Shocking!!

Shocking!!

I have got hold of these classified intel from the communication between Museveni the then chairman on NRA to his commanders in the North.

This confirms that we the northerns have been historically been branded animals uncouth names as chimpanzes appear in this official brief.

With the immediate and remote contexts of the document set out, it is now possible to examine its contents with a view to further ascertaining its authenticity. I will focus on four key areas in my assessment: 1) the shift in policy by Museveni to include the colonially demarcated region of northern Uganda as part of the new Uganda; 2) Museveni and his brother Salim Saleh’s efforts—as predicted in the memo—to take possession of land in northern Uganda; 3) the consistency of the language of the memo referring to the Acholi as “backwards” and as “Chimpanzees” and “Monkeys” with public statements Museveni has made about the Acholi; and 4) the consistency of the names mentioned in the memo, including the code names for Museveni and Saleh, with historical events.

The memo, written on a typewriter, is dated November 14, 1986. I have tried to find documentation either confirming or contradicting the author’s claim in the memo of having taken a flight over northern Uganda from Arua to Gulu during the time described. Mention of the flight would be evidence of the document’s authenticity; mention of Museveni being out of the country at the time, for instance, would be evidence of inauthenticity. Thus far, I have not been able to find public documentation either way. This is not surprising given that it is not the sort of flight that would typically be covered in the newspapers of the time. It is worth noting, however, that less than a year-and-a-half later—April 5, 1988—the indicated recipient of the memo, Salim Saleh, Museveni’s brother and a Major General in Museveni’s army, conducted his own flyover, and similarly commented, this time on the record to reporters, “What do you think of this unpopulated place? Couldn’t it be utilized for growing food, cash crops, and ranching to improve our economy, being such a fertile area?”1 The million-plus Acholi in the region did not count as a human population. The title of the memo, “Subject: RETHINK,” suggests that the author is considering a change in policy plans. The author and the recipient had made a “hasty decision to draw another national boundary, which would exclude the backward northerners from our new Uganda, particularly the Chimpanzees called Acholis.” The flyover convinced the author that this previous policy was not wise. “I have now realized that the Monkeys called Acholis are sitting upon Gold Mine. It is surprising that even the British Colonialists did not make them utilize the rich land properly.” Consequently, a policy change is necessary: “I have now reversed our decision to expel them, with their lands, from Uganda. We must keep Uganda as the British left it. But we must assume full control of the fertile lands.” Like with the flyover, I have not been able to find written documentation with regard to the earliest NRM policy. I have, however, spoken both to an Acholi elder and to a former high-ranking official in the NRM who have knowledge of the period, and they both confirmed the change in policy. It might be objected that the memo cannot be authentic because Museveni at the time was a nationalist who was trying to unite the country after a five-year bush war and that he would not have given up the Acholi lands. However, if Museveni’s objective was a united Uganda, he had the opportunity to realize the objective before he seized Kampala. Museveni did not overthrow Obote; rather Tito Lutwa Okello and his brother Bazilio Olara-Okello—both Acholis—did. After the coup, Tito became President, and it was he who tried to unify the country by extending offers of peace to the remaining rebel groups. The efforts led to the Nairobi Agreement between the Tito Okello government and the NRA in December 2005. Elijah Dickens Mushemeza writes,

On assuming power in 1985, General Tito Okello Lutwa invited all fighting groups, including the NRA, to join together and form a united government in the spirit of reconciliation and nation building. The NRA did not respond, and this led to Tito Okello’s Government seeking a negotiated political settlement with the NRA. This resulted in the Nairobi Peace Agreement (17 December 1985), detailing power sharing arrangements and the composition of the Military Council. All parties also agreed to a ceasefire within forty-eight hours including the UNLA and the NRA.2

Instead of pursuing a united Uganda, Museveni used the time granted by the Agreement to build up his own army, and a month later he seized the capitol. These are not the actions of a leader seeking to unite a country. The use of the term “nationalist” to apply to Museveni, then, is an odd one if we are to pay attention to his actions rather than his rhetoric. With regard to initially redrawing the border to exclude the Acholi even though this would be to give up territory, the move makes sense if the land were as barren as he first thought it was and the Acholi were as “backwards” as he has repeatedly described them. Museveni, as we will see, is a theorist of social evolution and an advocate of modernization. The Acholi would be a drag on his new industrializing economy. As it turns out, he has developed that economy while leaving out northern Uganda—the poorest region in the country, with 42.6% of the population living on less than $1 a day3 —in any case. Moreover, as we will see later on in this article with regard to NRM/UPDF action in the Democratic Republic of Congo, state boundaries are no barrier to exploitation. Museveni has gone—as the memo indicates he would—wherever he thought that he could draw financial benefit. What drew his attention back to northern Uganda was the possibility of the production of wealth (under his control) through industrialized farming in the North. To the extent that Museveni was the nationalist he advertised himself to be, then, he did not consider the people of northern Uganda in general and the Acholi people in particular to be part of the nation. For Museveni, where the geographical boundary was drawn by the colonialists was a secondary issue to that of which ethnic groups would be participants in the new nation. This is a point to which I will return, but for now it is sufficient to point out that the contradictions built into Museveni’s presumed nationalism are not dissimilar to the contradiction in earlier stages of United States political history between the claim that “all men are created equal” and the reality of the exclusion of African-Americans from participation in governance. Whether or not the latter are within the nation-state’s geographical boundaries, they are not considered part of the nation.

