Yoweri Museveni: The Godfather of the final and permanent solutions in Northern Uganda, Rwanda, and DRC Congo
Key Words: Genocide, Northern Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Yoweri Museveni, General Nkunda, Paul Kagame, Rwanda, Uganda, Tutsi, Hutu, Bahima, NRM/A, RPF, Nairobi Accord, Arusha Accord.
Peaceful means have no place in changing a society
It is not difficult to endorse the assertions that Yoweri Museveni is the godfather of genocide, or as we want to chracterise it, the final and permanent solution-against those he disagrees with politically- in East and Central Africa. And for those who do not know yet, he is the enemy of Africa and Pan-Africanism.
Hundreds of thousands of people have perished in the northern Uganda conflict as a direct result of the policy of Yoweri Museveni to achieve a final and permanent solution to potential, imaginary, political opposition to his regime. These have been achieved through direct actions or neglecting to act to protect the population from the ravages of the rag-tag Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) insurgents. And also partly through mass displacements of the population by the government army, into centres that were not ready to receive and house, protect and care for people as mandated by international humanitarian law. Consequently, more people have died in the camps from preventable and opportunistic diseases, hunger, malnutrition and other social ills than they have in the hands of the rebels.
These conjunctions of policy failures, neglect and violence against the population were not accidental. To understand what has been going on in northern Uganda, or Uganda as a whole, as well as Rwanda, and DRC Congo, and the Great Lakes Region of East and Central Africa, we need to understand what political philosophies and strategies inform Yoweri Museveni's thinking and guide his actions. Professor Balam Nyeko and this author wrote a sketchy profile of Museveni in 2002, within editorial constraints and limited interests and scope that could not allow for the kind of analysis that we want to delve into here; regarding Museveni the man, and the northern Uganda conflict and beyond.
To understand Museveni and his actions, we will quote extensively from the thesis he wrote on Fanon's theory of violence and its validation during the Mozambican liberation struggles. Some may question, how a thesis written about 40 years ago, would be relevant to understanding Museveni the man today. Our response is that, we too have had some scepticisms, had it not been that, close reading of the paper suggests that, those beliefs and sometimes gratuitous violent strategies have largely been validated by Museveni's actions, politics, and policies in northern Ugnada, Luwero, Rwanda, Southern Sudan, and DRC Congo.
It is Museveni's faithful conviction that post-colonial African societies needed to be recast, through violence, in order to re-orient thinking and mould new individuals for new societies. According to him, where decolonisation was achieved through peaceful means, it left intact, colonised psychology and complexes in the natives, which could have only been got rid of through directed violence. Even where there were violence, such as in Kenya, he believes the violence was limited in scope, and only aimed to dislodge colonialism, but not complete overhaul of society and establishment of a radically different social and political order.
As a preface to our discussions, here is what Museveni believes the role of violence is and what change means. He remarks:
"It migh be said that one can conduct such political education without fighting so that Fanon's theory on violence becomes a superfluity or mere romanticism. I do not share that view. Without a revolution, a revolutionary social convulsion, one cannot get the necessary discipline to mobilise the population. One cannot create a new order unless one shakes the old one, that is why the Chinese bourgeois revolutionaries , like Dr. Sun Yat-Sen, and the communists were opposed to the old Chinese society, to Confucianism-which acted as a stabilising agent of the Chinese empire by providing it with an ethical basis. It is necessary to create social convulsions so that the social institutions, the custodians of the status quo ,...are not only brought into question but are actually shaken and made malleable, a pre-condition for successful recasting. To say that one can introduce fundamental changes without a violent shake-up is to say that one can turn ore into iron without melting it. Not only must you melt ore first but the fire must be of very high temperature to enable you to melt it."
When Museveni came to power in 1986, the people of northern Uganda initially embraced the National Resistance Movement / Army (NRM/A). But as far as Museveni was concerned, they were his political enemies because leaders of previous regimes came from among them. Moreover, the myth of northern martial invincibility needed to be imploded; this for the benefits of Museveni's fighters from the south of the country, to vindicate their potence, allegedly questioned by northerners for long; and also to educate the northern populace and those that still entertained the false belief in northern military prowess, that there was a new military prince from south of the country.
Therefore, the northern population, as " backward" and " politically unconscious masses", needed to be conditioned for the new order; because for a revolution to be thorough and meaningful, two conditions- the objective and subjective-must obtain or be fulfilled.
The objective conditions are the social, economic, and political situation in discontent of the people with the old society and their predilection to change. But as far as northern Uganda was concerned, the objective conditions for the NRM/A revolution did not exist here as it did in southern Uganda. In this sense, they were considered hostile to the revolution and must be remoulded. Therefore, the NRM/A had to rely on skilfully imposing the subjective conditions on them through "revolutionary violence" in order for them to also become proponents of the NRM revolutiion. Second, philosophically, Museveni believes in the therapeutic and persuasive power of "revolutionary violence"; for ordinary, unconscious masses to accept new revolutionary order, they must be passed through the wringers of "revolutionary violence".
