Israel, Hamas, War Crimes, Condoleeza Rice, Gordon Brown, Crimes against humanity, Genocide, Gaza, Israeli Occupation, Palestine, Iraeli attacks on Gaza, Gaza attacks
The overwhelming, gratuitous, disproportionate, and callous destruction of lives-innocent children, women, and other Palestinian civilians and citizens; including the bombing of the Islamic University, is indefensible, immoral and criminal acts of state terrorism by Israel.
The United states and Britain, including the UN Security Council, cannot simply blame Hamas, while the perpetrator of violence, and the party using weapons of mass destruction to kill people in Gaza is the criminal and apartheid state of Israel. Why Gordon Brown simply saying he is appalled? Come on, Prime Minister Brown! How could you merely be appalled, when over Ziimbabwe, you could invoke the International Criminal Court (ICC) and even urge the UN Security Council to impose sanctions against Robert Mugabe and Zimbabwe?
What about Secretary of State condoleeza Rice? Why, only recently, she urged for a coalition of the willing, to overthrow Robert Mugabe, because he is allegedly violating the rights of Zimbabweans. But in the face of real and criminal acts of barbarity against the people of Palestine in Gaza, Condoleeza Rice looks the other way; condemning Hamas instead, and imposing the burdens of a ceasefire on the colonised, dominated and dispossessed people of Palestine.
Britain, the USA, and the European Union have no moral authority to lecture the world on the issues of human rights. Until they condemn and impose sanctions on Israel the same way they do to third world countries and other peoples who are regarded as "other"- the "other world" -from Asia to Latin America to Africa, must begin to cooperate the same way they cooperated during decolonisation, to defend their peoples and their interests defeat the forces of imperialism and double standards.
The source of the violence is not Hamas rockets fired into Israel, stupid! It is the occupation of Palestinian lands by Israel, and the exile and incaceration of Palestinians in concentration camps, supervised by the United Nations.
What is going on in Gaza, and what has been going on in occupied Palestinian lands since 1967, is nothing but genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. American leaders must stop pulling the wool over our eyes. Only after they have served their term in office, then they begin to say they care about the other majority of humanity by launching charitble foundations and other nonsense, when all the while they were in power, they supervised the same policies that impoverished and decimated people all over the world.
What comes out of Washington, London and Brussels, is all hogwash; they are deep up to their elbows in blood of innocent people in Palestine, by blindly supporting apartheid and Zionist Israeli policies of ethnic cleanisng that they would not tolerate elswhere.
The other world should not be interested in feigned compassions out of Washington, London and Brussels, but must insist on their reining in Israel and ushering it out of occupied Palestinian and other Arab lands, as the only realistic solution and means to a durable and just peace. Anything short of that, the Palestinians and all oppressed peoples of the world have a right to self-determination and to use all means possible to assert their claims and advance and defend their interests.
Where are Archbishops Desmond Tutu and John Sentamu, when they should be leading this moral outrage? Might it not be fitting indeed, for Bishop John Sentamu to cut up his cassocks, to demonstrate a proportionate moral outrage, since he thought a dog collar appropriately expressed his moral indignation at Zimbabwe and Robert Mugabe?
Tuesday 30 December 2008
Saturday 27 December 2008
Imperialist siege of Zimbabwe: A Mirror image of South Africa and Namibia future over the next decade
Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki, Jacob Zuma, Musouia Lekota, South Africa, ANC, PAC, SACP, Namibia, Robert Mugabe; Morgan Tsivangirai; Zimbabwe; Robert Mugabe
Africa, the African Union, Pan Africa, national liberation and anti-colonialist, anti-racists, anti-domination, and democratic forces in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific (ACP) countries cannot afford to allow Zimbabwe to fail. Should Zimbabwe be brought to its knees and possible forced-collapse from encirclement by racist and imperialist global domination forces, through illegal Western-imposed sanctions, embargo, and co-optation of some quisling African regimes and their intellectually impoverished leaders as imperialist continental policemen, they will have betrayed and rolled back, not only the causes for Zimbabwean liberation and its indepencence, but also cleared a path for the liberated peoples of Namibia and South Africa (Azania) to fail in their endeavours for social justice through national liberation, economic and social democracy.
