader for writing that acid letter. I was angry with myself for not raising the plight of the Acholi people often enough.