"Until the government understands why people need to have guns, they will continue focusing on conflict, which is the wrong side to solve this insecurity. Even after the disarmament, theft did not stop. Arrows and eventually the gun re-emerged. Let us focus more on the criminal." - Karamoja official
A brief history of insecurity and disarmament in Karamoja and Turkana
The current pattern of insecurity has its roots in the late nineteenth century when Swahili, Arab, Persian, and European traders came to Karamoja and Turkana to purchase ivory from pastoralists who hunted elephant for food (Barber, 1962). As demand grew and supply dwindled, traders offered livestock in payment and threw in guns to sweeten the deals. In the first years of the twentieth century, British colonial powers, encountering these armed populations, began a process of violent ‘pacification’ (Sana and Oloo, 2019). Rather than controlling trade and traders, the new authorities saw their task as controlling local populations.
Pastoralist oral history and archival material refer to large-scale state military intervention at several points throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century, beginning with a northern patrol of the King’s African Rifles, which ‘pacified the tribes’ westwards from the Nile in 1911, followed in 1918 by campaigns across Turkana, one of which saw thousands of Turkana killed and over 250,000 animals seized (Lamphear, 1976). This mode of militarised security is still resonant today in both Karamoja and Turkana. The military interventions did dampen cattle raids and intercommunal wars in the years following each intervention but failed to establish a system of law and order that communities deemed legitimate. None of the pastoralist communities gave up arms or ceased to engage in violence (Knighton, 2003).
In 1961, as part of preparations for Ugandan independence, the Bataringaya Committee report on Karamoja security recommended military methods to resolve persistent violent raiding, continuing a well-established pattern. After independence, the 1964 Administration of Justice (Karamoja) Act created special rules for courts in Karamoja, reducing normally strict rules for admissibility of evidence and juries. Commenting on these developments 30 years later in 1992, Mahmoud Mamdani defined ‘a general tendency to treat Karamoja as a warzone and reject the use of democratic methods’ (Oloka-Onyango et al., 1993).
In 2001, President Museveni deployed the Uganda People’s Defence Forces under the national military command structure to disarm Karamoja, using a voluntary surrender approach. By 2002 the campaign had netted some 8,000 guns, which was deemed inadequate, and a forcible campaign was instituted. In 2005 the Uganda government designed the Karamoja Disarmament and Development Programme (KIDDP). Under the supervision of the Prime Minister’s Office, it pursued a coercive approach to the surrender of arms, while offering some level of army protection for disarmed civilians, and development interventions that would lift them out of the poverty (Government of Uganda, 2007).
The stories told by pastoralists about how this disarmament was done in practice are almost the same as those being told today (Knighton, 2003):
“The Jie armies are immobilised, because of the Disarmament Programme. If suspected of having a gun, then one has to produce it and receive a certificate, but that leads to further harassment and the certificate being taken. Failure to produce a gun on demand means a beating with batons, sticks, or whips. Information is sought of others. Jie have been killed like that. If someone runs with a gun, he is shot."
"The government has harassed us. The authorities claimed that someone in the settlement had a gun, or a uniform, and they fired their guns and took his animals to the barracks. He was supposed to bring that gun and get back the cows. When he complained he didn’t have a gun, they put him in a container with bees which sting him. The army doesn’t follow stolen cows far, they find any cows, and take them instead.”
At the time, many of the surrendered guns were redistributed to local defence units (LDUs), formed of disarmed young men who would provide local policing under Uganda Peoples’ Defence Forces (UPDF) command. Development activities did not start until at least 2008 and were not only several steps behind the military operation but also largely inadequate. They were designed to settle the mobile pastoralist in alternative livelihoods, an approach that worked as a stopgap for dispossessed herders, but only until they could restock (Stites and Abakwai, 2010).
As had been the pattern for a century, disarmament-related livestock losses were extremely high. Protection of those who had given up arms was also inadequate. Data from the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD) shows that during 2006, while disarmament was under way, livestock raiding inside Karamoja increased by some 40 per cent, not due to increased cross-border raiding from Kenyan raiders who had avoided disarmament, but due to increased crime within Karamoja itself. Relations between the pastoralists and the Ugandan army hit a new low (Karamoja Action Research Team and Scott-Villiers, 2013).
