Uganda: Starting Over

For the first time in fifteen years the streets of Kampala were not empty at night. When I visited the Ugandan capital late last spring, people strolled without fear past the few shops and cafés that had managed to survive the seemingly interminable period of misrule and chaos which ended only in January of last year, with the coming to power of Yoweri Museveni. Museveni, who is in his early forties (he is not sure of his age), is a veteran guerrilla leader dedicated to national reconciliation. Under Museveni a modicum of normality has returned to Kampala. Badly printed newspapers are on sale everywhere; press restrictions are no longer in force. The Nile Mansions Hotel, once a torture and detention facility, is now just another white building with pruned hedges and flower beds; its grounds are easily trespassed upon. Gunfire is still heard in the capital, but rarely enough that the explanation for each incident is heatedly debated. One foreign resident told me it is so quiet in Kampala that he has trouble sleeping at night.

As Ugandans began to rebuild their lives, they were also beginning to learn about the extent of their own sufferings. In recent months the most popular pilgrimage for Kampala residents has been to an area north of the capital known as the Luwero Triangle, the scene of the worst army massacres a few years ago. Though the skulls lined up along the roadside in the Luwero region make it hard not to think of The Killing Fields, the nearby graffiti tell an essentially African tale with no real Asian equivalent—a tale that helps one comprehend the violence that has claimed perhaps as many as a million lives in Uganda (whose population is about fourteen and a half million) since 1971. On the wall of a deserted hotel in the Luwero town of Nakeseke, where soldiers had been quartered, the following note was scrawled: “A good Muganda is a dead one. Shoot to kill Muganda, signed the Soroti boys.”

A Muganda is a member of the Baganda tribe, the most numerous of the Bantu peoples inhabiting the southern half of this East African country, and the tribe from which Uganda derives its name. “Soroti” refers to an area in the north inhabited by a Nilotic group called the Teso, who helped form the backbone of the army in the early 1980s, when the atrocities in the Luwero Triangle occurred. Since most of Uganda’s forty tribes speak different and mutually unintelligible languages, the Teso soldiers wrote in English, the country’s lingua franca.

“Tribalism isolates you and is a part of your identity,” Grace Ibingira, a former Ugandan Cabinet minister and ambassador to the United Nations, told me. Tribalism, as he and other Ugandans define it, is an amplified form of sectarian conflict, existing in places where people of different languages , traditions, physiognomies, and occupations live in physical, but not psychological, proximity. Uganda, which is the size of Great Britain, and whose arbitrary borders are the result of the 1884-1885 Berlin Conference of European powers, is so tribal that it is more like a loose association of many nations than like one. It is as culturally diverse as India, as politically fragmented as Lebanon. A Western diplomat in Kampala says, “There are no horizontal linkages here—no unifying elements of history, ethnicity, or even religion. Nation-building can only start with particular groups and work upwards.

Ironically, because civilization in Uganda was so far advanced prior to the arrival of the British, the colonial legacy has been that much worse. In 1862, when John Hanning Speke became the first white man to locate the source of the Nile (at Ripon Falls, on the northern shore of Lake Victoria), the area now known as Uganda already boasted several substantial Bantu kingdoms, each with its own army, law courts, administrative system, and unambiguous sense of identity. During the years of the Protectorate, beginning in 1894 (Uganda never became a full-fledged colony with a large population of white settlers, as neighboring Kenya did), the British sharpened these divisions within the Bantu community by favoring the Baganda, whose kingdom was the most advanced, for posts in the colonial civil service. However, for the colonial army the British chose the tall, fine-featured Nilotic nomads from the north—Tesos, Langis, and Acholis—because they were considered to be more warlike than the sedentary Bantus. Meanwhile, the activity of Catholic and Protestant missionaries led to religious cleavages, accompanying the tribal ones. It was a shattered polity that emerged at independence, in 1962, one hundred years after Speke’s arrival.

