Whose land is our land?

In a recent statement, Museveni asked Acholi people if they, too, took tea and if they did, he derogatively wondered loud if the Acholi thought the sugar in their tea fell from the sky. This point was meant to intimidate Acholi on a proposal to give away huge chunks of land in Amuru to the Madhvani Group for sugar plantations.

The land issue has certainly divided our people, often pitying the IDP returnees against the powerful levels of NRM LCs and their supporting oppressive grassroot machinery. Acholi IDP dwellers are being forced by some members of UPDF, who themselves are Acholi, to give away ancestral lands for as little as Ush.100,000, especially when the victim is in dire need to solve an immediate tuition fees or hospital bill. The oppressors, both Acholi and non-Acholi, have exploited the desperate financial situations facing IDP camp dwellers and returnees.

Acholi people have all along wanted their communual lands to be put into the most economically productive activity to benefit all. The benefit to all does not imply that everyone shares in the economic activity; it simply means the spin-off effects must reach every Acholi irrespective of delivery method – direct jobs, healthcare, schools, apprenticeships, etc.

Let Acholi first resettle IDP returnees and ensure evey family owns a piece of the communual land, then the business interests will be resolved subsequently. After more than 20 years of genocide under UPDF/NRM, we believe it isn’t all that easy to break our common will.

General

This caterory will accept any other issues not included in this list. Feel free to share with Acholi.

Obituaries

Posting to this category is managed by Kwot-Kaka. Acholi weng would want to mourn the passing away of your loved one with you and the rest of your family. Send 1-3 pictures to kwot-kaka@rogers.com and we will post them for Kaka.

Births

Posting to this category is managed by Kwot-Kaka. Acholi ducu would want to share in the joy of the new addition to your family. Send 1-3 pictures to kwot-kaka@rogers.com and we will post the moment for posterity.

David Nyekorach-Matsanga

A London-based former PR consultant to the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and bankroller, the Ugandan insurgents notorious for abducting, raping, murdering and conscripting schoolchildren. Matsanga left the group in 1999, and in a statement released on the Internet, blamed an LRA official, Lt Col Nyeko-Yardin, for “dissolving” the political wing of the LRA. “Coup-plotters”, Matsanga said, had brought “political darkness” to the LRA. Today, he’s returned to LRA as a member of the negotiating team in Juba, Southern Sudan.

He was quated saying “People like Olara Otunnu (former UN special envoy on children in armed conflict) want to come to participate in this peace process but they fear to be labeled terrorists”. This drew an angry response from Olara Otunnu.

Genocide in Comparative Perspective – Cuthbert Onek-Adyanga

Genocide in Comparative Perspective: the Jewish and Acholi Experience

The debate between General David Tinyefunza and Olara Otunnu on whether genocide is unfolding in northern Uganda or not, deserves to be subjected to historical comparison for better understanding. Otunnu’s charge that conditions of genocide exist in northern Uganda drew evidence from the Government of Uganda and Non-Governmental Organizations reports that catalogued, among others, the deliberate policy of demonization, forcing people into concentration camps, abetting and encouraging rape by HIV/AIDS infected soldiers, and the prolongation of the conflict. The dynamics of the conflict has led to targeting unarmed civilians by both the Lord Resistance Army (LRA) and the Uganda People’s Defense Forces (UPDF). These conditions, taken as a whole, Otunnu argues, meet the threshold of genocide.

General David Tinyefunza of the UPDF denies perpetrating genocide against the Acholi people, without disputing the core sources of evidence presented by Otunnu. He argues that what exists in northern Uganda is not genocide but death caused by a situation of war. He adds that President Museveni has neither the will nor the desire to exterminate the Acholi, but protect them in the so-called “protected villages.” 

What is clear from the debate is that both Otunnu and Tinyefunza agree that there is mass death in Acholiland. However, they differ in their explanation about the mechanics of mass deaths, and whether the mass deaths should be characterized as genocide or collateral death. For a nuance understanding, a historical comparison of the mechanics of mass death is necessary. I would like to compare the case of the Jews during the Third Reich (Germany) under Adolf Hitler with that of the Acholi in Uganda under General Yoweri Museveni.

Leadership and Genocide: Hitler and Museveni

The path to consolidation of political and state power by Hitler and General Museveni are similar: First, both leaders began with creating environments where genocide would be seen as justifiable. Museveni ran a one-party state, where he and his associates conceived and meticulously planned genocide in broad daylight. Similarly, Hitler ran Germany as a one-party state. Both leaders excoriated democracy, constitutionalism and the rule of law, preferring bellicose militarism. 

Second, both leaders demonized their victims and proceeded to whip xenophobia and the fury of the population, initially as means to prosecute a war and eventually as a final solution in itself.  

For Hitler in Germany, the progressive conversion of Jews into enemies was later formalized by an executive decree in 1933, which pointed out that there was a Jewish problem. This graduated to the Nazi slogan that Jews were a misfortune. 

In Uganda, Museveni’s coming to power was based on explaining national crises as caused by northerners, who came to be mostly identified with the Acholi population. This was formalized by the NRM/A intellectuals that there was a northern question; and the derogatory NRM/A slogan became Acholis are “Abanyanyas” [read as equivalent to the Nazis’ justification – Jews were a misfortune]. The “Abanyanyas” referred to non-citizens, in fact, to southern Sudanese.

 

In both instances, the leaderships denationalized and transformed victims into enemies of the state deserving neither mercy nor reason. The logical solution was the so-called final solution.

Constructing and Articulating the Intellectual Basis
of Genocide

For genocide to occur with the apparent connivance of the population, an intellectual basis needs to be created and masqueraded as critical research. This is often used to brainwash the gullible.  

In Mein Kampf, Hitler vented out his hatred and xenophobia against the Jews by blaming the Jews for the humiliation that Germany suffered during World War I.  Once Jews had been presented as the source of the problem in Germany, the extermination project could be justified as the final solution. But it was not only Hitler; the Nazi intellectuals also legitimated the extermination project against the Jews. They misrepresented the deaths by blaming the victims as responsible for their own destruction.  

In the case of Uganda, to understand the background to the tragedy in Acholiland, we need to examine Museveni’s activities during his youthful days in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania. 

While a student at the University of Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, Museveni wrote his thesis entitled, “Fanon’s Theory and its Verification in Liberated Areas in Mozambique”, where he stated that:

“to transform a human being into an efficient, uncostly and completely subservient slaves, you have, as a pre-condition, to completely purge him of his humanity, manhood and will. Otherwise, as long as he has some hope for a better free future, he will never succumb to enslavement. To become an efficient instrument of oppression, you have to radically dehumanize yourself by foregoing many qualities that are normally found in balanced human beings. You purge yourself of compassion, altruism, consideration for other people’s sufferings and the capacity to restrain your greed. Failure of the oppressor to get rid of such undesirable feelings – like compassion – will mean inability to be a successful exploiter.”

Museveni followed his thesis by remarking that “Hitler was a smart man. …What he did in Germany, we will also do it here” (Uganda). To reinforce his admiration for mass murderers, Museveni boastfully approved the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, in spite of the fact that about 50 million Africans were killed. During interview with Atlantic Monthly, Museveni said, “I do not blame white people for slave trading. If you are stupid, you should be enslaved.” Blaming the victims of this form of genocide for their own extermination is the most pitiful and bigoted utterance. Yet no outrage was registered at home and abroad.  

In his book, Sowing the Mustard Seed, Museveni presented the Acholi, as a group, as responsible for the atrocities committed in Luwero. But let us consider the facts: the report of the commission of inquiry into the Luwero deaths have never been made public. Former fighters with Museveni have pointed a finger at Museveni for the Luwero deaths in their articles to the Monitor newspaper. Museveni promptly reacted by issuing injunction against retired National Resistance Movement/Army (NRM/A) military officers from continuing to publish the Luwero war memories. Museveni’s fear is that his complicity for deaths in Luwero will be exposed.

Demonizing the Victims: the Acholi and the Jewish Experience

There are similarities between the two leaders in favouring and promoting hatred that would lead to the crimes of genocide. 

Killings that lead to the crimes of genocide are usually preceded by psychological preparations. Museveni effected it through a vilification of the Acholi, as a group, by presenting them as responsible for the atrocities in Luwero. This provided justifications for “revenge” killings of the Acholi by the predominantly southern NRM/A soldiers. To continue stoking the flame of hatred and xenophobia against the Acholi, as a group, Museveni skillfully resorted to the indignity of displaying, for partisan reasons, human remains and rattling human skeletons as a political campaign ploy.
 
The various derogatory remarks about the Acholi people made by Museveni and his associates were interspersed by dehumanizing references of the Acholi people as inferior, primitive, backward and savage. In 1986, the NRM/A political commissar, Commander Karusoke Kajabago, referred to the Acholi people as biological substances, implying that they were deserving of extermination. 

The domestic internalization of the demonic ideology consigned the Acholi people to enemy status, within their own country, upon whom acts of debasement and genocide are acceptable.  Thus, what is aroused in the population is not so much hatred, although hatred is part of it, but indifference. 

The Strategy of Genocide: Implementation and Ruses

[a]. Concentration Camps:

If we examine the phenomenon of concentration camps, we find that it is characteristic of most genocide. First, the concentration camps were created through a great deal of ruses and deception throughout Germany and Uganda.  

The infamous concentration camps in Treblinka and Auschwitz were presented by the Nazis’ as industrial centers rather than what they really were. To effect the deception, the gate of Auschwitz still bears the infamous inscription, “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work Brings Freedom). Although some Jewish victims might have thought that the violence was part of Hitler’s repressive measures, they had no idea what Treblinka and Auschwitz, among others, signified for them. 

The extreme success of German propaganda was evident from the German murderers themselves who witnessed that, “down to their final moment before liquidation, they (Jews) believed they were going to be transported to some other place.” 

Museveni’s ruse in moving the Acholi population into concentration is similar to the Nazis. Initially, the unarmed civilian populations were encouraged to run for sanctuary to UPDF detaches, to churches and to police stations during UPDF and LRA firefights, but they would return to their homes after the hostilities. But soon, the UPDF innovators and architect of the final solution saw this as a strategic blessing. The Acholis were to move into the concentration camps for protection from combat hostilities.
 
When the Acholi’s realized that those camps were death camps, they resisted and stayed in their homes. A victim cried, “we were told that these camps were for our protection, but we are brought here to be killed.” The UPDF made mandatory that the unarmed civilian population must relocate permanently to designated concentration camps and those refusing would be deemed LRA sympathizers. Within 48 hours, the UPDF air force strafed those unarmed civilians who were reluctant to move, militia groups killed whoever remained to collect food and property, villages were burnt and artillery units fired live shells indiscriminately into unarmed civilian communities.

[b]. Some Deceptive Linguistics of Genocide: “Work” and “Protection”

The language used by the Nazis and the UPDF are comparable and similar. The Nazi concentration camps were mostly referred to as “work camps” and never as death camps, which was what the camps were in practice. 

The UPDF spoke of the concentration camps as “protection villages” and never as death camps, even when the reports of the Government of Uganda such as Suffering in Silence (January 2005); Health and Mortality Survey Among Displaced Persons in Gulu, Kitgum and Pader Districts, Northern Uganda (July 2005), and Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch reports describe conditions, which evidently meet the threshold of genocide.

Who is fooling who here?

The Nazi’s fooled nobody but themselves because, after the war, they were brought before the Nuremberg Tribunal and convicted. One of the problems in Germany was that most Germans were in a state of denial as illustrated by their attitude of silence and indifference. 

The UPDF are also fooling themselves. General Tinyefunza confirmed that only 15 soldiers are posted to protect a population of over 50,000 concentration camp inmates from the LRA attacks. Whereas, he agreed that Museveni, an individual, is protected by over 12,000 soldiers (1 Division of troops), consuming over one-third of the national military budget. Clearly, the concentration camps are not meant to provide protection.
 

We must be clear that the UPDF language of offering “protection” in villages and the Nazi language of “work camps” are similar. They are effective veil to cover the unfolding genocide.

[c]. Denials and Maligning of Victims

In both Germany and Uganda, propaganda played a central role in shaping the course of genocide.  

The Nazi propaganda purported that the Jewish people killed themselves while the Nazis were mere onlookers.  

This is similar to Yoweri Museveni propaganda that the Acholi’s are killing themselves while the NRM/A are offering protection and safety.
 

Preposterous as Hitler and Museveni’s allegations are, the main purposes of the denials and maligning were to blame the victims for their extermination. This shifted the guilt onto cousins or kin and kinship of the exterminated. 

The Donor Community and Accountability

There have not been any clear pronouncements about the tragic human catastrophe in northern Uganda from foreign donors, who finance up to 52 percent of Museveni’s administration budget. The donors have procured arms, trained and equipped the UPDF and the police force and continuously provided positive propaganda. It is this complicity that has made the donor community overlook the unfolding genocide in northern Uganda.  

We should all be ashamed about our failure or, even connivance with, the perpetrators of genocide by giving material and moral support. Many western donor’s diplomatic missions have regularly visited the concentration camps, signed the visitor’s book, but made no public complaints against the unfolding genocide.

 

The silence and support by the western donor community for Museveni’s regime must be construed as giving tacit assent to continue perpetrating the unfolding genocide against the Acholi people.

 

Why is it that the situation in Acholi, much like the tragic, humanitarian suffering in Darfur which Jan Egeland, the United Nations Under-Secretary for Humanitarian Affairs (UN-OCHA), described as the “world’s worst and forgotten humanitarian catastrophe” been denied the status of genocide? How come the tragedy does not also capture the sympathy and attention of the donor community?  

The Acholi genocide remains unparallel in terms of the ferocity sustained over time by several participating perpetrators and by the complicity of the donor countries.  

This is genocide where the ideological matrix of denial is among the most developed of any genocide in Africa; and, is actively propagated by donor community and agencies.
 

This is genocide where deniers such as General David Tinyefunza, Herbert Ogwal, Ambrose Murunga and Kintu Nyago, have called it “war” and often resorted to personal attacks, which are unrelated and distracting to what Otunnu actually charged. 

This is genocide occurring in broad daylight in spite of copious indicators: the Government of Uganda official reports, Non-Governmental Organizations, Humanitarian and Human Rights Agencies reports documenting atrocities, Museveni’s published philosophical justifications of mass murders and systematic demonizations of the Acholi people, and explicit dehumanization by NRM/A political commissars, meeting the threshold of genocide. 

Onek Adyanga  (Is a Doctoral Candidate in History at the University of Connecticut, USA). 

Email: <!– var prefix = ‘ma’ + ‘il’ + ‘to’; var path = ‘hr’ + ‘ef’ + ‘=’; var addy17997 = ‘adyanga’ + ‘@’ + ‘hotmail’ + ‘.’ + ‘com’; document.write( ‘‘ ); document.write( addy17997 ); document.write( ” ); //–> adyanga@hotmail.com

Why Museveni is undermining a negotiated settlement – Okello Lucima

Ref: Why Museveni is undermining a negotiated settlement

Garamba Sideshow: Divide and Conquer

Dead or alive, the fate of Vincent Otti, if Joseph Kony is to be believed, may well have been foreshadowed a year ago (LRA leader speaks out on deputy Otti, Monitor 8 Nov. 2007). It was reported then that the Ugandan government had focused its efforts at a parallel contact with the LRA fighters, rather than the official Juba Talks, as a preferred means to ending the conflict (Kony wants to talk to Museveni, Monitor, 23-29 July 2006). Such a strategy aimed to achieve one or more of the following objectives: to avoid addressing the root causes of the conflict; to isolate the LRA military leaders and fighters from its political leadership; and also to pre-empt the risk of issues raised at the Juba talks cohering with grievances and concerns over abuses in northern Uganda, which had sporadically been raised by civil society, political leaders, opposition parties, the media and rights groups.The sideshow in Garamba, led by Walter Ochora, Gulu RDC, also aimed to sow discord, mistrust and suspicions among LRA military leaders. These were to be achieved by all means of enticements including money, promises of presidential amnesty to induce high level and mass defections. Achieving one or a combination of these possible objectives was hoped to effectively pre-empt and scuttle a possible comprehensive settlement at the negotiating table. Coming as it did, the rumours of Vincent Otti’s death, or a possible fall-out between him and Joseph Kony, therefore, would have unfolded along a script authored by the UPDF High Command, and stage-managed by Walter Ochora and the 4th division hierarchy in northern Uganda. Accordingly, Lt. Chris Magezi’s denial to the BBC, of a possible UPDF plot to foment unrest within or portray the LRA as defeated and disintegrated force without organisation and unified command with whom negotiations was no longer necessary, is at best disingenuous, and crocodile tears at worst (Uganda rebel deputy feared dead, BBC online, Wed. 7 Nov. 2007).

