Labora Farms was founded as a project with the help of the Northern Ugandan Social Action Fund (NUSAF), a government organization in Uganda with $100 million of funding from the World Bank. The goal of NUSAF is to help local communities in the 18 districts of northern Uganda that have been ravaged by conflict over the last 20 years. This money is given directly to members of the community so they can invest in infrastructure and training for long-term development.
Labora Farms is unique in NUSAF as it was the first project started and run entirely by former members of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a rebel group responsible for numerous war crimes over the last 23 years in northern Uganda.
While all of the members had either gone through the customary cleansing rituals by their communities or were currently going through them, because of its ties to former enemy combatants, Labora Farms received a very negative reception in the international community. Within the local people and government though there was a lot of support.
Today Labora Farms is still receiving mixed praise from all sides, though it has had success in helping former LRA members not only make a living wage, but also for helping them reintegrate into their communities. Using historical newspaper articles and first hand interviews, this article looks at the history of Labora Farms since its controversial inception.
This article is organized as follows. The first section is a description of the history of the difficult and protracted conflict in northern Uganda and the effects it has had on the people. Section 3 describes the unique way the Acholi people have of accepting former enemy combatants back into their culture. Section 4 discusses the initial phase of implementation of the Labora Farms project along with the local and international reaction to it. Section 5 discusses the redistribution of land within the farm, why this turned out to be successful, and what the local and international communities are saying about Labora Farms today. Section 6 then discusses some of the future challenges of the project.
Northern Uganda conflict
Northern Uganda has seen some of the most complex and difficult violence in Africa. From 1994 until 2007 the LRA rebel group abducted approximately 60,000 youth aged primarily 5 to 30 years old to be used in their resistance movement. These youth were often used for short periods of time doing menial tasks such as giving simple directions and carrying supplies.
Many of the youth though were used as fighters and sex slaves for the soldiers and were forced to participate in violence against others. Approximately 28% of the males abducted were forced to murder a civilian, with 8% forced to murder a family member. Even among those that were never abducted, 37% of youth males witnessed a killing.
In addition to the violence most youth experienced, everyone was affected by the government’s strategy to fight the resistance group. To isolate the fighters, the government forcefully took all of the people in the north from their villages and placed them into internally displaced persons (IDP) camps. The people in the camps had no jobs as they were all trained previously as farmers. They were suddenly without land, with poor access to water, sanitation and health care.
In 2007 a serious peace process began, spurred in part by international pressure, impending International Criminal Court (ICC) proceedings on the leaders of the LRA and decreasing support from southern Sudan where the rebels were hiding. With the peace has come a return to the villages for the people, but the return is slow in part because of worries of insecurity and concerns for crop harvests.
Acholi cleansing and forgiveness
The Acholi people practice a unique system of forgiveness. If a person is truly seeking to be forgiven for past indiscretions, no matter how severe they are, they may begin a process of forgiveness, called mato oput, meaning literally “to drink from the tree”. This process is takes time and culminates in a ceremony where the offending and offended parties drink the waters of a local tree together. Alternatively, a ceremony can be performed where the offender steps on an egg, symbolizing a return to innocence, and then steps over a line, where they are then accepted back into the community. The acceptance is so complete that, after the ceremony, if anyone in the community accuses the person of wrongdoing, it is the accuser that will be tried for offending the community.