Read Senator John F. Kerry's Statement to Bush About Museveni's October 30th Visit to the White House



> WHAT YOU CAN DO:

1. Expose President Museveni for committing crimes against humanity with impunity in Uganda, as well as in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. (Read the US State Department's press release regarding Museveni's Oct. 30th visit.)
   
   
2. Ask Congress and Presidential candidates to hold Museveni responsible for his poor governance and embezzlement of funds meant for: children's vaccination programs, HIV patients, and the rehabilitation and reconstruction of war-ravaged Northern Uganda.
   
   

3. Urge your religious leaders to appeal to their members to take action as part of their moral obligation towards fellow human beings.
   
   

4. Urge students at all levels to organize activities to bring awareness about the crisis in Northern Uganda and the Great Lakes Region in general.

Read more...

No-peace-no-war in Uganda

Northern Uganda has been afflicted by war since 1986. The situation in the region has been described by a high-rank UN representative as one of the worst humanitarian crises of today. Yet, recently there have been developments which have encouraged some commentators to speak about a ‘post-war’ situation. In this brief commentary, I warn against declaring a post-war situation too soon.

By: Sverker Finnström, Researcher and lecturer, Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology, Uppsala University, Sweden, and affiliated to the Centre for Conflict Management and Peace Studies, Gulu University, Uganda.

In 1981, Yoweri Museveni and the National Resistance Movement/Army launched a guerrilla war in central Uganda with the objective of replacing Milton Obote’s second government (1980–85). Museveni took to arms with the argument that the 1980 elections that brought Obote back to power were rigged. In his book Uganda since independence: A story of unfulfilled hopes (1992) Mutibwa holds that there was an absolute need to revolutionise Ugandan politics in the aftermath of Idi Amin’s fall from power in 1979. He argues that “the system” that brought Obote back to power for the second time had been “created” by the colonialists and “inherited at independence,” thereafter “perfected” by Obote in the 1960s and “matured” under Amin’s rule. Museveni captured state power in 1986, and introduced his no-party Movement system. Unfortunately, and despite positive developments in large parts of Uganda so often reported on, the northern region has been war-torn ever since. To be blunt, in 1986 the war zone simply shifted from central to northern Uganda. Especially affected is Acholiland (Gulu, Kitgum and Pader districts), where I have conducted anthropological fieldwork. Today the Ugandan army is fighting the Lord’s Resistance Movement/Army (LRM/A, or more commonly in the media, LRA).

For an excellent overview of the background to the conflict and its stakeholders – in particular with reference to the many peace efforts that have failed over the years – I recommend Protracted Conflict, Elusive Peace, a volume edited by Lucima. The free online version includes a rich list of Internet resources as well. The conflict has recently found its way to the centre of international attention. As quoted in The New Vision, Uganda’s state-owned daily, on November 11, 2003, the United Nations Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Co-ordinator, Jan Egeland, claimed that “northern Uganda must be one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world”.

The Lord’s Resistance Movement/Army rebels, with bases in southern Sudan and led by Joseph Kony, are notorious for their gross violence against the non-combatant population. They have abducted thousands of minors. The rebel movement has become increasingly isolated and alienated from society over the years, and perhaps also increasingly fragmented. Their military practices have also changed considerably over time, becoming more violent and terror-like. In the aftermath of September 11 and with direct US support, the Ugandan army launched “Operation Iron Fist”. This extensive military campaign was meant to once and for all flush out the rebels. It is being carried out on Sudanese territory with the approval of the Sudanese government. It has seriously added to the pressure on the rebels. Small and extremely mobile rebel units operate increasingly in isolation from the high command. “If the rebels face difficult battles, they will be rude to the civil population. If they don’t face the battle, they are not rude,” a fieldwork associate concluded when we discussed Operation Iron Fist and the increase in rebel atrocities.

Yet another local, peripheral war in Africa?

In my own work, I have focused on the role of politicised rumours, cosmology, religion and local moral worlds in war. I have also discussed the discrepancy between the Lord’s Resistance Movement/Army’s violent insurgency practices and its political manifestos as well as internal mass displacement and the Ugandan army’s counter-insurgency tactics. In recent years, for example, a growing number of human rights abuses also committed by the Ugandan armed forces has been recorded. In its counter-insurgency tactics, the Ugandan army has forced large portions of the population into camps with strict curfews. More than 80 percent of the Acholi population, or more than one million people, are internally displaced, living in a chronic state of emergency. More than 1.6 million people are internally displaced in northern Uganda.