Undoubtedly, it is in the express interest of Yoweri Museveni for the LRA to surrender (Talks resume tomorrow, Monitor, 6 August 2006). At the beginning of the talks-any change to the contrary is doubtful-defence minister Chrispus Kiyonga insisted that despite the talks in Juba, the UPDF would still attack the LRA. And indeed they did attack, resulting in the killing of Raska Lukwiya, one of the indicted LRA commanders. It is no secret that, for Museveni and the government, the preferred means to force LRA capitulation is first through military pursuit, psychological warfare and subversive counter-intelligence (ICC wants rebel’s corpse, Monitor, 13 Aug. 2006). Part of the determination to achieve military victory, is not simply to end the insurgency, but what Onyango Obbo’s inside sources revealed as Museveni’s unyielding mission to defeat and explode the myth of northern tribal martial invincibility (Who wins if peace comes-Museveni or Kony? Monitor 31 Aug. 20-06). This view is supported by Olara Otunnu, who shows that the war has provided a perfect cover for Museveni to pursue inexplicable agendas other than defend the human rights of the citizens of northern and eastern Uganda (A Nation in Crisis, allAfrica.com, 19 Sept. 2006).

The second tier of preferences is threats with the sticks of ICC arrests weighed on the opposite end by carrots of presidential pardon. As far as Museveni and the government are concerned, it would be best if the LRA were decisively defeated or if the ICC warrant and military pressure could force a surrender or popular disaffection, mass defection and collapse of the LRA as an insurgent force in order to avoid the difficult and unpredictable prospects of a trial by the ICC or a special court in Uganda. This, for Museveni, would also mark his crowning as the indomitable southern military leader who brought the so-called insuperable martial tribes of the upper Nile to their knees. This sham goal matters to Museveni more than anything else he has ever accomplished in his career. Defeating and punishing northerners, for obscure reasons best known to Museveni, was the obsession that took him to Luwero in 1981. It will do anything to achieve something of a military victory. Therefore, suspicions that the UPDF has been investing heavily in convert activities to undermine LRA leadership and command, or cause rifts among senior LRA commanders for the insurgent organisation to implode, are not without merits (LRA leader speaks on deputy Otti, New Vision, 8 Nov. 2007).

History punishes those who do not learn its lessons

We will recall that, at the beginning of the Juba talks in 2006, Uganda tried and failed to alienate the LRA military leaders from their civilian delegation to the talks. A strategy of dividing and isolating insurgent fighters from their political leadership is not new. In 1988, the Museveni government did just that, in its negotiations with the UPDM/A (Reaching the 1988 Pece Agreement, Accord, No.11, 2002). Then UPDA insurgent forces were predominantly semi-literate and politically and socially unconscious, and without significant capacity to raise fundamental issues greater than their self-interests:limited concerns for their welfare and privileges. To such men, Museveni could posture with false empathy that the UPDM political leadership in exile was a breed of discredited politicians who messed up the country and were ensconced in foreign capitals sipping whiskey, while the fighters were suffering in the bushes. Essentially, the argument sought to exploit a supposed brotherhood between the NRA and UPDA fighters as soldiers first and foremost, and therefore, comrades- in -arms. The attractive yet deceptive logic it appealed to was that, as comrades, the NRA had no fundamental problems with the UPDA fighters, but the politicians who misled them; first to war in Luwero, and later hoodwinked them into rebellion after Museveni defeated them and seized power.

Museveni feared to negotiate with the UPDM/A as a unified military and political organisation in 1988 for two principle reasons. First, he did not want to address the root causes of the rebellion and it was best if he avoided equally seasoned UPDM/A political leadership. Second, he did not know how to deal with the questions of trust and credibility arising from his unilateral abrogation of the 1985 Nairobi peace agreement and framework for national reconciliation and unity that had offered Uganda the best hope for peace and stability. After cheaply disposing of the fighters, it was no surprise that two years later in 1990, Museveni sought and concluded the Addis Ababa agreement with the political wing of the UPDM/A. At this time, the fighters were already demobilised. Some of its more politically conscious leaders, including but not limited to Kilama, Obote, and Ochero, were executed, imprisoned or forced to flee. In the end, UPDM/A political leadership had no strength to put up demands it could not back up with a fighting force strong enough to impose its will or engage in a contest of wills in case of NRM/A intransigence. As a result, UPDM leadership in exile had no choice but to capitulate and accept offers of personal gratification and privileges on Museni’s terms.

In retrospect, it should be clear to those who should have learned from the histories of peace processes with Museveni that it is not for nothing that he would rather talk to the functionally illiterate former abducted children in Garamba. In addition, his initial criticisms and casting of the LRA delegation in Juba as non-authentic, aimed to remove a more enlightened group of players from the scene. This would have left him with people he could easily manipulate and dispose of without conceding anything he did not want to give. It did not matter to him that the team in Juba were appointed by Kony and mandated to speak for the LRM/A. However, our curiosity should be aroused at the new LRA Juba delegation that were disparaged by the Uganda government a year ago, but as late as this week, being embraced in Kampala, to do business with Museveni. This begs the question: Do they still represent the LRA and Kony? Sensing the need to answer that question, the permanent secretary, ministry of internal affairs, Dr. Stephen Kagoda, had to assuage the nation that the delegation was legit, to allay public scepticisms about plenipotentiary standing of the LRA delegation in representing Kony or the LRM/A (Kony backed Ojul, New Vision, 12 Nov. 2007).

Public worries had been aroused by the rumours of Vincent Otti’s death. And we should all be worried over these inexplicable rumours and unexpected camaraderie that include bear hug embraces; when barely over a year ago, handshakes were taboo.

Every Man has his price

We should wonder what the nature of the business is that should have belatedly endeared the much maligned Juba delegation of the LRA to the Kampala regime. In our considered view, intrigue cannot be too far down the list. Intrigues and divide and rule tactics have worked well for Museveni over the years. It is possible that, after failing to create a rift between LRA military leaders and the peace delegation in Juba, in order to create opportunity of talking to semi-literate men as they did in 1988, the government set about to maximise potential for covert activities to set the LRA military hierarchy against each other. This strategy must have become a priority after the Juba talks took on a life of its own, and acquired a higher profile with the appointment of Joachim Chissano as UN Secretary General’s Envoy to the region and the talks. Coupled with the unexpected plenipotentiary suave and political astuteness of the LRA delegation, the government of Uganda lost control of the Juba talks agenda and process and needed to scramble a strategy and agenda it could control that could still undermine a possible comprehensive settlement reached by negotiations and a peace treaty in Juba. The motivation for this is that any settlement that leaves room for a trial of any kind, other than mato oput or Acholi traditional justice system, risks opening cans of worms that the Uganda government would rather avoid, if it could.

It is therefore reasonable to ask: Have the people who are supposed to read the fine prints for the LRA military leadership and cut a good deal for Kony & Co., not been compromised to shove just anything under his nose for trinkets? Given the circumstances, such a question is not idle. Two critical events raised the stakes and forced active pursuit of option B. First, the Uganda government was taken off-guard by the LRA Juba delegation; virtually upstaged at the opening session of the talks. The LRA/M Juba delegation exploded on the scene as more sophisticated; politically conscious; articulate; world -wise; underestimated and capable of raising credible issues of the causes of the war and its impact on Acholi and other northern and eastern Ugandan communities (LRA opening address at the Juba Talks, 15 July 2006; LRA position papers on Accountability and Reconciliation, 20 June 2007; Peace talks need focus, New Vision, 26 June 2007; Will geographical north rally around political LRA? Monitor, 31 Aug 2006). In addition, goings-on in Juba had revealed that among the delegation, there were young and old alike; men and women who were ambitious and whose lifestyles and personal needs fortified the axiom that every man has his price.

Second, the Ugandan delegation and government could not countermand the plausibility of the LRM/A delegation position, and chose the only defence that had often worked for them-to character assassinate and discredit its critics. For instance, in a lengthy guest column on allAfrica.com, Museveni attacked Olara Otunu as a supporter of former murderous regimes (Our People Embrace Peace, allAfrica.com, 19 Sept. 2006). This was in response to Otunnu’s insistent campaign to draw national and international attention to the northern Uganda genocide, co-authored by Yoweri Museveni and Joseph Kony. Similarly, the LRA delegates in Juba mounted a strong contest to Uganda governmnet view that the LRA was the sole perpetrator of atrocities in northern Uganda. In response, the Uganda delegation and Museveni sought to question their credibility, authenticity and authority of non-combatant diaspora-based LRA spokespersons to speaking on behalf of the fighters in Garamba. LRA.

Revealingly, the problem of the Uganda government did not seem limited to who was raising theses issues or that they were being raised at all. The regime was worried that it should be raised in a manner that echoes and integrates the concerns of the civil population in eastern and northern Uganda, the opposition parties, and rights groups with that of the rebel fighters. But the government opposition to and strategy to discredit the LRA delegates collapsed in the face of strong Kony and Otti backing of their team in Juba, even allowing them to shuttle between Garamba and Juba for consultations. It seemed that things were not going Museveni’s way, even after he flew with a full military squadron to Juba to intimidate the delegates. The Uganda government was therefore scared and desperate to re-assert itself. Museveni was determined to undermine the talks and achieve LRA surrender under UPDF peace terms. And it was obvious that divide and conquer tactics would be used, among other things.

Isolating one group from or setting one against the other has always been Museveni’s grand political strategy, particularly in northern Uganda. For instance, Uganda is nominally operating under a parliamentary dispensation. One would think that parliament, incorporating government and opposition parties would be involved in a high national profile issue like peace talks to end insurgency that has devastated more than 27% of the country. That the opposition is not represented in Juba is no accident. The opposition has been raising the same issues of governance and human rights that the LRA delegation raised in Juba. Furthermore, the community and political leaders from eastern and northern Uganda have not been given a place at the Juba Talks as legitimate stakeholders and primary parties to the process and terms of agreements that arise from it. Instead, they are relegated to the sidelines as mere observers, not expected to present any grievances, articulate the urgent need for a just peace, or influence the outcome to include mechanisms that would ensure the kind of peace they want.

In the NRM’s grand scheme of things, religious leaders, traditional leaders, district council political leaders and representatives of parliamentary groups from eastern and northern Uganda, must be kept at bay. It is necessary that they are not substantively involved, lest their respective knowledge and memory of the war, its causes, as well as their demands for its end, correspond with and reinforce some of the issues the LRA raised. It is feared that a possible confluence of demands, and a meeting of minds and hearts between opposition politicians and insurgents, would constitute an unacceptable and unsettling unity of northern and north-eastern grand political spectre and possibilities (Will geographical north rally around political LRA? Monitor 31 Aug. 2006). No one, including the government, has any illusion about the truth behind most, if not all of the issues the LRA raised at the Juba Talks regarding the history of the war and its origins; the brutal methods of counterinsurgency; forced movement of people into camps; shared culpability for abuses and atrocities committed; and the need for reparation and reconstruction of the region.

As far as Museveni is concerned, a peace talk on the Juba framework is unacceptable, because its agenda must necessarily address the root causes of the conflict, which inevitably must highlight abuses and atrocities on both sides. But talking with the LRA directly, and without a mediator, would cut out pertinent accountability for war crimes and rights abuses as well as political and governance reforms questions. Consequently, this would then give Museveni and the LRA the opportunity to address only the basic needs and personal privileges and gratifications of the rank and file of the fighters with incentive for money, houses, ranks in the UPDF and amnesty from criminal prosecutions. Under such disguised surrender terms, Museveni and the UPDF are shielded from exposure and accounting for their own counter-insurgency strategies that harmed more than vindicated human rights of non-combatants in eastern and northern Uganda. This is precisely why mato oput or traditional justice is more acceptable to Museveni, not because he has recently had a revelation of and conversion to a newer and conciliatory self; but rather, he dreads the double-edged sword of the ICC that could cut both ways in an adversarial trial, testimony and cross examination of evidence and witnesses.

Juba remains the best hope for a semblance of a just peace

On balance, the prospect of a Museveni-Kony deal outside of the Juba Talks does not bode well for long term peace and stability for Uganda and particularly the eastern and northern communities. First, the need for peace, the conditions and mechanisms necessary for a comprehensive settlement and durable peace will have not been addressed at all. In other words, the plight and needs of the people in concentration camps at the centre of the Juba Talks will have been displaced by the needs of the LRA fighters and Museveni’s self-interested calculations as the impetus for ending the conflict. Second, the LRA fighters would be reintegrated into these societies and many others absorbed into the UPDF and deployed in eastern and northern Uganda.

Such a course would forever make demobilised LRA combatants grateful and beholden to Museveni personally, and only too eager and willing to do his biddings. Fears for such prospects are not borne out of unfounded cynicisms but concrete experiences. Witness the pro-Museveni overzealousness of former UPDM/A commanders such as Col. Walter Ochora and Col. Otema Awany; the exploits of Maj. Okot Wiilit and Maj. Fearless Obwoya; and the activities of former LRA honchos Brig. Kenneth Banaya, Brig. Sam Kolo, Maj. Ray Apire, and Col. Onen Kamdulu, to mention but a few. It did not bother anyone in Uganda, and internationally, that this latter group returned from the bushes and kept as wives, girls they abducted, raped and used as sex slaves.

Furthermore, a person like Brig. Banya, Brig. Kolo, and Maj. Apire are the original LRA. As officers and commanders, they should be more responsible for alleged abduction, extrajudicial execution and destruction in northern Uganda. But since their return and willingness to serve Museveni’s whims, they are shielded and the ICC not bothered about them. This is despite the fact that while these three were not abducted but are former soldiers and adults who joined the LRA willingly, the other commanders such as Raska Lukwiya and Dominic Ongwen, who have been indicted by the ICC, were abducted as children and trained by the Banyas and Kolos in the trade they now stand accused of.

For those interested in a negotiated settlement and a just peace through the success of the Juba Talks, there is need to understand the objective history of the war (Accord, No. 11, 2002) and not let the methods of the LRM/A insurgency and its alleged brutalities dim our own memory of the war or cloud our judgements on how best durable peace can be achieved. No doubt, there are enough evidence of atrocities on both sides to warrant summary, public executions of the highest ranking leaders and their generals on both sides. But what is needed now is a mechanism to bring the war and the suffering of the eastern and northern population to an end. This implies that, the Juba Talks, rather than some sideshow in Garamba, is the best framework and prospects for comprehensive ceasefire and the road to peace. Culpability for atrocities should be left to the next stage of the process, which must necessarily envisage addressing the inadequacy of the ICC indictments, and the preference for a UN Special Tribunal for Northern Uganda, to investigate and try all perpetrators guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity over the entire history of the war from 1986.

As a meaningful way forward, and for a sustainable peace afterwards, the Juba Talks must also suppose the setting up of a National Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Anything short of an honest, just and equitable peace and settlement, will only act as a temporary band aid measure that is bound to rapture with irreparable consequences. There should be no shortcuts. And in keeping with our moral quest for a just and equitable peace, we must avoid falling prey to making a moral distinction between atrocities committed by non-state parties and that perpetrated by the state. Neither public tears of remorse nor wrapping oneself in the national flag should obstruct our perception and even-handed judgment of criminal acts and responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in northern Uganda.

Of Museveni, Hitler, Napoleon & Ideology – Peter-Rhaina Gwokto

Of Museveni, Hitler, Napoleon & Ideology

A popup of a Newvision article titled “Buganda LCs back government on Federo” of August 19th 2004 drove me into a reluctant google search followed by a plethora of literature searches for the origin, meaning and implications of just one word: ideology. On a surprising note, it motivated me to complete Adolph Hitler’s Meinn Kampf having read just two chapters almost a decade ago.

Startlingly, Museveni and his cheerleaders have referred to the National Resistance Movement (hereafter, referred to as NRM or Movement) interchangeably as a system or an ideology. In retrospect, it is the supposedly educated and high-powered echelon of the Movement who frequently refer to it as an “ideology” while the majority of Ugandans and the avid foreign consumers of the country’s politics refer to it simply as a “system” of rule.

The following observation is not about the Movement as a system, but as an ideology. Nonetheless, to jump to the conclusion, the Movement is neither an ideology nor a system but simply a political movement in the real sense of the word, movement, albeit, with no clear political direction – forward/backward or up/down or left/right but, it is moving somewhere, anyhow; a totalitarian dictatorship.

What is it with the Movement and ideology?To argue the Movement’s interpretation of ideology, astounding discoveries were made through, first, a modus operandi comparison between Yoweri Museveni’s 10 Point Program of the NRM to Adolph Hitler’s 25-Point Programme for Nazism or National Socialism (German Nationalsozialismus) of the Workers’ Party and, second, a comparison of leadership styles between Yoweri Museveni and Napoleon Bonaparte.
When Destutt de Tracy coined the word during the French revolution, ideology was meant to embrace the rather positive notion of a “science of ideas” in order to understand the social world, realize its imperfections, and seek to improve the living condition of man.