As expressed in his much referenced yet ignored thesis: Fanon's Theory on Violence: Its verifidation in Liberated Mozambique, Museveni believes that "violence is the highest form of political struggle." That "not only is violence the only effective instrument of bringing about...real (change)"; but "it is also a laxative, a purgative, an agent for creating new men." It is the process by which "revolutionary violence" creates the subjective conditions for a revolution among population reluctant to embrace the kind of change envisioned by the revolutionaries. The need for change has to be created, instigated by cadres and agents of the revolution, through "political propaganda" among the people, and by showing the people that they have power by making sure the people witness how the "enemy can be destroyed by revolutionary violence."
As can be seen, forcing people out of their homes to townsquares in northern and eastern Uganda in the 1980s to mid 1990s, cannot be understood as anything else but to show the people the power of "revolutionary violence". The lesson was that those who resist were destined to suffer the same fate. Moreover, the myth of northern martial invincibility, needed to be permanently put to rest both in the minds of Museveni's fighters, and northern population. Accordingly, Museveni poignantly remarks that:
"It must be seen that the 'invincibility' of the enemy is just fraudulent; he is invincible because he has never been challenged by a revolutionary force using the correct methods of revolutionary violence. It ...(is)...necessary to show peasants fragments of ...(enemy fighter)...blown up by a mine or, better still, his head. Once peasants see....the head of the former master, ...the head cold in death, ..., he will know, or at least begin to suspect, that the picture traditionally presented to him of the ...(enemy's)...invincibility is nothing but a scarecrow."
Furthermore, the people need to be involved in destroying the enemy. They are therefore, to be politicised, aroused so that they can take up arms and partake of the revolutionary banquet of blood. Museveni himself asserts that it is " more remunerative to get the masses themselves to kill enemy troops. Such visual aids help (them) -to realise (their) potentiality and power." In this respect, the creation of the Arrow Brigades under Betty Bigombe, as the aptly named Minister for the Pacification of (the Primitive Tribes of) Northern Uganda, was not accidental. Nor was the exposure of captured or surrendering insurgents, suspected insurgents and alleged rebel collaborators to mob violence and lynchings by NRA commanders such as Brigadier Kazini in Gulu, accidental. These were all part and parcel of revolutionary violence and the strengthening of the subjective preconditions for moulding an entirely new society as planned by its proponents.Its other aim was also to make sure, the masses, once involved, lost their innocence and became part of the plot of the revolution and its counterinsurgency strategies against so called reactionry forces from within and without.
In addition, there is no doubt that mass displacement of people into camps in northern and eastern Uganda, and neglecting to provide social amenities as expected of a responsible government, were all deliberate revolutionary strategy to induce mass suffering and whip up the people's anger against those presumed to be the sources of their suffering. In this case, it is presented as the LRA. But reading Museveni critically, we can confidently assert that mass displacement had less to do with the safety of civilian population, than Museveni's belief that:
"...revolutionary struggles, preferably culminating in armed violence, purify societies. ...The reason for this purification is not hard to find; once the individuals are purified, then society as a whole will most likely be purified because, after all, society is an aggregate of individuals....The starting point is, therefore, the sublimation of individuals and everything will fall in its place. The sublimatory remoulding of individuals.... (leads) ...to a concomittant recasting of the whole society." (Emphasis added).
Strategies for the final and permanent solution
Museveni shot his way to power, despite the Nairobi Peace Accord, signed between the Military Council in Uganda and his insurgent National Resistance Movement / Army (NRM/A)in 1985. Perfect, it may have not been, but the Nairobi Accord did provide a credible and workable framework and incentives for peaceful political order and national reconciliation, without any further bloodshed than already shed in Luwero and during the 1985 coup. But Museveni needed war and violence, to provide the conditions for him and his forces to physically get rid of elements of the previous regimes and those considered reactionary, more than a negotiated political solution would have provided.It is the same view, that has guided his prosecution of counter-insurgency in northern Uganda.
Bent on a dubious political vendetta driven by irrational grudges and hatred against Milton Obote specifically, but northerners generally, Museveni duped the principals to the peace accord to believe he was committed to the provisions of the agreement, when all the while, he knew he wanted none of it, but to prepare for war and strike and defeat the national government he consistently mischaracterised as northern, foreign and Sudanese or Anyanya.
When he took power in 1986, Museveni knew that the rumparts of the Military Council government, and elements of the former Uganda National Liberation Army (UNLA) that it had defeated, could have been absorbed peacefully through some kind of negotiation than force. However, Museveni and the NRM/A, were not merely seeking to defeat the UNLA and the so-called northerners and seize power as we have already noted, but to stamp out by all means, any potentials for future northern threats to their holding onto power as long as possible-perhaps for 50 years if the clandestine Basiita (Museveni's) Clan's Fifty-Year Plan for ruling Uganda is to be believed.
It is easy to dismiss the plan as propaganda work of Museveni's detractors. But keen observation of what has transpired in Uganda and the Great Lakes Region in the last 23 years, gives pause for thought and a second look at what the NRM/A tribal clique are up to. In our considered view, Museveni's plan is to use economic, military and other means, to enrich his henchemen, while impoverishing people considered real, potential and imagined enemies or possible future challgers to the NRm/A regime. In fact, Museveni is not alone in this. His cousins, the Tutsi Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) who themselves were wards of the Uganda president, are singing from the same hymn book, as far as holding onto power and dealing with political opponents are concerned. In both cases, they are employing a strategy of final and permanent solution-mass physical elimination of their enemies or opponents through economic and social impoverishment and employing military means to suppress and eliminate opponents and terrorise their communities.
First, on coming to power, Museveni through privatisation programmes, shared out state assets among the top people in the NRM/A-which coincidentally were mostly Bahima. In order to create some semblance of credibility, those who were allocated these industries, former government civil service and parastatal houses, ranches and machineries, gave themselves loans from the state Uganda Commercial Bank (UCB) in the hundreds of millions of Uganda shillings, without intending to pay. In the end, they again recapitalised UCB, and sold it to Salim Saleh, the president's brother well below its appraised value. When this was exposed and there was a national uproar, they brought in Standard Bank of South Africa as a partner and a mask for the NRM/A biggies, which allegedly bought UCB, turning it into STANBIC.
While the new rulers were dipping their hands into the national till, they were economically chopping off the hands of those whose political loyalty were questionable. Moreover, people from northern and eastern parts of Uganda, considered loyal to the deposed UPC party, were particularly targeted for marginalisation. Their assets were frozen, and those with seniority in the civil service were retrenched in a move calculated to weed out people from the wrong parts of the country, than any alleged serious efforts at cutting costs and making the civil service leaner and more efficient.
As for the ordinary people from these parts of the country, and other areas considered UPC strongholds, the new NRM/A government dismantled cooperatives societies in Ankole, Bugisu, Busoga, Teso and Acholi, to deny the population any means of generating surplus that could be used to fund and organise political opposition to the new regime in Kampala. Particularly for Teso, Lango and Acholi, the NRM/A went even a step further, by the army itself rustling livestock and looting produce from granaries in these areas under the pretext of denying insurgents sources of food. Just to make sure no livestock was left, the other plank of the strategy was to disarm anti-stock theft militias in Acholi, Lango and Teso, while leaving the Karamojong under arms and to roam the region unmolested, in search of any cattle missed by Museveni's army.
With their livestock completely depleted, the people in these region were left impoverished, since their sources of food and animal traction for ploughs were no more and social reproduction itself became difficult. As if this was not enough social dislocation already, the NRM/A adopted mass displacements of population into so-called protected villages at short notice, allegedly to leave the countryside open for government to robustly mount assaults on insurgents. Contrary to international humanitarian laws on internal displacements, these displacement centres were unplanned and no provisions were made for the masses forced into them, where they suffered abuses, sexual violence and murders in the hands of government forces, and continued attacks and abductions by insurgents of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA).
Left impoverished, destitute and unproductive, these people could neither feed themselves, nor send their children to school. And as they were being dispossessed, the NRM brought in economic liberalisation measures, which nmeant, access to sevices was now through the market and availabilty now depended on ability to pay for services.It meant that, eastern and northern Uganda would lag behind the rest of the country in social and economic indices of development and wellbeing.
Second, Museveni deliberately provoked insurgency in northern Uganda by colluding with the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) to attack and drive back into Uganda, refugees from northern Uganda, particularly Acholi, who had fled into the Sudan when Museveni and the NRM/A seized power and committed atrocities against civilians in Buu-Cooro, Nam Okora, Kitgum, and throughout Acholi and eastern Uganda. These actions were preceded by rounding up of able-bodied Acholi boys and men and shipping them to unknown destinations in the south of the country, from where none returned to date.
Furthermore, with the insurgency against NRM/A atrocities picking up steam, the NRM/A adopted a strategy of gang-pressing able-bodied Acholi boys and men into so-called Local Defence Units (LDU) purpotedly to protect the local population and communities against acts of violence from any quarters. However, this was a clever strategy by Museveni and the NRM/A, to not only deny possible recruitment into the ranks of insurgents by putting these boys and men under arms on the side of the state, but it also desired to eliminate them physically, by deploying these boys and men in the front line under a Muhima or Tutsi commander, as the first line of defence against insurgents. During this time, when the Museveni government denied there was insurgency against his government but that it was Acholi killing Acholi, there was some element of truth to it.
Indeed, it served Museveni, the Basita plan, and the NRM/A vision of eliminating potential and possible sources and resources for organised opposition to them, when they could keep out of harm's way, the Tutsi and Bahima dominated NRM/A government forces, and let the Acholi local militia and the same Acholi insurgents, finish themselves off. In the end, it is Acholi that is diminished three ways-through the deaths of insurgents, local militia allied to the state, and the civilian population targeted by insurgents for supporting the government, and those caught in the crossfires, as well as those dying in the concentration camps through opportunistic diseases, hunger, and malnutrition.
All these work to fulfill the schemes for a final and permanent solution to organised political or military opposition to Museveni from northern Uganda. As he nerve-jarringly opined;
"To transform a human being into an efficient, uncostly and completely subservient slave, you have, as a pre-condition, to completely purge him of his humanity, manhood and will. Otherwise, as long as he has some hope of a better, free future, he will never succumb to enslavement."
Extrapolating northern Uganda to Rwanda and DRC Congo
As we suggested above, Museveni and Kagame in Rwanda, share the same philosophy on how to treat political opponents, particularly at the community level. As did Museveni to the northerners and easterners after he came to power-to create as much condition for violent conflict as possible, in order to draw able-bodied boys and men from particular communities considered political opponents and enemies into conflict and deaths-so has Paul Kagame in Rwanda.
In fact there are close parallels between what transpired in Uganda and what happened in Rwanda. Like Uganda, there was the Arusha Accord, between the RPF and the Rwandan government of Juvenal Abyerimana. And like Uganda, the RPF pretended to be willing to share power and abide by the Árusha Accord, when in truth, they were preparing for a military showdown, to seize power and use all resources of power, to eliminate their opponents physically. These they accomplished during their short insurgency operations and during the chaotic situation when they shot down Abyeremana's plane and plunged Rwanda into anarchy.
Just like Museveni, the RPF were crying wolf, while they were deeply involved in committing the kinds of atrocities they were accusing their opponents of perpetrating. For instance, it is known that the RPF were in full and complete control of the Kagera region, and yet that is one of the regions where the most horrendous atrocities were committed, with bodies clogging up the Kagera River. And most of those bodies were Hutus.
When the Hutus were driven out of Rwanda into Congo, the RPF followed them there; ransacked refugee camps and killed hundreds of thousands of women, children and men under the noses of the UN and international humanitarian organisations in 1994-96. Terrorised and dispersed into the Congo jungles, Rwandan refugees were hunted down like foxes by the combined Ugandan, Rwandan and Rwanda controlled and commanded Congolese Army under Laurent Kabila, the father of the current president, then an ally of Uganda and Rwanda who had put him into power after deposing Mubutu Ssesekou. Estimates have put the Congo debacles at more than 4,000,000 million people killed as a result of Ugandan and Rwandan involvement in conflicts in the region.
All these were done by Museveni and Kagame, in pursuit of the final and permanent solution-to neutralise northerners in Uganda and Rwandan Hutus in Rwanda, as potential threats to their respective regimes. Both Museveni and Kagame have followed these paths with lessons from history of Uganda under dictator Idi Amin. Amin massacred and terrorised the northern communities of Achli and Langi, after he deposed Milton Obote in`1971. According to the Museveni and Kagame strategy, Amin made the mistake of not terrorising and weakening the two communities enough to not be able to either flee into exile to swell the ranks of future insurgents, or its internal elites amassing wealth to suport future challenges to his regime. Indeed, Ugandan exiles, predominatly Acholi and Langi who had fled the Amin terror, supported by Tanzanian forces, overthrew Amin in April 1979.
Closer to home, Kagame himself being a former refugee in Uganda, witnessed first hand how hospitable sanctuary as Uganda was able to accord to them under successive governments, can make refugees communities like his integrate, prosper and penetrate power elites and mount assaults on oppressive regimes back in their original homelands. In fact they had done it under RPF with the backing of Yoweri Museveni.
It is their own success against Abyerimana, and its posssibility of being replicated in the distant future by the masses of Hutus fleeing into the Congo, that continue to haunt Kagame in Rwanda, and it is the reason that we see General Nkunda is active. It is not for nothing that we learnt recently, Rwandese Hutu children are fleeing for their dear lives from being forcibly recruited into Gen. Nkunda's rebel army-a leaf righ out of Yoweri Museveni's counter insurgency doctrine of using your opponent's own people to fight against them.
We are persuaded to believe that, as long as there are Hutu regugees-forget whether they are former soldiers or ordinary civilians-settled or attempting to settle in any part of the DRC, Museveni and Kagame will not want for tricks and stratagems to make sure they do not settle and prosper to present any threats to Rwanda in the future. That is why, Nkunda's claims about fighting to protect native Congolese Tutsis or Banyamulenge, is so convenient.
The two regimes in Kigali and Kampala would rather the Hutu refugees in Congo are either killed off or driven back into Rwanda, where economic and repressive weapons can be used to weaken, marginalise and disarm them of any ability and potential capacity to mobilise and organise internally to challenge the regime; the same way Museveni has been able to do in Acholi, Lango, Teso, and West Nile or northern and eastern Uganda through counter insrugency measures, including mass encampment without any kind of cupport to the population.
What is to be done?
We therefore urge progressive and Pan-Africanist leaders in Angola, Namibia, Zimbabwe, and Tanzania, as well as the African Diaspora-from the Caribean to Australasia-to see the jackals in Uganda, Rwanda and Eastern Congo-who cry wolf-for who they are-predators rather than preys. It is time therefore, these leaders in the region, treated Yoweri Museveni for who he is: the author and godfather of heinous crimes of final and permanent solutions against certain groups of African peoples in the region. Museveni, Kagame and Nkunda, must be treated for who they are-agents of hate, genocide and African bondage suffering.
It is time progressive African leaders actively and militarily came to the aid of DRC Congo and its people in the east of the country. We cannot repeat the mistakes we made, that cost the life of the young, progressive,revolutionary and Pan-Africanist Patrice Lumumba. We must act now and against any detractions from Washington or London or Brussels or Paris, in their stubbornness not to understand Museveni, and the diabolical social and political beliefs that underpin his exercise of political power and the use of people as mere instruments for Machavelian ends.
We must act in the interest of the African peoples.
Peaceful means have no place in changing a society
It is not difficult to endorse the assertions that Yoweri Museveni is the godfather of genocide, or as we want to chracterise it, the final and permanent solution-against those he disagrees with politically- in East and Central Africa. And for those who do not know yet, he is the enemy of Africa and Pan-Africanism.
Hundreds of thousands of people have perished in the northern Uganda conflict as a direct result of the policy of Yoweri Museveni to achieve a final and permanent solution to potential, imaginary, political opposition to his regime. These have been achieved through direct actions or neglecting to act to protect the population from the ravages of the rag-tag Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) insurgents. And also partly through mass displacements of the population by the government army, into centres that were not ready to receive and house, protect and care for people as mandated by international humanitarian law. Consequently, more people have died in the camps from preventable and opportunistic diseases, hunger, malnutrition and other social ills than they have in the hands of the rebels.
These conjunctions of policy failures, neglect and violence against the population were not accidental. To understand what has been going on in northern Uganda, or Uganda as a whole, as well as Rwanda, and DRC Congo, and the Great Lakes Region of East and Central Africa, we need to understand what political philosophies and strategies inform Yoweri Museveni's thinking and guide his actions. Professor Balam Nyeko and this author wrote a sketchy profile of Museveni in 2002, within editorial constraints and limited interests and scope that could not allow for the kind of analysis that we want to delve into here; regarding Museveni the man, and the northern Uganda conflict and beyond.
To understand Museveni and his actions, we will quote extensively from the thesis he wrote on Fanon's theory of violence and its validation during the Mozambican liberation struggles. Some may question, how a thesis written about 40 years ago, would be relevant to understanding Museveni the man today. Our response is that, we too have had some scepticisms, had it not been that, close reading of the paper suggests that, those beliefs and sometimes gratuitous violent strategies have largely been validated by Museveni's actions, politics, and policies in northern Ugnada, Luwero, Rwanda, Southern Sudan, and DRC Congo.
It is Museveni's faithful conviction that post-colonial African societies needed to be recast, through violence, in order to re-orient thinking and mould new individuals for new societies. According to him, where decolonisation was achieved through peaceful means, it left intact, colonised psychology and complexes in the natives, which could have only been got rid of through directed violence. Even where there were violence, such as in Kenya, he believes the violence was limited in scope, and only aimed to dislodge colonialism, but not complete overhaul of society and establishment of a radically different social and political order.
As a preface to our discussions, here is what Museveni believes the role of violence is and what change means. He remarks:
"It migh be said that one can conduct such political education without fighting so that Fanon's theory on violence becomes a superfluity or mere romanticism. I do not share that view. Without a revolution, a revolutionary social convulsion, one cannot get the necessary discipline to mobilise the population. One cannot create a new order unless one shakes the old one, that is why the Chinese bourgeois revolutionaries , like Dr. Sun Yat-Sen, and the communists were opposed to the old Chinese society, to Confucianism-which acted as a stabilising agent of the Chinese empire by providing it with an ethical basis. It is necessary to create social convulsions so that the social institutions, the custodians of the status quo ,...are not only brought into question but are actually shaken and made malleable, a pre-condition for successful recasting. To say that one can introduce fundamental changes without a violent shake-up is to say that one can turn ore into iron without melting it. Not only must you melt ore first but the fire must be of very high temperature to enable you to melt it."
When Museveni came to power in 1986, the people of northern Uganda initially embraced the National Resistance Movement / Army (NRM/A). But as far as Museveni was concerned, they were his political enemies because leaders of previous regimes came from among them. Moreover, the myth of northern martial invincibility needed to be imploded; this for the benefits of Museveni's fighters from the south of the country, to vindicate their potence, allegedly questioned by northerners for long; and also to educate the northern populace and those that still entertained the false belief in northern military prowess, that there was a new military prince from south of the country.
Therefore, the northern population, as " backward" and " politically unconscious masses", needed to be conditioned for the new order; because for a revolution to be thorough and meaningful, two conditions- the objective and subjective-must obtain or be fulfilled.
The objective conditions are the social, economic, and political situation in discontent of the people with the old society and their predilection to change. But as far as northern Uganda was concerned, the objective conditions for the NRM/A revolution did not exist here as it did in southern Uganda. In this sense, they were considered hostile to the revolution and must be remoulded. Therefore, the NRM/A had to rely on skilfully imposing the subjective conditions on them through "revolutionary violence" in order for them to also become proponents of the NRM revolutiion. Second, philosophically, Museveni believes in the therapeutic and persuasive power of "revolutionary violence"; for ordinary, unconscious masses to accept new revolutionary order, they must be passed through the wringers of "revolutionary violence".
As expressed in his much referenced yet ignored thesis: Fanon's Theory on Violence: Its verifidation in Liberated Mozambique, Museveni believes that "violence is the highest form of political struggle." That "not only is violence the only effective instrument of bringing about...real (change)"; but "it is also a laxative, a purgative, an agent for creating new men." It is the process by which "revolutionary violence" creates the subjective conditions for a revolution among population reluctant to embrace the kind of change envisioned by the revolutionaries. The need for change has to be created, instigated by cadres and agents of the revolution, through "political propaganda" among the people, and by showing the people that they have power by making sure the people witness how the "enemy can be destroyed by revolutionary violence."
As can be seen, forcing people out of their homes to townsquares in northern and eastern Uganda in the 1980s to mid 1990s, cannot be understood as anything else but to show the people the power of "revolutionary violence". The lesson was that those who resist were destined to suffer the same fate. Moreover, the myth of northern martial invincibility, needed to be permanently put to rest both in the minds of Museveni's fighters, and northern population. Accordingly, Museveni poignantly remarks that:
"It must be seen that the 'invincibility' of the enemy is just fraudulent; he is invincible because he has never been challenged by a revolutionary force using the correct methods of revolutionary violence. It ...(is)...necessary to show peasants fragments of ...(enemy fighter)...blown up by a mine or, better still, his head. Once peasants see....the head of the former master, ...the head cold in death, ..., he will know, or at least begin to suspect, that the picture traditionally presented to him of the ...(enemy's)...invincibility is nothing but a scarecrow."
Furthermore, the people need to be involved in destroying the enemy. They are therefore, to be politicised, aroused so that they can take up arms and partake of the revolutionary banquet of blood. Museveni himself asserts that it is " more remunerative to get the masses themselves to kill enemy troops. Such visual aids help (them) -to realise (their) potentiality and power." In this respect, the creation of the Arrow Brigades under Betty Bigombe, as the aptly named Minister for the Pacification of (the Primitive Tribes of) Northern Uganda, was not accidental. Nor was the exposure of captured or surrendering insurgents, suspected insurgents and alleged rebel collaborators to mob violence and lynchings by NRA commanders such as Brigadier Kazini in Gulu, accidental. These were all part and parcel of revolutionary violence and the strengthening of the subjective preconditions for moulding an entirely new society as planned by its proponents.Its other aim was also to make sure, the masses, once involved, lost their innocence and became part of the plot of the revolution and its counterinsurgency strategies against so called reactionry forces from within and without.
In addition, there is no doubt that mass displacement of people into camps in northern and eastern Uganda, and neglecting to provide social amenities as expected of a responsible government, were all deliberate revolutionary strategy to induce mass suffering and whip up the people's anger against those presumed to be the sources of their suffering. In this case, it is presented as the LRA. But reading Museveni critically, we can confidently assert that mass displacement had less to do with the safety of civilian population, than Museveni's belief that:
"...revolutionary struggles, preferably culminating in armed violence, purify societies. ...The reason for this purification is not hard to find; once the individuals are purified, then society as a whole will most likely be purified because, after all, society is an aggregate of individuals....The starting point is, therefore, the sublimation of individuals and everything will fall in its place. The sublimatory remoulding of individuals.... (leads) ...to a concomittant recasting of the whole society." (Emphasis added).
Strategies for the final and permanent solution
Museveni shot his way to power, despite the Nairobi Peace Accord, signed between the Military Council in Uganda and his insurgent National Resistance Movement / Army (NRM/A)in 1985. Perfect, it may have not been, but the Nairobi Accord did provide a credible and workable framework and incentives for peaceful political order and national reconciliation, without any further bloodshed than already shed in Luwero and during the 1985 coup. But Museveni needed war and violence, to provide the conditions for him and his forces to physically get rid of elements of the previous regimes and those considered reactionary, more than a negotiated political solution would have provided.It is the same view, that has guided his prosecution of counter-insurgency in northern Uganda.
Bent on a dubious political vendetta driven by irrational grudges and hatred against Milton Obote specifically, but northerners generally, Museveni duped the principals to the peace accord to believe he was committed to the provisions of the agreement, when all the while, he knew he wanted none of it, but to prepare for war and strike and defeat the national government he consistently mischaracterised as northern, foreign and Sudanese or Anyanya.
When he took power in 1986, Museveni knew that the rumparts of the Military Council government, and elements of the former Uganda National Liberation Army (UNLA) that it had defeated, could have been absorbed peacefully through some kind of negotiation than force. However, Museveni and the NRM/A, were not merely seeking to defeat the UNLA and the so-called northerners and seize power as we have already noted, but to stamp out by all means, any potentials for future northern threats to their holding onto power as long as possible-perhaps for 50 years if the clandestine Basiita (Museveni's) Clan's Fifty-Year Plan for ruling Uganda is to be believed.
It is easy to dismiss the plan as propaganda work of Museveni's detractors. But keen observation of what has transpired in Uganda and the Great Lakes Region in the last 23 years, gives pause for thought and a second look at what the NRM/A tribal clique are up to. In our considered view, Museveni's plan is to use economic, military and other means, to enrich his henchemen, while impoverishing people considered real, potential and imagined enemies or possible future challgers to the NRm/A regime. In fact, Museveni is not alone in this. His cousins, the Tutsi Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) who themselves were wards of the Uganda president, are singing from the same hymn book, as far as holding onto power and dealing with political opponents are concerned. In both cases, they are employing a strategy of final and permanent solution-mass physical elimination of their enemies or opponents through economic and social impoverishment and employing military means to suppress and eliminate opponents and terrorise their communities.
First, on coming to power, Museveni through privatisation programmes, shared out state assets among the top people in the NRM/A-which coincidentally were mostly Bahima. In order to create some semblance of credibility, those who were allocated these industries, former government civil service and parastatal houses, ranches and machineries, gave themselves loans from the state Uganda Commercial Bank (UCB) in the hundreds of millions of Uganda shillings, without intending to pay. In the end, they again recapitalised UCB, and sold it to Salim Saleh, the president's brother well below its appraised value. When this was exposed and there was a national uproar, they brought in Standard Bank of South Africa as a partner and a mask for the NRM/A biggies, which allegedly bought UCB, turning it into STANBIC.
While the new rulers were dipping their hands into the national till, they were economically chopping off the hands of those whose political loyalty were questionable. Moreover, people from northern and eastern parts of Uganda, considered loyal to the deposed UPC party, were particularly targeted for marginalisation. Their assets were frozen, and those with seniority in the civil service were retrenched in a move calculated to weed out people from the wrong parts of the country, than any alleged serious efforts at cutting costs and making the civil service leaner and more efficient.
As for the ordinary people from these parts of the country, and other areas considered UPC strongholds, the new NRM/A government dismantled cooperatives societies in Ankole, Bugisu, Busoga, Teso and Acholi, to deny the population any means of generating surplus that could be used to fund and organise political opposition to the new regime in Kampala. Particularly for Teso, Lango and Acholi, the NRM/A went even a step further, by the army itself rustling livestock and looting produce from granaries in these areas under the pretext of denying insurgents sources of food. Just to make sure no livestock was left, the other plank of the strategy was to disarm anti-stock theft militias in Acholi, Lango and Teso, while leaving the Karamojong under arms and to roam the region unmolested, in search of any cattle missed by Museveni's army.
With their livestock completely depleted, the people in these region were left impoverished, since their sources of food and animal traction for ploughs were no more and social reproduction itself became difficult. As if this was not enough social dislocation already, the NRM/A adopted mass displacements of population into so-called protected villages at short notice, allegedly to leave the countryside open for government to robustly mount assaults on insurgents. Contrary to international humanitarian laws on internal displacements, these displacement centres were unplanned and no provisions were made for the masses forced into them, where they suffered abuses, sexual violence and murders in the hands of government forces, and continued attacks and abductions by insurgents of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA).
Left impoverished, destitute and unproductive, these people could neither feed themselves, nor send their children to school. And as they were being dispossessed, the NRM brought in economic liberalisation measures, which nmeant, access to sevices was now through the market and availabilty now depended on ability to pay for services.It meant that, eastern and northern Uganda would lag behind the rest of the country in social and economic indices of development and wellbeing.
Second, Museveni deliberately provoked insurgency in northern Uganda by colluding with the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) to attack and drive back into Uganda, refugees from northern Uganda, particularly Acholi, who had fled into the Sudan when Museveni and the NRM/A seized power and committed atrocities against civilians in Buu-Cooro, Nam Okora, Kitgum, and throughout Acholi and eastern Uganda. These actions were preceded by rounding up of able-bodied Acholi boys and men and shipping them to unknown destinations in the south of the country, from where none returned to date.
Furthermore, with the insurgency against NRM/A atrocities picking up steam, the NRM/A adopted a strategy of gang-pressing able-bodied Acholi boys and men into so-called Local Defence Units (LDU) purpotedly to protect the local population and communities against acts of violence from any quarters. However, this was a clever strategy by Museveni and the NRM/A, to not only deny possible recruitment into the ranks of insurgents by putting these boys and men under arms on the side of the state, but it also desired to eliminate them physically, by deploying these boys and men in the front line under a Muhima or Tutsi commander, as the first line of defence against insurgents. During this time, when the Museveni government denied there was insurgency against his government but that it was Acholi killing Acholi, there was some element of truth to it.
Indeed, it served Museveni, the Basita plan, and the NRM/A vision of eliminating potential and possible sources and resources for organised opposition to them, when they could keep out of harm's way, the Tutsi and Bahima dominated NRM/A government forces, and let the Acholi local militia and the same Acholi insurgents, finish themselves off. In the end, it is Acholi that is diminished three ways-through the deaths of insurgents, local militia allied to the state, and the civilian population targeted by insurgents for supporting the government, and those caught in the crossfires, as well as those dying in the concentration camps through opportunistic diseases, hunger, and malnutrition.
All these work to fulfill the schemes for a final and permanent solution to organised political or military opposition to Museveni from northern Uganda. As he nerve-jarringly opined;
"To transform a human being into an efficient, uncostly and completely subservient slave, you have, as a pre-condition, to completely purge him of his humanity, manhood and will. Otherwise, as long as he has some hope of a better, free future, he will never succumb to enslavement."
Extrapolating northern Uganda to Rwanda and DRC Congo
As we suggested above, Museveni and Kagame in Rwanda, share the same philosophy on how to treat political opponents, particularly at the community level. As did Museveni to the northerners and easterners after he came to power-to create as much condition for violent conflict as possible, in order to draw able-bodied boys and men from particular communities considered political opponents and enemies into conflict and deaths-so has Paul Kagame in Rwanda.
In fact there are close parallels between what transpired in Uganda and what happened in Rwanda. Like Uganda, there was the Arusha Accord, between the RPF and the Rwandan government of Juvenal Abyerimana. And like Uganda, the RPF pretended to be willing to share power and abide by the Árusha Accord, when in truth, they were preparing for a military showdown, to seize power and use all resources of power, to eliminate their opponents physically. These they accomplished during their short insurgency operations and during the chaotic situation when they shot down Abyeremana's plane and plunged Rwanda into anarchy.
Just like Museveni, the RPF were crying wolf, while they were deeply involved in committing the kinds of atrocities they were accusing their opponents of perpetrating. For instance, it is known that the RPF were in full and complete control of the Kagera region, and yet that is one of the regions where the most horrendous atrocities were committed, with bodies clogging up the Kagera River. And most of those bodies were Hutus.
When the Hutus were driven out of Rwanda into Congo, the RPF followed them there; ransacked refugee camps and killed hundreds of thousands of women, children and men under the noses of the UN and international humanitarian organisations in 1994-96. Terrorised and dispersed into the Congo jungles, Rwandan refugees were hunted down like foxes by the combined Ugandan, Rwandan and Rwanda controlled and commanded Congolese Army under Laurent Kabila, the father of the current president, then an ally of Uganda and Rwanda who had put him into power after deposing Mubutu Ssesekou. Estimates have put the Congo debacles at more than 4,000,000 million people killed as a result of Ugandan and Rwandan involvement in conflicts in the region.
All these were done by Museveni and Kagame, in pursuit of the final and permanent solution-to neutralise northerners in Uganda and Rwandan Hutus in Rwanda, as potential threats to their respective regimes. Both Museveni and Kagame have followed these paths with lessons from history of Uganda under dictator Idi Amin. Amin massacred and terrorised the northern communities of Achli and Langi, after he deposed Milton Obote in`1971. According to the Museveni and Kagame strategy, Amin made the mistake of not terrorising and weakening the two communities enough to not be able to either flee into exile to swell the ranks of future insurgents, or its internal elites amassing wealth to suport future challenges to his regime. Indeed, Ugandan exiles, predominatly Acholi and Langi who had fled the Amin terror, supported by Tanzanian forces, overthrew Amin in April 1979.
Closer to home, Kagame himself being a former refugee in Uganda, witnessed first hand how hospitable sanctuary as Uganda was able to accord to them under successive governments, can make refugees communities like his integrate, prosper and penetrate power elites and mount assaults on oppressive regimes back in their original homelands. In fact they had done it under RPF with the backing of Yoweri Museveni.
It is their own success against Abyerimana, and its posssibility of being replicated in the distant future by the masses of Hutus fleeing into the Congo, that continue to haunt Kagame in Rwanda, and it is the reason that we see General Nkunda is active. It is not for nothing that we learnt recently, Rwandese Hutu children are fleeing for their dear lives from being forcibly recruited into Gen. Nkunda's rebel army-a leaf righ out of Yoweri Museveni's counter insurgency doctrine of using your opponent's own people to fight against them.
We are persuaded to believe that, as long as there are Hutu regugees-forget whether they are former soldiers or ordinary civilians-settled or attempting to settle in any part of the DRC, Museveni and Kagame will not want for tricks and stratagems to make sure they do not settle and prosper to present any threats to Rwanda in the future. That is why, Nkunda's claims about fighting to protect native Congolese Tutsis or Banyamulenge, is so convenient.
The two regimes in Kigali and Kampala would rather the Hutu refugees in Congo are either killed off or driven back into Rwanda, where economic and repressive weapons can be used to weaken, marginalise and disarm them of any ability and potential capacity to mobilise and organise internally to challenge the regime; the same way Museveni has been able to do in Acholi, Lango, Teso, and West Nile or northern and eastern Uganda through counter insrugency measures, including mass encampment without any kind of cupport to the population.
What is to be done?
We therefore urge progressive and Pan-Africanist leaders in Angola, Namibia, Zimbabwe, and Tanzania, as well as the African Diaspora-from the Caribean to Australasia-to see the jackals in Uganda, Rwanda and Eastern Congo-who cry wolf-for who they are-predators rather than preys. It is time therefore, these leaders in the region, treated Yoweri Museveni for who he is: the author and godfather of heinous crimes of final and permanent solutions against certain groups of African peoples in the region. Museveni, Kagame and Nkunda, must be treated for who they are-agents of hate, genocide and African bondage suffering.
It is time progressive African leaders actively and militarily came to the aid of DRC Congo and its people in the east of the country. We cannot repeat the mistakes we made, that cost the life of the young, progressive,revolutionary and Pan-Africanist Patrice Lumumba. We must act now and against any detractions from Washington or London or Brussels or Paris, in their stubbornness not to understand Museveni, and the diabolical social and political beliefs that underpin his exercise of political power and the use of people as mere instruments for Machavelian ends.
We must act in the interest of the African peoples.
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