ABSTRACT
Ethnic conflict has always been a major obstacle to democratization in Uganda. The politicization of ethnic diversity has played a highly ambivalent role since the country achieved its independence in 1962, and the tumultuous alternation of different regimes has enhanced internal polarizations along the lines of ethnic belonging. In Juma Okuku’s words, “the 1971 coup by Idi Amin, the civil war of 1981–86 and the insurgency in the North since 1987 have all had ethnicity as one of the driving factors” (2002: 9). Throughout the post-independence period, the “ordinary” redefinition of ethnicity in the process of poly-ethnic nation-building has been thwarted by the persecution and marginalization of and systematic discrimination against social sections. In particular, the mutually exclusive empowerment of ethnic groups has resulted in the opposition between economically dominant minorities, such as the southern Buganda (Kampala region), and relatively marginal but larger groups, such as the northern tribes of the Acholi and the Langi, who became the notorious right arm of Obote’s regime but were eventually disempowered by the advent of the National Resistance Army (NRA). As Reto Kuster and Martina Santschi show in Krieg in Acholiland, the kind of pluralism supported by Yoweri Museveni’s present leadership, which introduced multiparty politics only as late as 2002, has not radically challenged ethnicized politics reaching back to Idi Amin’s and Milton Obote’s regimes (2007: 17–30; 53–62). As a consequence, in the last fifteen years the “process of democratization has been thrown back into reverse” (Mwenda 2007: 23).
