The peace talks, which are taking place in Juba and which started on the 14th July, are taking the risk of sustain a rest in these days. It seems that the rebels, who should have gathered in the two camps of Ri- Kwangba and Owiny-Kibul in Sudan from the 30th August to the 19th September, [...]

In communion with their experience within the Pope John XXIII community, a group of youths and conscientious objectors felt questioned by the conflict in neighbouring Yugoslavia in 1992. They were present on various fronts and would labour to re-unite families, protect ethnic minorities through their presence, and endeavour to foster dialogue among the warring parties. However, they soon realized that these efforts were insufficient. This experience has since been exported to other conflicts: Sierra Leone (1997), Kosovo and Albania (1998-1999), East Timor (1999), The Chiapas Region of Mexico (1998-2002), Chechnya (2000-2001), The Democratic Republic of Congo (2001), and in Israel/Palestine (since 2002).
Operation Dove is open to all people. Believers and non-believers alike who wish to experience within their lives the power of non-violence as the sole means by which to obtain lasting peace founded upon justice and truth. Over 1000 volunteers have loaned their efforts to Operation Dove since 1992
Their are three main characteristics to our work:
Non-violence: Confronting an adversary with tools which allow you to understand the other rather than destroy him. The objective of non-violence is to liberate both the oppressed and the oppressor.
Fully sharing their lives with those undergoing the consequences of conflict.
Neutrality with respect to the warring parties but not with respect to the the concommitent injustices.

Operation Dove is today a Civil Peace Corps belonging to the Pope John XXIII Community which intervenes within armed conflicts by sharing their lives with the victims on three fronts: Israel/Palestine, Kosovo and Northern Uganda

Four volunteers have been living in St. Thomas Minakulu parish, Bobi area in Gulu district, since May 2006. Their presence has been made possible by Monsignor J. Baptist Odama’s invitation, archbishop of Gulu.

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Saturday 26th august 2006 has become one of the historic day for Uganda.
On Saturday 26th was signed an agreement for a truce which had its actual beginning at 6 a.m. of Tuesday 29th August and which, according to the terms of the agreement, should soon lead to peace.
This is the result of the diplomatic process worked out on the bargaining table in Juba (Sudan) and so long wished by many outsider, mediator and spectator in the theatre of this conflict under way from more than 20 years.
For more than a month, meeting, visits in the Garamba park (the rebel’s base), debates and council had taken place while news on newspapers were seesaw. Every day information about the peace talks reported unhappy remark from both parts, which were only able to flare up minds and weaken the expectations of a population exhausted by the conflict and much more by the life in the refugees camp.
So, the piece of news of the double agreement between the Ugandan government and the LRA (Lord Resistance Army) – with the mediation of an infinity of groups and people belonging both to the political and religious spheres – and the South Sudan government’s participation in the negotiations gave the most concrete possibility of the last ten years for a “rapidâ€? resolution of the hostilities.

To share, in this land, means to see every day situations of abandonment, especially towards children and elderly people, not only victims of the war, but often, especially for old people, of the impossibility of being able to till the land and then providing by one’s own for the food needed to survive. In the refugees’ camp, where people live, the food is scarce and the only source of survival are the lands, hard for elderly men to reach because many kilometres far from their huts. Elderly men can hardly go to get some water to the well and carry it in the can put upon their head, trying to lean on their staff; as for the food, they can only count on a piece of cassava and some bean. After having fled with their family years ago, because of the war, after years of hardship, fears and hard work in the refugees’ camp, they end up, nowadays, at the final chapter of their lives, old, con their gaunt bodies, often sick of tuberculosis and malaria, with their empty stomach and their heavy heart, and with their sons and daughter who hardly can provide for their new family. It’s not a matter of cruelty, but of that sort of “darkness� which we could even call “instinct of survival� and which inevitably leaves the weakest behind. All of this strongly resemble the respect of the human dignity which is not a matter of things to posses or possession to administrate, but of the ineluctable right to have every day enough food and to be able to take care of your health if needed.

Fr. Carlos Rodríguez
The Weekly Observer

What can drive a young, bright European graduate to leave a comfortable life at home and spent months digging in IDPs’ gardens for no pay?