It is incumbent upon Pan Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific, to step in and make up for what Zimbabwe has been forced to forego as a result of imperialist and racist blackmail from Britain and the USA. Post racialist and post settler Zimbabwean, Azanian, and Namibian economic and social democracy and national liberation and indpendence, are too costly a price to pay to endear, and once again enslave, ourselves as British or American shamba boys.
The intellectual dishonesty and resultant failure for Pan Africa on Zimbabwe; the inability and timidity to re-frame the critical problem and project the legitimate justice claims and the correctness and necessity for ZANU-PF led land reforms for black victims of British racism, domination, and exploitation, is a test-case and trial balloon that reveal the future trajectory for South Africa and Namibia, as post-liberation African states grappling with social and economic reforms after centuries of white racist dominationa and inequalities.
The sudden, bewildering, and humiliating departure of comrade Thabo Mbeki, signalled that the imperialist forces and their internal collaborators, are tireless in their efforts to stunt African progress and self-reliance, and undermine progressive African leadership that puts the interests of African people in the centre of governance. Part of their displeasure with Comrade Thabo Mbeki, was his patience and refusal to be stampeded into dancing to Western tunes and not thinking for himself over Zimbabwe. Internal factional struggles for leadership and control within the party, narrowly focused on power alone and limited horizon of South Africa, in their desire to undermine and defeat Mbeki within the African National Congress (ANC), and eventually recall him as president of the republic, played into the hands of the imperialist forces.
As we must now bitterly regret, the overzealousness on the part of the Jacob Zuma factions to defeat and humiliate Mbeki, so they could grab complete control of the party and the state, split the ANC right down the midlle. If this is not a godsend opportunity for the forces encircling Zimbabwe, what is; given that South Africa is host to ten times the amount of British and American capital investments there and greater and entrenched settler interests, than Zimbabwe? The weakening of the ANC, through a bitter leadership contest, and eventual fragmentation into two parties-with the emergence of the Congress of the People (COPE) led by former South African Defence minister Mosiuoa Lekota-places South Africa within striking range of who put Zimbabwe under siege through Morgan Tsvangirai and the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).
At this juncture, it is still too early to tell, which of the two ANC factions will play the counter-revolutionary role of collaboration with imperialist forces to roll back South African national and democratic liberation. If Jacob Zuma's populism wins the day, and COPE's emphasis on growth and the economy, without any clear statements on the need for economic and social democracy are any indications, then it is COPE, unfortunately, that will turn out to be home to the traitors of the Azanian cause.
Unfortunate because, COPE was founded as a protest against the treatment of Mbeki by the winning Zuma factions. But their politics and policies sound potentially so unmbekian. For instance, COPE have already broke ranks both with Mbeki's own positions and that of most of the members of the regional South African Development Cooperation (SADC) on Zimbabwe. For this reason, progressive forces in South Africa, need to look very closely at the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania(PAC) party and the South Africa Communist Party (SACP)components in the ANC coalition. In our view, it is the PAC-CP and the original ANC coalition that can best lay claims to the national, social and economic liberation and democratic historical mission of the South African and African liberation struggles. It is not the Lekota dissidents and counterrevolutionaries.
In our view, the departure of Mbeki, the ascension of Zuma, the break-up of the ANC and the rise of COPE, and the advancing age and failing health of Nelson (Madiba) Mandela, pose critical challeges for South Africa. We can be sure that the political capital that was earned by Nelson Mandela's dignified suffering and magnanimity towards his oppressors, including the West, some of whom still designated him as a terrorist as late as 2008, is gradually but surely dwindling. Just over a decade after the end of apartheid, and despite a brilliant and unprecedented start as a multiracial and democratic polity, the contrived honeymoon with merchant princes and Western imperialist forces, are coming to an end.
When old age and fragile health inevitably take their toll on our moral icon, an era will have been effectively closed, and South Africa, and by extrapolation, Namibaia, just like Zimbabwe, will have been left naked and exposed to imperialist forces to frustrate and undermine any unfinished economic and social democratic and affirmative action reforms. South Africa and Namibia can expect to come under intense pressure to abandon or water down reforms and policies with affirmative action components aimed at rectifying historical racial, economic, and social injustices and inequalities.