The Baganda soon deserted the coalition of Uganda’s first Prime Minister, Apollo Milton Obote. Obote, a member of the Langi tribe, was forced to rely more and more for support on his own kinsmen and the closely related Tesos and Acholis in the army. When his commander-in-chief, Idi Amin Dada, staged a coup in January of 1971, one of Amin’s first acts was to slaughter Langi, Teso, and Acholi soldiers in their barracks. Though a Nilotic northerner like Obote, Amin was a Moslem from the minor Kakwa tribe, which inhabits a sliver of territory in the extreme northwest. With a much narrower base of support than his predecessor had, Amin turned out to be far more brutal and imperial in his tactics. Most of his soldiers were recruited from the Sudan and Zaire, and the few indigenous Ugandan soldiers were Kakwas and others fromt eh northwest border region. For the Bantu especially, loyal to the memory of the great southern tribal kingdoms, and the most educated of Uganda’s peoples, it was as if their country had been invaded.

Amin’s behavior recalled that of Mutesa, a nineteenth-century tribal monarch, whom the late Australian journalist Alan Moorehead described in his book The White Nile as “a savage and blood-thirsty monster” in the “vales of Paradise.” During his eight-year rule, until his clumsy attempt to annex part of Tanzania resulted in an invasion that deposed him, Amin soaked this lush, sylvan country with the blood of several hundred thousand people. Several hundred thousand more were made homeless. The suffering was widespread, but not completely indiscriminate. All Langis and Acholis were in danger. So was any Bantu with a house, a car, or antoher possession that one of Amin’s thugs might covet. Amin expelled the Asian business community in 1972, and this precipitated a steep economic decline from which Uganda has yet to recover. However, the basic machinery of state, including public services such as water and electricity, remained intact. To the outside world, Amin’s bulk and buffoonery lent a comic-book quality to his atrocities. Yet, as many Ugandans I met pointed out, even worse was to come after Amin, though there would no longer be a colorful madman to rivet attention on the slaughter.

Two Ugandan exiles handpicked by the Tanzanian government, Yusufu Lule and Godfrey Binaisa, followed Amin in quick succession. Neither was able to establish a ruling consensus or maintain a semblance of law and order. A military commission came next, headed by Paulo Muwanga, a loyalist of former Prime Minister Milton Obote’s. Muwanga, by all accounts, rigged the election in December of 1980 that returned Obote to power. “Obote came back with hate in his heart,” Felix Onama, who was Uganda’s Defense Minister from 1966 until Amin’s coup, says. A Western diplomat describes Obote as “an amoral tactician without a strategy.” From the moment of his return from exile Obote played tribal politics to the fullest in order to hang on to power, but he never really got control of the army, which was quickly disintegrating into a rampaging mob. The atrocities accelerated after 1980, and Obote made no visible attempt to stop them. He never publicly condemned what the army was doing. He repeatedly denied that anything wrong was taking place, and he even made statements that had the effect of inciting more hate—by suggesting, for instance, that Uganda’s Catholics were supporting opponents of his regime.

After the 1980 election the Ugandan army reverted to the old British pattern of Tesos, Langis, and Acholis, which Obote had relied on at the end of his first, ill-fated attempt at governing Uganda. Amin’s Kakwa soldiers deserted and, together with their tribal cousisn across the border in the Sudan and Zaire, made forays against Obote’s army in the West Nile region, in the north-west of Uganda. What followed, in mid-1981, was a series of army reprisals against the civilian population of West Nile, including a massacre in June of sixty people—women and children among them—at the Verona Fathers’ Ombachi mission, which had been thought to be protected by its status as a Red Cross outpost. This and other events resulted in an exodus of some 100,000 Kakwa, Madi, and Nubi tribesmen into the Sudan and Zaire.

