How Museveni executed the land grabbing in Acholi

How Museveni executed the land grabbing in Acholi

 

 

 

Various credible witness accounts of massive  violations of international law by the NRM/NRA/UPDF—the victims and their relatives and neighbors—have not been in a position to report on those violations because NRM has been active in suppressing the efforts of journalists and human rights activists to investigate and report on the violations.

In Pabbo, Burcoro, Cwero, Awach, Naamakora, and more—a witness narrates “I have seen, also, young people arrested in my area, and put underground where a big hole had been dug by the military. And there, they suffered underground, and they [the military] would make bread and throw it to these people who were suffering in the ground, like little rats. I have also seen many of these young people who were thrown in the ground, in a pit, being killed by shooting, being killed by beating. Many people died in this way. They died from many causes – either you suffocated or you were beaten to death or you were shot and left dead in the pit”.

The UPDF pattern of placing people into deep pits to suffer and die, cited in three different places in the UN mapping report, was actually developed by the Ugandan army earlier in northern Uganda.

Time line of execution of Museveni and Saleh plan to grab Acholi land

 

1996: Museveni unilaterally issues a mandate that all people in the Acholi Gulu district move immediately to designated Internally Displaced Persons camps. Refusal to do so is met by beatings and armed attacks by the UPDF. In the meantime, the camp conditions are horrid, lacking food and sanitation. Museveni repeats this mandate in 2002 and 2004 to ensure that all remaining villagers in northern Uganda are forcibly moved to the camps.

 

1996: With the people now off of their land, Salim Saleh begins forming agricultural enterprises on Acholi land without permission of the landowners and for the sake of his personal economic gain. Saleh, who is in the position of having inside knowledge, presupposes that he has enough troops to protect his farms.

 

1996-2003: Museveni commits UPDF troops to the DRC to overthrow Mobutu Sese Seko and to control mineral resources in the DRC rather than use such forces to protect the Acholi in the IDP camps precisely at the time that the Acholi most need them. Museveni dispatched not enough soldiers to protect the Acholi from the LRA and just enough to forcibly keep the Acholi away from their livelihoods—their gardens and villages—and in the camps where they died.

2005, three years after the formation of the ICC: The World Health Organization finds that people in the camps in northern Uganda are, for reasons other than LRA attack, dying at a rate of 52,000 a year more than would be the case under normal circumstances.

If you read through the timeline its  consistent with actions of executing a developed plan in  methodical manner, a better example for the case in northern Uganda is the Holodomor—Stalin’s genocide through the destruction of the livelihoods of Soviet Ukrainians in 1932-1933.

 

 

For instance, the WHO reports that Pader, one of the three districts, “was almost entirely inaccessible due to insecurity for much of 2001 through 2003.”35 Estimates of the number of people Idi Amin had killed during his seven year reign range from 100,000 to 500,000. Even conservative extrapolation from the WHO study indicates that the number of Acholi deaths due to the forced displacement by Museveni, Saleh, and the NRM/UPDF clearly surpasses 100,000, and is perhaps closer to 300,000, the number of deaths often attributed to Amin’s regime.

 

At the time of the WHO study, 1.2 million people, around 90% of the population of the districts in Acholiland, lived in 121 camps. The rest of the Acholi moved to the towns. In addition to the forced displacement in 1996, the NRM/UPDF repeated the measure of forced displacement for all remaining people in the villages in 2002 and again in 2004 (after the signing of the Rome Statute and the founding of the ICC). Anyone found outside the camps was deemed a rebel. There is no question, then, that the operation was both consistent and methodical.

All evidence is before you Ugandans some may call me a war drummer but ,lets get it clear the truth can never be swept under the carpet.

Information empowers people, but choosing to make the  population remain in the information limbo for their evil regime to continue dispensing unjust policies to sustain themselves and cronies in power is much worst sin.

When you tell the populace the truth, you become a target to them , their vocabulary consist of words as inciting violence, sabotage , malice etc..