From Camp to Slum: The Politics of Urban Displacement in Gulu Town, Uganda

Abstract

For most of northern Uganda’s two-decade civil war, which lasted from 1986 until 2006, Gulu was an island of relative security in the midst of the violence that wracked the rest of Acholiland.1 Although a centre of internal displacement, with over 130,000 people crowded into a space meant for a quarter that number,2 the town remained mostly isolated from the massive devastation in the countryside. While the streets of Gulu were generally safe even at night, one had only to pass a military roadblock and leave town to enter a zone of unpredictable violence, where tens of thousands were killed, tens of thousands abducted, and waves of humanitarian crises left perhaps over 100,000 civilians dead – civilians who, like in many of today’s “dirty wars,” were the main target of the extreme violence by both Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebels and the Ugandan military alike. Gulu was even spared in large part the internal conflict and upheaval that often characterise such scenes of massive displacement and deprivation.