Northern Uganda

For some 19 years, a widely misunderstood and largely ignored two-tiered war has been waging in Northern Uganda between rebels from the Lord’s Resistance Army (“LRA”), the Ugandan Government and local Acholi civilian population, in particular, and by disaffected northern Ugandans with real grievances against their central Government. Tens of thousands have been maimed or killed, more than 25,000 children between the ages of 7 and 17 have been abducted and forced to fight or serve as wives and some 90% of the region’s almost 2,000,000 people have been displaced into refugee camps.

Yet this conflict has remained one of the ten most underreported humanitarian stories (MSF-USA: Special Report, 2005). It has been described by U.N.Under-Secretary General of Humanitarian Affairs, Jan Egeland, as “the world’s most neglected humanitarian crisis” and as “one of the biggest scandals of our generation.”

Recently, a renewed peace initiative has been sponsored by the Government of Sudan, in perhaps the most robust move yet to end hostilities. In what little media treatment these peace negotiations have received, a marked tension can be discerned between notions of peace and justice. Western punitive justice is held in conflict with Acholi traditional methods of conflict resolution which entail forgiveness. Put succinctly, it is a contrast between us and those not like us, the �others.’

The inherent difficulty in reporting complex foreign news, coupled with the media’s moral responsibility to portray participants as value-free or value-neutral �others’ cannot be understated (Silverstone, 2006:7). Contrary to Kipling’s quote above, it is within the mediated space where East meets West and where �others’ become visible (ibid). Response is formulated by how this �other’ is perceived and depicted (Cohen, 2001; Moeller, 1999). Ultimately, media representation will impact the peace process (Wolfsfeld, 2004) and could, if unfair, perpetuate inequalities, misperceptions and the very conflict itself.

This paper will examine how the Northern Uganda peace process has been represented by media coverage in terms of agency, defined as the ability to act or exert power or influence and will examine the moral consequences of such a depiction.

Although agency is principally used in the representation of suffering, I will expand the notion to encompass both the individual as well as the polity, with polity including both governmental and international organisations. I will examine this within the context of how the �other’ is constructed and how the representation of the �other’ relates to tension between notions of justice and forgiveness. Lastly, by analysing representations of the �other’ in terms of proximity and distance between subject and audience, the analysis of orientation between audience and subject and inter-subject relations in terms of agency can be distinguished.

I will first give a short background to the conflict and then discuss the theoretical underpinnings to my subsequent discourse analysis. This analysis will start with broad themes and move on to examine the portrayal of each key figure, the impact of proximity and distance and how the �other’ is constructed to, finally, an examination of the moral consequences of this representation.

Conflict Background

As Wolfsfeld (2004:183) notes in his examination of the media’s role in the peace process, “even news about peace is ultimately news about conflict.” Although the media may be guilty of formulaic over-simplification, Uganda’s complex past and intricate present is hard to capture adequately within this limited space.

Uganda’s postcolonial history has been described as “one of violence and counterviolence” (Behrend, 1999: 23). Current president Yoweri Museveni and his National Resistance Army (“NRA”)