Thus far, ideology was a science with a mission. However, it turned from being an innocent concept of belief to a rather violent, action-centred, inflexible word to be manipulated by revolutionaries. In Napoleon’s era, ideology was born out of a contradiction: the material study of immaterial ideas. What most ideologues do not seem to distinguish is that its earliest uses were derogatory or pejorative such that to be an ideologist was living with one’s head in the clouds, trying to delude or persuade people with mere ideas rather than hard realities.

On the contrary and strangely enough, the nationalistic component to Hitler’s Nazism appealed to many Germans. The fact that they were superior and stronger than other European nations appealed to the masses such that the apparent coherent way in which Hitler presented these ideas made it more believable than ridiculous. The dictionary definition of the word ‘ideology’ is ‘ideas, doctrines or beliefs that form the basis of a political or economic theory…a body of ideas reflecting the social needs and aspirations of an individual, group, class, or culture’.

From this it is possible to construe whether the Movement’s political and economic program is fulfilling the social needs and aspirations of Ugandans. Or, does the Movement have any original ideas at all? Was the 10-Point Program, so famous in its first two years, eulogized within the next two, and forever relegated to history, the basis for suggesting the Movement is an ideology?

Time and continuity are the true tests of ideology. Museveni reneged on the programme during Andrew Mwenda Live saying he abandoned the broad based system he introduced in 1986 because “some politicians were not supporting even the minimum programmes of the government”. The broad based system was enshrined in the 10-point program and by abandoning it simply to appease dissenters the Movement flip-flopped and chose to function without any rigid program or blueprint to give it direction.

It has been, at best, contradictory and hypocritical since it first chose to excite the masses with hope then chiselled away the little that was extant for the benefit of a loathed few.Edward Shils (1968) states that ideologies are not only distinguished by the explicit nature of their formulation but are also more closed and rigid than other types of belief and that those who subscribe to them are required to do so totally.

Having moved away from its 10-Point Ujamaa socialist beginnings, the Movement is now haphazardly coalescing ideas and theories from such rudimentary sources as the military ranks, cultural chiefs, show-off evangelists, and even known criminal gung-ho side-kicks who do the Movement’s dirty jobs.

The moral fundamentals of the Movement is continuously being eroded by exponents who have resorted to intimidating rather than convincing a community that is increasingly regretting the implications for having misappropriated their personal allegiance to the Movement and its wherewithal . Yet these unscrupulous and contemptuous politicians to whose interests Museveni succumbed are the same he reinstated around him, and ironically, the same who have been implicated for a laundry list of plunder, corruption and human rights abuses.

Of Museveni and Hitler

To substantiate that the Movement’s ideas are contradictory and hypocritical and, therefore, do not merit the criteria for ideology, a comparison of the Movement’s 10 Point programme to similar ring-tones in Hitler’s 25 Point Programme of the Workers’ Party is warranted. Acknowledging Hitler’s Nazism as ideology has been called flattery. The overall assessment is that like Nazism, the Movement ideas lack coherence and are intellectually superficial and simplistic. B

oth are merely collections of ideas which are not too intellectually challenging to piece together – well akin to the incongruous demands of an upcoming school strike. Both programmes are ensembles of everyday social, political and economic issues which are not, in any positive sense, original. Hitler’s originated from the nationalist and racist writings of the 19th century while Museveni’s were incubated in socialist Tanzania and from sporadic involvement in Mozambique’s war of independence.

Comparisons are shocking and mind-boggling; however, they help drive the Movement’s claim for ideology status closer to a near perfect DNA match with the Nazi’s intimidating oratory and gross injustices. Nearly the Movement’s entire 10 Point Programme is embedded in the Nazi’s 25-Point Programme.

Compare the Movement’s 1st point to the Nazi’s 6th point. The Nazi point states that the right to vote on the State’s government and legislation shall be enjoyed by the citizens of the State alone. It demanded that none but citizens whether in the Reich, in the states or in the smaller localities, shall hold all official appointments, of whatever kind. Furthermore, it opposed the corrupting parliamentary custom of filling posts merely in accordance with party considerations, and without reference to character or abilities.

The NRM point states that real democracy had to be organized at all levels through elections from the village, to people’s committees, to parliament, and on the basis of a decent standard of living so that ordinary people could resist the blandishments of unprincipled politicians. To this day the government has yet to uphold what being a Ugandan citizen entails.

Many Ugandan “extras” have attained status which gives them privileges way beyond the constitution would permit. Most vividly, there are many people of Rwandan origin who are funded through the national purse to Uganda schools and universities, access national universal healthcare, have better jobs than Ugandan equivalents and obtain benefits deserving of true citizens.

The foregoing assessment offers a placid justification until one is confronted by the fact that, at the minimum, both the Nazi and NRM points focus on the power of citizens to decide their country’s future. If Fred Rwigema and Paul Kagame (Rwandan citizens) were members of Uganda’s high command then one can only guess how many Rwandese nationals are eligible to vote in Uganda without hindrances of any kind.

You guess again; what about the undocumented Nubians and Kakwa of southern Sudan and RDC? There is reason to believe that these illegal residents have voted to help send the wrong people to the national parliament. There are more illegal voters in Uganda than the eligible Kyeyo manpower (migrant workers) in the Diasporas who have been denied the right to vote by the Movement.

Compare Museveni’s 2nd point Hitler’s 12th point. The Nazi programme states that “in view of the enormous sacrifices of life and property demanded of a nation by any war, personal enrichment from war must be regarded as a crime against the nation. We demand therefore the ruthless confiscation of all war profits”. Sounds familiar?

The NRM version states that because insecurity in Uganda had been largely the result of state-inspired violence, it could be eliminated through local democracy, a politicized army and police, and absence of corruption at the top. Napoleon, Hitler and Museveni were great single beneficiaries of wars which they doctored but most noticeable and widely documented were the loots accumulated by their generals – from sprawling chateaus and widowed Mademoiselles, to highly priced Van Gough paintings and Jewish gold dentures, to Congo diamonds and timber. An inquiry report on the Congo debacle has been shelved for good.

No known government across the world has initiated such expensive, reckless, incompetent and arrogant commission of inquires and yet shelved them in an “in-your face” blasphemy of its citizens like the Movement. Only the Movement can drum such elaborate inquiries just for the record and shove them up the rears of watching Ugandans without daring to convict any named suspects and accomplices.

Instead, they get rewarded with executive promotions and high commendations. It goes without question that any attempt to convict Salim Saleh (the president’s brother), would be followed immediately by a presidential pardon, leaving the taxpayers to chew the cud.

The junk helicopter saga is one asphyxiating gag to the taxpayer: first the commission was led by a judge whose tone was abundantly subdued when the president arrived for questioning – let alone stooping on bended knees in acknowledgement that the president had indomitable powers and mercies over her job.

Second, the saga was a national embarrassment that foresaw its closure well before the hearing even began. The trouble, however, is that Ugandans will pay for this loss over a long period of time and the irony is that the bulk of the money is not lost but sits in personal bank accounts of known crooks and money launderers. Uganda became a heaven for the likes of Van Brink who chose to flee the Caribbean after bankrupting an offshore bank. In Uganda, crooks are stars.

The saga also presented the reckless disregard of responsibility and escalating abuse of authority. It is deplorable to learn that public servants are permitted to amass hefty monetary commissions from deals made for the national good.

The question is whether it is right for public officials can acquire commissions from contracts that would be paid for by the taxpayer, from the national coffer. Nearly every suspect in the saga, and most especially Salim Saleh, acknowledged taking commissions for their efforts yet no justice was meted and no apology in the offing. This is simply not right because the assignment was not a new addition to Saleh’s job description which needed to be paid separately, but rather a duty which came with the office for which he was being paid to control.

In a related issue, the Northern war for which the helicopters were being purchased lifted the dark cumulus cloud of corruption high above the country’s skies for every Ugandan to see truth about their national leaders. It is common knowledge that the Uganda People’s Defence Force (UPDF) would be a non-performing asset without the sustained effort to continue this horrific war.

Northern Uganda has never received its share of GDP for almost 20 years and continues to develop its infrastructure – if any – with donor and NGO funding. Large amounts of money earmarked for northern development have been siphoned to personal bank accounts by the chief beneficiaries. Countries with large military establishments but undeveloped economies continuously live on the brink of civil wars – Uganda, RDC, Nigeria, and Ethiopia – because wars seem to be the most rational way to re-distribute development wealth to neglected regions, let alone to the greedy, ruthless and self-serving leaders.

Compare the Movement’s 3rd point to the Nazi’s 1st point. The Nazi demanded the union of Germany in a Greater Germany on the basis of the right to national self-determination. Similarly, the Movement states that national unity must be consolidated by eliminating sectarianism–that is, through the removal of politics based on religious, linguistic, and ethnic factional issues.

This sounds like perfect living in the mythical Garden of Eden. Like his predecessors, Museveni’s Movement continues to thrive on what it promised to eliminate: pitying ethnic groups against each other, perpetuating retributions, propagating fear, and recently, voicing maligning sentiments ridiculing the Anglican Church at the opening ceremony of a reformed church.

Museveni, Hitler and Napoleon have not only called themselves visionaries, but their most ostentatious visions have been their utmost nightmares. For Napoleon, it was about conquering the world – an undertaking which took him as far as Egypt and Turkey, Hitler’s was a Greater Germany over

The world has rubber stamped Museveni’s egoistic vision to win favour by reinstating archaic monarchies whose demands have increasingly become complex and headed to breaking up the country. The world is, however, watching the peaceful, lawful and democratic approaches being pursued. Reversing the direction is only possible through an abrasive and uncompromising counter approach called dictatorship.

Yet very soon, one will prominently characterize the Pearl of Africa. It is impractical to eradicate sectarianism when the president himself continues to heighten divisionary sentiments with talks about exterminating groups opposed to the Movement as though they were vermin. Whether by a calculated design, his deputies are now calling for restraining the increasing powers and demands of cultural kings to mere bark-cloth, feather-wearing and spear-toting pre-historic fashion models.

Compare the Movement’s 4th Point to the Nazi’s 2nd and 22nd Points. Hitler’s Nazi demanded equality of rights for the German people in its dealings with other nations, and the revocation of the peace treaties of Versailles and Saint-Germain (2nd), and, demanded the abolition of the mercenary army and the foundation of a people’s army (22nd). The Movement’s version echoes that it was possible to stop the interference of foreign interests in Uganda’s domestic concerns since independence, but only if the Ugandan leadership developed independent priorities based on Uganda’s, or rather, the Movement’s interests.

Nothing is uniquely holy about the biblical teaching to ‘do unto others what you would them do unto you’ because our fore fathers had stronger and more meaningful proverbs to deliver the same message with overwhelming impact. Although the message appears obvious, the NRM has inflicted irrevocable human, property and infrastructure losses in neighbouring countries that would require nothing less than a Clintonian mia-culpa to the people of Rwanda or a Papal apology for failure of the Catholic Church to protect the Jews and condemn the holocaust.

The Movement was noticeably associated by the international community to the bloody regime changes in Rwanda and Congo, and specifically, the bloodied fingerprints it left at massacre and rape scenes in eastern Congo. Ironically, the Movement’s interference into the affairs of neighbouring nations does not seem to entertain a return match in Uganda’s arena. While President Clinton made a single trip to Rwanda to apologize for doing little to halt genocide, Museveni – himself, the backbone and originator of the bloody emancipation – has made numerous trips to Rwanda but never shown a twitch of sympathy or commiseration to the people of Rwanda.

The Movement’s strategy has always been to have it both ways: initiate the victimization process and play victimized at the same time. To date, the people of the Luwero, their leaders and children hold insuperable hatred for the people of Acholi and Lango while obstinately and adamantly refusing to acknowledge that the originator of the Luwero massacres was Museveni’s Movement. On his part, Museveni has never apologized for the atrocities the NRM and the Army of Milton Obote equally meted out in Luwero. Moreover, the Movement army left more oppression and haunting memories in eastern DRC than any discernible, visible or tangible evidence of freedom or liberation.

The above incidents exposed a serious omission in the Movement’s 4th point which prohibits foreign interference in Uganda but, seemingly, condones the reverse. It also exposed the Movement’s hypocrisy in that it was addressing economic and political interferences in Uganda while deliberately concealing the brutal military appendage of a plan to wreck horror and carnage in Rwanda and Congo.

Instead, the Movement inserted a dilute afterthought in the second sentence of the 9th point stating that Uganda should also defend democratic, and human rights of African people against dictators who oppressed them. Museveni now wished he never inserted this sentence because like his contemporary nemesis, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Museveni is neither a defender nor an icon of democracy and human rights but the chief devil’s lobbyist against both.

Compare Movement’s 7th point to the Nazi’s 18th point. Hitler’s Workers’ Party demanded the ruthless prosecution of those whose activities were injurious to the common interest. Common criminals, usurers, profiteers, etc., must be punished with death, whatever their creed or race. Museveni’s programme states that because corruption, particularly in the public service, reinforced basic economic distortions, government had to eliminate it in order to assail economic distortions effectively.

Oh yeah? What a sweet but monotonous song in the ears of the African. The majority of Ugandans who adorn highly flammable dry banana leaves – symbolic support of the presidential third term or, is it a life term – are redundant pleasure seekers who do not know what to covet out of the Movement unlike its leaders who comprehend the political, legal and economic ramifications of losing the grip on power.

The constant bombardment of the ill-informed citizen with relentless rhetoric does not permit a moment to reflect on un-sieved support for the Movement. So much to ruminate over that criminals like Kakooza Mutale, Salim Saleh and Museveni himself, would wish they died long into the life of the Movement because they, sure, will face justice when the NRM flack-jacket loses its protective capability within their life-time.

Slowly, however, African judicial systems are bringing leaders who once trampled the law, thought they had purged all their wrong doings without a trace, and even fought to amend the constitution to protect them when forced out of office from the dramatic trials that would ensue. It happened to Jean-Bedel Bokassa of Central Africa and it is dogging Chiluba of Zambia, Arap Moi of Kenya, Bakilli Muluzi of Malawi and Jerry Rawlings of Ghana. However, none would come close to the immeasurable class action litigations which Museveni and the Movement will face regarding atrocities in the Great Lakes region.

Furthermore, one feature of Uganda’s politics has remained unchanged for decades: power consolidation vested in instilling and sustaining the politics of fear and intimidations. It pities groups against each other and often along ethnic lines, but most of all, it empowers a few to unleash blunting fear in the hearts and minds of the people.

Ever wondered why 95% of Uganda’s parliamentarians are political nonentities, or why they believe they just happened to have won a periodic job interview instead of representing their electorates, and why most lack common sense, sagacity, prudence, judiciousness, and shrewdness? Ever wondered why peasant politics prefers trading the level-headed, well-informed, well-educated, progressive but impecunious professors and PhD-ites for the total opposite in the thug of a man or woman next door to represent their constituency in parliament? The answer lies in the politics of disseminating and instilling fear.

Hitler presented to the masses a bombardment of political ideas, which seemed to take into account every personal opinion of the average and indeed middle class German. Fortunately for him, when victory over Europe appeared to be all theirs, many Germans who first acquiesced to his ideas out of trepidation for their lives soon began to religiously believe and preach “the man himself” with all their hearts and minds. Astonishingly, unlike Germans, Ugandans did not take long to disbelieve the Movement because as soon as its apostolic high command savoured the honey and milk flowing through the Promised Land, they immediately defrocked, abdicated their political faith, and ditched their 10 Point programme.

This aided the refuseniks to mentally disassociate from the ideas they once swore to uphold, thereby, feeling no remorse or the need for penance. With the milk and honey concentrated in the hands of a few, these turncoats regrouped to form the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC). Change? Aren’t these NRM bed mates? Well, so were Amin and Obote, Obote and Museveni, and presidential foes Museveni and Kagame. Nonetheless, there will be significant amount of change in Uganda under FDC; if only to appear different from the Movement as the bearer and guarantor of human rights, protector of the constitution and the resolve to fight corruption and abuse of power by party and public officials.

Those who understand the lifespan of Ugandan regimes should also discern when to wear the life-jacket before abandoning the Movement’s titanic and swim to the new ship christened “Change” before it gets full. It is playing Russian roulette and for many politicians, staying afloat is a life of pimping on a fleet of ships with unknown cargo but attractive names – SS inFamous, HMS Corruption, SS Change, HMS Commissions, HMS Raw Deal, SS Ituri, HMS Federo, HMS Power Grab, HMS Movement, or SS Junk Chopper.

It took more than 5 British battle ships to sink Hitler’s invincible battle ship, the Bismark and what the Movement should have learnt by now is that even the most feared dictators crumble like their white elephant projects and die cowards in foetal positions begging for atonement – Napoleon alone in exile in St Helene, Hitler by suicide selfishly taking his wife along, Idi Amin on welfare begging for more, Mobutu sadly on a bed of dollars, Sadam caught in a spider hole with roommates saved from clinical drug trials, Museveni — almost got that correct as well.

