WUNRN
By Gloria Aciro Laker in Gulu (AR No 236, 18-Nov-09)
With
northern Uganda at relative peace following years of war wreaked by Joseph
Kony's Lord's Resistance Army, LRA, activists are now worried about rising
outbreaks of domestic violence.
“The situation is worrying and a majority of the cases are violence on women
over land disputes,” Sarah Apio, the Gulu legal officer of the Federation of
Women Lawyers in Uganda, FIDA-Uganda, said recently.
She said most of the cases of domestic violence involve women being forced off
their husband’s land after the husband had died, “Relatives want to strip these
widows of everything despite them having children.
“Most of the widows have no income and they rely on agricultural activities for
survival, yet they are being thrown off the land.”
She recalls visiting a victim in Opit sub-county in May, “There we found a
mother [with eight children]. It was claimed that she was from Bugishu and
since the husband who brought her had died, she must go back to where she came
from.”
According to Apio, a large number of crimes that have been investigated and
sent to the courts are still awaiting a hearing because of the sheer number of
cases.
At least 329 cases of domestic violence were registered by the local police
child and family protection unit in the last 14 months.
In addition to cases related to land disputes, a growing number are linked to
the voluntary return and resettlement of internally displaced persons, IDPs
Gulu has been a focus of fighting between LRA rebels and the army but open
hostilities ended in 2006 and the refugee camps have closed.
“Since people started going back home, issues of domestic violence are on the
increase. The locals got used to camp life where they would get free food and
now they are finding it hard to work and get their own food,” said the Gulu
district police commander, Moses Okello.
In one recent case, a man battered his wife to death using a branch of a tree.
He later handed himself in to police, leaving behind nine children.
He said he was angry at his wife after he found her at a drinking joint late at
night. However, her relatives told The New Vision website that their daughter
had only gone out to buy food for the children.
“These nine orphans, like other children, will be neglected, abused and
abandoned. They have now added to the increasing number of orphans in the
district,” said police spokesman Johnson Kalama.
In September last year, another man, who was a displaced person from the Ongako
IDP camp, followed his wife who had gone to weed her cabbages and hacked her to
death. They had seven children.
The woman had apparently fled her husband’s continual violence and was staying
at her father's home. Her parents said the man’s behaviour had become
intolerable.
The man, who was later arrested and charged with murder, told the court he
killed his wife out of anger because she had planned to have him arrested. The
man had a prior criminal record and had just been released from prison.
Apio says more victims of domestic violence would come forward if they were
aware that something could be done to help them, “Most of the women and
children who suffer are ignorant of their own rights. Being vulnerable, they
lose a sense of direction and continue suffering without knowing what to do
next.”
FIDA says that the biggest problem when it comes to access to justice for women
involved in land disputes is the fact that many couples cohabit for a long
period of time, yet the law says they have to be married for the woman to have
rights to the property.
It hopes that a proposed domestic relations bill will help rectify this by
giving property rights to cohabitees.
Henry Kilama, a member of the Law Society for Northern Uganda, said more than
3,000 land disputes are pending, with only one magistrate for Gulu available to
deal with them.
“Some of the land-related problems need to be resolved at the community level
with the involvement of the traditional chiefs (the Rwodi). The cases are too
many for only one chief magistrate to deal with single-handedly,” Kilama said.
Kilama backs FIDA’s call for mediation and dialogue to resolve such disputes.
The charity, War Child Canada, which for the last five years has been offering
domestic violence victims in Gulu legal counselling, also prefers non-judicial
solutions.
“We see the court as a last resort. It is time consuming [and] most of the
victims do not understand the lengthy procedures so [the majority] of cases we
try to resolve through mediation, counselling, and dialogue,” said Vanina
Trojan, the organisation’s legal protection coordinator
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