One of the main concerns in my own work regards the fact that the war in northern Uganda has been dismissed for too long as an essentially local problem. Uganda is widely regarded, among both academics and influential organisations, as a success story of reconstruction, structural adjustment and economic liberalisation, celebrated for its fight against HIV/AIDS. To mention only one example, Bayart, Ellis and Hibou (1999) have listed Uganda among the African countries “where a logic of violence has been replaced by a political process of negotiation and rebuilding”. An exception to these positive developments, the northern region has been described as peripheral, and particularly war-prone. In the war propaganda, reference has been made to the alleged primitiveness of the Acholi people. Major General James Kazini, a non-Acholi and long-time member of the Ugandan army’s high command, illustrates the trend when he blamed all military violence upon the Acholi. “If anything, it is local Acholi soldiers causing the problems. It’s the cultural background of the people here: they are very violent. It’s genetic,” he claimed in an interview with Human Rights Watch. Taking issue with such conclusions, I found it necessary to devote substantial space in my PhD thesis to discussing colonialism and its racist ideologies, Uganda’s imperial inheritance and the country’s contested political history, and global politics.

No peace, no war

“ Suddenly,” writes the Gulu based Justice and Peace Commission in a statement from August 2004, “there is real hope that the 18-year old war that has afflicted Northern Uganda – particularly Acholi – may come to a quick end. Many organisations are even beginning to talk of the imminence of a ‘post-war’ situation.” The statement continues: “A ‘military peace’ won by a Government victory over the LRA may be in sight.” The monthly newsletter of the Justice and Peace Commission, freely distributed via e-mail, always includes well-researched and updated chronologies. The newsletter is essential reading to anyone who is following the developments in northern Uganda.

The reason for the commission’s optimism, it seems, is that rebels surrender on a daily basis. In November 2004 a former Ugandan minister, Betty Bigombe, who was active in peace talks in 1993–94 that eventually failed for various reasons, was again instrumental in linking the rebels with the Ugandan government. However, we need to be careful in declaring any post-war situation. The army’s Operation Iron Fist continues, and so do rebel attacks on civilian targets. Alleged rebel collaborators are arrested on a daily basis, including a priest and other peace emissaries. These days one can frequently read in Ugandan media, that the helicopter gunships of the Ugandan armed forces have been successful in yet another battle against the rebels. More often than not these stories are reproduced in Western media as well. In these news flashes, a given number of rebels are reported to have been killed. Yet on other occasions, the same news channels report that the Ugandan armed forces have again been successful, but now in rescuing a number of abducted children from rebel ranks. The bitter irony, however, is that the people referred to are most often minors, but categorised differently depending on how the propaganda of war describes the situation. If killed, they are labelled “rebels”. If they survive the bombing of the helicopter gunships, they become “rescued abductees”.

In early 2004, the Ugandan government requested the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague to collect evidence of war crimes committed by the Lord’s Resistance Movement/Army in general and its leader Joseph Kony in particular. The Ugandan government’s call for international justice left out possible war crimes committed by its own army. “Our position is if they [the International Criminal Court investigators] come across any allegations against government officials, they should let them be tried by the government,” as the army spokesperson is reported to have said to The Monitor, Uganda’s independent daily, on August 16, 2004. In addition, the International Criminal Court was created on the international diplomatic consensus not to include any crime committed before 2002. But having this year as starting point for investigation, regardless of the international diplomatic consensus behind it, cannot be said to be a correct choice, something that must be obvious to any person who has an informed understanding of the conflict in northern Uganda. It is notable that the initial fifteen years of war in northern Uganda will perhaps be left unaccounted for. In the light of Bigombe’s recent peace efforts, which many of my informants hope will be successful but which they from experience remain sceptical of, the Ugandan President has indicated that he may even be willing to plead with the International Criminal Court to drop the case against the LRM/A. Most likely he has listened to local clan chiefs and religious leaders who have argued all the time that there are better ways to become reconciled with the rebels, than international law. Amnesty International in London has however protested firmly against this.

