Popular justice and policing from bush war to democracy: Uganda 1981–2004

Abstract

The National Resistance Army (NRA) led by Yoweri Museveni against the Obote regime in Uganda saw itself as a peoples army leading a peoples war. The bush war 1981-1986 was according to an NRA political commissar no mere elite power struggle; it was a revolution aimed at replacing the old regime with structures moulded during the course of the struggle by the masses in accordance with their interests and the demands of the times (Ondoga ori Amaza 1998 p. 28). Those structures were to be institutions of self-government down to the village level that included justice and policing. Fresh from the Frelimo training camps of Mozambique the NRA leadership was enthralled with the possibilities of popular justice: a justice that was said to be popular in form because its language was open and accessible; popular in functioning because its proceedings involved active community participation; and popular in substance because judges were drawn from the people and gave judgment in the interests of the people (Museveni 1997 p. 30).They no longer followed the Weberian tradition that the state alone should make law and establish order; that rational bureaucracy and formal justice were the very essence of the modern world (Weber 1954). Instead they recognised that norms and systems of ordering can also arise spontaneously and that from time immemorial people had generated their own forms of popular justice. (excerpt)