Speaker reveals dilemma of peace and justice at U of M

Dr. Joyce Neu speaks of working to mediate war in Northern Uganda

Chelsea Moore Staff

How can justice be achieved in a country that is still in the midst of a horrific war? This is one of many questions that Dr. Joyce Neu, a world-renowned conflict resolution specialist, posed at the University of Manitoba last week.

“Dr. Neu’s contribution to world peace is outstanding,” said Sean Byrne, director of the Arthur V. Mauro Center for Peace and Justice and a professor at the U of M.

Hosted by the Arthur V. Mauro Center for Peace and Justice on March 14, Neu’s presentation, entitled “The Challenges of Security Peace during the Pursuit of Justice,” enticed a room full of people to reflect on some of the most devastating atrocities going on around the world today. It also offered a glimpse of what it’s like being on the ground in the heart of such conflicts.

“There are three hundred thousand children right now serving as child soldiers, forced to do so, abducted, or [with] no other options,” said Neu. “Tens of millions of people are refugees or displaced from their homes.”

“Wars kill, maim, destroy and traumatize thousands of people everyday,” added Neu.

Neu is the executive director of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice. She has worked to mediate conflict in many countries, including Uganda, the Republic of Congo and Sudan, to name a few.

In her speech, Neu placed particular emphasis on Northern Uganda, where she has spent the past several years mediating a 20-year war with many other groups and organizations, including the International Criminal Court.

So far, she said, nearly 1.7 million people have been displaced, and over 30,000 children have been abducted by Uganda’s notorious rebel group, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), to become either sex slaves or soldiers.

According to Neu, although these rebels claim to be fighting the Ugandan government, this is not true.

“The children that they’re abducting, the people that they are mutilating, the huts that they are setting on fire, the cars that they are ambushing, these are Acholi people, of their own ethnic group,” said Neu.

The problem is that after indictments were issued against five leaders of the rebel group by the International Criminal Court in 2005, Neu said that the Acholi people voted “uniformly against” these actions.

“For many of us in the developed world, justice is retribution,” said Neu. “We believe that there must be a price to pay for perpetrators.”

However, in other cultures, like the Acholi in Uganda, justice is “restorative.”

“It is intended to mend the relationships to break community members back into the hold of the community, and to restore peace and harmony, expressly designed not to punish or isolate,” said Neu.

Neu explained that some of the challenges they have faced in securing justice are that the country is still at war, and the people want peace first.

“You have to understand that the people who are killing them are their children,” explained Neu, adding that abducted children make up around 80 per cent of the rebel group.

According to Neu, part of the initiation process of the LRA is to force new child members to murder or commit other atrocities against their families to ensure that they will not abandon the group and go back to their loved ones.

“The Acholi people in the North . . . know their children are the ones doing these things,” said Neu, “but they want their kids back again. They want peace.”

“So here you have this dilemma between peace and justice . . . How do you get justice while you’re still in the middle of a war?”

While Neu emphasized that the answer is unknown, she stated that the prevention of future wars is an important step that must be taken.

According to Byrne, “[a]nalysing the causes of violence, rebuilding war-torn communities, lobbying for social justice and arms control, teaching and practising non-violent conflict resolution, sensitizing ourselves to our own ethnocentrism, consulting the peace-keeping operations, ensuring gender parity, addressing ethnic identities and hostilities, empowering alternative voices, and building environmental securities are just a few of the many ways we can contribute to building a peaceful and just world.”