Waste and big government are the Movement’s methods to appease Museveni’s sympathizers and pay his political debts. Consider these numbers: there are 295 MPs (an MP for every county and a woman MP for each of the 56 districts), there are 56 Residence District Commissioners (RDC) and 56 parallel LC5s (Local Councillors), 66 cabinet ministers and ministers of state, and 3 deputy prime ministers. At the district level, personality and ruthlessness determine the most powerful between the duplicate RDC and the LC5, the former being a presidential appointee close to the president, and the latter, a locally elected official who is loved or feared by his people.

Both are paid high salaries for doing the same job for the Movement. Parliamentarians earn more than the equivalent of US$ 3500 per month, a private in the army earns US$ 25 and the peasant who meets his basic food, clothing and shelter needs from a patch of ancestral land barely lives on US$ 10.

Compare the Movement’s 8th point to the Nazi’s 17th point. The Nazis demanded a land reform suitable to national requirements, the passing of a law for the expropriation of land for communal purposes without compensation; the abolition of ground rent, and the prohibition of all speculation in land. For the Movement, the problems of victims of past governments needed to be resolved: land should be returned to thousands of people displaced by mistaken development projects and land seizures.

It goes on to say the Karamojong should be settled by providing adequate water; and workers and public servants should receive salaries that would allow them to meet the cost of living. After nearly 20 years of NRM hegemony more land issues have emerged than existed and ‘man eateth where he worketh’ is the only way to make ends meet. Today, Uganda has more victims of erroneous development projects and forced relocation to Internally Displaced People (IDP) concentration camps than any other country has done to its own citizens since the German-Jewish holocaust.

Any talk about development projects and land-related corruption will prominently feature one of Africa’s renowned women, Dr. Speciosa Kazibwe, Museveni’s former vice president. She has never endeavoured to explain away the missing Valley Dam development funds for western Uganda and Karamoja regions. Through just one humongous debacle, she has dealt her hopeful women folks the greatest political low blow ever.

At a time when the majority of Africans and Ugandans in particular were beginning to reckon that women would do a better job at mothering the country as leaders than men, Kazibwe came as one of a kind and screwed up their hopes by involving in a habit characteristic of the male species: corruption. Like suspects of the junk helicopter saga and Congo diamonds, Dr Kazibwe was recently rewarded a high position in the Movement heading for national political party status – the same back-slap by Museveni which rewards known criminals for being infamous. This fair lady also had the bile to demand and successfully acquire 2.5 billion shillings for the cost of pursuing further studies at Harvard University.

The northern war seems to be ending yet a new one is picking up steam within the same region. First, there is unconfirmed information that due to unbearable conditions some Acholi and Langi in the IDP camps are selling their ancestral lands to unscrupulous middlemen. Second, the weekly Rupiny recently ran an article on Nubian claims over nearly half of Gulu District.

The claim is that Nubians inhabited this area in the years of Samuel Baker and Gordon Pasha until they (Nubians) started selling the Acholi to Arab slave traders. Frustrated with failing to wear the presidential mantle, Moses Ali in his waning years has emerged as leader of this Nubian group. One is left wondering why Moses Ali would not simply educate his fellow Nubians – of which he is not a member either – that the constitution of Uganda allows every Ugandan citizen to settle and/or resettle in whichever region or part of the country he or she chooses to dwell.

Then again, there is reason Ali is incapable of thinking this far and the clue is entrenched in just the same reason he could not stop his beloved life president Idi Amin from butchering Ugandans. Simply stated, Moses Ali is ignorant of the fundamentals of government even though he has been in public service for nearly four decades. He is illiterate; not in the true sense of an inability to read this text, but as an intellectually incapacitated buffoon – an intellectual dwarf, paradoxically contrary to his body mass.

There is something else to be seen through Moses Ali’s foggy eyes: a vision to create an exclusive enclave for Nubians in Acholi then declaring a district status – making a mockery of the Acholi in a show that he is not yet done with left-over hatred. So much for a group that sold the Acholi as slaves, yet allowed back to peacefully resettle after the reconciliation near Nimule. Unfortunately, the Acholi and Nubians never lived happily ever after as the fairy tales would conclude.

The Nubians soon sided with Amin’s pallbearers, one of whom was Moses Ali, to slay thousands of Acholi and Langi among other Ugandans, hence burying the reconciliation hatchet. Were they innocent of atrocities in northern Uganda, there would not have been any reason for Nubians to flee with Idi Amin and his surrogates. To date, but only for Museveni’s political survival,

Moses Ali remains unquestioned for unfathomed wrongs which many Ugandans are confident he must have committed or been accomplice to. As Amin’s Finance Minister, he is also believed to have made away with unknown sums of government money to exile in Pakistan. But somewhere in Uganda, a curious accountant and an aging orphan are again waiting for the political flack-jacket to fall off the back of one more crook. Should Ali’s cold case files get thawed to expose shocking details of his past, the evils of Nasur Abdalla and Mustapha Adrisi would be sins as negligible before God as the wet dream confessions of a Franciscan monk. Museveni recognizes as well that not a single big kahuna in Idi Amin’s high command got away with unbleached bloody hands – so much for birds of the same feather.

Of Museveni and Napoleon

Personality and leadership styles are important in rigidifying ideology. While “Everything for the French people” was Napoleon’s boldly inscribed motto, “Everyman for himself” is Museveni’s whispered equivalent. The Continental System, an economic war waged by Napoleon on his closest enemy, pushed him into one war after another and despite being branded an Enemy of Humanity by his enemies, the French people flocked to him. Bankrolling the conquest of more territories in order to ensure the self sufficiency of France took him to wars as far as Austria, Egypt and Turkey. Museveni, however, is no Napoleon. Ugandans feel safer away from him than flock to him. Museveni has more enemies, albeit powerless, inside Uganda than outside. Self-indulgence and a regional acclaim to political pomposity were not the only motives for fomenting military incursions into Rwanda and Congo but so were two morally disturbing issues which Napoleon would not have allowed to France but Museveni did to Uganda.

First, many Ugandan soldiers who died in the plunder of RDC unfortunately lost their lives in vain; not for the protection of Uganda but for the personal enrichment of a few generals, the president’s immediate family, and associate crooks from diamonds, gold, timber and flight concessions. Museveni armed and pitied tribal groups in RDC against each other while his cronies plundered away the region’s mineral and forest wealth. The lowly UPDF soldiers, meanwhile, destroyed the social fabrics, increased social ills, ravaged infrastructure, and worse still, returned to Uganda with no significant personal loots like their superiors except their Congolese women with children manufactured during the rampage – women and children who are now abandoned in the streets and slums of Bombo, Gulu, Entebbe and Masindi.

Second, the motive for bankrolling a war of plunder in eastern RDC exposed the inhuman, evil, sadistic and wicked side of Museveni. The preoccupation with war seems to serve longevity to Museveni’s Movement as good as it did Napoleon’s. It took seven regional coalitions 23 years to bring down Napoleon ending in the Battle of Waterloo. Museveni will probably outlast him if he sleazes his way into a third term. Most importantly, churning and fanning internal wars has helped Museveni to redirect the dissatisfaction within his military to a focus on war as a recurring employment opportunity. The Movement has regularly undermined every imminent opportunity to end rebel activities in northern Uganda even when it appeared the enemy was losing the battle or ready to reconcile. By his agenda, this is in order because it gives the enemy time to regroup, restock and continue the insurgence, thus busying the military and preventing an uprising or coagulation of mutineers to overthrow his government.

Unlike the multiple coalitions that ended Napoleon’s career, it is a known embarrassment in Uganda’s high circles that the small Rwandan army dealt very serious blows to Uganda soldiers at every encounter in eastern Congo. Contrary to the Movement’s assertion that it was time for NRA troops to withdraw since the mission was accomplished, allegations of massacres, arming tribal groups, rapes, dubious contracts, plunder of minerals and timber resources were all attributed to Museveni’s army operations in DRC – allegations for which UN investigations continue.

The principal tenet of the Civil Code that Napoleon created and today forms the basis of many European legal systems was that every French person was equal before the law. Ludwig Beethoven said of Napoleon “he would trample on all human rights and become a tyrant”. He was not flip-flopping on his code. Unlike the lion, the African leopard does not attack human beings unless a firm eye contact is established to signal a threat which ultimately prompts the leopard to preempt by attacking first and fast. On the same note, Napoleon went about his conquest for two reasons, first, to preempt imminent attacks by his enemies and, second, when there was political or economic need to do so for the good of France.

Museveni’s Movement, however, expounds the Orwellian philosophy that “all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others”. This places Museveni, his family and cronies above the laws of the land to the extent Uganda looks propertied. Worse still, even criminals like Kakooza Mutale (known for child labour abuses, extortions and forming a private army of intimidators called the Kalangala Action Plan), Musa Ecweru (for inciting tribal sentiments) Ofwono Opondo (for murder of a suspected robber), Speciosa Kazibwe (for embezzling Valley Dam development funds and extorting shs.2.5 billion), Salim Saleh and his wife, Nobel Mayombo, James Kazini (for plundering Congo), just to name a few, all live and operate above the laws of Uganda.

Never one to accept criticism, Napoleon cracked down on the press, censoring newspapers and eventually closing down all but a few. Museveni’s treatment of the press included several arrests and detentions or journalists and editors. Freedom of the press is nonexistent as journalists are constantly intimidated and newsgroups are regularly sued by the government in an attempt to bankrupt and put them out of business.

One of the accusations often levelled against Napoleon is that he “betrayed” the higher ideals of the French Revolution, thereby retarding democratic progress in both France and Europe. Museveni has equally retarded democratic progress in Uganda by deviating from the Movement’s ideals and by creating an unstable and most manipulated constitution in the region. Having ratified the 1995 constitution with its two five-year term limit, Museveni is now engrossed in amending it to unlimited terms. This, for a president who swore to uphold democratic principles and has ruled for nearly twenty years with the excuse that Uganda is not ready for any other leader but him – a numbing insult to millions of Ugandans who would do a better job at leading, developing and uniting the country.

Forecasting doom over its third term pitch, the Movement has resorted to purchasing conditional allegiance from elected members of parliament (MPs) at Shs. 5 million per supporter – so slimy, cunning and despicable an activity to which the president has responding sardonically. Once elected, Uganda’s MPs are known for ceasing association to with their constituencies. Their priorities change, specifically to bettering themselves and furthering their personal ambitions at the expense of the electorates. They completely immerse in corruption, defiance, bribery, and even coercion of the very people who elected them.

Bonaparte is also frequently held responsible for the “Napoleonic” wars and seen as a prime cause of them. It is argued that he should have prevented those wars with better statecraft and convinced the rest of Europe that France’s new and ideologically threatening government was not an enemy. Museveni is the prime cause of the instability which now spans the great lakes region of Africa. He once set himself as godfather to emerging regimes in Uganda, Congo, Rwanda, Burundi and southern Sudan.

Like Napoleon, Museveni is described by Movement detractors and dissenters as a corrupt individual, bereft of morality, and one who refuses to acknowledge that his actions are perilous, detrimental, and cause of great anguish. Museveni’s successes in wars and numbness to defeats have made him rely on war as the instrument of policy. He is utterly oblivious and insensitive to its human cost, toll on the bereaved family and immediate community. His recourse to diplomacy in times of crises is similarly farfetched. With a deformed intonation and inability to articulate his views eloquently, he has opted for bloody resolution of conflicts with the total disregard for human life. In Luwero, Rwanda, Congo and northern Uganda, Museveni has not heeded to a single call for diplomacy; instead extolling the death figures of his own country men and women with such callous heartlessness that defeats and demeans the respect for human life.

Napoleon is often described as being ruled by a gigantic ego. His lust for power, the coup d’etat Brumaire, his dismissal of democracy and the establishment of Empire, are all seen as benchmarks of rampant ambition. You name it; Museveni has it all. Comparisons of Napoleon with contemporary leaders are regarded as irrelevant presumably because Bonaparte is assumed to have been greater than they, and presented with unique opportunities, all squandered on a quest for personal aggrandizement.

Similarities are vivid although Bonaparte was greater and more loved and admired than Museveni. Museveni’s failure to create a Tutsi empire in the great lakes region was victim of his own self-seeking, egocentric and selfish undoing. It was no match to the coalition around Congo’s Kabila. Internal wrangling over loots and plunder, allegations of human rights abuses by the Movement’s army and the shocking rivalry and disintegration of Museveni-Kagame coalition brought Museveni’s lust for power and regional hegemony to a screeching halt.

Conclusion

A number of doctrines have emerged and retained their true attributes in defense of ideology. They include Conservatism, Liberalism, Capitalism, Socialism, Marxism, Fascism, and Totalitarianism. For the Movement, it is how its 10-point program could jointly form the foundation for ideology such that as a set of ideas it would attempt to explain reality for Ugandans. The conclusion will be based on L.B. Brown’s (1973) suggestion that all ideologies must have the following characteristics:

First, an ideology gives answers to important questions and defines approaches to them. What makes ideologies powerful is that by giving answers to important questions, they help define these institutional roles. The Movement’s program provided answers to traditional questions facing Uganda, however, it is one thing to provide answers and it is yet another to implement these answers. Somewhere down the implementation path, it miserable crumbled to dust.

Second, an ideology involves commitment to a recognized position. Ideology is not only belief. It is also a commitment to act in support of the belief. This commitment may be so strong that people may be willing to die to preserve their ideology. Many Movement acts have been to the contrary. Corruption, nepotism, child and human rights abuse, etc still characterizes Uganda’s political and economic scenes. The Movement has had many dissenters and deserters asserting or implying that it is not worth dying for.

Third, ideologies are concepts. Ideologies occur in the mind. To this extent they are “imaginary,” but concepts can contribute powerfully to the reality in which we live. The Movement’s ideas are ‘visible and tangible’ meaning that they were created for practical purposes but not to excite the mind.

Fourth, an ideology about other ideologies itself becomes a structure to which people can cling to interpret behavior. By its own tendencies, the Movement is moving away from the people and Ugandans do not see it as a viable uniter, defender of human rights or good for Uganda’s democracy. Just like Hitler’s Nazism, any reference to the Museveni’s Movement as ideology is sheer flattery.

Peter-Rhaina Gwokto is a Senior Financial Systems Analyst and Management Accountant with the Federal Government of Canada in Ottawa.

 

Structure and Agency in Acholi Genocide – Cuthbert Onek-Adyanga

STRUCTURE AND AGENCY IN ACHOLI GENOCIDE, NORTHERN UGANDA. (Onek Adyanga)

STRUCTURE AND AGENCY IN ACHOLI GENOCIDE, NORTHERN UGANDA.

Introduction

Genocide as political program and military policy does not occur by inadvertence but by deliberately orchestrated actions resulting in the destruction of a targeted group. To conceal it, modern genocide perpetrators have intentionally harnessed a synergy of debilitating factors such as infectious diseases, starvation and enforced hopelessness to execute the extermination policy. The high mortality caused by such debilities would have otherwise been benign if the targeted population was not entrapped in an environment where mass death could expeditiously occur. In the Acholi genocide debate, Olara Otunnu, a former United Nation’s Under-Secretary General for Children in Armed Conflict, argues that the Government of Uganda has knowingly created an environment where mass murder of the Acholi population would occur. But General David Tinyefunza of Uganda People’s Defense Force (UPDF), formerly, the National Resistance Movement/Army (NRM/A), and presidential advisor on security disagrees. He argues that the UPDF is providing security in “protected villages” and the mass murders are because of war. But war usually allows a regime to hide the implementation of mass murder from the international community and media and the gullible domestic population. It also enables a regime to shift blame for mass murder on the other combatant army, and at times, on the victims for their extermination. Most important of all, war allows the spreading of xenophobia and homicidal hate, necessary ingredients for the extermination of a targeted group.

I will examine the politics and the strategy of the war between General Museveni’s UPDF and General Kony’s Lord Resistance Army (LRA) to unravel the contours of Acholi genocide. Did the civil war offer the excuse and the occasion to execute the final solution against the Acholi population? What ideology and justifications have precipitated the destruction of the Acholi population? What roles have state institutions played in perpetrating the mass deaths of the Acholi population? How has the military policy of “protection” harnessed the debilitating synergies to exterminate the Acholi population? Against this background, I will test the hypothesis of advertence through harnessing a synergy of debilities in comparison with that of offering security in “protected villages.” The aim is to show how the confluence of factors that have synergistically caused mass deaths of the Acholi population came into being and what arguments have been used to sustain it. In the foregoing analysis, I will examine the nature of the state that can commit genocide against its own population. In the second, I will examine the role of the mass media in the genocide against the Acholi population. In the third, I will analyze the military strategy pursued by the UPDF and the LRA; and, the response of the media. In the fourth, I will examine the response of the international community. Finally, an attempt will be made to uncover the political and military policy that have concealed and deliberately harnessed mortal synergies of genocide against the Acholi population.

