Betty Oyella Bigombe

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Betty Oyella Bigombe is a former Uganda government minister and consultant to the World Bank. She is an ethnic Acholi and has been involved in peace negotiations to end the insurgency of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) of Uganda since 1994. As of 2005 she was acting as chief mediator between the LRA and government of Uganda. She has a masters degree from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. As well as English and Acholi, she speaks Swahili and Japanese. Bigombe is currently a senior fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace, which recently produced a video about her latest work in Uganda.[1]

[edit] Biography

Bigombe was one of eleven children to her nurse father. She later went on to marry Uganda's ambassador to Japan.[2] She was elected a minister of parliament in 1986, a post she would hold until 1996. In 1988, President Yoweri Museveni appointed her "Minister of State for Pacification of Northern Uganda, Resident in Gulu," a post in which she was tasked with convincing the LRA rebels to give up their struggle. Protests at the connotations of the word "pacification" led to the renaming of the post to "Minister of State in the Office of the Prime Minister, Resident in Northern Uganda." Following the failure of military efforts to defeat the rebels, Bigombe initiated contact with rebel leader Joseph Kony in June 1993. This began what would be known as the "Bigombe talks". In 1993 she was named Uganda's Woman of the Year for her efforts to end the violence. Despite meeting with Kony, the talks collapsed in February 1994.[3] Soon afterward the insurgency intensified and no significant efforts towards peace would be made for the next decade. She was also assisted in the peace efforts between Uganda and Sudan.

She failed to win the parliamentary seat for Gulu Municipality in 1996 and left government service.[4] In 1997, she took a fellowship award at the Harvard Institute for International Development. She then became a senior social scientist with the Postconflict unit at the World Bank and then a consultant to the Bank's Social Protection and Human Development units. She co-authored several articles on post-conflict peacebuilding and the impact of conflict on women and children.

Following the February 2004 Barlonyo massacre, Bigombe took a leave of absence from the World Bank and flew to Uganda to attempt to restart the peace process. From at least March 2004 to 2005, Bigombe was the chief mediator in a new peace initiative with the Lord's Resistance Army, personally financing much of the logistics of bring Ugandan government ministers and rebel leaders together. The last meeting on April 20, 2005 fell through. However, the failure of the Bigombe mediation is seen as laying the groundwork for the 2006–2007 Juba talks, which are mediated by the government of Southern Sudan. Bigombe is still regularly consulted by both Ugandan officials and LRA representatives on the course of the talks.[2]

[edit] Notes and references

  1. ^ In the field: Uganda, U.S. Institute of Peace
  2. ^ a b "The Woman Behind Uganda's Peace Hopes" by Nora Boustany, The Washington Post, July 11, 2007
  3. ^ O’Kadameri, Billie. "LRA / Government negotiations 1993-94" in Okello Lucima, ed., Accord magazine: Protracted conflict, elusive peace: Initiatives to end the violence in northern Uganda, 2002.
  4. ^ Kasaija Phillip Apuuli, "Amnesty and International Law: The case of the Lord’s Resistance Army insurgents in Northern Uganda" (PDF), African Journal on Conflict Resolution, Vol. 5 No. 2, 2005, p. 35
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