It soon became apparent that the real challenge to Obote’s rule would come not from West Nile but from the traditional Baganda homeland in the Luwero Triangle. Here Yoweri Museveni, one of the losers of the disputed 1980 election, set up the National Resistance Army (NRA). Museveni was a different kind of Ugandan leader. Unlike Amin and Obote, Museveni was a southern Bantu, of the Banyankole tribe. Whereas Amin was uneducated and Obote never finished college, Museveni had a degree from University College in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and had taught economics. Also, having led a guerrilla struggle against Amin in the early 1970s, Museveni had political and military experience that the former leaders Lule and Binaisa—both highly educated men—had not had. However, what really distinguished Museveni from every other political personality in Uganda’s history was ideology—specifically, the fact that he had one. Museveni proclaimed, “We are fighting for the democratic rights and human dignity of our people. … Our women shall no longer be raped by bandit soldiers; our citizens shall not be robbed or beaten at roadblocks; nobody, not even a tramp on the road, shall be killed unless so condemned by the courts. … Our political line is a broad, patriotic line—it is anti-tribalism, anti-dictatorship, and nationalistic.” Others had spoken up for human rights and against tribalism, but Museveni did so with such persistence and conviction that he created a movement.

“Museveni taught that anyone who tried to lead on the basis of tribe or religion was the enemy of the people,” Gertrude Njuba, Uganda’s new deputy minister of rehabilitation, explains. She was one of many educated townspeople who left Kampala to join the NRA when the bush war started in the Luwero Triangle, in 1981. Peasants began crossing over to the NRA the following year, fleeing from government troops. It seems that nothing was sacred to Obote’s soldiers. Skeletons exist of small children with their hands tied behind their backs. There are documented stories of gang rapes of girls as young as four. Torture, in which molten rubber was dripped onto a victim’s face form a burning tire suspended above, was administered by a paramilitary police unit that had been trained by North Korean advisers. Many Ugandans died from starvation; caught up in the turmoil, peasants frequently could not stay in one place long enough to harvest their usual crops of maize or matoke. Out of a population of 750,000 in the Luwero Triangle, almost two thirds were displaced, of which only 150,000 were formally enrolled in relief camps.

The combination of war and starvation produced throngs of orphans, who were adopted and armed by the NRA. Museveni’s kadogas (“little ones”) were indoctrinated with a moderate ideology based on the largely urban, middle-class values of the NRA’s original recruits. As reports of life behind NRA lines began to filter into Kampala in 1982 and 1983, a strange new picture began to emerge of a disciplined Third World revolutionary force without radicals.

Still, with opinion divided over Obote’s personal role in the atrocities perpetrated by his soldiers, Western governments were hesitant to criticize his regime. That changed in May of 1984, when, in the town of Namugongo, outside Kampala, government troops killed well over a hundred civilians in a four-day period, including an Anglican cleric, Godfrey Bazira. Two months later Elliott Abrams, the assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs, called the situation in Uganda “horrendous” and testified on Capitol Hill that it was getting worse. Though the United States was the only government to criticize Obote publicly, Abrams’s condemnation had a destabilizing effect on the regime. It bolstered the NRA’s morale and gave other countries impetus to curtail their aid programs in Uganda.

In the end it was Obote’s utter reliance on tribalism that undid him. Lacking any program or ideology, he ruled through a tense alliance of Tesos, Acholis, and his own Langis within the army. Festering disputes over promotions, pay hikes, and deployments eventually caused the Acholis to revolt. An Acholi brigadier, Basilio Olaro Okello, marched into Kampala on July 27, 1985, forcing Obote to go into exile in Zambia. Okello had been the commander in the Luwero Triangle during the time of the atrocities against the Baganda; it was perhaps predicatble that his troops would subject Kampala’s half-million inhabitants to mob violence. The ragged nature of the new regime became evident on the very day of the coup: martial music apparently could not be found, so the announcement of the takeover was accompanied by the strains of “We are the World” on state radio. The coup brought Ugandan tribalism to its logical extreme. One tribe, the Acholis, was now attempting to dominate the other thirty-nine. Anarchy prevailed in the capital, as large numbers of non-Acholi troops deserted to the NRA.

