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Wars do end even if they sometimes seem eternal. Two years ago, Anna Bosello retraced her steps through a part of the world where she'd seen horrors, the town of Gulu in Uganda, which had been terrorised by the messianic cult leader Joseph Kony and his Lord's Resistance Army, an implacable inexplicable militia full of brutalised child soldiers. And things really have changed.
The night before I leave for Gulu Town along the Road, I am terrified. I know it's unreasonable. I know the north has been peaceful for seven years. But in the 1990s when I lived in Uganda, no one travelled along this route unless they really had to. To venture there was to invite attack from Lord's Resistance Army rebels who roam through the unpeopled and uncultivated bush. And ambush meant injury, mutilation, death, or, for those fit and young enough, abduction into then notoriously brutal rebel ranks.
It's only when I set out the next day, driving along the new tarmac road that I understand what peace really means. At the height of the insecurity in northern Uganda, over one and a half million people were forced out of their villages into internally displaced camps. Now, they have returned home, transforming the landscape. Instead of neglected bush, there are plots of maize, beans, cassava. Men stand in gardens, thudding at the earth with hoes. Women walk slowly by the roadside, carrying food to market. Children, once the rebel's main prey, spring along in bright school uniforms. | 
发表于 2016-10-17 19:24:55