e than 300 men sat in a sunbaked sports field here in Moroto – shoeless, shirtless and surrounded by soldiers. Some were builders from a construction site, others staff from a tourist hotel. Ten were community health workers who had come to town for a training session with an international NGO.

All were detained for no other crime than being an adult male – and therefore a potential cattle raider. This is the unforgiving logic of the Ugandan army’s disarmament campaign in Karamoja, a region of 1.2 million people in the country’s northeastern borderlands.

Soldiers round up men indiscriminately and detain some for long periods without charge. They allegedly extort money, torture suspects and kill civilians.

For this story, we spoke to dozens of people across three districts, including civil society activists, political leaders and humanitarian workers. Most spoke anonymously for their safety.

Many acknowledged that cattle raiding by armed and violent young men had declined, partly due to the army’s campaign. But they also warned that human rights abuses have eroded trust and undermined the efforts of humanitarian groups responding to an interlinked hunger crisis in this rural region, 400 kilometres from the capital, Kampala.

By the security forces’ own reckoning, since July 2021, security forces have arrested more than 18,000 people and killed over 300 others – all of whom the government contends were raiders shot in gunfights. More than 600 guns and around 30,000 stolen animals have also been recovered.

But resentment was palpable during the recent round-up of suspects on November 1 in Moroto, the region’s largest town. Women clustered outside the fence, bringing identity cards for their loved ones. Others pleaded with the soldiers, many of whom had ripped off their name badges so they couldn’t be identified.

After hours in the searing heat, most of the detainees were screened and released. One of the first to come out was a 72-year-old man who had been on his way to hospital when soldiers accosted him. “If you question, they will beat you,” he said.

After a decade of tentative calm, cattle raiders returned to Karamoja in 2019. They have emptied cattle enclosures of livestock and killed hundreds of people, as we reported in January.

The escalating insecurity made national headlines in March when two soldiers, two government geologists and a student intern were killed.

The incident outraged Muhoozi Kainerugaba, the powerful son of President Yoweri Museveni, and the commander of the Ugandan land forces at the time.

“My Karimojong brothers!” he tweeted. “We have begged you to stop the life of robbery and violence. We have begged you to stop attacking your neighbours but to no avail! You have refused all our appeals! Well, now we are coming, and hell is coming with us!”

Although the residents of Karamoja were appalled by his belligerent language, many do want tough action to disarm raiders and recover stolen cattle. On a visit to Loyoro sub-county, in Kaabong district, it was easy to see why. In October, raiders made off with the community’s tiny remaining herd of 14 cows. Then they came back to try to steal the goats.

Violent waves of cattle raiding and tough disarmament campaigns by the authorities have swept across Karamoja since colonial times. Historically, most raids were tit-for-tat tussles between different ethnic groups. But locals say there has been a growth in commercial cattle raiding, where criminal gangs steal cows for sale. Raids draw in young men who have few other economic opportunities in the region.

In large parts of Karamoja, the insecurity has made it dangerous for people to go to their fields, exacerbating a severe hunger crisis worsened by erratic rains. Robbed of their cattle, in a region with few other sources of wealth, they have no assets to sell to get by on.

“If it wasn’t for insecurity and people were able to open up land, there would have been a reasonably good harvest.”

By late July, before the harvest brought some relief, there had been 2,465 hunger-related deaths this year in the nine districts of Karamoja, according to the World Food Programme (WFP).

“If it wasn’t for insecurity, and people were able to open up land, there would have been a reasonably good harvest,” said Kennedy Owuor, the head of the WFP office in Karamoja, adding that many households only have good food stocks for another two to three months.

Local leaders had long been calling for a more proactive response to the raids, built on peaceful disarmament and civil-military co-operation. But when the army stepped up disarmament in May, it resorted to the same iron-fisted approach deployed in Karamoja since colonial times – and which earned the military the name “ariang” or “the rough one” in the Ngakarimojong language.

The defining tactic of disarmament is “cordon-and-search”: a homestead or village is surrounded; houses are scoured for guns; the men are rounded up and screened, with suspected raiders taken to military barracks for further questioning.

The army insists these operations are “intelligence-led”. Accounts from detainees suggest otherwise. For example, on September 21 the army rounded up about 600 men in Moroto town, pulling them from streets and houses at dawn. Speaking two days later, two of those detained said soldiers had sorted them into groups.

• The New Humanitarian report