uganda

29 September 1990

Now that Doe is dead and out of the way, it would do
Liberians a world of good to be mindful of a lesson offered
by Uganda’s contemporary history.

When in 1979, interventionist forces helped to overthrow the
oppressive regime of Idi Amin, the world heaved a sigh of
relief. Peace, justice and freedom would at last return to the
terrorized people of Uganda. During eight years of reign, Idi
Amin is estimated to have been responsible for the death of
more than 30,000 Ugandans. Nobody saw intervention then as
a sin to be daily criticized.

An interim government under Professor Lule was set up and
democratic elections conducted in 1980. One-time Head of
State, Milton Obote, won the elections. Present Head of State,
Yuweri Museveni, dissatisfied with the conduct of the elections,
went into the bush with a powerful anti-government guerilla
force under his control.

By 1985, Obote had again been overthrown. A thousand and
two hundred political prisoners were released from the
notorious Luzira maximum security prisons by the new
messiah, Tito Okello. Then the world was shocked by the
announcement of the presence of thousands of human
skeletons in bushes with evidence that the victims had been
tortured before being hanged or shot in the head. As a gesture
of protest, a hundred thousand skulls lined the highway to
Kampala. Under the corrective Obote regime, the killings had
continued. When the whole truth finally emerged, Obote’s
regime was estimated to have been responsible for the killing
of half a million (500,000) Ugandans.

Unfortunately, that was not the end to the bloody history of
blood-letting. Despite appeals from government, bands of
undisciplined soldiers raped, looted and killed at random.
Meanwhile, guerilla activities had cost the country a heavy toll
in human lives. Rose Musoke of the ‘Freedom Fighters Group’
put the number of widows in Uganda by the end of 1985 at 3.5
million. Teenagers were freely recruited to fight as a rash of
guerilla movements threatened to institutionalize a culture of
violence in Uganda.

Finally, Museveni won the guerilla war and established a
semblance of order in 1986. Even then, blood continued to call
unto blood. There was the phenomenal episode of the rebel
priestess Lakwena of the so-called Holy Spirit Movement (Dec.
1986 – Dec. 1987) where dissidents armed with faith, primitive
weapons and stones, faced up to government machine guns,
and were, of course, cut down.

Sporadic government anti-rebel activities, brutal reprisals, like
the recent beheading of seventeen men during a raid by
unidentified armed men on a surprised village, have become
part and parcel of Ugandan life. Regime after regime, man has
remained man. Ten years after Idi Amin, Ugandans cannot now
have any more illusions of attaining socio-political justice
through the expulsion of one scape-goat individual. Painfully,
they have discovered that their true enemies have been they
themselves all the while.

It is not surprising therefore that Uganda, both government
and press, has been unequivocal in her condemnation of the
belligerency of some of the contending factions in the Liberian
crisis. Unlike certain truculent Nigerian journalists, stumbling
subjectively from one transferred aggression to another, from
one shamefully disproved phobic suspicion to another, Uganda
has joined her voice to those of a concerned international
community decrying what is easily one of the most sadistic of
civil wars in recent times.