Northern Uganda Messenger Post

Déjà Vu? Since the implementation of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) between Khartoum and the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement/ Army (SPLM/A) that established the Government of South Sudan at Juba, border and land disputes have characterised relations between South Sudan and Uganda. These disputes between border communities and the two countries underscore the need to revisit the notion of nation-statehood based on arbitrary colonial boundaries. In its issue of 25 October 2011, the Sudan Tribune reported South Sudan accusing Uganda of tampering with international boundary markers between the two countries that extended Uganda’s northern frontiers by tens of miles into South Sudan. This is the border area between Magwi County in Eastern Equatoria State of South Sudan and Lamwo District in northern Uganda. According to the report, a meeting called to discuss the concerns agreed a joint resolution to investigate the matter, but Lamwo Resident District Commissioner (RDC...

Dear friends and readers, Sorry I have not been able to write for the last couple of years. However, I am happy to announce that I am back and can once again make the time to write and comment on global and African issues of interest, particularly democratization in Uganda. Interestingly, I was away in Uganda, trying to do my bit about changing the world....putting to test and good use all that Professors Rodger Schwass, Peter Penz, Bill Found, Roger Keil, David Morley, Gene Desfore, Jennifer Clapp, Jack Craig and the good people at York University based their lectures, talks, conversations, workshops, debates and those ever useful brownbag lectures on sustainability. And not forgetting the Summer Practicum with Greg Albo and Vandan Shiva. Yes, Uganda has been one of the bright spots for the last several years as far as neoliberal indicators for development are concerned. However, in terms of sustainability as I learnt at York University, and as propounded by Vandana Shiva and...

Otunnu Welcomes US Congressional Directive on 2011 Ugandan Elections Jan.13, 2010 Kampala, Washington, Mr. Olara A. Otunnu, former United Nations Under Secretary General and an opposition leader in Uganda, today welcomed the directive by the United States Congress to the US Secretary of State to closely monitor preparations for the 2011 Elections in Uganda. Mr. Otunnu said, “I am delighted and applaud the US Congress for taking this decisive action in favour of free and fair elections in Uganda. This is a most welcome development.” Speaking in Washington, Mr. Otunnu said that the U.S. Congress has directed the US Secretary of State to work with other countries, including the European Union and Canada, to ensure free and fair elections in Uganda in 2011. Mr. Otunnu stated, “The Congressional directive is of particular importance given the extensive and well documented rigging and fraud witnessed in recent elections in Uganda.” The Congressional directive calls for close monitoring of t...

Last Monday, 21 December 2009, former UN Undersecretary General for Children and Armed Conflict, Olara Otunnu, survived a spectacularly “unusual” road “accident” that only a Hollywood action flick could conjure. Everything about the accident, as Otunnu characterised it in a press conference later that afternoon, was “unusual.” At the press conference, Otunnu and the team traveling with him narrated that about 0930 hours or thereabout, they came upon a convoy of military vehicles at Minakulu. A couple or so civilian vehicles ahead of them signaled and were given the go-ahead to overtake the stationary or slow moving Phalanx of military wares. As they approached, Otunnu’s party too signaled to be let by, and they were accordingly given the sign to drive past. No sooner had they gone by two of the seven vehicles, when the third military truck suddenly pulled out of the formation to block their way. Otunnu’s driver attempted a manoeuvre to avoid high impact collision, but was-as if on cue-...

I have been wondering what in military parlance and war tradition, it would mean for a private to single-handedly slay a general on the battlefield. Would one be promoted from private, to say Captain; Major; Lieutenant Colonel; or a Brigadier? Surely, those in the know of military customs and practices would know. I confess complete ignorance. Even more puzzling for me, and I am sure, for military historians and scholars alike, is the decoration that an untrained civilian, and a woman who looks as fit as a sack of potato, deserves, when she outmanoeuvres a Major General and former commander of a national army. It is intriguing what people on the streets are saying. Some have already promoted Lydia Draru to the rank of a Field Marshal for her improbable feat of felling with a fly-swat, an experienced, well trained, war-hardened and heftily built General in a “domestic” squabble. The death of Gen. Kazini last week in a Kampala suburb was shocking, bizarre, and a tragic spectacle that ca...

The press in Uganda this week is awash with homophobic hysteria against Gays, Lesbians, Bi-Sexual and Transgender (GLBT) Ugandans. This overt and shameless discrimination against a minority population of our citizens flows from the fact homosexuality is criminalised in Uganda. As if this was not enough suppression of personal freedom and civil rights, Ndorwa West Member of Parliament (MP), David Bahatia, has tabled a private member’s bill proposing a series of measures to control and punish GLBT activities in the country, including the death penalty for gays and lesbians caught living and expressing their sexuality. This is not only cavalier violations of human rights, but a dangerous hate campaign and incitement to harm or kill members of the GLBT in Uganda. The people of Uganda, and all people of good will, must not sit and watch while this happens. The sponsors of the bill, their supporters and political leaders- inside and outside parliament- must be identified, isolated and ostrac...

In the wake of the Kabaka riots, the Banyoro-Bafuriki controversy, and the perception that our country has been splintered a thousand folds along ethnic crevices since the NRM came to power, I would like to identify and discuss three broad political tendencies and their contributions to the national debate on a post-museveni society. These are the democratic centrist reformers; the federalist right; and the democratic left. Each of these groups draws its membership from across a wide spectrum of organised Ugandan political, civic, professional and religious organisations. They are as ideologically eclectic as their political characteristics, boundaries and strategies are diffused. Since the Kabaka Riots over Kayunga, their respective leading ideologues have been soul-searching for some magic-glue like national habits, which could be used to firmly sew up and keep fast, the seams on the patchworks of our multi-nationality state. For the democratic reformers, which include opposition p...

A New Vision article by Edward Mulindwa attacked Olara Otunnu for serving the 1985 Military Council government. According to Mr. Mulindwa, it is unacceptable to serve your country under military regimes. It is clear Mr. Mulindwa and others view realities from the same frame and stock of divide and rule, and exclusionary politics that has been perfected for the last 23 years by Yoweri Museveni. Divisions along regional, ethnic, historical , and who served what government; who fled and who remained in the country; who fought and did not fight what regime, which have been used too long, as a basis to exclude, marginalise and legitimise injustices. In the rush to label, condemn and exclude, such proponents confuse the conceptual distinctions between a state and government. The NRM, UPC, FDC, DP and any other party or clique of army generals may form a government; through elections or military putsch. Such regimes or governments, will come and go, but the Ugandan state remains. Civ...

Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), Joseph Kony, Yoweri Museveni, National Resistance Movement (NRA), DRC Congo, Southern Sudan, Uganda, Juba Peace Agreement. News that Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and the autonomous regional Government of Southern Sudan (GoSS) have attacked the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) in their Garamba Forest hideout, must be condemned in the strongest terms possible. For the last two years, an uneasy peace held over northern Uganda and much of the region previously ravaged by the LRA insurgency and NRA / UPDF counter-insurgency. Although faulty in process design and severely limited in its objectives, the Juba Peace negotiations and agreements , had moved the parties and the region closest to a peaceful resolution, more than at any one time in the many previous attempts and twenty-three year history of the conflict in northern Uganda . For the first time, there was international involvement and somewhat credible third party mediation, through...

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...