The Government of Kenya also initiated a round of disarmament in Turkana in the early 2000s but, like its counterpart in Karamoja, the voluntary surrender approach was unsuccessful (Sana and Oloo, 2019). It was followed by a short coercive effort in 2006. At the time, the UPDF disarmament operation had not yet begun, and many Turkana warriors crossed with their herds (some 60,000 head of cattle) into Karamoja to avoid having to hand over guns. Then, when the UPDF operation began in Karamoja, the Turkana returned to Kenya (ibid). Over the period, the Government of Kenya equipped local Turkana pastoralists with arms and organised them under the Kenya Police Reserve system, which mirrored the Ugandan LDUs (Bevan, 2008).
In 2006 the UPDF introduced a ‘protected kraal’ system whereby cattle were brought to enclosures inside the perimeter of army bases to be protected overnight from raiders. Though officially abandoned in 2009, the system continues to this day and is used by those pastoralists who have no other form of protection. Persisting for so long, the protected kraal system changed the lives of Karamoja and Turkana pastoralists inside Karamoja, reducing their mobility and shifting the power to protect livestock into the hands of the UPDF and away from young men and women. It also left homesteads, and in particular women and the elderly, unprotected and vulnerable (Stites and Abakwai, 2010).
By 2010 most of the Karamoja and Turkana pastoralists were disarmed and had lost the greater part of their livestock. Between 2010 and 2019 an uneasy peace prevailed. Many young people at the time had to take up artisanal mining and road construction to restock (Karamoja Action Research Team and Scott-Villiers, 2013). At first there were few major raids because there were few livestock left to take. Instead, there were reports of rising thefts and assaults on unprotected homesteads in both Turkana and Karamoja (Stites and Marshak, 2016). Increasing numbers of lonetia, ‘armed young men who steal’, took the opportunity to raid disarmed pastoralist households, while others acted as middlemen moving stolen cattle to local markets (Eaton, 2010). Many of these young men had themselves lost livestock during the disarmament programme; others felt it was an easy way to gain assets (Stites and Marshak, 2016). According to the herders, the only option to protect the herds and homesteads was to re-arm.
By 2023, armed raiding and assaults were once again widespread, civilians had re-armed, and the UPDF was ordered to resume disarmament operations (Stites, 2022). Violent ‘cordon and search’ operations (first given that name in 2002) were authorised once again and soldiers had permission to kill persons suspected of carrying guns illegally (Bevan, 2008). New accusations of human rights abuses became commonplace, but none were ever brought before a civilian court of law (Human Rights Watch, 2007). In the closing months of 2023, the Kenya Government began ‘Operation Maliza Uhalifu’, an anti-banditry campaign.
Violent crime, abusive military response, immiseration, and growing mistrust between people and state is a pattern set in place more than a century ago. It has changed surprising little in its essentials, and it helps explain how the quasi-war footing that determines justice and security in rural Karamoja and Turkana has become normal.
The geography of insecurity
We now turn to how insecurity works across space and between different people. We set out the community description of how one form of violence leads to another, and how a violent economy locks the insecurity system into place.
Over the course of the research, the team collected stories and analyses from hundreds of the actors who play a part in the violent drama that makes up daily life in the borderland. The key players are grouped by their affiliations: the armed forces of the two nations, the Karamoja sub-regional administration and its counterpart the government of Turkana County, and the members of named pastoralist communities – notably the Turkana, whose sub-groups’ ng’ireria (places to which they return in the rainy season) lie in the Turkana rangelands of north western Kenya (Rodgers, 2011), and the Jie, Matheniko, Dodoth, Tepeth and several other sub-groups of the Karamojong, whose ng’ireria create a mosaic across the Karamoja rangelands of north-eastern Uganda. The differently positioned actors described their perspective on the regularity of violent incidents including theft, raids, rape and murder. People explained who was involved and how kraal leaders, women, herders, young people, community elders, administrators, politicians and security forces responded to these crimes. Community members showed how one crime leads to another and no crime is effectively addressed. We give brief extracts from the many stories heard by the researchers, selected to show how violence, impunity, revenge, crime, vulnerability, corruption, suspicion, and institutional failures work together to cement a familiar system of insecurity.