1. CREATING A GENOCIDE STATE: NRM/A REGIME AND GENOCIDE

The account of genocide that ignores the role of the state in the destruction of a target group is incomplete. In Uganda, the state took the form of a one-party dictatorship known as “the Movement System.” Every Ugandan citizen, young and old, was forced by law to become a member. It followed that all military and local level leaders were chosen from among the Movement Cadres, who graduated from Kyankwanzi Political School, a college where “virulent xenophobia and racism” according to one graduate cadre, “was officially taught.” The Movement System was so ubiquitous that the NRM/A regime was truly a totalitarian state. Here, General Museveni could pursue a life presidency project, uncontested. Democracy, which could provide for a peaceful contest for leadership, was demonized as sectarian, divisive, backward and anti-human. Sorrowfully enough, western donor governments promoted and financed the one-party totalitarian state, which was in contradiction with what they have promoted around the world as necessary for good governance, respect for human rights and equitable development.

With western governments’ complicity, the NRM/A regime used the mass media to scapegoat the Acholi population for the deaths in Luwero, a district where General Museveni fought the Uganda National Liberation Army (UNLA) of the late President Milton Obote. We must be clear that the Acholi population never fought any community in Uganda and never had an army or a militia group of their own during Obote’s regime. However, Museveni needed to scapegoat the Acholi people, as a group, in order to consolidate an ethno-nationalist power base and intimidate any opposition through a militarist policy.

2. THE NRA REGIME AND THE MASS MEDIA
The NRM/A mass media was the ultimate tool of political mobilization of sections of the domestic audience and western governments whose cooperation or at least acquiescence was necessary for the perpetration of genocide. It forced every significant organ of information and opinion to chorus the same litany of disinformation, demonization and homicidal xenophobia against the Acholi population in the following ways:

[a] Demonization and Incitement to mass murder
The Uganda Broadcasting Corporation (UBC), former Radio Uganda, developed a very eerie linguistic formulation of negative emotion that inspired hatred for the Acholi population. It played xenophobic songs interspersed with vilification and offensive announcement of “Abanyanya” (meaning non-citizens, in fact, it refers to southern Sudanese) to urge a bloody revenge. Provocative songs like, “moto nawaka, mama eh!, moto nawaka….” translated as, “fire is burning Mother, eh! Fire is burning… when we reach Soroti, we will bomb, when we reach Lira, we will bomb, but when we reach Kitgum and Gulu, we will bomb and desolate completely.”

Following the song with wild and fictitious accusation that the Acholi population killed people in Luwero, it stirred negative emotion by rattling human bones amidst scary torture cry and staccato of machinegun fire to provoke a homicidal revenge against the Acholi population. As a result many Acholi’s were lynched on the streets of Kampala with vehicle tires slung around their necks and ignited, thus, popping out the victims eyes and cooking their brains. The media campaign to forge and consolidate such ethno-xenophobia and homicidal hatred is without precedent in post-independence Uganda.
[b] Justifying ethno-xenophobic racism and homicidal exterminations
The language of extermination, elimination, massacres and butchering proliferated in the media as the description of war policy against the Acholi people. On many occasions, the NRM/A regime used [a] a language of demagogy and headlong irrationality like “those killers who lost power are fighting to return to finish the job and we must preempt them.” [b] It posed rhetorical questions and exclamations such as “if the Acholi population did not kill in Luwero, who did it, eh!” [c] It issued menacing ultimatums based on a sense of infinite self-righteousness like “any opposition to us will meet with uncompromising annihilation.” [d] It made immense accusations backed by no evidence or investigations such as “all the Acholi people are killers” and [e] resorted to conspiracy-mongering and homicidal paranoia like “when we finish with the enemies, they will never rise-up as a community of people.” These powerful and brazen incitements to massacres through a language of genocide before genocide was even conceivable had immense negative effect of creating homicidal hate and indifference following the commencement of mass murders of the Acholi people. The NRM/A regime’s fictive arguments only make sense when the political and military elite chose genocide as a political strategy to retain power.

The provocation to homicidal extermination radicalized many NRM/A soldiers and auxiliary militia forces to a state of extreme paranoia and xenophobic hate. One senior NRM/A military officer observed, “we really hated the Acholi people and wanted to exterminate them. Our favoured slogan was ‘kill the Acholi, kill more Acholi, kill all the Acholi people…’ We vowed that by the end of the war, Acholi language would only be spoken in hell.”

The instigation of homicidal hate made it a relatively simple matter for the NRM/A political commissar, Commander Karusoke Kajabago, to remark that those who oppose the NRM/A (meaning the Acholi population) are biological substances to be exterminated. Regrettably, no protest to President Museveni was ever lodged by human rights and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), western donor governments and Uganda citizens for a declaration of intention to commit genocide.

3. THE NORTHERN UGANDA CIVIL WAR
It was possible for the UPDF in alliance with militia groups against the LRA to have fought an aggressive war in a just manner. This would have involved following the provisions of the Geneva Convention on the protection of non-combatants, proportionality in the application of lethal force, proper treatment of POWs and observance of customary and positive rules of engagement.

In the war against the LRA, the UPDF would execute attacks on vital communication links, arrest of collaborators and safeguard of civilian institutions and means of livelihood. And the LRA would target the UPDF military installations with clear rules of engagement, arrest partisans and protect the civilian population. But what were the conducts of warfare of the LRA and the UPDF in the northern Uganda civil war?

THE LRA INSURGENCY STRATEGY
Along a military strategy similar to that of Museveni’s NRM/A bush war in the 1980s against the late President Obote, the LRA military policy included the following strategies:
[i] Forced abduction of children to be trained as soldiers: These children were very cruelly indoctrinated into the art of warfare. Female child soldiers suffered the most. They were forcibly raped and kept as concubines and sexual slaves for the commanders. The LRA atrocities are documented in Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and numerous newspaper reports. These atrocities are similar to that of Museveni from a firsthand account by a former NRM/A child soldier, China Keitetsi. In her book, Child Soldier: Fighting for My Life, she documents similar acts of brutality and sexual enslavement of abducted children and girls. In this regard, both Museveni and Kony’s military recruitment strategies are similar.
The logic of relying on child abduction for waging war between Kony and Museveni was equally similar. A surrendered senior LRA military commander confessed to his elders, “we were abducting children because we needed to keep fighting to survive since mature adults have refused to voluntarily enlist.” This logic is similar to that of Museveni’s NRM/A. Museveni defended the forced abduction of child soldiers in a BBC interview as necessary for the war, rhetorically asking, “What is this Geneva Convention you are talking about? I have never read it.” and continued to defend it: “In our culture, children are trained to fight. It is normal.”
[ii] Demonstrative atrocities and destruction aimed at terrorizing non-combatant population into submission and non-cooperation with the others’ enemy combatant forces. A former sergeant in the NRM/A observes that they use to execute or bind victims “kandoya” style (a very painful and debilitating form of punishment that often resulted in paralysis of victims hands). He emphasized that the goal was to deter cooperation with the defunct UNLA of the late Obote.

This is also similar to the LRA maiming of civilian population. A surrendered LRA soldier confessed: “we prohibited bicycling and maimed individuals believed to be collaborators with the UPDF. An Individual riding bicycle toward urban centers where the UPDF is located would quickly report our presence in villages, when we came to forcibly collect food. So we stopped bicycling when we are in the villages.”
As a security measure, the criminal logic of the NRM/A and the LRA atrocities are similar. Both leaders of the combatant groups, Museveni and Kony, must be indicted for committing crime against humanity.

[iii] Targeting civilian vehicles. The LRA have targeted civilian vehicles and killed scores of civilians. This is similar to NRM/A targeting civilian vehicles on Kampala-Gulu road and killing scores of civilians as well. In attacking civilians, both Kony and Museveni employed similar tactics, committing crimes against humanity.
With such a background, we need to assess the UPDF counter-insurgency strategy against the LRA in Acholiland. We must bear in mind that Museveni and the NRM/A regime vilified, demonized and made the Acholi people scapegoat for the deaths in Luwero. What influence has the demonization and scapegoat on the counter-insurgency policy?

THE UPDF COUNTER-INSURGENCY STRATEGY
[a] The Tactics
Despite strength in weaponry and assistance by western donor military advisors, the UPDF adopted a counter-insurgency policy involving de-legitimating tactics.
[i] The de-legitimating tactics: In some respect, the de-legitimating tactics perpetrated atrocities committed by the LRA insurgents in order to deny support, if any, the insurgents enjoyed in the community. The media extensively illuminated and credited the atrocities solely to the insurgents, while concealing UPDF complicity and in a perverted manner, praising their gallantry as liberators. However, the success of the UPDF de-legitimating strategies was short-lived, as local militia units consistently caught them committing atrocities.
[ii] The perpetration of demonstrative atrocities and destruction against civilian targets: The UPDF would masquerade as the LRA and promote gross atrocities only to return and pretend to be saviors. Some testimonies from victims exposed such strategies: a 30-year-old woman victim confirmed that she was maimed by the UPDF; and, the defunct Shariat newspaper reported in the 1990s that the UPDF soldiers were caught masquerading as the LRA rebels and planting landmines to blow up civilian vehicles.

The effectiveness of the militia units against the disguised UPDF soldiers embarrassed the government. But the guilty UPDF soldiers were promptly transferred to other mobile units to continue perpetrating more atrocities against civilians. A UPDF officer based in Gulu pointed out “that these atrocities are approved by higher headquarters and committed under clear operation mission orders.” And in cases where the guilty UPDF soldiers told the truth, the UPDF Military Court Martial (MCM), to silence and conceal complicity, expeditiously and summarily executed them. The Military Court Martial has become a legal weapon of war against truth and human rights violations. It is part and partial of the counter-insurgency policy concealing the perpetration of genocide.

[ii] The UPDF abductions and atrocities: Masquerading as the LRA, the UPDF burned down Radio Wa in Lira and abducted civilians. When a stage-managed rescue was conducted, the abductees testified that they were abducted by the UPDF. This prompted a Lango Member of Parliament to issue a press release that the “UPDF burnt Radio Wa and abducted civilians.” The terrorizing of the Langi, a community of the late President Obote, was meant to isolate and contain the LRA within the Acholi sub-region.
As the local militia units were quickly uncovering these strategies of mass deception, an ingenious strategy was developed by the UPDF elite and military advisors to entrap the Acholi population in concentration camps, under the ruses of protection.

[b] The UPDF tactics of creating the concentration camps
One of the common features of genocide is the concentration camp. The tactics of evacuating the Acholi population into concentration camps by the UPDF, ostensibly to “protect” them, was sheer terror and genocidal campaign. The strategies, which can be described as state terrorism against the Acholi population, attacked the family units, means of survival and livelihood and social infrastructures. This scorched-earth policy included the followings:
[i] Siege and artillery bombardment of villages: The UPDF siege and indiscriminately bombed villages with little, if any, regard for civilians. The attacks were aimed at terrorizing the civilian population, thereby inducing them to flee into concentration camps. The Monitor newspaper reports that after the expiration of a 48 hours dateline, heavy artillery bombardments commenced against civilians.
[ii] Intermittent or sporadic artillery bombardment: The aim is to cause civilians to falsely believe that they are safe and when the civilian populations commence mass exodus, expose them to more artillery bombardments. The tactics of siege and intermittent bombardments caused a very large, though incalculable proportion of the total dead Acholi civilians moving into the concentration camps.
A victim sobbed, “we thought we were temporary safe in our hiding place but during the lull in bombardment we got out of our hiding place to run for safety; the bombardments started killing my pregnant wife and two years old daughter who could not run.” The false sense of security to lure unsuspecting civilians into open ground for bombardment caused appalling massacres of women, children, young and old people, who were daily shredded to pieces by shrapnel debris scattered by motor shells deliberately lobbed among exposed fleeing civilian columns.
[iii] Strafing with helicopter gunship: The nature of the shelling, strafing with gun ships destroyed schools, hospitals and dispensaries and water wells. This scorched earth policy is a genocidal campaign. An Acholi Member of Parliament remarks to the New Vision newspaper: “we spoke with President Museveni about moving Acholi civilian population in a planned manner to camps. The President said that he would look into the matter. To our dismay, the next day, helicopter gunship came and started strafing villages killing scores of unarmed civilians.”
[iv] Deploying UPDF mobile military patrols into villages: Following the bombardments and gunship strafing, UPDF mobile infantry units went into villages to destroy homes of those too frightened to move and to force them to abandon their homes. Water wells were poisoned, food granaries were burned or looted and those grievously injured or too weak to move were summarily shot. A victim cried, “we were herded like animals. We were not considered human beings; only the UPDF felt they were human beings. They killed our family members and got rid of them like animals.” A UPDF patrol leader agrees, “The mission order from my superiors was to “omuhiigo ebikoko” (translated from Runyankole to mean, “to go hunting animals”). He emphasized, “the ‘ebikoko’ (meaning animal) obeys order or gets shot.”
This scorched-earth policy threatened Acholi survival in fundamental ways because families were separated by death due to thirst, exhaustion, physical abuse and execution by the UPDF. The traumatic evacuation process destroyed the Acholi social, cultural and economic support system, which is fundamental to their survival. It is what Jan Egeland, the United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs (UN-OCHA) accurately described during his visits to the concentration camps on April 4 2006, as the “worse form of terrorism in the world.” He emphasized that “nowhere in the world have large areas where between 80 and 90 percent of the population have been terrorized into camps by violence.” Once again, General Museveni opposed Egeland’s comprehensive approach to the concentration camps, including a Special UN envoy for northern Uganda. This means that the genocide project against the Acholi people will continue unabated.

[c] The UPDF administration of the concentration camps
The concentration camps administration strategy is a total war against the Acholi society because of the following strategies:
[i] Proliferation of sodomy: The HIV/AIDS infected UPDF soldiers sodomize families with the view to infecting them with the disease and also humiliating them. The Gersony report points out that the UPDF battalion based in Gulu was nicknamed by the population “langungu-gungu” (meaning to sodomize). Sodomizing the Acholi population became part of the UPDF rite of passage, where a soldier was not considered a true man and was mocked to “go home and rear children” if he does not sodomize the Acholi concentration camp residents. The UPDF sodomy patrols armed with assault rifles and HIV/AIDS roam the camps at night stoking for families. A UPDF officer explains how difficult it was to resist the temptation of joining the mobile sodomy patrol units.
He said, “when UPDF soldiers sodomize the Acholi population, they would return to barracks shouting, ‘we are real men, we are real men, we have been into camps on patrol and sodomized the Acholi people. We are men, real men, now!’
Hardcore UPDF warriordom respect was won by severally sodomizing the same household members. A UPDF Captain boasted, “the soldiers have no taste for moral rectitude because renown and manhood is easier won in moral debauchery and depravities. These young warriors are eager to earn a badge of manhood and hardcore warriorhood against the Acholi population. This is war.” To the extent that the UPDF soldiers see themselves as earning a badge of honor and warriordom respect, they do not impute criminality to it. But we must impute the genocide intention to the UPDF political and military elite who planned, concealed and promoted the concentration camps as sexual commons.
Thus, sodomy was not simply an aberrant behaviour that the UPDF HIV/AIDS infected soldiers engaged in, it is an official policy that served to define rite of passage, manhood and warriordom respect to the UPDF officers and men.
[ii] Enforced Starvation: crops that concentration camp residents planted have been destroyed on the excuse of providing food to rebels. Many women who risked going out to forage for food for their starving and malnourished children were shot and killed by the UPDF soldiers.
[iii] Rejecting and Frustrating Humanitarian Assistance that can ameliorate mass deaths. General Museveni’s Cabinet Ministers refused any international humanitarian assistance to ameliorate the dire humanitarian situations. This has turned the concentration camps into infamous sites of mass murders. The World Health Organization (WHO) and NGOs reports document over 1,000 people die every week, that is, over 50,000 deaths per year. The mortality rate is three times that of Darfur in the Sudan. The violent death rate, according to Oxfam and Uganda civil society groups, is 146 deaths per day and this is several times higher than that of Iraq, a country actively at war with the United States of America. Yet, in a discussion with Jan Egeland, the United Nations Under-Secretary General for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN-OCHA) on April 4, 2006, General Museveni dismisses the daily death figures, of over 146 per day or 1,000 per week, as not worth highlighting. General Museveni also opposed the suggestion of a UN intervention force to provide humanitarian assistance and security to the Acholi genocide victims arguing that there is enough security in the concentration camps. We must be clear that the policy of rejecting humanitarian assistance by General Museveni and associates is a ploy to continue perpetrating mass murder in the concentration camps. This policy must be exposed for what it is, – a genocide policy.