Here it becomes necessary to interpret the conflict in relation to the wider national, even international, context. The Ugandan scholar Oloka-Onyango has described the ruling government as a “quasi-military” government and Prunier has exposed the Ugandan army’s murky involvement in eastern Congo. Despite a blanket amnesty offered to the rebels, the political environment in Uganda is increasingly volatile. For high rank rebels, amnesty means nothing other than plain surrender, and the risk of being sent to The Hague adds to these rebels’ scepticism.

Conclusion

Let me conclude this brief commentary by noting that Uganda’s political past is increasingly contested. The global war against terrorism continues in Uganda too, and president Museveni has indicated his unwillingness to step down from power. Like most of my informants, I doubt that the Lord’s Resistance Movement/Army can be defeated militarily. If there continues to be no genuine and consistent will to find a political solution to the conflict, it is difficult to see how the ruling government and its oppositional groups, including those bearing arms, can find avenues to replace a logic of violence by a political process of negotiation and rebuilding, to refer to Bayart and his colleagues quoted above. Rather, let us just for a second accept Mutibwa’s note on Uganda’s political history (also quoted above). He holds that Uganda’s political system was created by the colonialists and then perfected under postcolonial rule. Then it is again difficult to see, at least if the war in the north is included in the analysis, that Museveni’s military takeover in 1986 has resulted in any genuine departure from this unfortunate development.

Selected reading, references and quotations

Bayart, Jean-Francois, Stephen Ellis and Béatrice Hibou, The criminalization of the state in Africa. Oxford & Bloomington: The International African Institute/James Currey/Indiana University Press, 1999. (quotation from p. 5)

Behrend, Heike, Alice Lakwena and the Holy Spirits: War in northern Uganda, 1985–97. Oxford, Kampala, Nairobi and Athens: James Currey/Fountain Publishers/EAEP/Ohio University Press, 1999.

Finnström, Sverker, Living with bad surroundings: War and existential uncertainty in Acholiland, northern Uganda. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis/Uppsala Studies in Cultural Anthropology, vol. 35, 2003. (PhD thesis)

Finnström, Sverker. “‘For God and my life’: War and cosmology in northern Uganda”. In Paul Richards (Ed.), No peace, no war: An anthropology of contemporary armed conflicts. Oxford and Ohio: James Currey/Ohio University Press, 2005.

Gulu Archdiocese, Justice and Peace News. A monthly newsletter of the Justice and Peace Commission of Gulu Archdiocese. Aug–Sept 2004. E-mail submission: jpcgulu@infocom.co.ug

Human Rights Watch, The scars of death: Children abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda. New York: Human Rights Watch, 1997. (Kazini quotation from p. 59).

Human Rights Watch, Abducted and abused: Renewed conflict in northern Uganda. Human Rights Watch, 2003. Available at www.hrw.org/reports/2003/uganda0703/

Lucima, Okello (Ed.), Protracted conflict, elusive peace: Initiatives to end the violence in northern Uganda. London: Conciliation Resources and Kacoke Madit, 2002. Available at www.c-r.org

Mutibwa, Phares Mukasa, Uganda since independence: A story of unfulfilled hopes. London: Hurst and Company, 1992. (quotations from p. 155)

Oloka-Onyango, J., “‘New Breed’ leadership, conflict and reconstruction in the Great Lakes Region of Africa: A sociopolitical biography of Uganda’s Yoweri Kaguta Museveni”. In Africa Today, 50(3), 2004.

Prunier, Gérard, “Rebel movements and proxy warfare: Uganda, Sudan and the Congo (1986–99)”. In African Affairs, 103(412), 2004.

UN/IRIN, “‘When the sun sets, we start to worry...’: An account of life in northern Uganda”. IRIN, 2004. Available at www.irinnews.org

Van Acker, Frank. “Uganda and the Lord’s Resistance Army: The new order no one ordered”. In African Affairs, 103(412), 2004.

Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children, Against all odds: Surviving the war on adolescents. Promoting the protection and capacity of Ugandan and Sudanese adolescents in northern Uganda. 2001. Available at www.womenscommission.org.

Updated 24 November 2006, 11:12

Read more...

Renaissance Leader Runs Out of Steam

By William Wallis, FINANCIAL TIMES
Published: November 20 2007 06:27 | Last updated: November 20 2007 06:27

Much hope for Africa’s emergence was invested until relatively recently in a new generation of leaders from Ethiopia, via Uganda to the Cape.

African countries, so the thinking went, had a better chance of emerging from poverty and conflict with tough visionaries, who believed in self-reliance, at their command. Uganda has been one example of how that thinking has, in less than a decade, been turning on its head.

