Pabbo Camp
Pabbo Camp
by Tim Fitzsimons | September 1, 2009
You can hear darkness coming at Pabbo. By 7 pm, life there slowly lowers to a whisper as the sound of crickets grows and distant thunder thuds dully across the plains. When darkness falls, the women—tired from spending their day hunched over their washing, cooking, and cleaning—retire to their round huts where they sleep side by side with their children.
Life at Pabbo Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp, in Amuro district in Northern Uganda, is a lesson in waiting. The camp was created by the Ugandan government in 1995 near the height of the violence caused by the Lord’s Resistance Army as it rampaged across Acholiland, kidnapping children and forcing them into military service and sexual slavery. A 2006 ceasefire ended the violence, but thousands of children still remain in captivity with Joseph Kony’s LRA.
Most Pabbo residents receive little dependable information about the operations of the LRA and as such live in a state of continued paranoia of what life is like outside the camp. Some in Pabbo venture so far as saying that the strength of the LRA is in the millions, while the majority of outside observers peg the number of combatants from several hundred to five thousand. Still, the LRA’s successful twenty-year-plus campaign of violence has altered the landscape and the psychology of the north and has forced many of its residents away from their farms and into these camps.
The people of Pabbo occupy a strange position politically: they express an intense fear of LRA violence, yet they also voice their deep distrust of the Kampala government headed by President Yoweri Museveni, who took control via a military coup in 1986 by overthrowing Tito Okello, a member of the Acholi tribe. The Lord’s Resistance Army was, until the 1990s, one player in the greater insurgency fueled by the political tension of this north/south divide.
But by 1994, with little success to show for in its campaign to overthrow the government, the LRA turned its brutality on its own people, accusing them of sympathizing with Kampala. The deep emotional and physical toll of a barbaric campaign waged by conscripted children on their own parents and brethren means that the LRA and its victims are often connected by more than the crimes committed, and that blame is muddled and intertwined. The people of the north are both terrified of their own kin and fearful of any attempt to extinguish them, which feeds the tense limbo that pervades camps like Pabbo.
Pabbo is a bleak and boring place. Unlike many of the other IDP camps in northern Uganda, this sprawling settlement is poorly planned and overcrowded. Huts are jumbled too closely together, which causes streams of sewage and rainwater to cut half-meter deep gorges through the camp’s paths. Latrines and water pumps are well maintained, but only after cholera and other diseases swept through the camp and rallied international NGOs to swoop in. The Catholic health clinic next to the church is no longer packed, but little else of Pabbo’s day-to-day life has changed since the violence ended.
Located just 30 miles from the Sudanese border, Pabbo was once a small village along the main highway to Juba. After seeing its population swell to over 60,000 during the height of the conflict, the camp today still has limited access to running water, sanitary facilities, and scant electricity is powered by pricey solar panels, diesel generators, and car batteries. A private company installed two cell phone towers in the camp, and the residents lucky enough to procure a cell phone rely on charging stations where it can cost up to 1,000 Ugandan shillings ($0.60) to replenish their batteries. Aside from these phones, most Pabbo residents have little two-way contact with the rest of Uganda, or the rest of the world. Most information comes from radio stations that broadcast English-language news updates and government HIV prevention advertisements.
Fire swept Pabbo in 2004 and burnt down many of the huts, leaving six thousand residents homeless. Some have replaced their thatched roofs with UN tarps, leaving the landscape of the camp a hodgepodge of shredded plastic, grass, and tin. According to Pabbo residents, the fire—which was fueled by the camp’s congestion—was caused by witchcraft.
More than just the physical infrastructure of the camp is in disrepair. The ancient bond between the Acholi people and the land of northern Uganda has been broken, perhaps permanently, as many are unlikely to go back to their ancestral homes where their families farmed for centuries. In fact, many IDP camp residents no longer remember where their homes once were. The problem is so pervasive that the subcounty office in Pabbo runs a land wrangling court to settle border disputes for those who have chosen to return home.
While some older residents remember life before the LRA, they are outnumbered by the large number of Pabbo residents born in the camp during the conflict. These young Acholi boys and girls have been totally removed from the agrarian upbringing that their parents knew. The population of the camp is young and has little connection to the land.
While LRA violence has been on hold for several years and some people have left for satellite camps and farms, most of Pabbo’s 40,000 remaining residents seem to be in no great hurry to leave. Although life as an internally displaced person is squalid, camp residents enjoy religious congregations (including a large and active Catholic church), relatively accessible medical facilities, and a thriving market. Several prominent NGOs have offices in Pabbo and the World Food Programme still occasionally distributes cooking oil and food. Many Pabbo residents say that the threat of random violence keeps them in the cramped camp conditions, but others theorize that the aforementioned community services, which are not easily accessible to rural farmers, exert the greatest pull on IDPs to stay put.
The appeal of these services can be best observed on Sundays, when a thousand of the camp’s residents change out of their torn rags for ruffled pink polyester dresses and white Oxford shirts adorned with sashes bearing the cross. Parades of children march proudly while singing the songs of Jesus. For many camp residents, this is by a long measure the most exciting event of the week.
In addition, residents can purchase much of the same food they once had to work the land to obtain. Millet, maize flour, greens, cassava, beans, and other staples are today readily available at Pabbo’s market – a stark comparison to the recent past when regional violence and acute overcrowding caused severe food shortages in Uganda’s camps.
As the oft-cited exemplar of Uganda’s IDP camp “problem,” Pabbo has served as a barometer for problems that afflict other camps, as disease outbreaks have tended to strike Pabbo first. Yet today the camp is thriving, with commerce seeing an uptick over the past year even while thousands of residents have left Pabbo for satellite camps closer to their ancestral lands. Conspiracy theories fly among Pabbo residents, Western NGO workers, and others about why more are not leaving (and even why Uganda’s camps exist in the first place), but for many camp residents, the reason is simple: Pabbo is safety and the bush is danger.
Traffic continues to bounce along the one lane dirt road to Sudan, and life in Pabbo trundles on. Signs of urbanization and stability are growing in the camp, linked as the place is to the brutal conflict that confined the IDPs in such terrible conditions for so long. But as time passes over Pabbo, its residents may look back and wonder when their IDP camp—a product of chaos and violence—ceased to be a temporary refuge and began to be their home.
This article is from the Tufts University [EXPOSURE]/Aftermath Project workshop in Northern Uganda in August 2008.