Therefore, imperialist siege of Zimbabwe today mirrors the post Mandela future for South Africa and Namibia, two post liberation African countries with settler history and African dispossession with the imperatives for social affirmative action reforms in economic and social policies. Should the Western imperialist forces and Morgan Tsvangirai and the MDC, their shamba boy in Zimbabwe win the day, and the liberation hero, comrade Robert Mugabe and ZANU PF go down to defeat and humiliation, a prededence will have been set for Namibians and South Africans, to sneer at and desecrate the memories and sacrifices of Nelson Mandela, Steve Biko, and Hendriks Witboi. It is a concerted effort between imperialists and their collaborators to blunt Umkhonto We Sizwe; a possibility that South Africans and Pan Africa must not countenance.
Africa, the African Union, Pan Africa, national liberation and anti-colonialist, anti-racists, anti-domination, and democratic forces in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific (ACP) countries cannot afford to allow Zimbabwe to fail. Should Zimbabwe be brought to its knees and possible forced-collapse from encirclement by racist and imperialist global domination forces, through illegal Western-imposed sanctions, embargo, and co-optation of some quisling African regimes and their intellectually impoverished leaders as imperialist continental policemen, they will have betrayed and rolled back, not only the causes for Zimbabwean liberation and its indepencence, but also cleared a path for the liberated peoples of Namibia and South Africa (Azania) to fail in their endeavours for social justice through national liberation, economic and social democracy.
It is incumbent upon Pan Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific, to step in and make up for what Zimbabwe has been forced to forego as a result of imperialist and racist blackmail from Britain and the USA. Post racialist and post settler Zimbabwean, Azanian, and Namibian economic and social democracy and national liberation and indpendence, are too costly a price to pay to endear, and once again enslave, ourselves as British or American shamba boys.
The intellectual dishonesty and resultant failure for Pan Africa on Zimbabwe; the inability and timidity to re-frame the critical problem and project the legitimate justice claims and the correctness and necessity for ZANU-PF led land reforms for black victims of British racism, domination, and exploitation, is a test-case and trial balloon that reveal the future trajectory for South Africa and Namibia, as post-liberation African states grappling with social and economic reforms after centuries of white racist dominationa and inequalities.
The sudden, bewildering, and humiliating departure of comrade Thabo Mbeki, signalled that the imperialist forces and their internal collaborators, are tireless in their efforts to stunt African progress and self-reliance, and undermine progressive African leadership that puts the interests of African people in the centre of governance. Part of their displeasure with Comrade Thabo Mbeki, was his patience and refusal to be stampeded into dancing to Western tunes and not thinking for himself over Zimbabwe. Internal factional struggles for leadership and control within the party, narrowly focused on power alone and limited horizon of South Africa, in their desire to undermine and defeat Mbeki within the African National Congress (ANC), and eventually recall him as president of the republic, played into the hands of the imperialist forces.
As we must now bitterly regret, the overzealousness on the part of the Jacob Zuma factions to defeat and humiliate Mbeki, so they could grab complete control of the party and the state, split the ANC right down the midlle. If this is not a godsend opportunity for the forces encircling Zimbabwe, what is; given that South Africa is host to ten times the amount of British and American capital investments there and greater and entrenched settler interests, than Zimbabwe? The weakening of the ANC, through a bitter leadership contest, and eventual fragmentation into two parties-with the emergence of the Congress of the People (COPE) led by former South African Defence minister Mosiuoa Lekota-places South Africa within striking range of who put Zimbabwe under siege through Morgan Tsvangirai and the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).
At this juncture, it is still too early to tell, which of the two ANC factions will play the counter-revolutionary role of collaboration with imperialist forces to roll back South African national and democratic liberation. If Jacob Zuma's populism wins the day, and COPE's emphasis on growth and the economy, without any clear statements on the need for economic and social democracy are any indications, then it is COPE, unfortunately, that will turn out to be home to the traitors of the Azanian cause.