In the mid-1990s Yoweri Museveni, the president, was at the heart of a group of leaders lauded in Washington, the UK and parts of Africa itself, as the vanguard of an “African renaissance.” If there is talk this week of another African dawn, when 54 heads of state descend on Kampala for the Commonwealth’s biennial summit, it will be for different reasons.

Hopes for Uganda today – as for other parts of the continent – are less bound up in its leadership. Instead they are inspired by technocrats keeping a tight rein, against considerable odds, at the central bank; by graduates emerging, politically conscious and connected to each other by mobile phones; and by dynamic businesses thriving – relative to the past – alongside steady inflows of foreign investment. He still has many supporters. But Mr Museveni is now viewed increasingly by diplomats, donors, and a good number of Ugandans themselves, as an impediment to the country’s prospects. To his reported irritation, an increasing number tell him that, to protect his legacy, he should go.

It is revealing that of the handful of “renaissance leaders” in whom so much hope once rested, four have taken their countries to war. None has yet relinquished power or prepared a smooth succession, and most have become more autocratic with time. Mr. Museveni, now in his 21st year in power, has been no exception.

Like other liberation movement leaders he has resisted the transition from military to democratic rule. In the past decade, he has led Uganda into two wars in neighbouring Congo in which his army’s reputation was damaged by complicity in plunder and abuse. Until a lull last year, the army also fought a brutal rebellion at home, to the enduring bitterness of Ugandans in the affected north who felt peace could and should have been made sooner.

Nor has the state shown much sign of becoming more tolerant. In some respects, human rights groups say, the opposite has been the case, especially since 2005 when the constitution was altered to allow Mr Museveni to stand for a third elected term at the same time as political parties were legalised. The main challenger in elections last year has been in and out of courts. A number of Uganda’s more strident journalists have been too.

Yet, Mr Museveni is also a victim of his own success. The economic recovery he has been instrumental in engineering has put strains on infrastructure that threaten future growth. Having opened the books to more scrutiny than many of his peers, more evidence has emerged of nepotism and corruption. In new property developments sprawling over Kampala’s seven hills, in shopping malls and grinding traffic, there are signs of a re-emerging middle class, bringing yet more demands.

“Underneath, structural change is taking place in society. The number of people with secondary school education is rising and so is their demand for jobs. This in turn is creating a civil conscience in society,” says Andrew Mwenda, an outspoken Ugandan commentator. Members of a new generation, such as Mr Mwenda, tend to view the ruling class as corrupt and anachronistic, and value less the stability Mr Museveni represents to more conservative Ugandans who lived through darker periods in the past.

When he took power in 1986 after a five-year guerrilla war, Uganda’s economy was on its knees. Society had been traumatised by the manic rule of Idi Amin, followed by the murderous regime of Milton Obote. It was hard to argue with Mr Museveni’s vision of how democracy in Africa should evolve – around a single movement in which different groups could be represented but without political parties around which divisive ethnic interests could coalesce.

Uganda was a “sick patient” he said, persuading much of the world that he was the right man to heal it. Overcoming initially Marxist leanings he went to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to bankroll his recovery programme. In the ensuing years Uganda threw open markets, privatised state industries, and floated its currency. It also restored properties and businesses seized when Idi Amin expelled a whole mercantile and professional class of Asians from Uganda in 1972. Setting a precedent for the sanctity of property rights, this helped encourage an influx of foreign investment from other quarters too.

“Museveni did one thing that will forever be his saving grace,” says Andrew Rugasira, whose “Good African Coffee” company supplies UK and South African supermarkets. “He liberalised the economy so everyone from petty traders to big industrialists can do their thing.”In the past 20 years growth in gross domestic product has averaged 6 per cent – a record unparalleled over such a span in Africa. With assistance from foreign donors, poverty has been reduced from 56 to 31 per cent, Aids infection rates among the sexually active have declined from 18 per cent to more like 7, although there are signs of a recent climb, and universal primary and now secondary education have been introduced.

Yet Uganda is still among the world’s poorest countries, dependent for 40 per cent of its national budget on foreign aid. It was only in 2000 that it regained the per capita GDP levels at independence in 1962. With a population of 28m growing at 3 per cent, overwhelmingly rural and with a majority under the age of 15, the strains are visible.

