What happened on the 21st of February, 2004?

One February day in 2004, word came through the wires that a series of bombings had ripped apart commuter trains going into Madrid during rush hour. I was living in Scotland at the time, and had a Spanish roommate who poured over the news hour after hour, hoping that no one he knew was amongst the dead. As with all mass murders in certain parts of the world, all eyes were focused on this one tragedy.

In Edinburgh, one of the courses I was taking at the time was African Politics, and I was also taking Anthropology of Development. My assigned term project for the anthro class was focused on Uganda, a country that I knew next to nothing about. In African Politics, we lived and breathed case studies in several key countries, Uganda included.

Not once in my studies or research did I find out what else happened in February of that year. In fact, the terror of the Madrid Bombings paled in relative comparison to the horror unleashed on residents of Barlonyo IDP camp in northern Uganda. Within the space of two hours, over 300 (but perhaps hundreds more) had been murdered as they prepared dinner. Many were burned to death in their mud and grass huts, others were mutilated and killed with pangas (machetes), some were shot, some were beaten to death with blunt objects, and babies had their skulls smashed against trees. Pregnant women had their bellies slit open, their not-yet-formed babies thrown in the fires. Still others were abducted and marched to Sudan. Many died along the way of violence, sickness, or starvation. Others never returned and may still be part of the rank and file of the Lord’s Resistance Army.

Do you remember hearing about the Barlonyo Massacre on the 22nd of February? How about the 23rd? Maybe you heard about it after they had counted the bodies that they could (those that hadn’t been immediately placed in shallow graves, and those bones that don’t linger in the outlying bushes or elsewhere on the route to Pader and Kitgum) and constructed a mass grave? Did you hear about the few survivors being forced by the army to dump the corpses into pit latrines to reduce the death toll? Or perhaps you heard about it when the President of Uganda attended a memorial prayer and told the mourners that “what goes around comes around” – implying that the victims, by virtue of being northerners, were directly responsible for atrocities in southern Uganda that occurred during his own guerrilla war? Where you angry when it was reported that the Ugandan army had withdrawn from the camp less than two weeks earlier, despite reliable reports of an impending attack, leaving the protection of many souls in the hands of 30 unpaid, untrained, scared locals? You probably weren’t, because it was never reported.

If you’re like me, you never heard about Barlonyo. Or any of the atrocious number of massacres that have happened in northern Uganda in the last twenty-odd years. You may have even been in an African Politics class with me, immersing yourself in articles about the Rwandan genocide, the violence of transitional South Africa, or even about the ‘new breed’ of African leader personified in His Excellency, Yoweri K. Museveni, President and saviour of post-Amin Uganda. You may have read the heartfelt apologies of UN officials claiming that they “didn’t know” about what was happening in Rwanda in April 1994, but you probably didn’t hear them say that northern Uganda was too dangerous to set foot in for their beloved employees.

What I do know is that four years later, the ghosts aren’t going away.

I’ve spent this week in Barlonyo. On Monday I interviewed a woman who survived that night, hiding in the bushes where she could see her house in flames, her family still inside. She lost 7 family members in two hours, and told me that they still haunt those that are left. Because, she said, if the dead see that you are suffering, they will do all they can to bring you out of the land of the living. Later, I interviewed a 14-year-old boy who was forced to be part of the attacking force that night that killed his parents, his baby sister, and several other relatives. He now lives with several other orphans in the very spot his 10-year-old self mutilated and killed during that February supper-time. We spoke to each other while sitting on top of the concrete-covered mass grave, because it was the only private spot we could find.

I don’t believe that any country, any culture or ethnicity, any religious group, or even any one period of humanity has a monopoly on suffering. I am sure that those killed in Madrid suffered no less than those in Barlonyo. But what I do believe is that the world has served a great injustice upon northern Uganda by ignoring all that has happened here, even in just a few short years. What makes a story news-worthy? Is a massacre only news-worthy if it involves bombs and loud explosions? Do people suffer less when they are hacked and burned to death in the secrecy of the East African countryside?