War in Uganda

national | miscellaneous | news report Saturday August 24, 2002 10:13 by David Ouma Balikowa

The last two months have witnessed events that depict Uganda as a country haunted by a past of kidnappings, killings and endemic rebel activity. Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) rebels stepped up attacks in northern Uganda. The civilians trapped in this 15-year inferno continued to die helplessly in large numbers.

The war often dismissed as a small problem by government has once again sucked President Yoweri Museveni and the entire top army command into Gulu.

To many people, this is the best measure of how big the LRA problem is in northern Uganda. By the time a president and the entire top army command go into the trenches, it is not a simple matter.

The seriousness with which Museveni is taking the renewed fighting is justified and long overdue. The civilian and army casualties are running high. The rebel casualties are the children the army failed to protect from being abducted.

Not to mention the sad fact that an entire generation of Acholi born under Museveni's rule has grown up and become parents in constantly raided protected camps.

Not surprisingly, the media is once again being used as a scapegoat for the army's failings in the north. The generals always quick to blow war trumpets in the media, are again the first to complain when the hard realities of war set in.

Back in the capital Kampala, the airwaves are surging under the weight of all sorts of accusations and counter accusations.

The intelligence chiefs are telling us former presidential candidate Col. Kizza Besigye is supporting Joseph Kony's LRA. He is also accused of globetrotting in search of arms and fomenting rebellion.

The intelligence bosses swear they have recordings of telephone conversations between Besigye and some army officers bordering on treason.

Besigye challenges them to play the tapes for the Ugandan public to hear for themselves.

We are waiting. Not forgetting that just recently security denied tapping telephones in the country.

The recent past has also seen people dying in the hands of intelligence organs, many arrested and detained on accusations of rebel activity or armed robbery.

Sections of the public, upset with the spate of violent robbery, support Elly Kayanja's "Operation Wembley". But Kayanja, the deputy chief of Internal Security Organisation (ISO) does not amuse many other cautious ones when it comes to extra-judicial killing of suspects.

The caution is fuelled by bad acts in the past. Armed state agents have the tendency of abusing their guns to extort or be used to kill in order to settle all sorts of scores. All the state agents have to say is that he or she was a robber and the case would be closed!

The unending rebel activity plus the unstable politics in the country compounds the situation. It creates an intricate cobweb of issues that require a careful process to resolve, especially where individual rights are concerned.

Last Sunday, Sunday Monitor published a moving story of Duncan Muhumuza's three-decade search for the killers of his father Erifazi Laki.

Laki was killed by Idi Amin's state agents in 1972, his car commandeered away and his body buried in secret.

Muhumuza's moving story could have come at no better time. Juxtaposed against some of the recent deaths, one gets the strong feeling that governments never learn from past mistakes.

It took Muhumuza 30 years to find his father's killers, former state agents at that. One can bet that the killers of those that have died in state hands in the recent past will, however long it will take, be found one day.

Was it Eriya Kategaya who said that Ugandans read and know a lot of history but unfortunately never learn from it?

Well-intentioned Ugandans have campaigned strongly against mob justice. Not that it does not enjoy popularity among some sections of Ugandans. But because chances are high that some innocent person might be killed. Or that some vital evidence might die with the suspect.

The same caution needs to be deployed when dealing with armed thugs. When soldiers are allowed to kill unarmed suspects at ease, be sure that strange practice will, like some disease, live with them. Because they do not have to account much for the deaths at their hands, the allowance will be susceptible to abuse.

Besides as we all know, many of the guns used in violent robberies come from army sources. If we do not plug the arms' sources, "Operation Wembley" is to some significant extent chasing wind.

So as the airwaves surge with talk about the Besigye's and others fomenting rebellion, as a country we need to be reminded about our violent past. The recent live debate between Besigye and Chieftainancy of Military Intelligence boss Col. Noble Mayombo was valuable in a sense that it provided insights into some of the factors underlying recent events.

The problem though is the political players do not seem gravitated towards moving such debate to any productive re-engineering of the political process. The levels of intolerance are simply getting higher. It creates the unfortunate impression that the country is being pushed to the edge of a cliff.

The Monitor (Kampala)

Uganda's privately owned daily

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