[d] The response of the media: complicity and concealment of genocide.
In the uncritical and non-investigative reporting of numerous attacks, there was prevalence of ambiguous and deceptive phrases, which actively promoted and concealed genocide. Some of the mischaracterization of war against civilians included the followings:
[i] Use of ambiguous and deceptive phrases:
[a] War against non-combatant civilian Acholi population was reported as “pacifying the north”
[b] Murderous artillery bombardments and helicopter strafing as “moving people into camps for their protection”
[c] Poisoning civilian water wells as “denying the rebels drinking water”
[d] Emphasizing vacillating perspectives on the attacks on unarmed civilian Acholi population. At times, it reported it as a war against the LRA, or against the Sudan, or against terrorists instead of the Acholi population being attacked by the UPDF.
[e] Killing abducted children as “killing rebels”; when the abducted children escape from LRA captivity, they are reported as “rescued abductees.”
[ii] Misrepresenting the frame of reference in the war
Occasional accurate reporting of civilian bombardments is interspersed with blaming the LRA as responsible for the creating the camps. This is then followed with a more focused rendition of alleged LRA rule by 10 commandments and other alleged lurid and perverted details of vile atrocities, suggesting that the UPDF atrocities against the Acholi people are less severe, and therefore, acceptable.
On the many occasions when Museveni scuttled the almost successful peace negotiation between Betty Bigombe, a government appointed peace negotiator with the LRA peace team, the media often misreported that the LRA are disinterested in peace talks. They would then make a case for war, which is the cover for the genocide against the Acholi population.

5. THE RESPONSE OF THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY TO THE PLEA OF ACHOLI GENOCIDE VICTIMS: CHIDED AND INDIFFERENCE!
The international community have chided and reacted with indifference to the plea of Acholi people for a genuine and unconditional negotiated peace.

The Acholi population based their plea on precedents from the International Community’s resolution of conflicts in Mozambique, where RENAMO committed serious atrocities against the civilian population; Sierra Leone, where Foday Sanko’s Revolutionary United Front (RUF) committed unspeakable atrocities against the Sierra Leonean people and South Africa, where the apartheid regime committed horrible crimes against humanity. For the sake of peace, civil co-existence and continuation of a sense of nationhood, a genuine unconditional negotiated peace and amnesty was enforced.

The international community, against the background of other cases in Africa, points out that there must be no wanton impunity to perpetrators of crimes against humanity and genocide. Nonetheless, they are silent on numerous documented crimes of genocide being committed by the UPDF in the concentration camps. They have also refused to label the “worse and most forgotten humanitarian catastrophe in the world” festering under the “worse form of terrorism” as described by Jan Egeland, genocide.

To salvage the surviving genocide victim population, the Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative (ARLPI), a non-partisan ecumenical coalition of the religious faiths, traveled to the capitals of western countries seeking a peaceful resolution to the war but their efforts have been ignored. Instead, the international community has joined factions of the genocide forces by training and equipping the UPDF in lethal war-fighting tactics, thus, continuing the perpetration of genocide against the Acholi population.

The indifference shown by the international community by throttling fast-forward with militarism, equipping and training the UPDF, providing psychological warfare expertise for concealing and perpetrating genocide against the Acholi population is unparallel in the twenty first century. It is mockery of the international community’s dictum of “NEVER AGAIN,” will genocide occur under our watch. For this dictum to garner hope for our collective humanity, it must be openly and dispassionately enforced.

CONCLUSION
When we evaluate General Museveni’s sustain media campaign of ethno-xenophobia and official racism jointly with the UPDF war strategies, we must characterized the trajectory of the NRM/A regime as a genocide revolution, with the complicity of western donor governments and the United Nations.

The regime of General Museveni intentionally provided the structure and agency for genocide. It constructed and sustained it by [a] creating a genocide state, [b] demonizing the Acholi, as a people, [c] infusing the UPDF with ethno-xenophobic hate, [d] deploying artillery bombardments and helicopter gunship strafing to terrorize and forcibly induce exodus of civilian population into concentration camps, [e] encouraging rape by HIV/AIDS infected soldiers, [f] enforcing starvation [g] and entrapping the population in unsanitary and disease ridden concentration camp environments where the synergy of deadly agencies bring about genocide. While the LRA war strategy of child abduction, enforced sexual liaison with commanders and concubinage, which is similar to the NRM/A strategies against the southern/western Uganda population in the 1980s, is crime against humanity.

With a combination of such negative and deadly synergies intentionally imposed upon the Acholi population by General Museveni and associates, it would not be farfetched to accurately say, according to an NGO relief worker in Acholiland, that the “Acholi, as a people, face extinction” unless a stinging indictment of regional and global political alliances that routinely put ideological and strategic agendas before international law, moral accountability and plight of the victims is exposed and shamed.

Most important of all, the United Nations unanimous endorsement of the “responsibility to protect” during the World Summit in 2005 will remain hollow and sham. Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Tony Blair, made the commitment very clear: “For the first time at this Summit we agree that states do not have the right to do what they will within their own borders, but that we, in the name of humanity, have a common duty to protect people where their own government will not.” The genocide by General Museveni and associates against the Acholi people provides a test case of the UN commitment to protect in the name of humanity. The United Nations must without delay exercise the common duty to protect in the name of humanity, the Acholi people from the ongoing genocide now!

posted by Stop The Genocide In Northern Uganda at 9:09 AM 0 comments   

Thursday, March 30, 2006

Rate of death in northern Uganda is three times higher than Iraq: Oxfam Press Release

Oxfam Press Release – 30 March 2006http://www.oxfam.org/en/news/pressreleases2006/pr060330_nuganda

Rate of death in northern Uganda is three times higher than Iraq

The current rate of death from the war in northern Uganda is three times higher than in Iraq following the Allied invasion, finds a new report released today. The release of the report comes as the UN Under-Secretary General Jan Egeland holds high-level meetings in Kampala with the Ugandan government and other international representatives to address the 20-year conflict in northern Uganda.

The report by a coalition of over 50 leading non-governmental organizations, Civil Society Organizations for Peace in Northern Uganda (CSOPNU), reveals new facts and figures showing the brutal impact of the conflict on the civilian population between the Government of Uganda and the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army. The coalition includes Oxfam International, Care International, Norwegian Refugee Council, Save the Children, and International Rescue Committee as well as national and community based organizations.

Almost two million people have been displaced by the conflict. A staggering 25,000 children have been abducted during 20 years of war. One quarter of children in northern Uganda over ten years old have lost one or both parents.

The National Program Coordinator, Uganda Child Rights NGO Network and Chairperson of CSOPNU, Stella Ayo-Odongo said: “Northern Uganda is one of the world’s worst war zones. The violent death rate in northern Uganda is three times higher than in Iraq. It is tragedy of the worst proportions. This conflict cannot be allowed to fester any longer. A peaceful resolution of this conflict must be found.”

The report, “Counting the Cost: 20 years of war in northern Uganda” shows the devastating economic cost of the war estimated at US$1.7 billion (GBP £1bn) over the course of the last two decades. This is equivalent to the USA’s total aid to Uganda between 1994 and 2002 and is the double the UK’s average annual bilateral gross public expenditure on aid to Uganda from 1994 to 2001. The average annual cost of the war to Uganda is US$85 million.

Kathy Relleen, Oxfam’s Policy Advisor in Uganda, said that twenty years was enough: “The Ugandan Government, the rebel army and the international community must fully acknowledge the true scale and horror of the situation in northern Uganda,” said Relleen. “Twenty years of brutal violence is a scar on the world’s conscience. The government of Uganda must act resolutely and without delay, both to guarantee the effective protection of civilians and to work with all sides to secure a just and lasting peace.”

Kevin Fitzcharles, Director, Care International said: “UN Under-Secretary General Egeland is clearly pushing the Security Council to act, yet none of his recommendations are being implemented. It is time for the Security Council to recognize that its failure to address this crisis is a scar on its record and undermines its credibility. The UN must act by passing a resolution urging the Government of Uganda to protect its own people.”

CSOPNU is calling upon all parties involved to take up Jan Egeland’s challenge and to act decisively. The coalition is urging the UN Security Council to adopt Egeland’s recommendation to appoint a panel of experts to investigate the activities of the LRA. The appointment of a high level envoy to reinvigorate peace efforts, address all aspects of the crisis and report back to the UN Security Council on progress has also receivedwidespread support though as yet no action has been taken.

Despite the scale of the crisis and its huge impact on the region, the Secretary General has not yet been publicly engaged. A recent meeting in Geneva offered hope for a comprehensive plan of action on the conflict but urgent action to make this plan a reality is needed. Benchmarks must be established to enable the Government of Uganda to show clear progress in monitoring peace, protecting the civilian population, and addressing the humanitarian crisis. Egeland’s visit to Uganda raises hope for concrete action to address this devastating crisis.

Key figures from “Counting the Cost: 20 years of war in northern Uganda”:

Rates of violent death in northern Uganda are three times higher than those reported in Iraq following the Allied Invasion in 2003. (The violent death rate for northern Uganda is currently at 146 deaths per week, (0.17 violent deaths per 10,000 people per day). This is three times higher than in Iraq, where the incidence of violent death in the period following the allied invasion was estimated to be 0.052 per 10,000 people per day.

20 years of conflict have had a devastating impact on children.

– 25,000 children have been abducted during the course of the war.
– 41 per cent of all deaths in the camps are amongst children under 5.
– 250,000 children in northern Uganda receive no education, despite Uganda’s policy of universal primary education.
– An estimated 1,000 children have been born in LRA captivity to girls abducted by the rebel army.
– At the times of heightened insecurity up to 45,000 children “night commute” each evening and sleep in streets or makeshift shelters in town centers to avoid being abducted by the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army. The World Food Program (WFP) currently delivers food to 84% of all households that are dependent on food aid. Almost 50 per cent of children are stunted due to malnutrition in the Kitgum area.

The economic cost of the war to Uganda after 20 years is $1.7 billion (£1bn). This is the equivalent of: Double the UK’s gross bilateral public expenditure on aid to Uganda between 1994 and 2001 OR the USA’s total aid to Uganda between 1994 and 2002.

The annual cost of the war to Uganda is $85 million. This is the equivalent of:

– The cost of providing clean, safe drinking water to 3.5 million people per year, or the total population of Liberia
– Uganda’s total annual income from coffee exports
– The entire budget of the World Bank’s five-year Northern Uganda Social Action Fund

Contact

For more information or to arrange an interview with a spokesperson, please contact:CSOPNU: Stella Ayo Odongo +256 772 467 427CARE International: Kevin Fitzcharles +256 782 910 814Oxfam International: Caroline Green +1 202 321 7858 or Clare Rudebeck + 44 (0) 7769 887 139

Notes to Editors

The report draws on statistics gathered during the last year. In the last three to four months northern Uganda has experienced more calm yet with the rains now fully upon us, the usual fear of increased rebel activity and violence is returning.

The report describes northern Uganda as a catastrophe fuelled by terrible acts of war and violence and by a shameful litany of failure – the continuing failure of the LRA to cease its brutal campaign of violence against civilians, and the failure of both the Government of Uganda and the international community to uphold their legal obligations to secure the protection, security, and peace of the civilians of northern Uganda. It recommends that:·

– The LRA must immediately cease attacks on, and abductions of, civilians and aid workers and show clear commitment to peace.·

– The Government of Uganda must take make the protection of civilians its first priority and take immediate, concrete action to guarantee the protection of its citizens and also commit to resolving this conflict peacefully·

– The UN Security Council must act resolutely and without delay to guarantee the protection of civilians and humanitarian assistance in northern Uganda.

The Politics Of Mass Deaths – Cuthbert Onek-Adyanga

The Politics Of Mass Deaths – Cuthbert Onek-Adyanga

THE POLITICS OF MASS DEATHS: HUMAN BODY PARTS, HUMAN REMAINS AND WAR PROPAGANDA IN MUSEVENI’S UGANDA

Introduction
The policy of public display of human body parts and human remains has a long history in warfare. Whether for cultural reasons of heroism and gallantry, sadistic and psychopathological reasons or a measure of attrition rate of the enemy, this grotesque but ingenious display of human body parts and human remains has powerful propaganda value. The propaganda values include, but are not limited to, justifying militarism and aggressive genocidal wars, demonizing imagined enemies, mobilizing donor community support, generating and sustaining regime relevance and legitimization of violence. Since the NRM/A regime came to power in 1986, the public display of human remains has been central to its demonization project, legitimizing the regime, and garnering western support. Whenever General Yoweri Museveni’s legitimacy is threatened, a guided tour of Luweero is organized to display human remains and body parts. Museveni conducted many of these tours with the diplomatic corps in 1996. In the subsequent years and most recently in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006, he took western ambassadors to Luweero (The New Vision, May 19, 2006). Among the African presidents he recently took to Luweero, was the President of Tanzania, Jakaya Kikwete (Monitor Online, 2006). Again, about the middle of this year, May 2006, he summoned and took members of western diplomatic corps to Luweero where he claimed publicly that a former United Nations Under-Secretary for Children in Armed Conflict, Olara Otunnu, was responsible for the atrocities represented by the display. In spite of the numerous accusations and public showings of human remains and body parts, there has never been any prosecution of perpetrators. Why is it that we hear the loudest and persistent accusations for Luweero deaths by General Museveni, but no prosecution of the alleged perpetrators of the crime? What purposes are Luweero atrocities serving the NRM/A regime of General Museveni? What impact has the consistent allegation, without court conviction, on the struggle to control the public history and public memory of Luweero deaths?

This analysis examines the struggle to accurately present public history and historical memory in view of Museveni’s transformation of Luweero deaths into a practical political tool of ethno-xenophobia, demonization of imagined political opponents, concealment of genocide and harnessing ethnic and western donor legitimacy to govern. Emphasis on Luweero deaths and the many sites of massacres must be seen as exposure and disclosure that not only challenge the self-celebratory NRM/A narratives, but tell the truth to restrain manipulators of such tragedies who seek political relevance and personal aggrandizement. Luweero atrocities and those in other parts of the country are Ugandan deaths. These deaths are Uganda’s tragic history of the folly of NRM/A militarism and megalomania to extra-constitutionally gain political power. General Museveni, a presidential candidate for the Uganda Patriotic Movement (UPM), was defeated by Sam Kuteesa, a Democratic Party (DP) contender and brother in-law of Museveni in the 1981 general election (The Monitor, October 9, 2006, “Museveni Challenges Kuteesa’s win”). Kuteesa is now serving as a foreign minister in the NRM/A regime. Instead of Museveni following the recommendation of the Commonwealth Election Observer team to abide by the verdict of the court; he resorted to war, a crime of breach of peace, leading to the mass deaths around the country.

Researchers may encounter a public often unwilling to read critical analyses that challenge political myths and call into question comfortable and self-righteous assumptions that have sustained the NRM/A regime and its beneficiaries. The truth, however, must be spoken clearly and selflessly. In the absence of a balanced account in which the voices of all the actors in Luweero and other infamous sites of massacres can be heard, the marginalized will often devise counter narratives to explain the disjunction between their demonization and the NRM/A celebratory official account. Fashioned by deep, well-founded suspicions and political logic to counter deception, propaganda and demonization, these counter narratives can be as difficult to dislodge as the official NRM/A self-celebratory version they seek to undermine.
We must adopt a more critical and interpretive sense of the past beyond complacency and political comfort levels. Failing to do that, we will be paralyzed by the fanatical propaganda and deception of the NRM/A regime and its political and military elites which revise history, remake and exploit the memory of the Luweero and other sites of massacres for political gains. We must also direct the consciousness of Ugandans to hardcore historical facts rather than to NRM/A deliberately manufactured political and social myths to legitimize ethno-nationalism and governance. Those found guilty, through trial in a competent court of law, of commission of atrocities in Luweero, Teso, Lango, Acholi, West Nile and western Uganda, and profiting from peddling the tragedy must be punished for the war crimes.

1. THE NRM/A AND ATROCITIES: HUMAN REMAINS AND BODY PARTS
Contemporary debates on Luweero deaths must be solidly grounded in the knowledge of history, but not in political mythmaking, which is often characterized by exploitation of deaths and tragedy for personal interests. This debate must take place in a public arena because Luwero deaths have a greater presence in the national psyche than any events in Uganda’s history since the NRM/A came to power in 1986.