Since last year I have been asking myself that question every time I see the four Italian volunteers working in my parish at Minakulu-Bobi (Gulu district) pick their hoes and accompany some of the nearby displaced persons in their daily trek for survival.

Two years ago I met a group of enthusiastic Italians from the Association Pope John XXIII who had come to visit northern Uganda and get a first-hand experience of the people’s life conditions.

For a good number of years I have seen many of such groups. Most of them come for some few days, take pictures, show sympathy and go away. Perhaps they may continue the relationship for some time and send some money to support whatever project. The young people of John XXIII had different intentions. They said they wanted to stay in a displaced people’s camp. “We want to live with the victims of this war”, they told me, “but everyone we met told us that it’s impossible”. My answer to them was: “It’s not impossible, it’s only uncomfortable”.

The volunteers’ eyes – the eyes of those who do not belong to large NGO’s and whose reports will never be laid on the important tables of those who make decisions on the peoples’ future – seem to most people to be dimmed by high principles and candour.

Probably the volunteers’ work will never give figures or numbers for interesting statistics about the development and aftermath of a war, but the eyes and ears of those volunteers who share their life with people suffering “for and in the war� can and will express the feelings of anger and the inequity those who count for nothing must endure.

In the fields the news is collected with difficulty through the waves of small radios or from rare papers and it cannot do away with people’s doubts and uncertainty about the peace negotiations under way.

Doubts raise when one reads ambiguous phrases in local papers and sees photos that can be described as at least “nonsensical�.

The photo of Joseph Kony – head of LRA rebels – in which he is described as a general, but in fact he is sought by the International Law Court for war crimes and everybody knows that he is the leader of a fanatical group that is one of the “terrorist groupsâ€? of the world, guilty of murder, kidnapping and abuses especially against children, is in our opinion nothing else than a shameless way of exalting and increasing the frenzy of a murderer.

As we meet here today to focus on the fate of children being destroyed in situations of war, I must draw your attention to the worst place on earth to be a child today. That place is the northern region of the Republic of Uganda.
What is going on in northern Uganda is not a usual humanitarian crisis nor a natural disaster, for which an adequate response might be the mobilisation of necessary humanitarian support and relief.
In the aftermath of hurricane Katrina last August, Americans and the world were horrified to see some 10,000 citizens exposed to conditions of utter despair and vulnerability in the New Orleans Superdome.
In northern Uganda, the government has warehoused two million people in 200 ‘superdomes’, for the last 10 years, in conditions more abominable than what we witnessed in the New Orleans Superdome.

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Fr. Carlos Rodríguez

It was a sad Christmas for Martha this year. On the night of December 13, LRA rebels sneaked into her homestead, some five kilometres from my place of work in Minakulu-Bobi Catholic Parish and abducted two of her children. One of them, a 16-year old girl, returned some 10 days later with swollen feet, bruises and terrified eyes, having been forced to watch her 20-year old sickly brother being beaten to death.
Other four girls kidnapped from the same village are still unaccounted for. I saw their parents come to pray on Christmas Eve with a heavy heart. Will God listen to our prayers and send our children back? They asked me. For more than 15 years I have heard that same question hundreds of times and most of the time I found myself hopelessly seeking the answer in the deepest corner of my heart, not knowing what to say.

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Don Benzi visited Uganda from 24 to 26 August 2005 in order to meet the volunteers of Operation Dove (the Civilian Peace Corps of APGXXIII) operating in the field.

Don Benzi encountered a very difficult situation. The conflict between the central government and the rebels of the LRA (Lord Resistance Army) continues, although the rebel army seems to have weakened.
The abduction of children is also continuing, although the phenomenon has decreased somewhat in the last few months. People are still dying as a result of this conflict and a sense of insecurity and terror prevails for the general population in the area, since the rebels are free to strike wherever and whenever they wish, attacking villages without warning and spreading fear and carnage.

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JUSTICE AND PEACE GULU.
NEWSLETTER JUNE 2005.

CONTENTS
1.THE FORGOTTEN DISPLACED PEOPLE OF TESO
2.OUR UPDATE ON THE PEACE PROCESS
3.A DAY IN A PARALEGAL’S LIFE
4.TRAUMA IN AN ON-GOING VIOLENT SITUATION
5.OUR ACTIVITIES. MAY 2005
6.RECENT CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS