NOTES ON CONCEALMENT OF GENOCIDE IN UGANDA

by A. Milton Obote
April 1990
Lusaka, Zambia.

INTRODUCTION

1. In 1971, there was a military coup in Uganda. The International Media called Idi Amin, the leader of the coup, "a gentle and harmless giant" for about two years, when, in fact, Amin's reign of murder and terror began on the first day of the coup. The international community and the Human Rights Organization took the cue from the media and, with the exception of Tanzania and Zambia, also saw nothing wrong with Amin's murder and terror. Amin's crimes were therefore effectively concealed for two years. Today, Uganda, under Museveni's militarist regime, has had a state of genocide since 1986. However, Africa and the rest of the world speak a language which Ugandans, who have been and are in the throes of massacres, find it difficult to accept as human language; the language which cleanses Museveni and his militarist regime. The objectives of these Notes are to place on record the evidence of the concealment of the genocide by the international community, media and Human Rights Organizations.
2. On 28th February, 1990, an academic from Oxford University and I exchanged views on some agonizing and distressing events which have been and are still the lot of Ugandans as well as on the attitude of the international community, media and the Human Rights Organizations. During our conversation, I learned of the International Symposium on Uganda due in May 1990, at Queen's University, Ontario, Canada, and that the sponsors were World University Services of Canada -Queens Local Committee. Ten days later, a Ugandan living in Zambia brought to me the Prospectus of the Symposium.
3. It is to be hoped that the organizers of the Symposium will succeed in their aim: "The Search for Peace in Uganda" and that they would be able to confirm or reject, to quote the Prospectus, "the myth that with the departure of Idi Amin and Milton Obote everything in Uganda is now fine". The organizers have an uphill task: Africa and the entire International Community, since January 1986, have been saturated with propaganda, biased reportage, and down-right disregard of the facts of the situation in Museveni's militarist Uganda. The International Media and Human Rights Organizations such as Amnesty International, Minority Rights Group and International Alert have painted and continue to paint Museveni and his regime in glowing colors that to them there is no myth. According to them, Uganda, under Museveni, is rapidly recovering from the agonies of the past and there is much improvement.
4. These Notes present the opposite view that Uganda, under Museveni's regime, is a Police State where:
5. Genocide has been and still reigns even as I write;
6. Entire villages have been and continue to be destroyed by soldiers of the regime as legitimate and proper action against "rebels";
7. Foodstuffs in the fields and in granaries in the so-called "war-zones" have been and continue to be uprooted, burnt or destroyed allegedly to deny succor to "rebels";
8. Water wells and boreholes in the "war-zones" have been either poisoned or dismantled;
9. The entire livestock in several Districts have been looted by the National Resistance Army (NRA), the soldiery of the Museveni regime;
10. In the Districts of Gulu, Kitgum, Lira, Soroti, Kumi, a large part of Tororo and now Kasese - (population 2.8 million 1979 census) - where the NRA soldiers have wrought their greatest havoc, those not massacred, arrested or detained are forced by the soldiers to go to Concentration Camps where many die on various accounts of torture, and from lack of food, water, medication and protection against inclement weather;
11. Women in the Concentration camps and in the "war-zones" are at the mercy of the NRA soldiery to abuse as they fancy;
12. Soldiers known to be infected with contagious diseases including the deadly HIV are posted to these Concentration camps where they are free to mix and abuse the female inmates. The Concentration camps are in fact cauldrons of genocide where the vulnerable groups (the children, pregnant women and the elderly) are taken to die. The list in not exhaustive.
5. I am acutely aware of the venomous attacks which befalls anyone who dares to point out and provide evidence that under Museveni, Uganda is a Police State. In 1987, for instance, I wrote a Paper entitled "Massacres and the Reign of Terror in Uganda". I pointed out that Museveni and his army were engaged in "orgies of carnage and destruction which traverse the whole country, from East to West and from North to South". The evidence I presented was not even given a cursory examination by those who speak loudest about human rights. On the contrary, it was twisted and turned round to heap attacks on me. The wars in the North and East were totally disregarded and I was called to account for the Luwero war as if the past and not the present must always be the issue. In other words, the present day massacres must not be exposed or discussed at all.
6. My 1987 Paper is now a "prohibited document" in Uganda and Kagenda Atwoki, the Administrative Secretary of the Uganda Peoples Congress (UPC) is now on trial for being in possession of it. Atwoki had been reported by the BBC as having said that Museveni's well known wars were wars by the regime against the people. He was arrested and detained but was later charged with "being in possession of a prohibited document" despite the fact that the Paper had never, to date, been gazetted as "prohibited" in accordance with the Uganda law of sedition. Atwoki remains charged illegally but the real reason for his suffering is because he dared to expose Museveni's massacres.
7. The detention of Serra Muwanga, an erstwhile friend of Museveni's and Chairman of the Uganda Human Rights Activists, is another case in point. Muwanga had given an interview to African Concord which the Magazine published. Museveni was bitterly irritated that Muwanga had expressed concern on gross violations of human rights by the National Resistance Army (NRA) - Museveni's personal army which now rules the country. Muwanga was detained and placed under hardship regimen. On release, and in poor health, Muwanga was warned by a senior officer in the NRA that the NRA does not arrest a person twice; the meaning of the warning was that the sentence for a second arrest is death. He took the advice and left the country. Museveni has justified Serra Muwanga's arrest, detention and flight by saying that Muwanga had "criticized the army" - his number one instrument and rule of genocide.
8. Museveni has promulgated a law which prohibits not only the pointing out of the shortcomings of or crimes committed by the NRA but also the publication, in whatever form, of the identity or existence of any NRA regiment in any particular area. To dare to point out any shortcoming or crimes of the NRA is to "criticize the NRA" and that in itself is a serious and greater crime than, say, if the NRA had buried people alive or herded them in houses and then burnt the houses which genocidal practices are quite common in the so-called war zones. The walls of protection which the international media and Human Rights Organizations have erected to protect the regime are such that Museveni, like the mythical James Bond, is thereby licensed to kill and to do whatever he likes with the lives of the citizens of Uganda.
9. Chapter three of the Constitution of Uganda, has provisions for the "Protection of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms of the Individual". Although he has not suspended this Chapter, Museveni rules as if the provisions of the chapter do not exist and his regime and army have no obligations whatsoever to observe or attempt to observe those provisions. War of aggression is Museveni's chosen method of gross violations of human rights. Under cover of war which he himself instigated, the NRA has massacred Ugandans on a megascale. Under cover of wars, political activities have been banned and comments on the deeds of the NRA are not permitted. In an interview with the BBC in July 1989, Museveni said: - ..."unfortunately for the BBC the war has ended, so you will not have much to report - it is ended". (Focus on Africa - BBC Magazine 1989). Yet in the month of February, this year, his own Propaganda Newspaper, New Vision, edited by his friend and accomplice William Pike, was reporting the forceful uprooting of 80,000 people from their homes in Kasese District in the far West to concentration camps in order to leave the villages free for artillery bombardment and strafing and thereby destroy homes and foodstuff allegedly to deny succor to rebels.
10. In March 1990, Museveni moved physically to Kumi District in the East and remained there for 18 days where he took command of his army against "rebels". The war, which according to him, had ended was being prosecuted by him, some nine months later, with the greatest brutalities. The entire population of Kumi District or whatever number remained alive from previous massacres, have now been forced into concentration camps and Museveni is personally commanding his army in the destruction of homes and property. Considering that the population of Kumi (1979 census) was, in round figures 350,000, the number of the entire population of the District which has not (1990) been herded in camps is extremely ominous. The number being given is 150,000; that certainly can not be the entire population of Kumi. The missing 200,000 and more appear to be of no interest or concern to those who have created walls to protect Museveni and conceal his genocide. Kumi is the District where on several previous occasions, the NRA rounded young men and had them burnt, gassed or starved to death in Railway wagons. The latest such deed was in July 1989. Museveni and his army have been engaged in the orgies of killings in this District like others in the North and East since 1986. Kumi like its Northern neighbors of Soroti and Lira was a cattle area. This time as the people went to concentration camps, there was no cattle at all in the villages; the animals in Kumi are to be found in the NRA barracks; which is also the case in the Districts of Soroti, Lira, Apac, Kitgum and Gulu.
11. The fiendishly cruel massacres in the so-called war zones continue unquestionably, despite propaganda to the contrary, to be the main characteristic of Museveni's rule. The massacres and the expanding wars are not freely discussed in any forum in Uganda. During the second UPC administration, the leaders and members of the Democratic Party (DP), for instance, had the freedom and by various means followed the course of the Luwero war, assessed the situation and expressed publicly and in Parliament their findings and views. In the case of Museveni's wars in the North and East and now in Kasese in the West, the DP leaders have been totally mute. Their apparent and ostensible excuse is that political activities are banned but the Executive Council of the DP, despite the ban, continues to meet from time to time and to issue statements. In every such statement, nothing was said about the massacres and each statement has always unfailingly included praises of Museveni's rule (see Appendix Two). The only and ever constant complaint which the DP leaders lodge is that Museveni has not permitted their Party to govern the country. Leading members of the DP including the President of the Party are in Museveni's Cabinet. A section of the Executive Council of the DP has been campaigning for the DP members to resign from Museveni's regime; but the campaign is not against Museveni's obsession with wars, massacres and destruction. The campaign is about Museveni's unwillingness to surrender power to the DP.
12. The ban on political activities applies only to the UPC. The definitive political target of Museveni's National Resistance Movement (NRM) and its armed core the NRA is the "Removal of UPC/Obote's dictatorship by force of arms" (see Appendix One). The document was issued in 1987. Having observed the DP leaders at close quarters throughout 1986 as members of his Cabinet, I have confirmed that the NRM/NRA and the DP had one common target: the destruction of the UPC, not by the ballot but by force. Having found that the DP was, so to speak, a toothless bulldog, Museveni ordered the production of Appendix One in 1987. The destruction of the DP is in Paragraph 3.3 of that document but even that fact has not diminished the attachment of the DP leaders to Museveni's regime.
13. The DP leaders have often made it known that before the DP members accepted to serve in Museveni's militarist regime, they held discussions with Museveni in early 1986 and agreed to the DP and the NRM/NRA being the kernel in a "broad-based government". The UPC leaders never had any such discussion with Museveni. The few members of the UPC who are in Museveni's regime are voluntarists to whom Party principles are of less importance than their being left alone to seize any opportunity to better their lot. The UPC has left them alone and this is the first public criticism of their joining the NRM/NRA and the DP in the heinous conspiracy to project Uganda as peaceful when thousands and thousands of their fellow citizens have been and continue to be slaughtered by the NRA.
14. It is most inconceivable that those who claim or propagate that Museveni's Uganda is peaceful or that there are no gross violations of human rights have not heard of Museveni's wars in the North and East and now in the West in Kasese District. What of the arrests of hundreds of Ugandans now in jails accused of treason? Some 150 people from Buganda alone and some desperate groups are presently in jails awaiting trial on that charge. There have been killings and arrests by the NRA in Busoga (Jinja, Iganga, Kamuli Districts) since June 1989; 43 people from Busoga have recently been charged with treason and I have the names of 187 people killed by the NRA in the still ongoing massacres. There are unknown number of people in Mbale jail on the same charge - treason. Museveni's Uganda must be a very special country to "enjoy peace" in the face of wars in three out of four Regions (Provinces) and where desperate groups in each of the four Regions have sought year after year to remove the regime by force of arms. In the latter part of 1989, the NRA units in Bunyoro - Masindi District - went on a rampage, terrorized villages and arrested leading persons therefrom only to return their bodies to the relatives to bury. Such is the nature of "peace" which is said to exist in Uganda.
15. In Uganda of today, it is a treasonable act to exercise the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of conscience, of expression and of assembly and association. What Museveni fully guarantees and rewards handsomely is servile flattery and praises (sychophancy), of his greatness, alleged intrepidity, invincibility and as the only person alive who has all the answers to all the problems (some of them created by him) which afflict Uganda. Thus his wars for all intents and purposes are wars to banish freedom of thought in every brain and home throughout Uganda; and wherever and to whoever submission is humiliation beneath the dignity of a citizen, scorched-earth retribution and massacres are brought into play. That is the meaning of Paragraph 1.2 of Appendix One - "The establishment, by force if necessary of a one Party "popular democracy" in Uganda under the NRM". I hope to show in another part of these Notes the extent and nature of force which Museveni used in Luwero for the establishment of his idea of grassroot "popular democracy". Better brains, than mine, trained in the science and practices of democracy, can not fail to find it odd that a person who claims to be extremely popular, as Museveni does, should resort to force, as Museveni is doing and has been doing throughout his adult life, as the most appropriate means to establish democracy. No amount of propaganda in such a situation can bury the fact that the claim must be a blatant lie and that Museveni's objective is not democracy but some form of governance where the citizen must be suppressed and forced to obey the ruler and never to question neither the policy nor the deeds of the ruler. The classic situation of a Police State.
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16. Museveni's determination to consolidate his Police State is clearly observable in he origins and the prosecution of his wars against citizens of Uganda. The current wars in Acholi, Lango and Teso, and North Bukedi are all extensions of Museveni's war in Luwero. The objective origin and the extent and nature of the force used in each case are the same; only rationalization for the purposes of tactics, as publicly stated have differed. Luwero was rationalized as a war launched because the 1980 elections were allegedly rigged in favor of the UPC. Museveni chose war and not the constitutional course to redress the matter through the law Courts. The war in Acholi (Gulu and Kitgum Districts) was rationalized, by Museveni, as quelling rebellion by the remnants of the Okello and Okello forces. However, when we come to the wars in Lango and Teso, North Bukedi, Kasese and the NRA assaults and sorties in Bukedi, Bugisu, Busoga and Karamoja, Bunyoro and elsewhere, attempts for rationalization have defied his dissembling mind. Instead he has variously described them and interchangeably as wars, assaults and sorties against rebels, cattle rustlers, gangsters, robbers and bandits, without stating which is what. It is my task to unravel Museveni's deliberate ambiguity.
17. The fact is that Luwero afforded Museveni a classic ideal situation and ground for putting into effect his design to divide and rule Uganda. In the prosecution of the war in Luwero, he presented the Uganda National Liberation Army (UNLA) founded at the Moshi Conference by the Uganda National Liberation Front (UNLF) as "Obote's Northern Soldiers". As will be seen later herein, Museveni terrorized and brutalized the people of Luwero and in order to win the sympathies of the Baganda, he made such terror and violence to appear as having been wholly the misdeeds of the UNLA. Failure by the international community to grasp Museveni's atrocities in Luwero at the time is at the root of today's concealment of the genocide. Museveni tried very hard to expand his Luwero terror to other parts of Buganda but was contained within the Luwero Triangle. If he had succeeded to expand, it is doubtful that a significant number of Baganda would be found today who would have any sympathy with the North and East and other parts of Uganda, in their current ordeal.
18. Having got public opinion in Buganda to his side and against the Northerners, Museveni then set out to plan for all out war with the Northerners but he had first to win the Luwero war. The all out war against the Northerners was to be launched irrespective of any provocation on the part of the Northerners. The important considerations were to conceal NRA atrocities in Luwero, retain the goodwill of the Baganda and be seen (in Buganda) as punishing the "criminal Northerners". The irony is that it was the UNLA officers (Tito Okello, Bazilio Okello, etc.), who opened the floodgate of the ongoing bloodshed in the North and East. Why and how the Okellos did so, is discussed in Part two of these Notes. Meanwhile, it suffices to say that when Museveni "stormed" into Kampala with the fire-power of his artillery, tanks, katysha howitzers and Armored Personnel Carriers (APCs), the Okello Junta, soldiery and two allies simply fled. The UNLA had no artillery in the Western Region which the Junta had, way back in August 1985, allocated to Museveni to govern and there were no battle worthy tanks or APCs anywhere in Uganda. How and where Museveni was able to get the artillery pieces, tanks, katysha howitzers and APCs are officially still secret.
19. The Junta's rule of six months was never popular anywhere in Uganda; not least in the North including Acholi from whence the Okellos came. The fall of the Okello Junta was seen as poetic justice throughout Uganda except in Buganda where the DP organized a big rally to welcome the start of Museveni's rule and for overthrowing a Junta in whose Cabinet the three top DP leaders - President, Secretary General and Treasurer - were members. No such rallies were organized either by the DP or the NRM in the West, East or North. The only consolation for the Okellos was another poetic justice when Museveni arrested and detained in 1987 the DP treasurer, Evaristo Nyanzi, who was the leader of the welcome rally for Museveni. Nyanzi was later charged with and prosecuted for treason but was acquitted by the High Court. He is now one of those in the divided National Executive Council of the DP, campaigning for resignation of all DP members from Museveni's regime.
20. After he had overthrown the Okello Junta, Museveni wasted no time in ordering an onslaught onto members of the UPC throughout Uganda especially in the Eastern Region. As an excuse to kill, arrest and beat, terrorize and brutalize UPC members in Busoga, Bukedi, Bugisu, and Sebei, Museveni's functionaries invented what they called "Force Obote Back Again" (FOBA) Movement. No such movement ever existed but thousands of UPC members were killed, arrested and detained, terrorized and brutalized for allegedly belonging to it. It is a sad commentary that the DP leaders and members not only gleefully welcomed but also assisted the NRA in the persecution of UPC members. Today, the ordeal covers and affects all in the East and North irrespective of Party affiliations; and as their members groan and die together, of course with UPC members, Ssemogerere and other leaders of the DP see nothing untoward with Museveni's regime. Being a Minister in Museveni's regime would appear to them to be of greater importance than the groans and deaths of thousands upon thousands of fellow citizens.
21. The ongoing genocide in Acholi, Lango, Teso and Bukedi began in total secrecy, in March 1986. No public pronouncements were made of any resistance to the NRA rule by the remnants of the Okello forces; of any rebellion or insurgency or gangsterism or banditry. Young men and former soldiers were simply picked up by the NRA and could not be found by relatives in Police Stations or military barracks. The NRA denied any knowledge of the young men and former soldiers having been picked up, even when they have been picked in the presence of witnesses, by the NRA. Such persons have not been seen to date. This exercise or operation went on from March to the beginning of August 1986, when Museveni, for the first time since seizing power in January, issued an urgent order which required all former soldiers, throughout Uganda, to surrender firearms in their possessions within ten days to NRA units.
22. While we may accept that the order was appropriate, it would be remiss not to see and appreciate the effect which that order had in the minds of former soldiers in Acholi whose comrades had been picked up and had disappeared and therefore the likely consequence of their surrendering their only means of defense in the then ongoing operation. It is pertinent also to examine and appreciate what those former soldiers from Acholi knew and felt about the cause or causes for non-implementation of the Nairobi Peace Accord, the fall of the Okello Junta and where else in Uganda former soldiers had appreciable stock of arms.
23. It was common knowledge that Museveni chose not to be a party in the formation of an UNLA/NRA regime to which he had agreed as per the Nairobi Accord. Instead he increased the velocity and the vulgarity of his attacks on the Junta and the UNLA and left no doubt whatsoever that his mission was not only to overthrow the Junta but also thereafter to "punish" the soldiery of the Junta. The said soldiery of the Junta had amongst them officers who had good education and above average understanding of the political and military situation then. They can not be expected not to have known that the Junta, in order to woe Museveni and gain his support, had surrendered intact to Museveni all the military and Police armories in the Western Region way back in August 1985. They also knew that the military and Police armories in the Eastern Region had not been disturbed, leave alone ransacked, when Okello and Okello stated their rebellion in July 1985. They also knew that in January 1986, it was they alone who carried arms except for the heavy one from military and Police armories in the East to their homeland. They further knew that they left in armories in Kampala not only considerable stocks of arms but also thousands of arms in the hands of their former allies in the Junta namely, Uganda Freedom Movement (UFM), and Federal Democratic Movement of Uganda (FEDEMU), had joined the NRA and were also engaged in the kidnappings in Acholiland. Lastly, they knew that their former allies, Uganda National Rescue Front (UNRF) and Former Uganda Army (FUNA) had also joined the NRA.
24. The remnants of the Okello soldiery must have concluded that the ultimatum to surrender arms within ten days was a prelude for their wholesale arrest and murder. The danger, real or imaginary, led them to follow many of their numbers - who were already in Sudan but quite close to the border. In Sudan, Bazilio Okello, very much dazed in his stupidity of July 1985, took the decision to invade Uganda. His plan, as I came to learn later, was to destroy quickly the NRA and allies in Acholi and then march to Kampala. What happened deserves no comment except to point out that Bazilio Okello at that time was extremely unpopular and was detested throughout Acholiland and that whether Okello knew it or not, he gave Museveni the excuse he (Museveni) wanted in order to launch and put into effect a heinous scheme he had long harbored to exterminate the Northerners who, he is fond of referring to, as "backward and primitive people".
25. The invasion force did not take any NRA position nor even border posts. The force withdrew into Sudan within twenty four hours when the invasion petered out. To Museveni, however, the invasion had not petered out but a serious and an all out war had broken. This war, total war, was to be launched in Acholi and later to spread into Lango, Teso and North Bukedi with sorties throughout Bukedi, Bugisu and Busoga. This is a zone wherein the people detested Bazilio Okello and his force intensively - and wherein the UPC had massive support. In the first week, the NRA and allies (in fact mixed units) launched attacks on villages and homesteads throughout Kitgum District and in North Gulu District (Acholiland). It was then that Museveni used words which even Idi Amin or Jean Bedel Bokassa never used: "We massacred those backward chaps"! That phrase contains all the essential elements of Museveni's policy for the prosecution of his wars against the people. Massacres in Kitgum District and part of Gulu District forced many civilians to flee to Sudan whence they returned, armed, to defend lives and property against the outrages of a rapacious and gangster army - the NRA. REBEL, the ominous word around which Museveni justifies his massacres and earns the praises of the International Community, Media and Human Rights Organizations began in Museveni's regime in the manner described. Okello's invasion which was confined to and collapsed at a few border areas could not and can not be said to have been rebellion. In Museveni's eyes, it was a rebellion despite the fact that the people (Acholi) in the Districts invaded were overwhelmingly antagonistic to Bazilio Okello and his invasion force. To Museveni, however, the common factors which constituted rebellion were Okello being Acholi, invasion force was composed of Acholi or overwhelmingly Acholi and the territory attacked was Acholiland. To him, therefore, the Acholi, as a people, were in rebellion to his rule.
26. Museveni's common factors are, to put it mildly but succinctly, red-herrings. Bazilio Okello did not invade the other war zones - Lango, Teso and North Bukedi; neither did the people of those zones sympathized with Okello or the objective of the Okello invasion. There were also no organized groups or nuclei of rebels in those zones. The same goes for Museveni's other zones of aggression; Busoga, the rest of Bukedi, Bugisu and Bunyoro. A common factor is always important in any equation. Okello and his invasion force do not constitute a common factor in the wars which have devastated zones outside Acholiland; indeed not even Acholiland or zones of the NRA sorties. In the Luwero war, Museveni named his bogeyman, the sole agent of massacres, as "Northern soldiers", specifically Acholi and Langi soldiers or as "Obote's soldiers". There have been no "Northern soldiers" or "Obote's soldiers", in Museveni's wars in the East and North and now in Kasese District in the West. Such soldiers, therefore, whether they existed or not or did what was heaped wholesale onto them can not be said to have been the common factor in the Luwero war and also in the wars in the North and East. Whatever force fought the NRA in Luwero has not appeared in the ongoing wars but the NRA does. The Luwero war, therefore, becomes the key in finding a common factor, and for the identification of which force, in the Luwero war, had the obsession as in the on-going wars. That common factor can only be Museveni and his NRA. They were in the Luwero war and have been in the wars in the North and East. They started the Luwero war and also the wars in the North and East. The nature of the devastation is the same; and the tactics of showering blame onto opponents of the NRA are also the same in all the wars from Luwero to date.
27. The perceived wisdom is that Museveni and his NRA were, during the Luwero war, disciplined democrats who had taken up arms against a government they believed was illegitimate. The devastation and atrocities by the NRA in Luwero and later in the North and East show that the perceived wisdom missed the essence of Museveni's wars by a very wide margin: The subjugation of Uganda through extreme terror and violence in order to create a situation of total docility by the people to his will and whims. Through a combination of terror, violence and dissemblance, Museveni created such a situation in Luwero (about which more later) - but Luwero was a very narrow base - under 600,000 people (1979 census). Since January 1986, Museveni has been working to expand that base; thus the saturated dissembling propaganda in the "South" and outside Uganda about peace having returned to Uganda while at the same time wars rage in the North and East to expand areas of docility. There can be no doubt that after the subjugation of the North and East, the war of subjugation will be launched in the "South". There are already signs to that effect. The time for the "South" to come out of the topor - induced by Museveni - is now.
28. Meanwhile, opinion leaders in the so-called "South" sleep and remain totally mute on the matters of massacres in the North and East as if those Regions are not part and parcel of Uganda - one single body of sovereign people. Opinion leaders from the North and East are also silent presumably for fear of being branded "rebels"with dire consequences but there is no doubt that amongst them as well as in the "South" there are avaricious opportunists to whom even crumbs from Museveni's high table are more than enough to seal their mouths. In the frightening and terrifying situation where death is stalking every village and homestead; where foodstocks are destroyed and sources of drinking water are poisoned by marauding gangs of the NRA; where women are raped in the presence of their husbands, sons, daughters; and daughters raped in the presence of parents and brothers; where people are uprooted from their homes and taken to captivity and called "Lodgers" for simply being residents of the so-called war zones; where entire residents of villages are forced into Concentration camps, etc; and where opinion leaders are silent, what choice remains for the masses! The masses chose the only honorable course: To defend themselves against the repression of the Police State.
29. The people of Uganda started their struggle in 1986 against a rapacious, oppressive and massacring regime led by a demented man. They did so in their various localities. Museveni's pet and mocking song is that the uprisings had no cause! Defense against or opposition to this massacres are, to him, not valid. He has had the advantage because the uprisings were not organized and started simultaneously without prior preparations and were not coordinated. Be that as it may, the point I emphasize here is that the people of Uganda in the North and East - millions of them - rose against being massacred but the rest of the world has shown an excessive zeal to side with the megaslaughterer, and to underplay the scale of his atrocities! Late last year, the Romanians, starting in Timisoara also rose against their oppressive regime. The West led the world in encouraging Romanians to overthrow the regime and when that happened the world went wild with hilarity, precisely at the time when repression and massacres in Uganda had reached a megascale. In Romania, the head demon was killed while in Uganda he lives to kill and kill and kill. It is a most ghastly lesson the world is forcing Ugandans to learn. The task to regain freedom is for Ugandans. I am convinced that however long it may take and whatever protection the world affords to the oppressors, freedom shall be won and that the Pearl of Africa shall Rise and Shine Again.

PART ONE

PROFILE OF A DEMENTED MIND

The Sayings of Yoweri Museveni

30. The Sayings included herein are not exhaustive and were not uttered once but several times and continue to be Museveni's stock-in-trade. It defeats the imagination that whoever is not incorrigibly biased or simply indifferent, be they Ugandans or not, would disregard the meanings of these Sayings. The Sayings are given without comment. It makes no sense for Museveni's well-wishers abroad to project him as an educated man, which he is, who knows what he says and wants to do and at the same time to hold that when Museveni speaks of "massacres" he does not mean it or means well. The groans of Museveni's target victims directed to the world at large is this: - It may be in your interest that we be massacred; but how can it be in our interest that we be massacred.
1. "The rebels attacked us (NRA soldiers) at a place called Corner Kilak 20 miles South of Kitgum (Town). They came in while singing and shouting; our people (NRA) massacred those chaps. They approached our troops frontally. This gave us a very good chance because they exposed themselves; so on Sunday (January 24, 1987) we surrounded them and massacred them. We massacred them very badly. (Standard - Nairobi - January 21, 1987)
2. "Our role is to wipe out insecurity ... if we have to eliminate those chaps by force, we will do it". (Daily Nation - Nairobi - January 26, 1987)
3. "I don't know about torture. I have educated myself on many things but on torture I have not known the boundary between what is torture and what isn't torture. I know the NRA tie these people (rebels, etc.) when they catch them. They tie their hands backwards. I am now being told that is torture. It is the traditional method. (Daily Nation - Nairobi - January 26, 1987)
4. "I don't think we are destroying people's crops. We are destroying rebel crops and stores." (Daily Nation - Nairobi - January 26, 1987)
5. "The soldiers feel that the Police are not serious with the criminal elements and that they are corrupt. The army had to come in and insist that criminals must be punished. It happens in all countries, there is a time when the army assumes the duty of internal security". (Daily Nation - Nairobi - January 26, 1987)
6. "What is the Geneva Convention on wars! I have never read it". (TV Panorama Programme of the BBC, March 1986)
7. "In the areas which have been disturbed people are living cordially with the Security Forces. In areas like Gulu people are living peacefully. There is scrupulous respect of human rights". (Daily Nation - Nairobi - January 26, 1987)
8. "You see when you give them (civil population in the North and East) a good beating then those who are using them will no longer use them. Since the month of January (1987), we have given them much beating especially in Lira and Kitgum Districts. And in fact the week I left (for Yugoslavia) we had given them a good blow in Gulu District. So it is going to settle down". (New Vision - Official Daily of Museveni regime - January 19, 1987)
9. QUESTION: People have criticized what they called, "the scorched-earth policy", that is, civilians were moved from areas of rebel sanctuaries to population centers, and then the burning of houses and granaries, etc. to deny rebels food. Is this policy still in force? ANSWER: That is a misnomer. There was no policy of scorched earth. There was a policy of destroying foodstuff being used by the rebels. The population was warned in advance through the dropping of leaflets by helicopters written in vernacular. I repeat this: There was no policy of scorched earth. There has never been such a policy. What there was was a policy to destroy food stocks that were assisting the rebels to continue disturbing the peace of the ordinary people. This was done after due notice was given to the population through dropping of leaflets in the disturbed areas of Gulu District well in advance, by the helicopters. These leaflets in vernacular were telling people to evacuate the fire areas where the security forces would clash with rebels, to safe zones. It was only food found in such areas that were destroyed. But not food belonging to wananchi. Now, whether that policy is still continuing or not is no longer a major issue because we have already - even in some of the Counties in Gulu District, the rebels have been cleared and the population have gone back like Omoro County and Atiak, areas like Pabo and Amuro. We hear the population have already gone back, the operation was over. It is only in Nwoya County, that is Anaka, Olwio and the Park - that where they are still operational. And in those areas, there isn't any food anymore. So there is nothing more to destroy. That is one of the reasons why the rebels are desperate. And that is why they are waylaying people on the road because they have nothing to eat and that is why they are surrendering in big numbers now because they have nothing to eat really.
10. QUESTION: Allegations of violation of human rights by the NRA appears to have made the civilians quite emotional. The last time we met, you said the human rights record of the NRA must be assessed in light of whether the mechanism for detecting these violations are in place, effective punishment of culprits and their code of conduct. The civilians there are not satisfied that these are being very effective in the sense that the culprits who could have been involved in violations in the war areas have not really been brought to book. Cases of indiscipline have been shown to have been from the more peaceful areas. There have been cases of murder, rape, followed up. There have been executions but not really in operational areas. As far as cases of atrocities are concerned, it has not been easy to identify the culprits in the war areas. Whereas it has been much easier probably for the undisciplined ones in other areas to be identified. There is dissatisfaction and discontentment that these people have not been brought to book and the mechanism of identification has not been very effective. ANSWER: Well...but my sister, that is the whole point. That is why we are saying and that is why we insisted that civilians should be evacuated from combat zones so that they are not mixed up in the fire between the rebels and the government forces. It is because we were aware of the difficulty of identifying who has done what in combat zone that we were insisting on this. It is, of course, not easy. When people are fighting, it is not easy to know who has done what. Therefore, civilians were moved from these zones. Maybe crime committed in places that were peaceful were easier to unearth than those committed in combat zones. It is precisely because of that we insisted on this separation of law abiding citizens from those who happened to be bandits. Therefore, people who were opposing us on this issue were actually murderers of civilians. Because they wanted civilians to be killed./li>

The Real Museveni

32. Museveni has a thirst for power in its most naked form. He believes intensely in violence as a means of governance and for holding power. He is an accomplished liar and a total stranger to truth. His method of conducting public affairs or his political Party, the UPM, and now his NRM/NRA is a combination of violence and lies. Museveni is an extremely poor, indeed inept, civil administrator. He seeks nor accepts advice from anybody on any matter and detests the conduct of public affairs through discussion, debate or competing ideas; his own ideas must be accepted as the only valid ones and all others are "bankrupt ideas". Yet he is not averse to steal ideas from others and claim to have been the originator, but often without clear understanding of how to implement the stolen ideas. Museveni prefers militarist (violent) approach in the resolution of problems and issues but would also, at times, put forward a dissembling scheme,while preparing a military solution. Both on personal and public Affairs, there is no ethic, moral values or law which he would not either discard, flout or bend in order for him to achieve his designs. Museveni's propensity for bloodshed did not start in Luwero. The UPC government contained this mass killer within the Luwero Triangle. The Okello and Okello Junta facilitated the killer and now he brutalizes the whole country. Ugandans, who, for whatever reason, have not seen Museveni as a killer or think that they would be safe because they are close to him are in for a rude shock. Museveni kills not only those he sees or regards as his enemies but also those closest to him. I cite some examples:
33. In Tanzania in the early 1970s, a number of Ugandans who were very close to Museveni disappeared and have not been seen again. They included Mwesiga Black, Raiti Omongin, Miss V. Rwaheru (Museveni's housekeeper) and Martin Mwesiga (brother of Frank Mwine of the Uganda Commercial Bank). In the case of Martin Mwesiga, his sister Margaret, who was living and working in Arusha, personally told me in 1974 in Dar es Salaam the murky story about the disappearance of her brother. The gist of Margaret's story is that on several occasions in 1973, she asked Museveni about the whereabouts of her brother, who until he disappeared, was always with Museveni. Margaret told me and others that on each such occasion, Museveni gave her a different version of where Mwesiga was, ranging from Mwesiga being alive and well but on a mission abroad to Mwesiga undergoing a secret course. Late in 1973, Margaret said, Museveni told her that her brother had died in a battle in Mbale in February 1973. One of those present when Margaret gave this account was Enoka Muntuyera, the father of the present Commander of the NRA, Major General Muntu. Enoka and another Ugandan told Margaret that they had stayed in the same hotel as Museveni and Mwesiga in Tabora, Tanzania, in April 1973. Margaret had travelled to Dar es Salaam with another brother, Magara, to enlist my help for Magara to get a place in the University of Dar es Salaam. Magara who after his graduation joined the UNLA, defected and joined the NRA in 1981. In 1983, when he was on an NRA mission in a Kampala suburb, someone rang the Police to say that Museveni was in a house in the suburb. The house was surrounded and its occupants were asked to come out without their arms but instead the occupants opened fire. Magara died in the shoot-out. Two of Magara's NRA colleagues were taken alive; they were wounded. The two told the Police that as far as they knew, the mission was known only to Museveni, the house was safe and they got there at night as they had done previously. Margaret and Frank, Sister and Brother of Mwesiga and Magara are now in very lucrative positions.
34. In early 1979 after the capture of Ankole by the Tanzanian troops, Museveni organized hooligans, mostly from the two Refugee Camps, Rusinga and Nakivale, and led them in attacks and massacres of Muslims. He led the hooligans to the Kakoba Coffee Factory and burnt it down. He also organized an assault to burn down his former school, Ntare, but this was frustrated when patriotic Ugandans appealed to the Tanzanian troops to restrain Museveni which they did. In Mbarara Town, Museveni, the son of an itinerant immigrant, lived in Omugabe's Palace. His reasoning for the massacres of the Muslims, the burning of the coffee Factory, etc. was that in so doing the "wrath" of the "wananchi" (citizens) was being expressed against the Amin regime. It was immaterial to Museveni that the hooligans he was leading were not citizens and that the victims were citizens. What was of greatest importance was to show in the most unmistaken form that he was the new ruler in Ankole and that terror including massacres were to be instruments of his rule.
35. Museveni entered Uganda in early January 1979 in the company of the Tanzanian troops. Contrary to propaganda, he had no army which he left behind either in Tanzania or Mozambique and had no such army anywhere in Uganda. When his hooligans were restrained from attacking Ntare School and after they had dynamited Public Buildings in Mbarara Town, he began to raise an army. In the second part of February 1979, he returned to Dar-es-salaam where, at a meeting with me, President Nyerere determined that Museveni would henceforth lead the Ugandan component of forces then fighting against Amin. From Dar es Salaam Museveni, now the Supreme Commissar, went to Rakai and Masaka Districts where, again, in order to show the "wrath" of the citizens, much destruction was wrought. Houses of the affluent were dynamited as were Public Buildings, including Tropic Inn (Hotel). From there Museveni proceeded to Fort Portal which had fallen to the Tanzanian troops. In Fort Portal, like in Mbarara, Museveni stayed in the Omukama's Palace which was intact and furnished. In 1987 Elizabeth Bagaya, then Museveni's friend and Ambassador to the USA, in a tele-cin video, charged that "Obote's soldiers" destroyed in the 1960s her father's Palace; the same Palace in which Bagaya and Amin once stayed when she was Amin's Foreign Minister and in which Museveni stayed in 1979 when Obote was in Tanzania and had no soldiers in Fort Portal. It is known that Museveni ordered the destruction of the Palace when on April 11, 1979, David Oyite Ojok announced over Radio Uganda the fall of Kampala. The Supreme Commissar was said to have been very furious that someone else and not him had announced the fall of Amin.
36. With the approval of Tanzania, I sent in January 1979, two Teams to Western and Buganda Regions. Each Team had a medical doctor. The role of the Teams was the mobilization of the people in liberated areas so as to ensure good order, public health, rural production and trade, cooperation with the Anti-Amin forces and collection of arms abandoned by Amin's soldiers and surrendering such arms to the anti-Amin forces. Central to the mobilization exercise, was the establishment of Committees from the village to District levels. The 1970 UPC Party election regulations, for lack of a better form, were to be used with amendments in the establishment of the Committees. This meant that the residents of a village would assemble irrespective of Party affiliations at one place on the appointed day and elect a Committee and officials such as Chairman, Secretary, etc. and also the village delegates to the next Committee above the village level. Elections were to be in the form of the electors filing behind candidates for the various offices. Delegates elected from the villages would form the next Committee in the tier but at that level to the District level delegates were free to decide on whether or not to elect officials by filing behind candidates or by show of hands. Museveni vehemently opposed the very idea of these Committees. His position was that Uganda was in a revolutionary situation in which the barrel of the gun alone should and must be allowed to give birth to the new order. Chris Rwakasisi and Edward Rurangaranga were the leaders of the Team which went to the West and Samwiri Mugwisa led the Team which went to Buganda. After he became the Supreme Commissar, the two Teams were forced out of Uganda. They returned to Dar es Salaam and the exercise was thereby killed. Today, however, Museveni is credited with having been the originator of the so-called "grassroot democracy". The great difference between the original system and Museveni's, is that the latter is part and parcel of Museveni's instrument of control and oppression whereas the former was Peoples' non-partisan instructions. I do not believe that on account of the NRM Committees, Museveni can be said to have moved from being a Saul to being a Saint Paul on the matter of democracy.
37. There was also another Team which I sent to Uganda with the approval of Tanzania in February 1979. This Team was composed of agriculturists, veterinarians and economists. I should mention, in passing, that at that time, it was not certain that Tanzania would fight Amin to the bitter end. It was, therefore, imperative to assess the economic situation in Rakai, Masaka and Ankole which had been liberated with a view of presenting to Tanzania proposals designed to sustain the economic well-being of those areas in the event of such areas and Kigezi being cut-off from the rest of Uganda. Museveni attacked this Team for allegedly interfering with the prosecution of the war. No wonder, therefore, that Museveni's pre-occupation with militarist approach to the exclusion of every other consideration destroyed the economies of Luwero, North and East. The Economic Team of 1979 like the Mobilization Teams were also forced out of Uganda.
38. The sting in the tail is that Milton Obote, whose ideas are described by Museveni as "bankrupt", was the originator of Museveni's so-called NRM grassroot democracy and the man who presided over a Cabinet which, after the 1980 elections, put together for the first time since the 1960s, bankable projects in a Rehabilitation and Recovery Program which Museveni now claims to be his work. That the implementations of the borrowed ideas have been difficult for Museveni can be ascribed to two reasons. First, his pre-occupation with militarist approach. Second, in the Uganda Saying (adage) that a woman who knows not what she is cooking will burn in vain her entire stock of firewood. Museveni does not believe in democracy and loathes the very heart of civil administration - discussion and competing ideas. He can not, therefore, implement the good ideas and programmes he has borrowed despite claiming them to be his own simply because his nature and temperament are diametrically opposed to those ideas and programs but which are useful to him only for propaganda purposes.
39. I return to 1979. There was a meeting in Mwanza, Tanzania, on June 8 and 9, 1979, between Presidents Nyerere and Lule and their advisors. I was at the meeting as an Observer and on the invitation of the host President. The meeting, as I gathered at the proceedings, was called to resolve a serious political and constitutional issue which had developed between President Yusuf Lule and his supporters on the one hand, and on the other Edward Rugumayo, the Chairman of the Uganda National Liberation Front (UNLF) and also the Chairman of the Interim-Parliament and his supporters. Museveni at that time was Lule's Minister of State for Defence and was at the Mwanza meeting. I gathered from the speeches of the participants that the problem at issue was whether the Moshi Decision took precedent over the 1967 Constitution or vice-versa. Lule held that Chapter IV - (the Presidency) - in particular and indeed the Constitution as a whole, took precedence and that any Moshi Decisions which was at variance with the provisions of the Constitution was ultra vires the Constitution and therefore null and void. Rugumayo on the other hand, argued that the Moshi Conference was a constitutional making body, had on that basis spelt out its rules (Constitution) under which Uganda was to be governed on the fall of the Amin regime and that the 1967 Constitution was never specifically nor generally alluded to or referred to in the Moshi Conference.
40. The situation had been complicated and confused by several events which took place at and after the Moshi Conference. First, Semi Nyanzi, the Chairman of the Conference (before the election of Rugumayo to the office of the Chairman of the UNLF), had his sets of Minutes of the Conference decisions. Nyanzi was in the Lule camp. Another set of Minutes was from Omwony Ojwok (Rugumayo camp), the Secretary of UNLF and who published his Minutes (Moshi Decisions) in a pamphlet whereas Nyanzi's Minutes were cyclostyled and distributed or furnished only to whoever was in the Lule camp or whoever would advance the political fortune of the camp. The existence of the two sets of Minutes which disagreed with each other on vital issues on decisions taken at a Conference which each set purported to record, is a measure of how unstable and freak the foundation was for the new UNLF democratic beginning.
41. The second confusing event was that Lule was actually elected at Moshi, as the President of the UNLF and even the Omwony Ojwok's Minutes showed that the President of the UNLF would assume the office of the President of Uganda, on the fall of Amin. The late David Oyite-Ojok announced soon after midday, on April 11, 1979, on Radio Uganda the fall of Kampala. I must disclose, for the first time, that he rang me before the broadcast to ask for what to say. Telephones from Uganda and to Uganda had been cut. David went to a patriotic Ugandan Engineer and put him on the job, at dawn on that day, to open the lines. The engineer and David assembled the technicians as the battle for Kampala raged and bullets and mortar bombs whizzed over them and their paths to the Radio Station. I was naturally elated to hear his voice and to know that he was alive and in Kampala. My first question to him was whether he had phoned President Nyerere. When he answered "NO", I told him to ring the President before making any pronouncement on the Radio and he did. David asked me what to say. I dictated a short message which he told me he was writing on the back of an envelope. The message, as no one can deny, was a nationalist and a uniting message and was delivered in the name of the UNLF.
42. That evening Lule made a broadcast from Radio Tanzania which was also connected to Radio Uganda. Lule announced his Cabinet and promoted and appointed Military Officers that included David Oyite as Chief of Staff of the (Moshi) Uganda National Liberation Army (UNLA). At Mwanza, Lule agreed that the appointments and promotions he made and announced on April 11 were not vetted and approved before he made them public. Rugumayo's response was that Lule had acted contrary to the Moshi decisions and that since the Minutes had not been produced when the appointments and promotions were made by Lule (alone), they had been accepted in good faith but were not to be repeated. According to the Moshi decisions, Rugumayo said, all Presidential appointments and promotions had to receive the approval of the National Consultative Council (NCC) of the UNLF.
43. The situation was an inappropriate and a short sighted scheme very much as it is today in Museveni's NRM, where an organ of a political entity was deliberately institutionalized as national and designed to direct and control two different and distinct aspects of the body politics of the country. The National Consultative Council (NCC), like Museveni's National Resistance Council (NRC), was not only the supreme body of the UNLF, which in the UPC's case would correlate to our National Council and in the case of Museveni's National Resistance Council, the National Consultative Council, like the NRC, was also the Interim Parliament. Making the supreme organ of a political entity, be it Party, Movement or Front, to be also a national, non-partisan institution, is always a dicey matter in a situation where all political entities had not willingly given their consent. Lule, whose political affiliation hovered and swung rapidly between his membership of Kabaka Yekka (KY) and the DP and whose adherence or commitment to democracy at the very least was highly questionable, was "elected" to lead Uganda at a very trying and testing time. He was, however, not a fool. He saw clearly what he later called the "Moshi fraud" but whose central plank he never was able to discern despite the existence of plenty of evidence being readily in sight. Thus, Lule rejected the role of the National Consultative Council (NCC), the supreme organ of the Uganda National Liberation front (UNLF), itself a loose political entity, to require him, the President of Uganda, to submit to it his decisions on appointments and could find no such provision in the 1967 Constitution.
44. The issue had been compounded in April 1979. On April 13, 1979, Lule, the new President of Uganda, was sworn by Justice Sam Wambuzi on the 1963 Oath - the "Sovereign State of Uganda" and not on the 1967 Oath, the "Republic of Uganda". Within days, George Kanyeihamba, Lule's Attorney General and Minister of Justice, produced Proclamation No. I of 1979 (New Constitution) and Lule signed it. The National Consultative Council (NCC) was not consulted. In the Kanyeihamba/Lule Proclamation, certain chapters of the 1967 Constitution were left intact, others were amended but Chapter IV - the Executive; i.e., the Presidency was completely deleted. The effect was that by the Proclamation, Lule ceased to be the President of Uganda. This ludicrous situation arose because way back in 1971, Kanyeihamba had been fascinated by the Amin coup and wrote a piece in the Transition Magazine about how Amin came with a "Bang". In 1979, Kanyeihamba simply copied Proclamation No. I of 1971 but failed to notice that, as a populist ploy, Amin had in that Proclamation pretended to abolish the Office of the President which he later reinstituted. A new Proclamation was hurriedly issued to restore Lule's Presidency but Lule had taken the same Oath as Sir Edward Mutesa had taken and was therefore ipso facto a constitutional and not an Executive President. Edward Rugumayo and the Personnel of the UNLF Secretariat, particularly those who came to be known as the "Gang of Four" were also no fools. They knew that Lule was in a corner and they pressed their advantage. That forced Lule to go to the Interim-Parliament and to announce that from thence onwards governance would be on the basis of the 1967 Constitution, the very Constitution which was anathema to him on April 13, only weeks back.
45. The Mwanza meeting of June 8 and 9, 1979 was held to resolve the crisis within the UNLF. I have given at length the essential elements of the crisis, a political and constitutional crisis which was of great import, to show what part Museveni played in it. At Mwanza, Museveni was indifferent when the crisis was under discussion. He became alive and highly animated in the afternoon of the second day when new arrangements were discussed for the deployment of Tanzanian troops following the collapse of the Amin forces on June 3. Museveni told the meeting that with the assistance of Tanzanian Commanders, he had raised from within Western Uganda and trained more than ten thousand troops, three thousand of whom were in the West Nile and more would be sent there if the situation warranted and Tanzanian troops could therefore be withdrawn from the West Nile zone. As for the Kampala zone, Museveni said that he had seen a proposal that the UNLA, under the command of Tito Okello and Oyite Ojok, be deployed there but he did not approve that proposal. He charged that the UNLA Officers were lax on discipline and had a fixation with legal niceties including Court-Martial. He then threw a bombshell when he told the meeting that in his army, he had ordered many executions without "colonial legal niceties". Today, friends of Museveni's cite cases of Courts-Martial as evidence of proper and legal conduct of the affairs of wayward soldiers. I will show that Museveni's Courts-Martial are a sham and illegal and that they are essentially summary executions.
46. Museveni was the Minister of State for Defense in the 1979 post-Amin Government. He was also the Vice-Chairman of the Military Commission of the Uganda National Liberation Front (UNLF) founded at Moshi, Tanzania, in March 1979, in a Conference of some then Ugandan exiles. In both capacities, Museveni wielded considerable powers. Although President Lule, and later President Binaisa assumed the office of the minister of Defense, it was Museveni who ran the Ministry and administered it as he wished. The Military Commission was moribund until it seized power in May 1980. Museveni remained Vice-President of the Commission until the General Elections held in December 1980.
47. Museveni's period as Minister of State for Defense was noted on three counts: -
1. He embarked on a large scale recruitment of a private army outside the Uganda National Liberation Army (UNLA) which was founded at the Moshi Conference. This was without the approval of the Lule/Binaisa Cabinet or of the then Interim-Parliament.
2. At the fall of Lule, voted out by the National Consultative Council (NCC) of the UNLF, Lule supporters staged peaceful demonstrations in Kampala. Museveni personally led a contingent of troops in indiscriminate shooting of the demonstrators. This was in the third week of June 1979. In July and August of the same year, 15 (fifteen) highly qualified professionals were gunned down in their houses in Kampala. In three known cases, Museveni reached the scenes of crime within minutes of the shootings, allegedly to "console", mark the word "console", the widows!
3. The Ugandan contingent which together fought with the Tanzanian soldiers numbered around 1,300 men. I was their political leader. Museveni entered Western Uganda from Tanzania alone, of course in the company of Tanzanian troops. That was in January 1979. He immediately embarked on the recruitment of Banyarwanda (Tutsi) refugees who were in Refugee Settlements close to Tanzania border. The men were trained and armed by Tanzanian troops. It was, like the NRA, Museveni's personal army. It was this army which went with Tanzanian troops, to the West Nile Districts (Nebbi, Arua and Moyo) in May 1979. The Tanzanian troops withdrew from the West Nile in September. Museveni visited his army that month. Following the visit, a campaign of massacres, terror and destruction was launched. President Binaisa was pressed by many in the UNLF to remove Museveni from the Ministry of Defense which he did.
48. During the rule of the Military Commission, there was no Minister of Defense. The Commission as a Collegiate, handled all military matters. Thus Paulo Muwanga, David Oyite-Ojok, Zed Maruru and William Omaria curbed with some difficulties, Museveni's senseless killings. At the beginning of its rule, the Military Commission, with one dissenting voice - Museveni's - pledged and committed itself to holding multi-Party General Elections within the period the Moshi Conference had appointed. The period appointed was "within eighteen months after the total liberation of Uganda". Amin's forces were defeated and driven out of Uganda on June 3, 1979. It is a credit to the members of the Military Commission (minus Museveni) that they kept the pledge. In meetings of the Commission and of the Interim Parliament, Museveni was vehemently opposed to elections. His pet point was that Uganda was in a revolution and election was not necessary. Museveni even went to Tanzania and Mozambique where he appealed, in vain, to Presidents Nyerere and Samora Machel to stop the elections.
49. Museveni is very corrupt and presides over a regime which is equally very corrupt. In fact the nature of Museveni's corruption is some kind of mania. As already stated, he is acutely uncomfortable with his lowly background, a matter which to a normal person would be of pride. But the mania which he exemplified in 1979 by living at the Palaces of former rulers, has now led him to build with public funds, his own Palace in Mbarara District. The Palace was built and completed within three years. Some of the materials for building it were imported as were the furniture, fittings, carpets, etc. The Palace stands on a huge farm with hundreds of exotic cattle imported from abroad. The cattle, farm implements and tractors and vehicles were all bought with public funds. Workers at the farm are paid by the Office of the President and Museveni is, of course, the President.
50. In Museveni's regime, public funds are Museveni's private incomes and he uses public funds and resources as his mania directs him. Whenever he travels abroad he takes with him, as if he fears to return, huge amounts of US dollars in cash. His parents live in a government house in Kampala and all their expenses and requirements are fully met by the State. In addition, the State also pays them monthly subvention. His friends and those he calls "allies" in the regime or those whose mouths must be sealed are free to loot Uganda as they please. Samwiri Karugire, the Commissioner of Customs, and his wife have ten vehicles in Kampala; six for Karugire and four for his wife; Karugire and Museveni have been allies for many years.
51. Museveni's friends and protectors will not accept this real, corrupt Museveni. Appendix Three contains Museveni's own words where he admits corruption but like when he admits massacring Ugandans, his friends and protectors simply ignore the admissions. They also do not find it inconceivable that Museveni has large sums in banks in Europe. One of the conduits through which the peasants' hard earned dollars is being salted abroad is a Company by the name of ANL TRADING LIMITED, PO Box 4762, Nicosia, Cyprus.

PART TWO

FOOTSTEPS TO GENOCIDE

1980 Elections

52. The Uganda Peoples Congress (UPC) alone amongst Uganda's political Parties, Movements or Fronts has always been consistent in treating every election in Uganda strictly as constitutional and legal matters of great national importance. Where it was possible to go to Court and seek redress for alleged election malpractice, the UPC did so. There have, however, been elections where politics or political situations did not or were designed not to allow the electorate to freely express their will. In such situations the UPC worked, politically, to diffuse such situations and designs. I cite concrete cases.
53. The first ever direct elections were held, on a near adult franchise, in 1958 for the Legislative Council (LEGICO). The Colonial Government had decreed that the elections were to be held only in those "Districts which wanted them". This meant that each District Council was to opt for or against the elections. In the event, some District Councils decided against elections and the elections were therefore not held in those Districts. Buganda Lukiiko also decided against the elections and with the same result. The Congress took this as a political campaign and program, in favor of elections. By the time of the 1961 elections, the whole country, except Buganda, was for elections.
54. The 1961 elections in Buganda was a farce. The boycott of the elections ordered by the Buganda Lukiiko was overwhelmingly obeyed. I quote from the Report of the Supervisor of Elections - a British Officer: "The number of people who registered in the electoral districts (Constituencies) outside Buganda totalled 1,300,433 out of the estimated 1,500,000 - 1,750,000. This represents a registration of between 75 percent and 85 per cent of those enfranchised". In the 24 electoral districts (Constituencies) in Buganda where, due to the attitude of the Kabaka's government, only 36,006 registered as voters - a "4 to 5 per cent registration resulted". The political and constitutional problems which that "4 to 5 per cent registration" presented, on the eve of Independence, if Independence was to be attained soon and resting not least on an elected National Assembly in which the whole country had confidence were serious and demanding. The boycott edict did not stop at registration; it went on up to the polling day and the poll was derisory.
55. The two main Parties, the UPC and the DP, took opposite views on the political meaning and effect of such a low and derisory registration and poll in Buganda. Both Parties had campaigned against the boycott, urged its members to register and to vote and filed candidates. On that ground, therefore, both Parties were at one in accepting the constitutionality or legality of the registration and poll. I had since 1959, through the good offices of Mrs. Pumla Kissonsonkole who, like me, was a member of Legico, been in contact (often accompanied by Abu Mayanja) with the Kabaka, Sir Edward Mutesa, and with his knowledge also with his Prime Minister and other Ministers. By means of those contacts, we put to Mengo authorities a strong case in favor of elections and for Buganda, like the rest of the country, to have effective representation in the National Assembly. Mayanja later became a Minister at Mengo and dropped out from the UPC Program.
56. The DP on the other hand regarded the facts of the registration and poll in Buganda as defeat for Mengo and totally disregarded and ignored the stark political reality which had prevented the overwhelming majority of the electorate in Buganda to register and to vote. In the elections (1961) where the Buganda boycott edict did not apply and where the elections were "free and fair" the UPC defeated the DP - 34 seats to 24 seats. There was a successful petition to the High Court and in the ensuing by election, the UPC won and increased its seats to 35 thus reducing the DP seats to 23. However, the DP was more successful than the UPC in getting their supporters in Buganda to register and vote and the DP won in that Region, gaining 20 seats to one seat won by the UPC. The derisory nature of the poll and indeed the farce of the election in Buganda, may be seen in the fact that in nine Constituencies, contested by eighteen candidates, less than 1,000 votes were cast in each for all the candidates. In the Constituency of the current President of the DP, Paul Ssemogerere, for instance, a total of 358 votes were cast; i.e., only 358 people voted for Ssemogerere and his opponent. In no Constituency in Buganda did the total votes cast reach 2,000 but voters in Ssemogerere's Constituency did better than in two other constituencies which the DP also won on a total votes of 132 and 133 cast in each respectively for all the candidates.
57. That is the sad story of the 1961 elections which the DP leaders have always and continue to sing as having been "free and fair". The UPC disagreed then and still disagrees. The effective boycott made the elections not only unfair to the electorate outside Buganda but was also patently not free in Buganda in that a very, very large number of the electorate were politically hindered from participating. Unlike the DP, the UPC could neither disregard nor ignore the serious political situation which the boycott had imposed on national unity and on the institution of Parliament as well as on governance by the ballot freely cast by the electorate. There were three possible ways to tackle the problem. The first - which I have already stated, was the one the DP took but which the UPC rejected namely, that Mengo had been defeated and that the evidence was the twenty one members in the national Assembly representing the Constituencies in Buganda. The second was increased political campaign to get more and more people in Buganda to defy Mengo and to opt for elections at some future date. This was the original position of the UPC. It soon became clear that the confrontational course was fraught with considerable dangers to lives and property. Campaigners and activists for the Mengo stand launched a reign of terror against supporters of political Parties alleging that such supporters were undermining the authority of the Kabaka. The real issue which had existed for years, however, was the position of the Kabaka and therefore Buganda in an independent Uganda.
58. The more Mengo articulated that issue, the more the UPC pressed Mengo to call off the campaign of terror so as to create a political climate for the discussion of the issue. That was the third course for the UPC. Mengo did call off the campaign of terror and the Colonial Government appointed what was called Relations Commission. Mengo at first did not want to have anything to do with the Commission just as it did in the case of the Constitutional Committee in 1959. This time, the UPC succeeded in persuading Mengo to present its case to the Commission and the Commission's Report recommended that Buganda should have a form of Federal status in the united Uganda.
59. The matter of the elections of the 21 members of the National Assembly from Buganda being elected indirectly by the Lukiiko did not originate from the UPC or as I came to learn later from Mengo either. The first time I heard about it was when the UPC evidence was being presented to the Relations Commission. Members of the Commission asked what would be the position of the UPC should Mengo agree to the 21 members being elected by the Lukiiko and argued that in that way the impasse which the boycott of elections which the Lukiiko had imposed would be broken. We asked for time to consider the matter and took the opportunity to gauge Mengo's view on it. I found that the idea had been put to Mengo by the Commission and that Mengo had neither accepted nor rejected it. I also gathered that provided Mengo's main concern, Federal Status for Buganda, could be settled, the issue of the Lukiiko's resolution against elections would be rescinded.
60. In a subsequent meeting with the Commission, the UPC delegation urged for direct elections. The Commission, in its Report, recommended that a directly elected Lukiiko should decide whether the 21 seats in Buganda should be filled by directly or indirectly elected members. When I discussed this recommendation with the Mengo authorities, I found that they were in some kind of a quandary. They were not sure of whether or not to accept it and the reason for that uncertainty laid in dissolving the Lukiiko and the election of a new one on adult universal franchise and in secret. The Lukiiko had some very vocal members who wanted nothing to do with the National Assembly; in December 1959 those vocal members had made the Lukiiko to pass a resolution which purported to excise Buganda from Uganda-secession. The Mengo Ministers, particularly the Katikiro (Prime Minister), Michael Kintu, were fearful that accepting the Commission's recommendation could lead to the fall of the Mengo government. Kintu told me that right from the 1900 Buganda Agreement, Buganda recognized only British Protectorate authority as being above that of the Lukiiko and that the British were in collusion with the political Parties to impose onto Buganda and above the Lukiiko another authority, the National Assembly and an Uganda Government. Left to Michael Kintu, there was no way of resolving the impasse. I, therefore, took the matter to the Kabaka Sir Edward Mutesa and the impasse was resolved.
61. The decision I later reached with Michael Kintu was precisely what the Relations Commission had recommended; namely, Buganda's Federal Status - the content of which was still to be negotiated by Mengo and the rest of the country including political Parties - and I reserved the position of UPC on a new elected Lukiiko to decide on the mode of the elections of members of the National Assembly to represent the 21 Constituencies in Buganda. I reported this to the UPC Parliamentary Group and to the Central Executive Committee (CEC) of the UPC. Michael Kintu had, however, urged me not to make public the decision we had reached and the UPC never did. That then was the situation when the first Constitutional Conference was opened in London in late September 1961. The UPC had, through patient negotiations with Mengo, advanced progress to the unity of Uganda whereby Mengo had accepted the desirability of the National Assembly and for Buganda to be represented in it. It is a matter of record that the leaders of the DP never sought to approach Mengo. To the DP leaders at that time, all that was important was their being in power, in fact sharing it with the British and their demand that the British hand over full powers to them. The farcical 1961 elections in Buganda were to them free and fair and the derisory poll in Buganda was a full mandate for the DP to govern Uganda. History is now repeating itself. The present leaders of the DP say that they are in power, sharing it with Museveni and his NRA and the DP's only demand today is that Museveni should hand over full powers to the DP. Museveni's massacres are of no concern to the DP leaders.
62. Before the London Conference, I was directed by the Central Executive Committee (CEC) of the UPC to endeavor to persuade Mengo to agree to Buganda's 21 seats in the National Assembly to be filled through direct elections and not indirectly, through the Lukiiko. All that I could get from Mengo was that despite the understanding I and Kintu had reached, the matter and indeed the whole issue of Buganda's relations with the rest of the country would be decided by the Lukiiko after the Conference. The Central Executive Committee of the UPC also, therefore, decided that the matter of direct or indirect elections for Buganda members of the National Assembly be decided by the National Council (Parliament) of the Party after the London Conference if, at the Conference, Mengo had opted for indirect elections. In London, at the Conference, Mengo delegation, in a separate (side meeting) with the British side opted for indirect elections. I soon learnt that the British had something for each of the main participating delegations. To the Mengo delegation, it was the indirect elections. To the DP delegation, it was Benedicto Kiwanuka, the Chief Minister, becoming Prime Minister on March 1, 1962. To the UPC delegation, it was fresh elections to be held in April 1962. There was no disagreement amongst the delegations to the content of Buganda's federal status but there were reservations as to whether the same contents should be extended to Bunyoro, Toro, Ankole and Busoga.
63. It is illuminating that in London, the DP and the UPC agreed to fresh elections as did Mengo and to Buganda representatives in the National Assembly being elected indirectly by the Lukiiko. At the end of the Conference on October 9, 1961, Kiwanuka, the leader of the DP and Chief Minister and I both publicly stated that the Conference was a success. Independence was agreed for October 9, 1962; Kiwanuka and I were happy with that. As already stated, Kiwanuka was also happy that he would be Prime Minister on 1st March, 1962 and I was happy that fresh elections would be held in April 1962. In London or back in Uganda neither of us expressly condemned the indirect election for the Buganda members of the National Assembly.
64. After the London Conference, the meeting of the UPC National Council decided against the UPC putting up candidates for the Lukiiko elections. It was not a boycott and contrary to what has been written and said, there was no alliance or anything of the kind when that decision was made. The reasons for the decision were two. The first was that the UPC had inherited from its parent, the UNC, a political mission for direct elections as a form of governance and that although participation in the Lukiiko elections was on consonance with the promotion of that mission, the Lukiiko being an electoral College for a quarter of the members of the legislature of Uganda, was not. The 1958 experience was recalled. The District Councils which in 1958 decided against direct elections had each a majority of the two main Parties combined but despite the Parties' stand for direct elections, other forces worked to ensure decisions for indirect elections. The National Council saw nothing which would or could hinder Mengo from ensuring that the new elected Lukiiko would decide for indirect elections and, therefore, decided against participation in the Lukiiko elections.
65. The second reason was taken in the light of the tense political situation, particularly between the DP leaders and Mengo and also on account of the unresolved issues which included the contents of the federal status of Bunyoro, Toro, Ankole and Busoga. There were also other matters such as the "Lost Counties" and whether Mbale Town was in Bugisu or Bukedi District. On account of such matters the National Council decided that the UPC should work for the promotion and realization of a National Coalition government to be formed after the elections due to April 1962 and I was mandated to propose and discuss the decision with the DP and Mengo. I decided to approach the DP first. I approached Ben Kiwanuka in Parliament Buildings, Kampala, at Tea time and told him that I wanted a meeting with him to discuss the desirability of a National Coalition government after the forthcoming elections. I would write, I said, formally if he could indicate to me that the idea was worth pursuing. He told me that he would be in contact later. He never did and I kept on reminding him until he one day told me that he was not interested. As Kiwanuka kept dithering, I approached Mengo. By then Kabaka Yekka had been founded. It was founded during the London Conference and the UPC had nothing to do with how it came into being.
66. At first Mengo readily accepted the idea of a national coalition government. That was the beginning of what later came to be known as UPC/KY alliance. However, when it became clear that the DP was using its position as the government, seeking to restrict new registration of voters in Buganda and to have the 1962 elections held virtually on the electoral Registers of 1960, which had less than 40,000 electors, Mengo and KY - the difference was the same - urged the exclusion of the DP from the Coalition. The scheme of the DP to curb the registration of new voters in Buganda was resolved when the conduct of the elections was taken away by the British Governor from the Chief Minister's portfolio and became the responsibility of the Governor. As a result, a total of 805,647 people registered as voters in Buganda compared to the derisory 36,006 who were on the register for the 1961 elections. The UPC has never been given credit for persuading Mengo to agree to surrender the power of the ballot to some three quarters of a million people in Buganda. Instead the UPC has been condemned and continues to be condemned ad nauseam for accepting the voice of 805,647 electors as more nearer to the voice of Buganda then than the voice of 36,006 electors.
67. That is the nut of the opprobrium which is hurled against and onto the UPC by the leaders of the DP, other Ugandan political shell-groupings, biased or uninformed journalists and academics, militarists, the ignoramuses of the UPC's political plank and mission or agents of imperialism, colonialism and big businesses who hate and oppose that plank and mission. Even now, in 1990, the DP leaders, for instance, unashamedly assert that in 1961 at the London Conference, the British, UPC and Mengo colluded in a dirty scheme to overthrow the then "democratically elected DP Government". The same has been said about an alleged collusion between the British and the UPC (or Obote in particular) to frustrate and then overthrow the "UNLF democratic administrations". Such assertions, claims, propaganda and self deception may and can have roots abroad; i.e., outside Uganda but in Uganda, they have no currency and are treated with utmost contempt. The facts as known in Uganda speak for themselves.
68. There was never any collusion between the UPC, the British and Mengo to oust the 1961 DP government and replace it by the UPC/KY alliance. In 1961, the UPC decided to get Mengo to lift the boycott of the National Assembly and elections to it; KY was not even in being. The UPC also did not urge Mengo to change its stance and demand for immediate dissolution of the National Assembly to be followed by elections. Some detractors have also argued that it was opportunistic and filthy for the leftist UPC to go to a right wing and reactionary traditionalists and in 1962 to form a coalition government with them. The truth of the matter is that Mengo had locked up and detained thousands upon thousands of votes and it was Mengo alone who had the key to unlock and release those votes; i.e., whether they were for Mengo, the DP, the UPC or any other. The important consideration was that Mengo, reactionary or traditionalist, was an integral part of Uganda and so were the votes locked up and detained by Mengo. As a national political Party, it would have been grossly remiss of the UPC to disregard reactionaries, and traditionalists as not part of Uganda and to ignore their concern, real or imaginary or the power they had exhibited in frustrating the 1961 elections in Buganda.
69. Let me digress a little. In 1979 at Moshi and under the Lule, Binaisa and Military Commission administrations of the UNLF, reactionaries and traditionalists were the most sought after single group. They were seen by those who were the rulers to be the strongest bulwark against the UPC. How else can one explain the sudden emergence of Yusuf Lule in the Moshi Conference from no known anti-Amin grouping and the shameful maneuvers at Moshi where the Presidency of the UNLF was reserved for Lule. Paulo Muwanga was rejected and Lule, a reactionary to boot, was declared "elected unanimously". Today, and since 1986, in Museveni's regime, the reactionaries are everywhere and in key positions and their job is to shout loudest as Bagaya did in 1987 that there was peace in Uganda. In the 1980 elections, the DP filed as candidates a large number of reactionaries. It would follow, therefore, that it is only the UPC which must have no dealings with the reactionaries even if it is for the promotion and the realization of the ends of democracy or national unity. This outlandish attitude where anything done by the UPC is or must be wrong and where the same, if done by opponents of the UPC, is and must be proper, is one of the root causes of Uganda's agonies. The UPC is, unlike several of its opponents, a very big Party with massive support which has been proved again and again in all the elections which have been held in Uganda.
70. The political understandings reached between the UPC and Mengo were not against the unity of Uganda and had no opportunist element whatsoever either for the UPC or for Mengo. The matter of the indirect election of Buganda's representatives in the National Assembly, properly seen was, in fact more of a challenge to the political Parties than a victory for Mengo. The challenge was contained in the facts that Buganda was to be divided into 68 (sixty eight) Lukiiko Constituencies; that universal adult franchise was to apply and did apply in the registration of voters; that elections were to be in secret; that political Parties and independents were free to contest the elections and that only those 68 elected members of the Lukiiko plus six Mengo Ministers and six nominees of the Kabaka were to decide on whether or not the Buganda Members of Parliament should be directly elected. The challenge to the political Parties was to win in 41 (forty one) of the 68 Constituencies and thereby have a pro-direct election majority in the Lukiiko. The DP leaders believed at the time that their Party could get the majority. They got only three seats and Kabaka Yekka (KY) won 65 seats.
71. After the Lukiiko elections in February 1962, and before it met, the UPC had meetings with the Mengo authority at which Mengo was urged to opt for direct elections. The UPC argued that the electorate would not swing appreciably from the results just declared and that through direct elections, the 21 representatives would have direct attachments with their Constituencies and constituents rather than be just posted thereto by the Lukiiko. Mengo's response was that all KY candidates had campaigned on the programme of indirect elections and that the KY votes were for indirect elections. The Lukiiko subsequently met and duly voted for indirect elections. Some of the Lukiiko members who voted so were, like I.K. Musazi and E.M.K. Mulira, stalwarts in the Uganda nationalist cause. It is difficult and hypocritic to accept that they joined the KY to promote national unity and at the same time to say that UPC did wrong to form a Coalition Government with the same KY. Because the Lukiiko opted for Buganda's 21 members of the National Assembly to be elected indirectly, Parliamentary elections were, therefore, not held in Buganda in 1962.
72. What came out of the 1961 and 1962 elections had shown itself in the 1958 Legico elections and was to rear its ugly head in every subsequent elections of all kinds. We have seen how Mengo accepted universal adult suffrage for the 1962 Lukiiko elections but manoeuvred to get the 65 KY Members of the Lukiiko to decide for indirect election for the Buganda members of the National Assembly. Mengo did it constitutionally just as the DP had won the 1961 elections constitutionally. In both cases, the UPC accepted the constitutionality of the election results but saw that much political work remained to be done to remove hindrances which distort the will of the electorate. However, in the rest of the country, outside Buganda, the 1962 was virtually a repeat of the 1961 elections. The DP was again beaten by the UPC - 24 seats to 37 seats which after a successful petition to the High Court and a bye-election was reduced to 23 to 38 seats for the UPC. The DP accepted the constitutionality of the 1958 and 1961 elections but not of the 1962 and 1980 elections. In the case of the 1980 elections, they could easily have proved their case if they had it in the High Court but did not do so and instead resorted to baseless propaganda and consorting with gunmen.
73. In the 1961, 1962 and 1980 elections, other Parties abroad provided for the DP considerable resources; money, vehicles, public address systems and even foreign advisers. In 1984, those masters of the DP met in a conference in Kampala and Ssemogerere invited me to address them which I accepted. I told them that what they were doing to Uganda could be likened to a man who goes to the home of a poor couple and proceeds to woo the wife with gifts. Ssemogerere asked "who is the wife" and I said "you and the DP" and added that it was not natural for a seducer to woo the husband. The Uganda elections of 1961, 1962 and 1980 were, therefore, in those circumstances heavily influenced from abroad and it was only the strength of the UPC which stopped them from being travesties of the will of the electorate. This is a matter on which I hold a very strong opinion to the extent of even at times, throwing away diplomacy in dealing with it. The consequences have been serious. During the second UPC administration, for instance, I wrote a letter to a Head of Government in which I implored him to discontinue financing of the DP by his Party and affiliates. I never received a reply but economic assistance from that country to Uganda was immediately discontinued and the excuse floated was that my Government's human rights record was bad. Today, with massacres, burnt down villages, homesteads, granaries, etc, and with the DP in the regime, the human rights record of the Museveni regime is very good and aid is available but can not be used fully because of the wars which are Museveni's excuse for genocide.
74. It is perhaps not known by many that in the 1980 elections, the DP and indeed the UPM and the CP did not issue election Manifestos and that it was the UPC alone which did. The problems in which Uganda was engulfed were daunting, intricate and myriad; some were also very sensitive. It is therefore possible that the leaders of the other three Parties chose silence as the best policy and yet by doing so they made it impossible for the electorate to choose between competing ideas and programs. Be that as it may, I am also of the view that at least for the DP leaders, their friends abroad must have advised them not to commit themselves on any matter in respect of the future. That was the advice which those friends gave to the DP leaders for the 1961 and 1962 elections; in fact the advice given was accepted and published in the only Manifesto which the DP ever produced in April 1960. In that Manifesto, the DP leaders did not, for instance, recognize the existence of Liberation Movements, they were not mentioned at all. The UPC, on the other hand, in its policy statement issued in march 1960, pledged to "establish fraternal relations with and offer support to all Nationalist Movements on the Continent of Africa". The implementation of the pledge was to cause, in 1963, ill feelings between the first UPC administration and former Colonial Rulers. I give how the ill feelings came about and on a matter which I thought was innocuous but which London and NATO countries saw otherwise.
75. It began when I was in London in 1962. Uganda was not yet independent. Mrs. Pumla Kissonsonkole was also in London on a mission unconnected with my being in London. Pumla came to my hotel without appointment one afternoon and told me of the presence in London, of certain people from South Africa whom she knew and thought I should meet. What she said was to my heart and an article of faith to the UPC. Pumla and I decided to go and meet those "certain people" very much in the same way as she had come to my hotel; i.e., without appointment. That was when I met Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo and four other leaders of the Africa National Congress (ANC). The ANC leaders asked for Uganda Passports for their cadres and for the Passports to be endorsed for travel to "all countries". At that time, before Independence, Uganda Passports were endorsed for all countries except "Communist (ruled) countries". I readily agreed to the ANC request and after Independence redeemed my promise, I hope, to their satisfaction.
76. Soon after independence, the endorsement in the Uganda passport was changed to all countries "except South Africa, Portugal and Portuguese Colonial Territories". Looked at today, it seems totally nothing, but in 1963, such a policy and posture by a neo-colonialist State was regarded seriously by NATO countries as evidence of communist control of the neo-colonialist government. Thus that simple change, in the endorsement of the Uganda passport and the issuing of the same to the ANC, confirmed to the NATO countries that the UPC was communist controlled. Obviously other African countries such as Ghana and Tanzania must have made similar changes in their passports. It can not, therefore, be argued convincingly, that the UPC administration was singled out as unfriendly to NATO countries on the matter of passports. The circumstances were, however, deeper than that.
77. In Uganda, before Independence, the most important question which was put to an applicant for a passport was whether the applicant had been to a "communist country"; an affirmative answer or a lie meant the automatic denial of a passport to the applicant. But the UPC had done worse things in the eyes of the NATO countries. The Party had sent "secretly" students to the Warsaw Pact Countries and to China and some of those students were from Tanzania and Kenya; the Party also had an office in Cairo and had forged a very close relationship with the Afro Asian Solidarity Committee whose Headquarters was in Cairo. I, as the leader of my Party, had visited East Germany, the Soviet Union and China in 1960. The visit became known and the British Governor later, on my return, threatened to deprive me of my passport. The Party's Administrative Secretary, Otema Allimadi, did also go to those countries. I do not know whether Africa's illustrious leaders such as Kwameh Nkrumah or Julius Nyerere had, before independence, visited Warsaw Pact Countries and China or sent students there. In our case, the matter became a very hot political issue in the 1961 and 1962 elections. The DP branded the UPC as communist and the rich Parties in Western Europe poured resources to help the DP to defeat the communists. It is in that context that I have always treated the request by the ANC leaders for Uganda passports, simple as it now appears, as a test case when the UPC government disregarded the wishes of the NATO countries and the reactionary opinion at home against Warsaw Pact Countries and China. I do also believe that had the DP been in government at independence, the DP government would not have given any concrete support either to the ANC or any Liberation Movement and would have also continued with the colonial policy which forbade Ugandans from travelling to Warsaw Pact countries and China. The silence of the DP leaders in 1980 on big and small issues was, in my view, not only on advice from their friends abroad but also designed as the basis for misrepresenting UPC policies in the event of the UPC winning the 1980 elections which became the case.
78. There are a whole range of matters and issues which the first UPC Government faced but resolved in favor of the interest of Uganda and African revolution. The NATO countries disclaim that they have no strategic interests in Uganda but who does not know that Uganda lies between the Indian and Atlantic Oceans or that Uganda is the under-belly of the Arab world and, therefore, that the Arab/Israeli conflict is quite close to Uganda. The Frontline States of today originally had three members, Tanzania, Zambia and Uganda. Despite the above disclaimer, the first UPC Government was forced against its desire not to have the Embassy of East Germany in Uganda and was threatened with dire consequences, if it arranged with the Soviet Union for geologists from there to determine the quantity of wolframite and, therefore, the commercial value of Tungsten known to exist in Uganda. And how come that the Brussels based International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) chose to build a College in Uganda, on the eve of Independence, when at the time and of the three East African countries, Uganda had the least number of workers and the weakest trade unions. It is not necessary to serialize issues, matters or decisions on which the UPC and the British or for that matter NATO and WARSAW Pact counties were in conflict. On the other hand, no one can produce any concrete evidence of any conflict between the DP or the UNLF and those other countries collectively or individually. Yet it is politicians from those groupings who hide their lack of popular support by claiming that they were frustrated by the capitalist countries or by the communist countries. Events have proved all such deceptive stratagems to be hollow on two broad fronts; at home and on the international plane.
79. In the first place, soon after Amin's coup, Ugandans who today shout loudest and present themselves as socialists and progressives sided with Amin. At a series of meetings at Makerere, some of these socialists and progressives urged the students to support Amin on two grounds. First, that Amin be encouraged to appoint more and more progressives to import posts and in time, the progressives would overthrow Amin. The second ground was that Amin was "not against the progressives and was only killing Obote's people"! Imagine such words coming from the brains and mouths of people claiming to be progressive. The so-called "Obote's people" as was well known, were Langi, Acholi and UPC leaders. To the so-called Ugandan socialists and progressives, the killings of the Langi, Acholi and UPC members was a most important socialist reconstruction of Uganda. They got the jobs but later fell out with Amin. On the international plane, the stratagems were also shown to be hollow when both WARSAW Pact and NATO countries found Amin a man with whom to do business. Uganda immediately became a "free market" where East Germany and North Korea opened their Embassies with the approval of all. The Ugandan so-called socialists and progressives could not understand what was happening because they did not know that the interests of a country, West or East, is of higher importance than the promotion of ideology.
80. In March 1979, the progressives and the reactionaries were permitted by Tanzania to organize and convene what became to be known as "Moshi Unity Conference". It was, despite the name, a farce. The majority of the 22 or so individual "organizations" which composed the conference never existed before the conference and naturally have never been heard of since the conference; they were "founded" at the conference for a specific purpose and when that purpose was realized at the conference they ceased to exist. The UPC and the DP were represented at the conference. The conveners had written to me as Milton Obote, inviting me to the conference and I was to lead a delegation of five. I did not go to the conference on verbal and written advice by the President of Tanzania but sent a delegation which was promptly locked out. Uganda students in Scandinavia, the University of Zambia and Dar se Salaam University whose organizations had been in existence long before the conference also sent delegations but were all locked out from attending "Unity Conference". The Dar es Salaam University students had members on the frontline and their two delegates had been in the war with Amin's forces in Tororo. The women whose husbands were engaging Amin's forces in Masaka had their own delegation formed in 1973 in Tanzania; their delegation was locked out. In the end, three times as many Ugandans as those in the Unity Conference were locked out. Had that been done by the UPC and not against the UPC, the detractors of the Party and the international media would have condemned it savagely. However, since it was against the UPC, it was democracy at work.
81. It has been argued by the conveners of the Moshi Conference that it was important to ensure that the conference was not flooded by what they called "Oboteists". It is a most illuminating admission carrying the inescapable meaning that the unity of Uganda depends on the humiliation and the locking out of "Oboteists" from discussing and forging that unity. The corollary is that "Oboteists" must be suffered if necessary to have only a limited voice even if or where they deserve, on account of their numbers, a great voice. Moshi was hailed as a democratic and a most successful "Unity Conference". The point is who said so; certainly not the people of Uganda.
82. After Moshi, the leaders of the UNLF purported to hold democratic elections for the expansion of the membership of the Interim-Parliament. The method they chose was indirect election by nominated members of the District Councils. Candidates were vetoed and anyone not approved could not stand. That was the measure of confidence the UNLF leaders had in the electorate and also the nature of their belief in democracy. One young Ugandan academic, supporter of the DP and very much opposed to the UPC, I.C. Ovonji of the Faculty of Law, University of Lesotho, has asserted that those "elections resulted in a DP victory". How the DP could have gained such a victory when officially neither the DP nor the UPC were allowed to put up candidates is an example of the acceptance of any farce, provided it can be shown to be against the UPC, as genuine democratic act. The leaders of the UNLF saw their 1979 election farce as democratic and so did the leaders of the DP. The UPC regarded the Moshi Conference and the UNLF elections and indeed the UNLF administration, as concrete political situations brought about not by the will of the electorate. The UPC accepted the reality of the situation but argued for direct elections and the Party thereby earned the wrath of the UNLF leaders.
83. It is of significance that although the UNLF was a "Front", a coalition of various organizations of which the UPC was one, the leaders of the UNLF never consulted me, the leader of the UPC, on any matter. Indeed the UNLF leaders at Moshi and later at home, sought to make it appear that the UPC had ceased to exist or was too unpopular in Uganda as not to merit giving it any consideration. Such attitude energized the UPC even more to call for direct elections but the detractors of the UPC seemed, inexplicably, to hold that I and the UPC were so unpopular that it was their duty to protect me and the UPC from humiliation at the polls! It was indeed amazing that opponents of the UPC should take such a position while continuing to propagate, as they still do, that the UPC was working to wreck the pillars of democracy they claimed to have been erecting. One such pillar was to do away with political Parties and was initially to start with holding elections under what was called "UNLF Umbrella" where individual Parties were not to put up candidates. No one discussed this important matter with me or separately with the UPC members who were in the Interim-Parliament. The matter was simply announced. The UPC could not simply disregard the locking out of delegations at Moshi allegedly for being "Oboteist"; i.e., UPC or the vesting of candidates which happened only a few months back. The UPC decided that it had a higher responsibility to the nation and to its members than to the un-elected UNLF.
84. I returned to Uganda on May 27, 1980, after over nine years in exile and after a little longer than a year and a month since the fall of Amin. It was the UPC alone, after the fall of Amin, which organized a mammoth rally to welcome its leader home. Leaders of other political Parties or fractions had simply slipped into Uganda as if their arrivals were embarrassing to them. On return home, I embarked on gruelling tours of the whole country. I addressed huge rallies everywhere I went, visited schools, hospitals, homes and villages, talked to the old and the young, etc., etc. Paul Ssemogerere who, as the leader of DP, had returned to Uganda well over a year before me, had done no such thing. I was in Busoga during one of those tours when another election farce arose; this time within the DP alone. A delegates Conference had been called to elect DP leaders and discuss the Party's policy for the Parliamentary elections due then in September 1980. Yusuf Lule flew from London to Nairobi where he announced his intention to proceed to Uganda and contest the election for the Presidency of the DP. However, the DP Headquarters, in Kampala, issued a statement to the effect that Lule was not a delegate to the DP Conference and was not even a member of the Party. Later Lule was to claim that President Nyerere and I prevented him from becoming the President of the DP. At the DP conference, the known supporters of Lule were denied accreditation and Paulo Ssemogerere was elected unopposed as leader of the DP.
85. The lengthy account of the various elections since 1958 and prior to 1980 may appear not to have connections with Museveni's massacres. I have done so in order to give a complete historical perspective; namely that the UPC has always stood for direct and fair elections; accepted defeat in 1961 when it could easily have gone in the opposite way and on a very strong ground; promoted national unity through working for all parts of the country to be effectively represented in the National Assembly; accepted Moshi and the UNLF administrations but refused to be garrotted either by the dictator Amin, or by the regimes of the UNLF and Museveni. The DP leaders and Museveni have been in authority since 1986 but have not, after four years, brought into the open the evidence that the 1980 elections were rigged in favor of the UPC, the one most important reason which Museveni claims to have been the cause of the war he first launched in Luwero in 1981. Does the evidence exist or not? I say firmly that it does not and that it never existed. After the fall of the second UPC administration in 1985, Paul Ssemogerere and Robert Kitariko, President and Secretary General of the DP respectively, became the most important and highly valued Ministers. Kitariko's Portfolio covered the matter of elections and the documents of the 1980 elections were available in the offices of the Electoral Commission. No attempt was made for an independent body to examine those documents against the allegations by the DP and Museveni that the elections had been rigged or that the DP and the UPC were simply allocated seats by Paulo Muwanga.
86. The first allegation against the UPC in relation to the 1980 elections was made by Yusuf Lule soon after the Electoral Commission had published the number of Constituencies. Lule asserted that the Commission had demarcated more Constituencies in the North than in Buganda! The fact was that Buganda (including Kampala) had 34 and the North 26 Constituencies. Lule's allegation showed his and other people's ignorance in the baseless claims that the UPC support was concentrated in the North. It should also be noted that this allegation was made long before the poll and, therefore, suggesting that to people like Lule, the idea of the national and Uganda wide elections in which national Parties were to compete was secondary to ethnic or Regional considerations.
87. The so called North/South divide which Lule used had never been known in any previous elections. My coming from the North, for instance, did not make the UPC a Northern Party just like Ssemogerere a Muganda, did not make the DP either a Ganda or a "South" Party. The politics of the North/South divide was introduced by Museveni; but like most of Museveni's schemes of divide and rule, it had glaring flaws. At the caucus meeting at which the UPM was founded Museveni, who was the convener and Chairman, told the meeting that the UPM had to have a leader who was neither from the North nor from Buganda; because those Regions already had three leaders heading other Parties. He also told the meeting that the leader of the UPM must be someone who had an army. The caucus without debate made Museveni the leader of the UPM. That was and remains Museveni's form of forging unity and democracy and the basic reason why he hated, disapproved and waged a war in Luwero against the ballot.
88. The 1980 elections were not affairs for the Ugandans alone. The Commonwealth of Nations sent a Team of Observers to monitor and report on the various aspects of the elections. Many who derided the victory of the UPC also find it painful to accept the Report of that Independent Team. However, for the record, it is pertinent to quote from the Team's Report. This is what the Team said in their Interim Report: "It is unique in the annals of democracy for a sovereign nation to invite an international group to observe its national elections and report whether they were free and fair. Our role, which was endorsed by all four political Parties, is without precedent. The response of the people of Uganda to our presence has been heartwarming. No assessment of this election would be valid which did not take full account of the prevailing situation in Uganda and its recent history. A general election makes large demands on a country's financial, administrative and manpower resources, as well as accentuating strains within the body politic. To conduct such an exercise against the background of a shattered economy, an enfeebled and disrupted administrative infrastructure, continuing security problems and the social fabric stretched to the limits of endurance by eight years of brutal oppression and incalculable human tragedy would be a daunting enterprise for any country. Uganda's dilemma has been whether to wait for better and more settled times before holding an election or to hold an election as an essential step towards national rehabilitation. Its choice has been an act of faith deserving of the world's sympathy and understanding."
89. In Paragraph 20 of the same Report, the Team wrote: "The Group as a whole is continuing to monitor the count and our final view must be contingent on how it is conducted and how ballot boxes were stored overnight. At this stage, however, despite the imperfections and deficiencies to which we have drawn attention, and subject to the concern expressed on the question of nominations and unopposed returns, we believe this has been a valid electoral exercise which should broadly reflect the freely expressed choice of the people of Uganda."
90. The DP, as is well known, claimed that the elections were rigged in favor of the UPC. At mid-day on 11th December, 1980, the DP Headquarters actually issued a Statement claiming victory and giving the number of seats the DP had allegedly won. The International media, representatives of which were all gathered in Kampala, took the lie and broadcast it far and wide and have not, to date, ceased from spreading the lie.
91. The lie was exposed by the fact that when the DP statement was made more than half of the 109 Constituencies which were contested had either not even started voting or the votes were still being counted. The Commonwealth Observer Group had this to say about the DP claims in their Final Report in Paragraphs 142 and 143: 142. The first results were announced over the radio Uganda shortly after 2:00 PM on December 12. We were present in the Communication center at this time and while results were coming to hand. 143. Earlier in the day we had debriefed all our assistants who had returned to Kampala from various parts of the country and it had become apparent to us from the reports of their observations both during the poll and at the count that the DP was publicly claiming to have won seats which it had almost certainly lost. For instance, the claim was even made of a success in Gulu, where we knew that the UPC was taking over 90 per cent of the vote. At no stage did we lend credence to claims made by the DP that they had won a clear majority. Rather we contacted the DP to advise it of the position as we understood it to be, and subsequently the DP confirmed to us that some of its information from outlying Districts had been incorrect.
92. The declaration by the DP that "some of its information from outlying Districts had been incorrect" was itself a lie. In the 1979 war, telecommunications system in the entire Western and Northern Regions were destroyed; no such systems existed in the Eastern Region except in Jinja and Iganga in Busoga. The systems were not working by the election day December 10, 1980. The DP Headquarters in Kampala could not, therefore, have received any information, correct or incorrect, from Districts in the North and West and much of the Eastern Region by mid-day on December 11, 1980. The Electoral Commission used the Police Communications to receive the elections results from the "outlying Districts". It is inconceivable that the Police in those Districts fed the DP Headquarters with "incorrect" results, a matter which would amount to saying that there was in the DP Headquarters some means by which Police message could be received there.
93. Despite owning to the Observer Group as above stated, the DP leaders actually stepped up their lies. In that way the DP leaders wittingly gave moral support to Museveni who had publicly made clear his resorting to the gun if his Party lost the elections. One month and three weeks after the 2nd UPC Government took office, Museveni begun his war in Luwero District.
94. There was a legal way for the DP leaders to prove that their allegations were based on fact. This was filing of Petitions to the High Court which had the constitutional power to redress the very matters which were being alleged. The DP, indeed, filed 24 Petitions but were singularly reluctant to prosecute them! The UPC filed 26 Petitions and vigorously prosecuted the majority of them. Some UPC petitions were not prosecuted because the "elected" DP candidates joined the UPC. Such Petitions were therefore abandoned.
95. Although the DP claimed that the elections were rigged in favor of the UPC, that claim did not, in their view include the thirty four seats in Buganda and Kampala except one which they lost. In other words, according to the DP, whoever rigged the elections, left Buganda and Kampala alone but concentrated the misdeed in the other Regions! The more plausible reason is that the DP can not stomach losing an election. If indeed the DP had won as claimed, such a situation would have propelled the DP to prosecute their Petitions with much vigor.
96. There were two reasons why the DP were reluctant to prosecute their Petitions. The first and most important was that they feared to lose again in the High Court. The second was that amongst Petitions filed by the UPC, in the case of a Constituency in Buganda, one was heard and pronounced upon early by the High Court. The Court found that the DP candidate elected in December 1980 "had not been elected in accordance with the law". The Court ordered for a fresh election which the UPC won easily. The finding by the Court of rigging in a Constituency in Buganda, demoralized and exposed leaders of the DP as dishonest. For various reasons which had nothing to do with the impartiality of the High Court, the UPC lost in Court fifteen Petitions. The DP prosecuted only one out of their 24 Petitions. That is the nature of the vigor with which a Party which had claimed to have won elections sought to redress their grievance in the High Court.
97. Neither the DP leaders nor Museveni nor their friends abroad could or can even now produce a scintilla of proof that the 1980 elections were rigged in favor of the UPC. The lies by the leaders of the DP, as already indicated, gave Museveni a convenient cover to conceal his belief in arbitrary, tyrannical and militarist rule. Museveni's quest for that type of governance and the support given to him by the DP leaders, have cost Uganda most dearly first in Luwero and now in the Northern and Eastern Regions and Kasese District in the West.

Luwero War

98. The nature of the support which the DP leaders gave to Museveni was disclosed by the Party's Secretary General, Robert Kitariko, on October 6, 1989. The Citizen, the Mouthpiece of the DP, in its edition Vol. 6, No. 13 for the week ending October 18, 1989, said: "During Obote II, DP gave support, food, guidance and international publicity, Kitariko revealed and ask them (the gathering) who did not fight"?
99. The UPC Government knew that the DP leaders were giving support to Museveni in Luwero but could not prove it legally. Paul Ssemogerere, the President General of the DP was tackled by me and other members of the Government on the matter throughout the four and one-half years. He flatly denied any DP involvement in the Luwero war on the side of Museveni. Now that the Secretary General has "revealed" the "truth" which is the DP motto, Ssemogerere has the choice of continuing lying or accepting what Kitariko has disclosed. In either way, the UPC will take this crucial issue of Parliamentary democratic rule versus rule of the gun to the electorate and expose the DP for supporting the gun at the expense of the lives of our fellow citizens. Expose the DP leaders for their rapacity to continue to support Museveni in return for offices from whence they eat crumbs from Museveni's high table.
100. The "international publicity" which Kitariko disclosed is now silent in the face of genocide in the North and East. It was a concentrated propaganda against the UPC Government. The international media took up the conspiracy and saturated the world with one-sided stories in which the UPC Government allegedly committed all kinds of despicable atrocities in Luwero and Museveni who started the war was painted as defender of the people! A month after Museveni was sworn in as President, a Panorama team of the BBC was in Uganda. In their Panorama TV program (Gavin Hewit), the BBC team actually asserted that Luwero was "Obote's war to exterminate the Baganda"!
101. Luwero District as Ugandans know was, in fact, the most cosmopolitan of all the Districts in Uganda. Luwero was inhabited by practically all the major ethnic groups in Uganda. Had the UPC Government or Obote alone, as alleged by Hewit truly had such designs, Luwero was the least of all the 6 Districts in Buganda to have been chosen for "the extermination of the Baganda"!. It was not the BBC alone which during the Luwero war and after charged the UPC Government only of the atrocities of that war. All the great broadcasting stations and the great newspapers in Europe and North America did the same. They are still at it.
102. Museveni published a pamphlet - "Selected Articles on the Uganda Resistance War" - in 1985. In the pamphlet Museveni speaks of large areas of Luwero which were "No-go" areas for "Obote's army". After the war and more than four years after the end of the Luwero war in August 1985, no foreign journalist has gone to those "No-go" areas which were under the control of Museveni in order to prove the correctness of their concentrated propaganda against the UPC Government; instead the International Media have shied away from going to those areas in Luwero which Museveni governed and to observe how well Museveni governed his areas of Luwero. More than four years after Museveni took the reign of government, nothing of the kind has seen the light of day. Museveni himself who loves and lives on propaganda (lies) has not seen it fit to take foreign journalists in the areas he governed and where homes, schools, dispensaries, granaries, etc. remained intact on account of his protection.
103. Museveni has not done so for two reasons. First, because he waged his war as a terrorist onslaught on whoever, anywhere, did not accept him as leader of Uganda and secondly, to destroy institutions of good government replacing them by his own schemes for a militarist control of Uganda. There were more atrocities in the "NO-GO" areas.
104. Museveni launched his war with attacks not against UNLA units or barracks but against peasants in r