To understand the politics of death, it is imperative to revisit Museveni’s undergraduate thesis, Fanon’s theory of violence: Its verification in liberated Mozambique (1971), at the University of Dar-es-salaam, Tanzania. In glorifying violence and death, Yoweri Museveni writes, “violence alone, violence committed by the people, violence organized by its leaders, makes it possible for the masses to understand social truths and give the key to them.” Museveni continued to show the potency of organizing violence and displaying human remains and body parts as tools of war. He writes,

In Mozambique, it has been found necessary to show peasants fragments of a Portuguese soldier blown up by a mine or, better still, his head. Once the peasants sees guerillas holding the head of the former master, the white man’s head cold in death, the white skin, flowing hair, pointed nose and blue eyes notwithstanding, he will know, or at least begin to suspect, that the picture traditionally presented to him of the white man’s invincibility is nothing but a scarecrow. However, once the peasants’ passions are aroused, they usually swing to the other extreme; that all white men are devils… This position is not entirely wrong…

The despicable act of displaying severed heads of dead human victims for propaganda purposes must be seen within that context. General Museveni and associates regarded the slaughtered white men with amused contempt. We must take seriously that this act was not a simple matter of youthful student bravado. The mutilations, public display of severed heads and body parts were raised to a level of military and political policy in the NRM/A conduct of warfare in Uganda from 1981 to the present.
Luweero would offer the first war theater for such despicable utility and public display of human heads and body parts during Museveni’s military campaign from 1981-1986. Subsequent Uganda war theaters from 1986 to the present time would experience their share. In attempting to understand atrocities and war in a political debate on April 18th 2006, involving NRM Members of Parliaments from northern and eastern Uganda, Andrew Mwenda, a Kampala radio anchor for KFM 93.3, quoted the late Apolo Milton Obote. He said,

Museveni has for the last twenty three years fought different enemies in different regions of Uganda: Uganda National Liberation Armies (UNLA) in Luwero, Uganda People’s Democratic Army (UPDA) in the north, West Nile Bank Front, Uganda People’s Army of Peter Otai in Teso, Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) in western Uganda, and the Lords Resistance Army (LRA). In all these wars, the adversaries are different, the theaters of war different, the periods different. There are only two elements that are constant: Museveni on the one hand and massive atrocities against civilians on the other.

Mwenda asked,

What does this tell us? How can it be that all Museveni’s adversaries in the different regions of Uganda, under different political organizations, and at different historical times fight the same way? Is it not logical that since Museveni and atrocities is the only constant, that it is Museveni who employs atrocities to win wars?

Certainly, the cynical manipulation of atrocities as political and military policy of warfare in Uganda implicate Museveni in atrocities, mass murders, war crimes and crimes against humanity beginning from wars in Luweero and spreading to the rest of Uganda. It is important to cite a few:

· “Terror and Massacres of Muslims in Ankole in June 1979” (Uganda Government. Report of the Human Rights Commission of Inquiry into Violations of Human Rights, 1981,p.31)
· “Abduction and Assassinations of Civilians” (Amnesty International, Uganda, August, 1981,p.1)
· “Attacks on Civilian Vehicles” (Africa Research Bulletin, December 1-31, 1981: 6289BC)
· The late Dr. Andrew Lutakome Kayira, eyewitness report after meeting Museveni at the NRA command post in Luweero said,

There were no less than 50 heads at a quick count. We found Museveni and the NRA soldiers inside the ring of human heads. Museveni told us while pointing at the heads. You see those heads? That is how I deal with those who do not agree with me. (Cited in Muwanga and Gombya, The Pearl of Africa is Bleeding)

· “Massacres of Civilians in Luweero while disguised as UNLA Soldiers” (Lance-Sera Mwanga, Violence in Uganda: What is inside Museveni’s Uganda; Mwanga and Gombya, The Pearl of Africa is Bleeding; A.J. McIlroy, in Luweero, The Daily Telegraph, London, on 16th August, 1984.
· Cooking 28 massacred civilians in pots in Gang pa Aculu in Omot, Pader, northern Uganda, on October 28, 2002 (See, Dr. James Rwanyarare, New Vision, October 28, 2002; The Monitor, November 14, 2002).

The use of atrocities would become bolder as the insurgencies drew longer, changed phases and emphases; and senior NRM/A members refashioned new political parties. The blame for the atrocities would metamorphose into a bold political strategy to demonize, blackmail, malign and obstruct justice for the purpose of NRM/A legitimization and governance. The ferocity of the exploitation of Luweero deaths to silence and malign any political opposition that drew attention to the genocide in northern Uganda would increase exponentially.

2. THE POLITICAL UTILITY OF LUWERO DEATHS TO THE NRM/A REGIME
[a] Muffling western donor criticisms and generating ethno-xenophobic hate and anger of victims towards the alleged perpetrators.

The exploitation of the Luweero human remains and body parts, as a weapon to generate hate and anger in victims, is here exemplified as the most lethal weapon of war beyond dispute in the conflicts in Uganda. This act by the NRM/A regime stoked ethno-xenophobic hate and anger of victims against alleged perpetrators. The exposure of human remains became the official NRM/A trump card and policy for dealing with political opponents of the regime, and predominantly those living in northern and eastern parts of Uganda.

Whenever General Museveni NRM/A regime comes under attack for human rights violations, he would personally take ambassadors accredited to Uganda to Luweero mass graves, where he would officially vilify “killers” and make more accusations to justify his human rights records. On May 18, 2006, Henry Mukasa, a New Vision journalist, quotes Museveni:

The purpose of your coming here with me is because some of your countries have interest in the human rights situation in Uganda especially European countries. As human beings, it’s okay but you should do so with knowledge.

Museveni continued,

Because you don’t know, instead of being part of the solution, you can be part of the problem. To cure this, I am going to partner with you to enable you to know Uganda so that when you talk, you don’t talk from ignorance.

A selected group of NRM youths were assembled to heckle the diplomats at Nakaseke: The NRM/A youth hecklers jeered,

They tell lies, false propaganda, trying to turn black into white about human rights in Uganda and these (ambassadors) become the loudspeakers.

The convergence of NRM youth hecklers and official propaganda of Luweero deaths as a political tool of blackmailing western diplomats worked, to some extent. In western capitals and official relations, Museveni’s human rights abuses are being carefully sanitized and the narratives are scripted to exclusively implicate NRM/A’s political opponents, in spite of glaring facts to the contrary. Any attempts to raise the violations of the NRM/A regime by critics are usually ignored and deemed unnecessary and malicious.

At the domestic level, its application has stoked ethno-xenophobic hate and call for vicious revenge against the “killers.” On November 18, 2002, Joshua Kato, a New Vision journalist reports the effectiveness of the policy of NRM/A official functionaries inculcating hatred in the example of 74 pupils between the ages of 12 to 13 years. These children were displaced by war in northern Uganda and brought to take their national examination from Luweero. Fred Sserukenya, a teacher said, “We decided to bring them to Kampala so that they sit for their exams in more comfortable environment.” This was not to be: Edward Kawooya, the Local Council 1 (LC1), accused the pupils of posing “a serious security risk” and directed that the pupils be evicted in 48 hours. A pupil cried, “Have mercy on me,” and another, “I don’t want to miss my exams,” tears welling in his young eyes. They continuously pleaded, “We want to sit our exams. Whatever happens, let us be allowed to sit our exams even if it is on the streets of Kampala.” The blaming of Luweero deaths upon the northerners was responsible for such official policy. Where is the sense of nationhood and nationalism if official policy blames innocent young citizens who were born many years after the Luweero insurgency was over and have nothing to do with past records of alleged atrocities? Such actions are best understood as arising from a regime whose power base is ethno-nationalists and its lifeblood is stoking ethno-xenophobic hate and anger.

[b] Blackmailing political opponents and critics of the NRM/A regime
[i] In Notes on the concealment of Genocide, the late Apollo Milton Obote accuses Museveni for committing atrocities against Ugandans in Luweero, while masquerading as the Uganda National Liberation Army (UNLA). General Museveni fired back that Obote must answer for the atrocities of the UNLA, in Luweero. Obote’s accusation of Museveni’s NRM/A gained support from the Luweero report of A.J. McIlroy of the The Daily Telegraph, London, on 16th August, 1984.

And Mr. Nusur Jogojogo, the area chief, later told me [McIlroy]:

Three months ago, seven villagers were killed; three men and four children were shot or hacked to death by men with pangas and guns. They were bandits; there is no doubt about that. Some of them were from our village. They were dressed half way, I mean they were in Army and civilian clothes, all mixed up.

By the time the soldiers arrived, the people had fled into the bush. Whatever possessions they left behind, were looted by the soldiers.

McIlroy’s report is corroborated by a serving UPDF officer (former NRA), Col. Kutesa. He writes in his book entitled, Uganda’s Revolution: How I Saw It, (2006): “they (NRA) dressed in UNLA uniform and green coats, they [his NRA colleagues] mingled with the government soldiers and infiltrated…”

Col. Kutesa had made such a claim before he published his book. During an interview with William Pike on Capital Radio in Kampala in 1995, in a program called Desert Island Disc, he told Pike that he was “a Lieutenant in the UNLA but as an NRA infiltrator whose mission was to undermine the credibility of the army from within.” Similarly, the Monitor Newspaper of April 15, 2005, carried a report that as officer in-charge of the road block at Konge, Kutesa would harass civilians, rob them of their money and kill some.

It went on to say that Generals Kahinda Otafire and Elly Tumwine boasted at the funeral of the late Adonia Tiberondwa of similar kind of machinations and deception to delegitimize the regime of Obote and win local support. Certainly, atrocities committed against civilians with the purpose of achieving a political and military victory worked, especially when the adversary took the blame for it. As an effective weapon, the use of atrocities for political gain would become clearer during the last political competition between incumbent President Museveni and Besigye, a former physician to Museveni during the NRM/A guerilla was in Luweero. Besigye and other former members of the NRM/A high command who fought alongside Museveni against the UNLA were blamed for the Luweero atrocities. Yet these military commanders were firsthand witnesses to the deaths and destruction of the war Museveni launched after losing the election to a DP candidate. The former colleagues grew furious and warned Museveni to stop blackmailing them for cheap political ends.

[ii] Blackmailing former NRM/A guerrilla colleagues, turned political critics.
In the electoral challenge of 23 February, 2006, Museveni blamed the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) leaders: Col. (Rtd) Kizza Besigye, Major General Mugisha Muntu, Major Rubaramira Ruranga and John Kazoora, for the atrocities in Luweero. Put simply, shifting the blame for Luweero deaths upon his former guerilla colleagues served as a strategy to shift internal alliance and deny them legitimacy in the southern part of the country; and Museveni, unblemished, remained the defender of the southern ethnic political power elite.
The retired FDC military officers who served loyally under Museveni’s NRM/A and witnessed the ferocity of the war responded in anger. Major Ruranga, of the UPDF (former NRA), who fought alongside General Museveni during the Luweero war from 1981-1986, when the atrocities were committed, writes in the New Vision, July 12, 2005:

…the killings in Luweero during the civil strife must be blamed on the National Resistance Army (NRA) that started the war.

Major Ruranga continued,

I hear many people claiming that Obote killed people in Luweero. Obote could have done something wrong but Museveni did many bad things. I was in NRM with Museveni and people in Luweero were used as shields by us. I saw many people die, not only from bullet but also from hunger.

So for someone to say NRA did not kill people and that former regimes were more bloody than this one is not true because there is no war where two sides are shooting in a cross fire and only one side gets casualties.

Another demonized retired UPDF (former NRA) military officer, Kazoora, Kashari Member of Parliament, who fought alongside Museveni spoke of his personal dossier on the 1981-86 Luweero war on November 8, 2005, while responding to Museveni’s accusation of Luweero deaths. He writes,

Some of us have deliberately kept quiet about Luweero war …it would be wrong for one side to accuse the other of committing crimes in Luweero

I thought that we were fighting for democracy. Little did I know that we were fighting to make one man, Museveni a life President.

Col. Besigye (Rtd), presidential torchbearer for FDC, and former personal physician to General Museveni, who fought alongside Museveni during the Luweero war, supports and emphasizes Kazoora and Ruranga’s statements. In an interview with Andrew Mwenda, on KFM’s Tonight on October 27, a day after he returned from exile, Col. Besigye acknowledged that the NRM/A, which he was part of, could share the blame in the Luweero killings.

Col. (rtd) Besigye said,

In a war, all parties are there to kill either in defense or aggression. We need to investigate who killed who, for the purposes of resolving future conflicts. It’s not good for one party to lay charges on others. People (forces) of all parties could be culpable.

The FDC former NRM/A military officers-turned-regime political critics, unleashed the wrath of President Museveni’s press office. Responding with more accusations and blame for atrocities, Ofwono Opondo, published an opinion piece in the New Vision, on August 26, 2005, in which he shifts the blame for atrocities onto General Muntu, the longest serving Army commander of the NRA/M, who is currently in-charge of FDC mobilization, and Besigye, as FDC presidential candidate.

Opondo writes,

If Muntu was seeking comprehensive justice for all, how come he is not talking for the 39 who died (read roasted alive) in Mukura wagon (Teso), Bur Cor (Acholi, where scores of people were buried alive), when he was Army commander?

He continues,

Indeed, the politicians from northern Uganda, including ministers like Omara Atubo and Zackary Olum, whose sober accounts of torture while being arrested and in detention between 1990 and 1993, should not seek redress lest they (meaning Muntu and Besigye) are called to judgment.

And further, FDC leaders falsely believe that 1986-98 when they were the bosses is now so far away, and it would be better to forget.

Opondo wanted to blackmail Gen. Muntu into silence when he referred to atrocities committed against civilians in eastern and northern Uganda by NRA, for which Muntu bore command responsibility. He was silent on the fact that as president and commander-in-chief of the NRA, Gen. Museveni bore the final command responsibility. In his address to the Langi and Acholi Resistance Councils (RCs) and elders, Museveni had once admitted to atrocities under Gen. Muntu. He said,

Sometimes, our own indisciplined soldiers took advantage of the breakdown of law and order caused by the rebellion and committed atrocities against the civilian population. (New Vision, March 28, 1994)

The admission followed similarly, “mass rapes and other atrocities by the NRA,” (New Vision, January 1, 1988; New Vision, February 22, 1988, etc), for which Muntu and other retired officers were in active service and gained rapid promotions.

The open acknowledgment by President Museveni, Gen. Muntu (rtd), Col. Besigye (rtd) and the other retired UPDF officers have not been followed with criminal convictions and a truth and reconciliation commission. We must be clear that the blackmailing of Gen. Muntu, Col. Besigye and others was because they would deny Museveni the free utility of atrocities for political legitimacy, to consolidate an ethno-xenophobic and militarist regime and to conceal the current genocide in northern Uganda.

[c] Consolidating an ethno-xenophobic and militarist state, a genocidal and divisive administration
By consistently inciting maniacal feelings of revenge and contempt, which functions to support the northern genocide, the NRM/A has successfully divided the country along ethnic lines. Andrew M. Mwenda writes in The Monitor newspaper, April 26, 2004,

It does not pay for other MPs to follow colleagues from Acholi, Lango and Teso in walking out of parliament because that does not advance their electoral fortunes. The war in northern Uganda has therefore been contained in the prism of an ethnic conflict affecting only the Acholi, or Langi, and the Iteso, rather than a national problem.

Mwenda continues his observation in The Monitor, May 6-12, 2006:

The war in the north has always been used to rally people in the south around the NRM and Mzee (Museveni) during election times by spreading imaginary fears that “northerners want to come back to power to kill us.” This cynical and highly ethicized politics was effectively employed during the 1996 presidential election campaigns. Some FM radio stations ran adverts of soldiers with a northern accent torturing and killing people at roadblocks. Newspapers also carried adverts of skulls… But to keep the ethicized campaigns against the north, it is politically necessary to brand them (political competitors) agents of “those northerners” by linking them either to Obote or Kony. It is this process of demonizing people from the north…that is the basis of Mzee’s regime.

The consolidation of ethno-xenophobic policy thrives on the devious NRM/A regime’s self-celebratory memory. This is often invoked in the name of nation, ethnicity and perpetuates the need for revenge. The lifeblood of the ethno-xenophobia is deliberately manufactured myths to conceal complicity in genocide against the northerners. Its practical policy is militarism and militarist ethno-xenophobic and chauvinistic governance.
The 41-page report entitled, Northern Uganda: Understanding and Solving the Conflict, by the Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG) released on April 15, 2004 agrees,

The war helps him justify and maintain the status quo in Uganda politics, denying his opposition a power base and offering numerous opportunities for curtailing freedom of expression and association in the name of “the war against terrorism”.

The State House acting presidential press secretary rubbished the report describing it as “ridiculous and the work of research tourists.” To be clear, the ICG is chaired by former Finnish President, Martti Ahtisaari, and run by former Australian Foreign Minister, Gareth Evans. Both have clear credentials in democratic governance.
Similarly, a political science professor, Joel D. Barkan, of the University of Iowa, writes in The Weekly Observer newspaper on 4 August 2005,

The war has served Museveni’s political purpose in two fundamental ways. First, it has helped him consolidate popular support across southern Uganda, and particularly among the Baganda…. Second, the war has shored up Museveni’s political base within the UPDF; the UPDF has always been a pillar of the regime.

President Museveni supports Professor Barkan when he added that the high ranking military officers needed the war to amass wealth, hence consolidating his political base (New Vision, November 29, 1996). Museveni said,

It is true that in the past army officers were doing business out of the suffering of Acholi and they did not want it [the war] to end.

The tragedy of Acholi people has become a necessary Trojan horse to accumulate wealth among the high ranking military officers. A government’s own investigation into the Ghost Soldier reports by Mbabazi/Generals Tinyefuza and Saleh, showed that about 50 percent of the UPDF payroll was inflated with “ghost soldiers”. Unfortunately, no prosecution has even been undertaken; and, most of the implicated officers have gained rapid promotions.