“On the macroeconomic level Uganda is still doing very well. But they need to get to the next frontier. Health performance is stagnating. In education there is a quality quagmire. On infrastructure – you can’t keep building new roads if you don’t maintain them,” says a senior donor official.“Underlying all of this, the main architecture of success is no longer working – the government machinery,” the offical adds. “We no longer have a critical mass of well-educated, effective bureaucrats who have the interests of the people at heart.”

Mr Museveni, who visited US president George W. Bush in Washington this month, is an experienced tactician. He has maintained strong support abroad partly by collaborating in the US war on terror, and most recently by sending the only peacekeeping troops to Somalia, where the west fears a resurgence of al-Qaeda-linked Islamists. He has also tried to make peace in Uganda’s war-torn north – something his supporters hope will deliver him votes if, as anticipated, he stands for a fourth elected term in 2011. But friends as well as critics say his style of government has become less inclusive and more dependent on patronage than the persuasive power of his ideas.

“The very institutions he spent years building, he is now weakening,” says a senior donor official. The danger is that maintaining power has become more of a priority than putting it to good effect, argues Mr Mwenda. That formula for political and economic stalemate is one that has cost many countries, not only in Africa, dearly.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

Read more...

The Acholi "Final Solution"

[Black Star News Editorial]
By Milton Allimadi, December 21, 2007

For more than 20 years critics of Ugandan dictator Yoweri Museveni contended that his government’s policy of confining nearly two million Acholis in squalid concentration camps amounted to mass death sentences—that the regime was intent on depopulating Acholi in order to seize fertile lands.

Such talk was often dismissed as “conspiracy theory.” Now the assertions are coming to fruition right before our eyes.

Since the Museveni government was aware that people were dying in the thousands through hunger, thirst, diseases, and sexual abuse, and still continued to maintain the concentration camps, critics saw the mass deaths as deliberate policy.

The Museveni regime and international relief agencies referred to the camps euphemistically as “internally displaced people’s” camps (IDPs). The Museveni regime claimed the 200 or so death centers were intended to “protect” Acholis from the vicious attacks of Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) insurgents.

Well how many Acholis were protected? Uganda’s own Ministry of Health and The World Health Organization (WHO) in a report concluded in 2005 that there were as many as 1,000 excess deaths per week in these camps.

As The Black Star News has pointed out before on these pages, this translates to 52,000 deaths per year. Since the forced government-ordered encampment of Acholis has lasted for more than 20 years now, more than a million people may have perished in these camps.

In other words, the Museveni regime was responsible for several-fold more deaths than the LRA, his own Ministry of Health reported.

So, is Museveni’s government in a rush to dismantle the concentration centers? On the contrary, the government is more focused on a land-grab campaign---to steal land in Amuru, some of which may belong to people still in the camps, confirming what the “conspiracy” theorists have asserted all along. Releasing people from the camps would get in the way of awarding the land to developers.

This Wednesday, Museveni himself reportedly attended a secret meeting in Acholi. The objective was to arm twist Acholis into awarding fertile land to investors, including possibly the Ugandan Asian industrialists, the Madhvanis, who want to build a sugar plantation.

The Madhvanis must beware of profiting from blood-money. Let the owners of the land –or their heirs if they have died in the camps— make the decision about what to do with the land.

The Madhvanis may love money, but more than any other people, they must know what it means to be dispossessed. Have they forgotten the illegal seizure of their properties after Idi Amin ordered Asians out of Uganda? They must not allow the regime to use the Madhvani wealth to intimidate and coerce Acholis. The Madhvanis, if they are a people with conscience, must empathize with the Acholis who face dispossession.

Moreover, the Madhvanis, who are engaged in global business, would not want to tarnish their reputation by being associated in any possible land grab.

Kony and Museveni have been disastrous for Acholis. Kony eventually will answer for his actions and for those of his LRA combatants. The International Criminal Court (ICC) already has issued warrants for the arrest of Kony and his top lieutenants.

Who will answer for the million-plus Acholis who died in the concentration camps as a result of the orders issued by the Uganda government to confine them? Who will protect the land for their children? Where are the warrants for the authors of the “Final Acholi Solution”?

Publisher’s Note: Anyone with knowledge about the officials that drew up the plan for the “Final Acholi Solution,” and the establishment of the 200 concentration camps please send us an e-mail message with details to Milton@blackstarnews.com
http://blackstarnews.com/?c=122&a=4015

Read more...