The researchers collected hundreds of testimonies from herders about cattle raiding. The majority concerned the large-scale raids that have come to dominate. In this example, the herder describes how cattle raiding works today:
"A group gathered in the bush and raided a kraal at night. They took hundreds of animals and made rendezvous with trucks. The animals left Karamoja, passing government roadblocks on the way. The animals are sold, and the raiders get mobile money. The criminals have been calling on their phones and getting weapons. If I, as a kraal leader, get weapons, what would I use them for? I have cows here and I would use the gun to protect the cows." - Male pastoralist leader
In these commercialised raids, armed criminals from different communities steal large numbers of animals in ways that are well organised. They have networks that supply them with guns and assist them to trade the cattle to markets many hundreds of kilometres away. The herder in this example is pointing to a criminal economy and a supply chain involving people from within different parts of society, including pastoralists, administrators, armed forces, and the private sector.
It differs from the kind of cattle raiding that used to dominate, in which young men from one community would raid those of another, revenge raids would follow and eventually elders of both communities would intervene to make peace, restore stolen animals, punish perpetrators and compensate victims. The new commercialised crime is not subject to communal responsibility and does not fit with the old institutions of compensation and restoration. Elements of the traditional inter-communal raiding culture are still present, with elders calling for shows of strength or backing youths to exact revenge on communities suspected of benefiting from thefts or colluding with authorities (Eaton, 2010).
Both the Ugandan and the Kenyan governments understand pastoralists to be communally responsible for the frequent violent raids, though it has been a long time since raiding was a way of ‘alleviating communal hardship’ (Olaka Ongango et al., 1993; Eaton, 2010). A practice which was once a form of competition between young male pastoralists armed with bows and spears in raids regulated and resolved by customary leaders, cattle raiding is now a lucrative enterprise carried out by armed criminals seldom aligned with a single community (Greiner, 2013). The raiders sell the stolen stock to herders-turned-traders, who sell on to larger traders, who move the animals to urban markets (Eaton, 2010). According to pastoralists on the ground, sales of stolen livestock and sometimes the raids themselves are facilitated by the administration and security forces. The only way to respond to the new crime in the absence of state policing and protection, say the herders, is for herders to arm themselves and to use unreliable state infrastructure as little as possible.
The research teams also spent some time in local markets to learn traders’ perspectives on security. The trader in this example describes abuse perpetrated by a person in authority in the market system and an absence of recourse to due process.
"At a market near Moroto, a young man brought a cow. The authorities accused him of stealing the animal and confiscated it. They told him to bring one million Ugandan shillings [approximately US$267] the following week on market day. He paid, but they did not return the animal. They kept on pushing him for more money, so he left it." - Male trader
In several similar descriptions, sellers and buyers describe how taking animals to market is hazardous. Getting there on the unsafe roads is also a problem, affecting men and women in different ways:
"A woman on her way back from market was raped and robbed. The authorities don’t take this violence against women seriously. The pain is bigger for a woman than a man. During a raid most of the women’s possessions are burned by raiders, including traditional items that are irreplaceable. There is rape and there is loss of husbands and children. This issue of raids will eventually finish us." - Female herder
The female pastoralist telling this story is describing how violence is gendered not only in its effect, but also in the official failure to respond. She refers to violent robberies at homesteads, a phenomenon that grew significantly after the disarmament campaigns of the early 2000s. The disarming of herders left isolated homesteads unprotected from raiders, who had either avoided disarmament or acquired new ones. She also describes vividly not only the physical danger, but also way in which women’s personhood and her symbolic role in community reproduction is attacked. Beyond the horror of the injury itself, rape without justice generates discord and despair within households and communities. The violence and negligence combine to prevent healing. Family members may seek revenge.
Several women, including those on the research teams, went on to explain how they responded to these attacks. With no institutional response from the respective governments, and little effective response from traditional institutions, women are broadly in support of the males in the household carrying arms in defence of their homes and herds. Many also accept that it makes sense to promote revenge and call for counter attacks. The team also heard and described several instances of women rallying other women to lobby administrations, kraal leaders and elders to take the situation in hand.