[d] The NRM/A and genocide against the Acholi population
The genocide imposed on the Acholi people is fabricated as being the result of the mass deaths committed in Luweero; instead of the Acholi people remaining as a formidable political opponent of the NRM/A regime. It follows that numerous accusations have been concocted to implicate the Acholi people and to justify their decimation by the NRM/A regime. John Muto-Ono P’Lajur, a journalist for The Monitor newspaper, reports on April 5, 2004, of a Luweero meeting from March 4-7, to which Acholi elders and religious leaders were invited to apologize to the Baganda victims. The Acholi leaders rejected the invitation saying that they never fought the Baganda, even in ancient history. Many Acholi councilors described the meeting as “unfair and meant to justify the ongoing war” [genocide] against them.
Gulu Local Council-V Chairperson (LC-V), Lt.Col. Walter Ochora, an Acholi and former commander in Luweero with the defunct UNLA, turned a staunch supporter of the NRM/A in Gulu, said, “Neither the Acholi nor the Obote army would take responsibility for the killings.” As a former soldier with the UNLA, he was the enemy of the NRA rebels and fought long and hard battles to kill the NRM/A rebels of Gen. Museveni.
His observations are supported by that of Col. Kutesa, a former officer of the NRM/A. Kutesa writes that he fought the bloody battle of Kampomera against Lt.Col. Ochora; both former outfits were arrayed against the other. Kutesa calls Ochora a personal friend with whom he often shares memories of their concerted attempts to kill each other. He also speaks of fighting against Colonel Ogole of the UNLA at Kamboga, where many combatants perished.
Col. Kutesa writes vividly of death and destruction in the Luweero war. However, Museveni would rather not call these fighters to account for Luweero deaths; neither does he investigate or punish these officers for Luweero deaths. In the context of political demonization to retain power at all costs, the genocide against the Acholi people, politically opposed to the NRM/A regime, would continue under the propaganda machinery that extols Museveni as ushering in the era of “peace and tranquility,” “economic growth,” and the “golden boy of the west” and “the savior of Uganda from ruin.”
However, one thing remains clear to critical observers. Kevin Ogen Aliro, a journalist with The Monitor newspaper reports why some people are reluctant to see the genocide in Acholi (The Monitor, May 18, 1999):

I particularly understand the dilemma of some ordinary Ugandans, who after many years of torture and oppression, don’t want to believe that the UPDF (former NRM/A) …could even dream of such atrocities against any Ugandan… Ugandans are victims of self-denial and its associated symptoms. In their subconscious…they know that UPDF, like previous armies, are capable of all and worse.

Aliro gives a personal reminiscence:

I was like such Ugandans. There were times when I would never believe the UPDF would hurt a fly. I dismissed the Bur Coro incident (in which innocent human beings were buried and smoked in a pit) as an isolated case of indiscipline.

In his conclusion about the silence surrounding the genocide in Acholi, he said,

Deep inside, we (journalists) were also afraid. Afraid of the known consequences of publishing anything that may be deemed by the powers that be as “damaging to the image of Museveni’s sacred cow, the NRA (now the UPDF).” Hundreds of other incidents came and went, most unreported.

The decimation of the Acholi population is the result of lethal cocktail of deceit, demonization and ethno-xenophobic hate, in which western governments and the United Nations became complicit. Genocide is unfolding under our watch as we save Darfur, a less severe and shorter in intensity tragedy, than that in northern Uganda. There is ongoing genocide against the Acholi people, political opponents of the NRM/A regime, in northern Uganda.

[e] Luweero deaths as a necessary political tool for regime survival and governance.
The Luweero atrocities and mass deaths is being used to build a vanguard of people often unwilling to hear the narratives that challenge NRM/A political myths and call into question comfortable and self-righteous assumptions of the NRM/A regime’s non-complicity.
Badru Wegulo, Chairman of the UPC Constitutional Steering Committee, challenged Museveni to investigate the Luweero deaths. He observes that whenever election time nears, Luweero deaths are raised to prominence by Museveni. Skulls and other human bones are dug up; the staccato of machine gun fire and eerie torture cries play on the national radio to instigate ethno-xenophobic hatred and win votes for Museveni. Wegulo said (The Monitor, June 22, 2005),

If the government is concerned about Ugandans, we demand that an international commission be set up to investigate who is responsible for the killings in Luweero.

The NRM spokesman, Ofwono Opondo, answered,

There is no need for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission and we shall not have one anyway.

Concerned and irked by the continuing exploitation of Luweero deaths for political blackmail by the NRM/A, a Member of Parliament for Samia Bugwe North, insisted:

We are tired of Luweero and the demonization…They have stretched us far enough…”

Ofwono Opondo, once again, dismissed the call for international investigation. He said,

We do not need the international community to come and tell us who killed people in Luweero either. The survivors are there and they can tell us who destroyed their homes.

Early this year, 2006, before ambassadors and high commissioners accredited to Uganda, a suggestion to have the alleged perpetrators tried for Luweero deaths and punished was dismissed by Museveni:

[We] did not follow up culprits who fled to European capitals from where they are issuing invectives on [my] government to paint it black. [It} was deliberate not to ask for extradition of presidents Idi Amin and Milton Obote to allow wounds to heal. The devils we chased away here ran to Europe from where they became angels. (New Vision, May 18, 2006).

If Museveni wanted to allow the Luweero wounds to heal, why is it that when the legitimacy of his regime to govern is slipping, then Luweero atrocities are remembered and the “wounds” opened? Certainly, the concealment of truth and perpetration of atrocities through [i] shifting the blame and [ii] using truth telling merely as tactical but not principled communication, yield handsome dividends to legitimize President Museveni’s governance.

3. THE CONCEALMENT OF TRUTH UNDER NRM/A REGIME OF GEN. YOWERI MUSEVENI:
[a] Shifting the blame

Joseph Paul Goebbels, Propaganda Minister of the Nazi regime under Adolph Hitler.

If you will tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.

It follows that the longer the genocide perpetrated by Museveni and associates in northern Uganda continues, the longer and larger are the lies told. Shifting the blame of Luweero mass death conceals the truth.

Recently, President Museveni alleged that Olara Otunnu, a former Uganda diplomat at the UN, a former Under-Secretary for Children in Armed Conflict at the UN, is responsible for the Luweero atrocities. Olara Otunnu, the author of various articles: “What Shall I tell the children of Northern Uganda” (2001); “The Secret Genocide” (2006); “Nation in Crisis” (2006); and “Genocide in Northern Uganda” (2006), sought in his writings to expose Museveni’s demonic agenda for the ongoing genocide in northern and eastern Uganda. How farcical is it to attempt to pin the Luweero deaths on Olara-Otunnu, who never set foot in Luweero? Needless to say, the exploitation of Luweero deaths is a powerful political weapon for Museveni’s regime survival and governance. For this weapon to be disarmed an international investigation must be launched and Museveni and associates benefiting from parleying deception must be brought before the International Criminal Court (ICC) for genocide and war crimes in Luweero, eastern and northern parts of Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

[b] Concealing the truth: Why is President Museveni hiding the Justice Oder Commission report on Luweero deaths?
On coming to power, the NRM/A regime commissioned an investigation into human rights abuses from 1962 to 1986. The commission recommended that several commanders of the former NRM/A, now UPDF, and the defunct UNLA be punished for war crimes in Luweero. However, the lists of the military commanders to be punished were never released; and Museveni refused to grant public access to the commission’s report. We must ask:
· Where is the Justice Oder Commission report that investigated, reported and recommended that some former UNLA and some current UPDF officers be punished for crimes committed in Luweero? Why is Museveni hiding the Justice Oder Commission report?

Museveni followed the refusal to release the Justice Oder commission report with an injunction against those NRM/A high command officers for writing about their Luweero guerilla experience, while under his [Museveni] command. What is that injunction supposed to hide?

Certainly, the truth about the many massacres that underpin governance, diplomatic support and legitimacy for Museveni will be exposed. The exposure will undermine the use of human remains and body parts as tools of governance, legitimacy and demonization of regime critics and political opponents. It will expose the propaganda machine of the Museveni regime.

4. NRM/A DECEIT AND MANIPULATION: TRUTH TELLING AS TACTICS, NEVER AS PRINCIPLE!
Truth telling has been reduced to tactics of regime survival and harnessing ethnic legitimacy, which is masked as nationalism. Here are some test cases of political and military elite duplicity, which must be understood solely as animated by the desire to cling to power at all cost. Power for power’s sake is the maxim and it must be held by lies, deception and duplicity.

[a] Nairobi Peace Talks in 1985.
Museveni said,

We tried peacefully to push the case that the Amin elements, who had killed people in broad daylight, must be excluded.

The present truth is: Former notorious Amin’s ministers, Moses Ali, became a Minister under Museveni, and Amin’s Vice-President, Mustafa Adrisi, notorious for mass deaths, (and was jailed for mass murders), is now one of the over 100 advisors to President Yoweri Museveni.

[b] Soldiers on the street of Kampala
Museveni swore never to call soldiers to the streets (The Weekly Observer, 2005)
On his 6th day in Office in 1986, President Museveni swore:

I will never deploy soldiers on streets like my predecessors had done.

The present truth is: On December 22, 2005, John Vivian Sserwanio, a journalist, revisits the promise and reports in The Weekly Observer, 2005. He writes,

Soldiers are now a regular feature on Kampala Street.

[c] Constitutional Term Limit
Peter Mwesigye of The Crusader asked Museveni about the constitutional term limit.

Museveni said, in The Crusader, Sunday 12 May, 1996:

I said that I would serve only one term, this term. My inclination is that I should retire after this. Of course the constitution says I can serve two terms as president, and it would not be unconstitutional if I did it; but my inclination is that I should serve this one term, then retire.

President Museveni followed the statement by writing in the New Vision, on Oct 29-Nov 5, 2003, saying that,

I will not cling to power.

The present truth is: Museveni changed the Constitution to govern as a life president, in the Kisanja-project (no-term limit) (See, The Monitor, March 16, 2005, “Museveni Explains Reluctance to Retire”; New Vision, March 17, 2005, “I want to remain an Actor – Museveni”).

Museveni said,

Bidandi Ssali has been asking me to retire and remain an advisor. But if I advise you when I am Commander-in-Chief and President and you refused to take heed, how sure are you that you will take my advice when I am just an advising elder.

Emphasizing his desire to never relinquish power through electoral process, Museveni, in the New Vision newspaper, August 13, 2004, said,

Why should I sentence Ugandans to suicide by handing over power to people we fought and defeated?

[d] Electricity Power Crisis
Museveni said, on Independence Day celebration at Kololo on October 9, 2004,

Interference from development partners has made it impossible to hold anybody accountable for the power crisis, as the country had become “everybody’s business.

In an opinion piece to the New Vision, on February 15, 2006, President Museveni shifted the blame to FDC political opponents:

The opponents of this dam were PAFO members who, at that time, were masquerading as Movementists but have since then joined FDC. These were people like Kazoora, Muntu, Salaamu Musumba, etc.

The truth is: Jaberi Bidandi Ssali, former Minister of Energy and Local Government in the NRM/A, and Museveni’s confidant, said,

As far back as 1989, a proposal to build new hydro electric power sources to stabilize the country’s power supply for the next 15 years (1990-2005) was tabled but President Museveni rejected the idea. He [Museveni] said no, no, no, … clearly irritated” (The Observer, 2006)

Bidandi continued,

Museveni’s rejection partly stems from his nature of “thinking he has the solution to every problem, only for him to turn around later and blame other people whenever things go wrong.

Shifting the blame for electricity power shortage to FDC opposition party, Museveni writes (New Vision, February 15, 2006),

We must ask you to reject them in the coming elections. Many of them no longer belong to the Movement. They are in FDC. These are: Kazoora, Musumba, Muntu, Lukyamuzi etc” responsible for electricity shortage and paralyzing the Government in respect to electricity.

[e] On the Genocide in Northern Uganda
Museveni blamed donors for the failure to defeat the Lord’s Resistance Army in the wake of Barlonyo massacres.

The truth is: Ambassador Sigurd Illing, Head of European Union Delegation, disagrees.
Ambassador Illing, said,” (The Monitor, February 28, 2004, “Don’t Blame us for Kony’s war – Donors.”)

Donors agreed to exceptional increases in defense spending last year that were related to combating the LRA.

Ambassador Illing added,

It is the obligation of government, as Parliament repeated this week, to protect the lives and property of its people.

[f] On Multiparty and Democratic Pluralism in Uganda
Edmund Kizito of Reuters asked President Museveni,

We expect you campaigning against multiparty democracy?

Museveni answered:

Yes, Yes. I will campaign against multipartyism. I do not believe in multipartyism for Africa now or Uganda. For the next ten or fifteen years, I do not believe in it. So I will campaign against multipartyism in Uganda in four years time. And I am sure we shall defeat it. We shall not have multipartyism here (The Monitor Online, 2005; The East African, Nairobi, August 2, 2005).

The truth is: In 2005, Museveni campaigned for multipartyism after changing the constitution so that he becomes a life president (The Monitor, March 24, 2005, “Opposition Call for Anti-Kisanja Demo”).

[g] The ICC and Human Rights Violations in Northern and Eastern Uganda
Apolo Kakaire writes on July 6, 2006 under the title, “Amnesty Offer Blow for Rebel Chief Arrest Plans” (News: Institute for War and Peace Reporting, London, UK; The Monitor, May 17, 2007, “Museveni Offers Kony New Deal”)
Museveni said,

If Kony reaches a deal with me, Uganda would guarantee him safety from prosecution, by the ICC (International Criminal Court).

Museveni himself blamed his offer on the United Nations. He said,

The United Nation, by implication the ICC, has no moral authority to demand that Kony be brought to trial, since they had failed to arrest him…

The truth is: Museveni now insists that Kony be arrested by the ICC. Museveni said,

The ICC is actually very good for us (Uganda) because it makes the terrorists (rebels) come up to seek peace and end impunity. The ICC was created to fight impunity.

In dealing with Museveni, we must be clear that deceptions and propaganda, however openly contradicting, which will consolidate the NRM/A regime in power and shield him from prosecution for war crimes and genocide, are usually presented as truth. He preempts democratic political threats to his hold onto power by vicious blackmail, violence, deception and atrocities for which opponents must take the blame.

CONCLUSION
The manipulation of Luweero deaths has become a powerful political and military weapon in the hands of NRM/A political and military elite to mobilize ethno-xenophobic hate and chauvinistic nationalism against political opponents. Particularly against the Acholi population, it has been used to justify the ongoing genocide, and, among other political critics, it is useful to demonize to consolidate a militarist and ethno-xenophobic power base. Luweero deaths are useful for the preservation of NRM rule, as the NRM regime struggles to legitimize its governance and entrench itself in power. The use of Luweero deaths as weapons of malice, to malign opponents and retain power has replaced the search for justice. At the hand of Gen. Museveni, it has become an actual commodity, a promissory note and a currency to buy political support. The success of manipulating the Luweero deaths is reflected in incessant instability and denying access to the Justice Oder commission report that investigated human rights abuses from 1962 to 1985; denying a truth and reconciliation commission investigation; refusing an independent international inquiry into Luweero deaths and prohibiting retired NRM/A military officers from freely writing about their experiences in the Luweero war.

Ugandans must understand that Museveni used atrocities to get to power; uses atrocities to impede democratization that threatens his hold on power, by shifting the blame on his political opponents like the UPC and FDC. Museveni was successful in using atrocities against Obote in Luweero; against Besigye in the last two general elections; in the war against rebels in eastern and northern Uganda since 1986, and in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He is also successful in maliciously shifting the blame for the war in northern Uganda upon western donor nations who contribute 52 percent of Uganda’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), but who also allied with Museveni for strategic control of Africa.

Finally, the history of NRM/A regime is a narrative of victimization, violence, massacres, genocide and exploitation of death to give political life to the NRM/A regime. Mass deaths, deception and genocide disguised as concern for the sanctity and protection of life, are necessary for NRM/A legitimacy to govern. Sadly to say that the NRM/A regime was never about the promotion of democracy and human rights, but rather domination resting on coercion, massacres, beatings, mutilations, humiliations, rape and genocide. While this analysis does not offer insight into NRM/A psychopathological deception, lies and obsession with death and massacres, one point must remain clear: whatever direction our current debate takes us, it must go down the path of broader public education and learning the truth about Museveni’s complicity in the Luweero deaths and the horrendous destruction of lives in its wake. It must also emphasize the shameless duplicity with which Museveni has harnessed Luweero deaths for political dividends. What we understand today as Luweero deaths is a legacy of the NRM/A engineered war on February 6, 1981, against the defunct UNLA of the late Apolo Milton Obote, nearly 25 years ago. It is apt, to quote Joseph Paul Goebells honest boast, “We have made the Reich by propaganda” and I must paraphrase it to say that in Uganda, the NRM/A has made itself by propaganda.

Onek Adyanga (a PhD candidate in History, the University of Connecticut, Storrs, USA)