Museveni’s capture of Kampala, six months later, on January 25, of last year, was the culmination of a protracted military campaign that, in terms of strategy, came closer to the Maoist blueprint than any previous African guerrilla struggle. Analysts say that the NRA could have taken Kampala earlier, but Museveni kept postponing the invasion until the support for him was so overwhelming that his rule became inevitable. “Patience and a historical sense of timing characterized Museveni’s every move,” a Western diplomat told me. “He read Mao, and was conscious of the Maoist dictum that a guerrilla army ‘swims in the sea of the people.’” This time there was no looting of the capital. Not even when Museveni’s forces—including kadogas as young as eight—mopped up in the Acholi territory in the north were there any reports of army misconduct toward civilians. “They behaved well because they were the first Ugandan soldiers to be politicized,” Benjamin Kanyangyeyo, an aide to Museveni, says.

A tour I made of the northwestern border area turned up no complaints on the part of the Nilotic population about the largely Bantu NRA. “Since the fall of Kampala we have finally had peace in this area and no trouble with the soldiers,” P. Pilli, the commissioner of the district of Moyo, said. Tens of thousands of Ugandan refugees in the Sudan are walking back home. New grass huts and maize fields are springing up on the sites of ruined homesteads. The biggest change is at the roadblocks. No longer do drunken soldiers point rifles through car windows, demanding money, wristwatches, and cigarettes. The searches now are strictly for weapons, of which there are assumed to be tens of thousands at large. “The change in the human-rights situation in Uganda is undoubtedly as dramatic as that which has occurred in the Philippines, and certainly more than that in Haiti, to date,” Roger Winter, the director of the Washington-based United States Committee for Refugees, says.

One of Museveni’s first acts after the NRA captured Kampala last January was to thank U.S. Ambassador Robert G. Houdek for Washington’s having stood by the Ugandan people at a time when no one else would. In a conversation last spring in Washington, Abrams, now the assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, told me, “Uganda demonstrates why you have to be in the human-rights business. Even the most narrow, amoral foreign-policy calculation says supporting human rights is in our interest.” Abrams admitted, however, that because Uganda is of little strategic importance, the United States risked nothing by its criticism.

For the United States, the only thing strategically important about Uganda is the fact that it borders on countries that are strategically important: Zaire, the Sudan, and Kenya. Trouble in Uganda can easily spill over its frontiers. (This is what happened in the early 1980s, when the exodus of tens of thousands of Ugandans northward into the Sudan helped to upset the fragile peace in that country.) There are no significant American economic interests in Uganda and, aside from the modest at the U.S. Embassy and the Agency for International Development, few Americans in the country. “Uganda was an easy one to call,” Abrams said. “Geopolitical factors were largely absent, so the only issue was the internal question.” The fact that America stood alone against Obote has left American diplomats in Kampala with both a sense of pride for having done so and a sense of being special partners with the new government as it struggles to get on its feet.

With this nation experiencing the first real peace it has known in twenty years, Ugandans are, in the words of an NRA junior officer, “starting to rebuild from a point below zero.” Almost the entire Plexiglas façade of Crested Towers, Kampala’s tallest building, was shot out. Roads were torn up. The downtown area, stripped bare by various armies before the advent of Museveni, is a maze of peeling, leprous storefronts with little to buy inside. The soldiers even took the mattresses from hospital wards; many patients must lie on bare metal springs. Makerere University was once the finest institution of higher learning in black Africa, but its library has made almost no acquisitions since the late 1960s and the shelves are totally bare of periodicals. In the countryside wildlife has been severely depleted. A flight I took over Kabalega (Murchison) Falls National Park, where John Huston filmed The African Queen, revealed scores of hippopotamuses and crocodiles in the Nile. But elephants, once plentiful, were not to be seen. Ever since Idi Amin came to power, soldiers had been coming into the park to poach, using jeep-mounted submachine guns. Still, the beauty of this country is such that it catches one by the throat. The air approach to Entebbe, marked by a dense eruption of flame trees, papyrus, umbrella acacias, and mangoes on the shores of Lake Victoria, creates the illusion of flying into a Caribbean island.