The Scramble for Acholiland

As described in the memo, the shift to the later policy by Museveni is due to the wealth of land in northern Uganda and the President’s desire to control it. Here, there is abundant evidence for the memo’s account, and it is therefore the second area of my focus on the question of the authenticity of the memo. To interpret that evidence, it is necessary to understand the role of land in the Acholi culture of northern Uganda. The cultivation of land is the primary source of wealth-generating production, and thus livelihood, in northern Uganda. The vast majority of Acholi are rural-dwelling small-scale farmers. They often supplement their diet with game procured through hunting.4 The land available for these activities is, for the far greater part, held in customary ownership. That is to say, ownership, even when it is individual ownership, is not conferred via government-authorized written title but rather through oral mechanisms of clan authority. Even when an individual—or more precisely, an individual family—holds claim to a parcel of land, the controlling idea is that it is held ultimately for the common good of the clan. One important study puts the matter this way:

The land which a family owns is not considered as being totally “theirs”: it is their heritage and the future heritage of their children. Since they see that a family exists only as a part of a wider community, so its land is held within the wider structure of a community (clan) and as clan’s land. Land is the fundamental productive asset, without which one cannot survive, and so one’s social obligations and claims are intimately connected to claims and rights over land. These obligations extend to the next generation: land must therefore be protected for them, and if anyone who leaves the village and fails to survive in the urban economy, the customary land is a safety net, because they can always return and be allocated a plot. Land is also the link with people’s heritage—quite literally, since it is on the family land that one is buried.5

Hunting lands (tim) and grazing lands (olet) are held in trust by the clan as a whole. These are not empty lands; rather their purposes are best stewarded through allowing multiple families to make use of them whole rather than as divided up into smaller parcels. The fact that ownership is orally-based and dependent upon the memories of the persons involved makes customary ownership, particularly but not solely of the hunting and grazing lands, vulnerable in crisis situations such as the twenty-year conflict in northern Uganda.

On September 27, 1996, Museveni issued the mandate that all people in the Gulu district of the Acholi region move immediately to designated Internally Displaced Persons camps. The decision to displace the people into camps was by fiat. When Acholi MPs found out about the plan, they protested; Museveni then promised to re-consult with the military and to get back to the MPs in two weeks. He never did. It is noteworthy that it was Saleh who gave the reason for Museveni’s not doing so, pointing up the tight relationship between him and Museveni: no consulting took place because Museveni and Saleh “suspected bureaucracy and politicking over the issue.” That is to say, they were concerned about resistance to and perhaps defeat of their plan of forced displacement should the issue go to Parliament.6 When individual people refused to move to the camps, the soldiers beat them; when whole villages refused, the UPDF often used attack helicopters against their inhabitants. A report from the Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative is worth quoting at length.

In every camp we visited in Gulu, people told us invariably that they were forced. In some cases people remember that soldiers gave them a seven-day deadline (Opit) or only three days (Awac), threatening to treat those who resisted as rebels. In most cases, however, it would appear that soldiers just stormed villages—often at dawn—without any previous warning. They told people to move immediately without giving them much time to collect their belongings. People were often beaten to force them out of their compounds. Much of the property left behind was looted by both rebels and soldiers. A number of people who ventured to go back to their former homes soon after found them burnt down. Men told us that they were harassed and even shot at, and women raped. A resident of Paicho summarised that experience of unbearable stress with these words: “We were beaten by Government troops, who accused us of being rebel collaborators and told us to go to the trading centre.” . . . In Pabbo, Opit, Anaka, Cwero, and Unyama we met a good number of people who had direct experience of having had their villages shelled. We were told that big guns of the BM21 6 barrel type were used to fire at villages where people refused to move. . . . Aerial bombardments were used—we were told—in places like Kaloguro village, in Pabbo, Awach, KocGoma, Amuru, and Anaka. This first wave of forced displacement occurred at a time of the year which normally marks the beginning of the harvesting season. Given the fact that in most cases people were not given time to collect any foodstuff, their crops remained in the fields or in the granaries. In Pabbo and Opit people told us that there were cases of Army helicopters being used to collect foodstuff from abandoned villages. Force was also used by the UPDF some months after the camps were started, in order to compel back into the camps communities who had gone home to tend their fields. We heard this complaint in every camp we visited in Gulu and in some in Kitgum.7

The frequent justification offered by NRM and UPDF officials for the forced displacement of the Acholi people is that it was to protect the latter. In fact, the name officials often give the camps is “protected villages.” However, such justifications do not stand up to empirical scrutiny for the straightforward fact that the NRM/UPDF did not adequately protect the camps, even when they had the military capacity to do so.8 Instead, the camps served as LRA magnets, and most of the worst massacres occurred in the camps. People I interviewed confirmed this experience of being left vulnerable:

You can download it from the drop box.

https://www.dropbox.com/home…

https://www.dropbox.com/home?preview=letter_-ebbe.march_16th1.pdf