Uganda Petrol Bölgesi: Yerinden Edilenlerin 'Kara Altın' ve Kayıp Sığırları İçin Adalet Arayışı

Enos Mubangizi remembers being woken at 5AM in December 2010, hearing hundreds of gun-wielding soldiers and police outside, rounding up cows from his family kraals and those of his neighbours. Local pastor Stephen Mugisha, a respected pillar of his community, received a call just a day before from then-coordinator of Uganda’s national intelligence General David Sejusa. Sejusa informed the pastoralists that the Ugandan army was evicting all the families and their cows from their land. “We were the only family in the area that had a bungalow, and it was demolished,” Mubangizi says, a member of the Balaalo pastoralists who also lost cows and land. Code-named Justice, an estimated 640 families were forced out, and 20,000 head of cattle were taken. For Balaalo people, a nomadic pastoralist group spread out in the South, Western and Northern parts of Uganda, cows make up most of the family wealth. The 20,000 cows were mixed together, and their owners could no longer identify them. A few managed to rescue their livestock but no longer had land to graze them. The cows who were mixed in the big herd died from a lack of pasture and water. Others were sold off cheaply, sometimes for less than UGSh50,000 ($14). Mugisha had set up a primary school and laid the foundation for what he envisioned as a mega church. He lost all of it. Another pastor, Sam Tumwine, built a house that is now occupied by police. “I wonder who the police are paying rent to,” he says. When contacted, the police refused our request for comment. The parcels of land in Buliisa district targeted for eviction had become nationally significant , the site of oil discovery in 2006, and where much of the production infrastructure was installed , in a race to start extracting the country’s “black gold” by the end of 2026. I would like to hear from the people themselves. To express that they have been positively impacted is not for us to decide The new oil frontier turned neighbours into enemies , and the question remains whether anyone was held accountable for the devastating evictions. Almost 15 years later, Mubangizi and the hundreds of other violently evicted herdsmen say they are still counting their losses and waiting for compensation. Conflict over land and oil-era property claims When oil was being surveyed by Tullow Oil, a multinational UK-headquartered oil and gas exploration company, Mugisha says they asked the geologists if their cows would be allowed to continue grazing, and they were reassured this was fine. The conflict between pastoralists and the local community started in 2007, less than a year later. Oil discovery had an instant impact on the community: suddenly, people saw value in land and raced to transform it from a communal to an individual land tenure system. As land values rose, disputes emerged over whether some sales of customary land were valid under local tenure arrangements. At the time, Buliisa was an extremely rural community, whose life was still communal, including land ownership. Land possessed little value, costing about UGSh50,000 per acre at the time of Uganda’s confirmation of commercial oil discovery in 2006. District chair Fred Lukumu said he regarded some transactions as invalid because, in his view, sellers lacked exclusive title. “It was an illegal transaction because people were selling what did not exclusively belong to them,” Lukumu tells The Africa Report. “They were never verifying… just paying whoever told them land was theirs,” he adds. Buliisa subcounty chairperson Kabagambe Kamanda doesn’t dispute the claim that pastoralists had bought land; rather how the acquisitions were documented and understood locally. By 2003, the numerous pastoralists who had come to graze cattle had started buying land.