The Woman Behind Uganda's Peace Hopes

Betty Bigombe, 53, now at the U.S. Institute of Peace, laid the groundwork for reconciliation in Uganda as a minister of state. (Photos By Andrea Bruce -- The Washington Post)

To win their trust, she encouraged them to criticize leaders openly so she could convey their complaints to the top. She danced with them around a communal fire as is customary with each evening meal. She paid for food and bought alcohol for them, she said, "to loosen their tongues and open their minds."

What she mostly did was listen. "This work took over my life," she said. Bigombe repeatedly missed her children's birthdays. "It cost me personally," she said. "I did things, yes, but I also lost opportunities."

Museveni pressed her to goad the LRA into surrendering. But Bigombe knew that for peace to be sustainable, Acholi grievances had to be addressed.

On May 1, 1993, assassins came after Bigombe in the dark, torching a camp where she was speaking. Tipped off by one of her guards, she melted into a crowd of women shrieking and running in horror. She recalled one woman crying for her baby, left behind in a burning hut.

On May 9, she headed into the bush with six religious elders.

"Those were scary, lonely moments," she said. "Nobody spoke in the car, each in his own world. We assumed we may not make it alive. I wrote letters to my children and to Museveni to make sure they got an education."

When she finally met Kony, she recalled, his costumed followers chanted and splashed butter oil and ashes on themselves to ward off bullets and evil spirits.

Boys with frozen stares jumped out of bushes with AK-47s, she said, never blinking, as if on drugs. Kony eventually arrived in a cloud of dust. Fireflies flickered through the night as they talked.

There were six such encounters. By Jan. 11, 1994, Kony was calling her "Mummy Bigombe" at a rally. She urged Museveni and the army to sign a peace agreement by the end of that month.

Taking the same dirt road where a python had once held up her convoy to Kampala, Uganda's capital, she carried a letter to Museveni from Kony asking if he might leave the bush to address Ugandans publicly. That afternoon, two weeks ahead of the scheduled signing, Museveni called off the peace talks. A handful of individuals, war profiteers, had "poisoned his mind," she said.

"It was devastating. The kidnapping, the killing resumed," she said. "The impulse to undermine me was a diversion."

Bigombe continued to talk to Kony via radio every morning at 11. She made up dreams to dissuade him from attacking areas she knew to be vulnerable. Disillusioned by the collapse of the peace for which she had put her life on hold, she left in 1996 to begin graduate studies at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

Last year, former president Joaquim Chissano of Mozambique brokered the resumption of talks in Juba, suspended since 2005. As southern Sudanese mediators took over, Bigombe stepped aside. Kampala officials and the LRA continue to consult with her regularly as she speaks out on her country's behalf.

"At first I resisted, mainly out of fear, but I was happy in the end to make my contribution," she said.