An uncounted number of individuals have been injured and killed in the security operations (Sana and Oloo, 2019). The disarmament and policing approach has developed into repertoires of attack, abuse, and counterattack which help to perpetuate warfare between citizens and state forces on both sides of the border, as these three examples show:
"Three young Turkana robbed a Jie trader who was doing business with them. The trader went to the UPDF barracks and complained, and, at 5am the next day, soldiers came to the kraal where the Turkana men were sleeping. Hearing the commotion, and thinking it was Jie community come to raid them, the Turkana opened fire. The soldiers returned fire and at least one of the three Turkana was killed. They had laid a trap. You cannot say that it was the Jie community who killed the Turkana. It was government mishandling. They came fighting, they did not come and investigate."
"The soldiers have started to just shoot people. Soldiers said some people have their uniforms. So, they break people’s houses and confiscate their stock. Every time cows are confiscated not all of them are got back. After following cows taken on a raid, they will slaughter to reward themselves."
"Soldiers came and took all the cows to the barracks, the cows suffered there, the bitterness grew among all the shepherds. Young men exchanged fire with the UPDF."
The failure of the Ugandan and Kenyan armed forces to count and account publicly for the deaths and injuries and to prevent the large-scale appropriation of livestock leaves pastoralist men and women incensed. People express distress, anger and profound pessimism in equal measure. Confiscated stock is also not accounted for, and the animals disappear from Karamoja and Turkana through the supply chains of the raiding economy. From the people’s perspective, soldiers are untrustworthy and dangerous, as the incentives for them to make money from unchecked extortion, coercion and confiscation are too strong.
Meanwhile young herders, unable to call on insurance or justice, become increasingly drawn to become raiders or market intermediaries themselves. In some cases, they are tempted by the ease of making a living and the glamour of warriorhood. Other youths act as informants for raiders or the security forces, either for money for under coercion:
"Everywhere there is suspicion and fear. Our settlements have been infiltrated by spies and criminals. Our own young men are part of networks of raiders taking a cut of the profits. Traders don’t come only to buy and sell but to also see where the herds are grazing." - Female herder
"Young men have become informers. They come with the army and point out which households have hidden a gun, or an army uniform." - Female elder
In this example, a double betrayal takes place:
"Young men decided to raid a kraal. Within the kraal was an informant. The soldiers caught the informant and instructed him to communicate with the raiders. The moment the raiders came the soldiers started firing. The raiders were all killed except one who was taken alive. Later, the locals followed a man who was selling bullets to the raiders, and he led them straight to the barracks. Some soldiers work hand in hand with raiders." - Male herder
In their distress they can supporting taking revenge on neighbouring communities, creating and sustaining conflict:
"Sometimes women are prevented from joining meetings about dealing with raids because they have suffered so much the loss of sons and husbands, that their emotion is too strong. Somehow women contribute to spreading the conflict, promoting revenge." - Female elder
Suspicion within and between communities has risen with increasing levels of loss and a sense of powerlessness. Revenge attacks contribute to an assumption among authorities that the people themselves are lawless and the only solution is a militarised one. But the fundamental problem, say the pastoralists, is the state’s failure to provide reliable policing, justice, and governance. They point out the clash between traditional modes of policing and punishment and those of the government:
"When you punish your son for raiding, he runs to government. They come and arrest you and the thief is left unpunished. If you say as an elder that this one should be arrested, the young man threatens to kill you, so we live in fear of death and we are silent about the criminals."
"Police arrest thieves and after three days the person is back, free. The person pays part of what he has stolen to the police. The owner is left with nothing. It has continued happening over and over."
"Young people in the society say they have lost confidence in the traditional system of policing and punishment, helping to create divisions within the society."
To conclude, one of the research team members, himself a herder, winds these different interlocking aspects into a single statement (Box 3). He put it together during our third analysis meeting in January 2023, when we were refining the ‘story of stories’, a summary of what had been learned about the pastoralist experience of insecurity up to that point.
Box 3: Researcher statement
