Did UPDF officers sell arms to Kony?

ALEX ATUHAIRE / KAMPALA

REVELATIONS that some UPDF 4 Division commanders could have sold arms to Joseph Kony's LRA rebels shocked the committee that investigated the presence of ghost-soldiers on the army payroll.

Sources close to the committee chaired by Mr Amama Mbabazi, then minister of Defence, told Daily Monitor that several testimonies gathered from the Fourth and Fifth Divisions in northern Uganda, indicated that some commanders may have "sold their souls" in return for Kony's dollars.

The reports come in the aftermath of jailing former army commander James Kazini for three years for profiteering from the ghost soldiers's scam. The Mbabazi committee implicated Maj. Gen. Kazini. A source close to the committee, who did not want to be named because
he is not authorised to speak about the activities of the investigation told Daily Monitor that cases of arms supply to the LRA, who would in return pay handsomely in dollars were apparent and shocking as the committee conducted investigations in bases of both the Fourth and Fifth divisions.

The committee grilled the late Noble Mayombo, then chief of Military Intelligence about shocking revelations that apart from findings that more than half the UPDF's Fourth Division were ghosts, the unit's commanders also sold arms to the sometimes well funded LRA.
Sunday Monitor yesterday reported that the late Mayombo admitted that the Fourth Division was before the commencement of operation Iron Fist in March 2001 "a ghost division" and the army had to deploy another 4,000 troops to support the operation that was supposed to, once and for all, rout the rebels.

Though the late Brig. Mayombo did not specifically admit that commanders were selling arms to the rebels, he shockingly confirmed that some UPDF commanders were "blinded by money".
Q: So the meeting agreed that 4th Division was about (50%) fifty percent of its establishment, how was that figure arrived at?

Mayombo: Through head count. Ninety percent of the available strength was at Aswa ranch.

Q: But what would prevent a commander who has been so blinded by money as to maintain ghosts on the strength of his unit from selling his arms to Kony?

Mayombo: They are blinded by money from what we know. "There is possibility of loss of firearms to the enemy due to the units failing to declare arms which belong to ghost soldiers," the committee noted in their analysis of the effects of ghost-soldiers on the army, adding that the practice undermined the fighting capability of the UPDF and enhanced the culture of impunity and "possible subversion".

Gulu LC5 Chairman Nobert Mao, told Daily Monitor yesterday that he has also heard reports that some UPDF commanders have sold arms to the LRA though he did not have "any specific information".

"I have heard some reports," he said. "But even the rebels have told us that some of the sources of their supplies were from UPDF," Chairman Mao, told Daily Monitor on phone, adding that the war had failed to end because "of corruption and abuse of office" on what he termed as "conflict entrepreneurs" within the UPDF.

Mr Mao, who was Gulu Municipality MP in Sixth and Seventh Parliament, said Gen.Kazini was not alone.

Gen. Kazini was last Thursday jailed together with former 507 Brigade commander Lt. Col. Dura Mawa Muhindo and Capt. Michael Baryaguma after they were sent to the General Court Martial in December 2003 for trial as result of the recommendations of the Mbabazi committee.

Gen. Salim Saleh and Gen. David Tinyefuza were the other members of the committee which gathered evidence between June and September 2003. The committee, appointed by a High Command meeting at Bombo on June 3, later appointed 12 support staff including -President Museveni's Military Assistant Col. Proscovia Nalweyiso, the Chief of Legal Services in the Army, Col. Ramadhan Kyamulesire and Mr Paul Mugisha the deputy director of Counter Intelligence at the External Security Organisation.

The others were, Maj. Julius Bakirana (CMI), Capt Timothy Kanyogonya (CMI), Lt Patrick Ssemuju (UPDF Political Commissariat), Lt Oscar Munanura (CMI), Lt Carol Basaliza (CMI), Pte Were Wange (DPU), Mr David Nuwamanya (MOD), Ms. Jane Namirembe (ESO) and Ms. Christine Nabirye (MOD).

Maj. Bakirana would later be implicated in the same report, as among the officers who were used and later benefited from the money from ghost-soldiers. He was also in December 2003 fired from CMI and sent to the General Court Martial for trial.

http://allafrica.com/stories/200803310012.html

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Have aid agencies prolonged Uganda's war?

21 Feb 2008 14:36:00 GMT

Written by: Emma Batha

An internally displaced woman in her hut in Pabbo camp. REUTERS/James Akena

Reports on northern Uguanda often paint a picture of an evil, crazed rebel cult committing unspeakable atrocities while kidnapping thousands of children to fight. In the background, aid workers do their best to feed hundreds of thousands of people crammed into squalid displacement camps where disease is rife. But have humanitarian agencies actually helped prolong the crisis?

The question is posed by journalist Matthew Green, who recounts his search for reclusive rebel leader Joseph Kony in his new book "Wizard of the Nile: The Hunt for Africa's Most Wanted". Coverage of northern Uganda rarely makes clear that many people were systematically forced into the camps by the government as it sought to close in on Kony by depriving him of support.

The army broadcast ultimatums telling people they would be considered rebels if they refused to leave their homes. Green argues that the United Nations' World Food Programme (WFP) was unwittingly sucked into underwriting this strategy when it began trucking aid into the camps shortly after the government began creating them in late 1996.

"The government said at the time it would be a few months," Green says. "Ten years later the camps were still there and they caused arguably more suffering than the rebels. The amount of disease, the squalor and social deprivation people suffered was appalling. "And all this time the WFP was effectively sponsoring this strategy... No one was asking was it really correct for the government to herd hundreds of thousands of people into camps and leave them there indefinitely."

At the height of the crisis some 2 million people - 90 percent of the local population - were living in camps. Many were also dying there - up to 1,000 a week, according to a 2005 report by the Ugandan government and U.N. agencies. Green describes the camps as "giant incubators of disease, alienation and despair" that ended up killing more people than the rebels did.

CONUNDRUM

He stresses he isn't condemning the WFP, but highlighting a bigger problem with the whole system.

"Aid agencies sometimes look away from the cause of the suffering," Green says. "They try to treat the suffering but by doing that they actually become part of the system that creates the suffering.

"It's easy to criticise but I think people even within the organisations recognise there's a dilemma - it's that dilemma of it's much easier to put a humanitarian band aid on the problem than to mobilise the political will in Western capitals to try to do something about it."

Western governments viewed Uganda as a success story - a development story rather than an emergency. And President Yoweri Museveni's government, for its part, was eager to play down the crisis.

"They always presented the camps as a temporary measure," Green says. "They kept repeating this mantra that we've defeated Kony and then there would be some terrible outrage and they would always use this phrase 'the last kicks of a dying horse'. It was essentially propaganda and I think that worked."

The myth of Kony as an apparently deranged mystic also distracted international attention from conditions in the camps. The plight of children abducted by his fighters made better copy than the quiet suffering of a generation growing up in squalor.

"The fact that Kony was this bizarre jungle dwelling demi-god figure surrounded by dozens of wives talking about the Holy Spirit - that image was so powerful that it made it much easier to dismiss the conflict as something almost beyond the realms of rational intervention and that played very much into the government's hands," Green says.

For more, see AlertNet's interview with Green about his hunt for Kony. You can also watch a video of an interview he gave at London's Frontline Club.

Reuters AlertNet is not responsible for the content of external website

http://www.alertnet.org/db/blogs/19216/2008/01/21-143641-1.htm

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****Footage of IDP camps, World Food Programme, N. Uganda 2007)

Glimpses of Reality

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