But paradise is a long way from being regained. Years of chaos, starting with the expulsion of the Asians, have resulted in a virtual dismantling of Uganda’s economy. According to the World Bank, Uganda’s growth rate fell from 5.9 percent in the 1960s to 0.2 percent afterward. Starting in the 1970s the industrial growth rate dropped by 7.8 percent a year. When a visitor changes a $100 traveler’s check at the airport, he is given a small cardboard box in which to take his Ugandan shillings home—assuming the bank has the money on hand. (Last June the official exchange rate was 5,000 Ugandan shillings to a dollar; a few months later the currency was revalued at the artificially high rate of 1,400 shillings to the dollar, a move that will only stimulate the black market and make it even more costly for international-aid agencies to operate in the country.) Moreover, the civil service is just beginning to function again, and Ugandan authorities have been slow in taking such simple revenue-enhancing steps as sending out monthly telephone bills to subscribers. But they have gotten around to nationalizing certain sectors of the economy, a poorly thought-out step that may mean that Museveni is closing himself off to outside advice.

Still, Uganda’s soil is rich and its people are industrious. Diplomats and foreign businessmen agree that if the government can maintain order and restore basic services, a combination of foreign investment and local enterprise may succeed in reinvigorating the economy. Thanks to $5.4 million in U.S. assistance that was never used during the Obote era, and $7.9 million in new appropriations, the Agency for International Development’s budget for Uganda is now at an all-time high. In addition, Western donors have granted roughly half of the $160 million in emergency aid that Museveni requested soon after coming to power. Western officials remain reluctant, however, to make new commitments to Uganda until they see stronger signs of economic stability. Some fear that Museveni may follow the pattern of those Third World leaders who have quickly become disenchanted with the level of Western assistance and have turned to the Eastern bloc.

At the moment, though, Museveni’s main concern is to transform a guerrilla organization into a stable ruling force. In attempting to govern Uganda, Museveni has several advantages. He is a Bantu southerner, like most of his countrymen. But because he is not a member of the Baganda tribe—the most prominent Bantu group—the Nilotic tribes of the north may be more willing to trust him. Museveni’s biggest advantage, however, is not his ethnicity but his ideology. Uganda never had to fight for its independence. Its tribes have never waged any common struggle that might have served to unify them. It now appears that Uganda’s struggle for independence has come a generation after the fact—with the enemy being not the British but the Ugandan heirs to their divide-and-rule legacy. In a sense, Museveni is Uganda’s first nationalist.

At the same time, Museveni faces some stiff challenges. Though the soldiers are receiving allowances—they did not in the days of Amin and Obote, and had to steal for their daily bread—the amount they are getting is so low that the temptation to plunder grows steadily. Another problem is the integration of disaffected Nilotic tribesmen, especially the Acholis, into the NRA. In recent months Acholi ex-soldiers have mounted attacks near the northern cities of Gulu and Kitgum.

The arrest of seventeen persons in Kampala last fall, including three government ministers and Paulo Muwanga, who engineered Obote’s return to power, clearly indicates that Museveni is also finding it hard to be as lenient with the supporters of Uganda’s previous regimes as he had hoped to be. (When first assuming power Museveni had been criticized by many of his supporters for not immediately arresting Muwanga, called by one Western observer “the Darth Vader of Ugandan politics.”) All seventeen are charged with treason. The fact that some of those arrested are connected with political parties other than Museveni’s may indicate that national reconciliation could be limited to the various ethnic groups within the NRA, and not extended to those outside. Continued trouble from ex-Obote soldiers in the north is forcing Museveni to be tougher. The problem is not so much Uganda as the Sudan: having defeated Obote’s and Okello’s soldiers is not enough. The total breakdown of order in the southern Sudan—Khartoum lacking power in the regime—means that the defeated soldiers have a sanctuary from which to launch attacks against northern Uganda.

Museveni certainly has his hands full. On account of the desperate economic situation and the continued fighting in the north, The World in 1987, a publication of the Economist Intelligence Unit, warns that a “palace coup” cannot be ruled out in 1987, although a descent into renewed civil war is not foreseen. However, Museveni may be Uganda’s last chance. In Gulu an Italian doctor, who has lived in Uganda for twenty years and has survived all the coups and subsequent lootings, told a colleague of mine recently, “If Museveni cannot make it this time, I am going to leave, because there is no hope.”