Unfortunate because, COPE was founded as a protest against the treatment of Mbeki by the winning Zuma factions. But their politics and policies sound potentially so unmbekian. For instance, COPE have already broke ranks both with Mbeki's own positions and that of most of the members of the regional South African Development Cooperation (SADC) on Zimbabwe. For this reason, progressive forces in South Africa, need to look very closely at the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania(PAC) party and the South Africa Communist Party (SACP)components in the ANC coalition. In our view, it is the PAC-CP and the original ANC coalition that can best lay claims to the national, social and economic liberation and democratic historical mission of the South African and African liberation struggles. It is not the Lekota dissidents and counterrevolutionaries.
In our view, the departure of Mbeki, the ascension of Zuma, the break-up of the ANC and the rise of COPE, and the advancing age and failing health of Nelson (Madiba) Mandela, pose critical challeges for South Africa. We can be sure that the political capital that was earned by Nelson Mandela's dignified suffering and magnanimity towards his oppressors, including the West, some of whom still designated him as a terrorist as late as 2008, is gradually but surely dwindling. Just over a decade after the end of apartheid, and despite a brilliant and unprecedented start as a multiracial and democratic polity, the contrived honeymoon with merchant princes and Western imperialist forces, are coming to an end.
When old age and fragile health inevitably take their toll on our moral icon, an era will have been effectively closed, and South Africa, and by extrapolation, Namibaia, just like Zimbabwe, will have been left naked and exposed to imperialist forces to frustrate and undermine any unfinished economic and social democratic and affirmative action reforms. South Africa and Namibia can expect to come under intense pressure to abandon or water down reforms and policies with affirmative action components aimed at rectifying historical racial, economic, and social injustices and inequalities.
Therefore, imperialist siege of Zimbabwe today mirrors the post Mandela future for South Africa and Namibia, two post liberation African countries with settler history and African dispossession with the imperatives for social affirmative action reforms in economic and social policies. Should the Western imperialist forces and Morgan Tsvangirai and the MDC, their shamba boy in Zimbabwe win the day, and the liberation hero, comrade Robert Mugabe and ZANU PF go down to defeat and humiliation, a prededence will have been set for Namibians and South Africans, to sneer at and desecrate the memories and sacrifices of Nelson Mandela, Steve Biko, and Hendriks Witboi. It is a concerted effort between imperialists and their collaborators to blunt Umkhonto We Sizwe; a possibility that South Africans and Pan Africa must not countenance.
How third party intervention and mediation failed in northern Uganda
Joseph Kony, Yoweri Museveni, Joachim Chissano, Riek Machar Teny, northern Uganda, Southern Sudan, Sudan People's Liberation Movement / Army (SPLM/A), Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), Juba Peace Talks, Third Party Intervention, Third Party Mediation.
Even before the final stocks are taken, there is no doubting the damning verdict that Third Party Intervention & Mediation-the outsiders looking in-failed in northern Uganda. The last nail on the coffin of third party mediation, aka the Juba Peace Process, was dealt by Uganda's decision -at the behest of the USA- to cobble together a coalition of DRC Congo and Southern Sudan, for high noon showdown in Garamba with Joseph Kony and the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). However, the failures as processes, can be accounted for by five inter-related components of actors and their framing of the northern Uganda conflict.
1. First on the list is superpower-small-states politics, and the structure of global inter-states and multilateral international / regional politics.
2. The second one is perceptions and actions of international human rights organisations.
3. Third, is the code of silence among international humanitarian agencies, particularly in favour of a state and the status quo, and the willingness to work with and support unjust conditions.
4. The fourth factor is loss of autonomy and voice in the process by victim civil society groups in northern Uganda and their diaspora.
5. Fifth, the credibility and neutrality of mediators foretold of doubts in viability and impartiality of the Juba Process
1. superpower-small-states politics
Lately, public international law, particularly human rights law and multilateral governance, are being gate-crashed by non-state entitities, people, groups, particularly social movements, as legitimate and primary stakeholders who are in the first line of fire when normal politics and states fail. However, high politics, that is international relations and diplomacy, as well as multilateral governance, is stil the preserve and relations of states. Moreover, states conduct their affairs to maximise the welfare of their citizens, by pursuing advantage in their self-interests. As such, any claims to a normative criteria or conduct in the international behaviour of states, is defined by a realist morality-a mix of pragmatic, case-by case, self-interested, and flexible apporach to security and strategic issues, rather than following an inflexible, standard template of moral matrix that would apply uniformly to similar cases under similar conditions anywhere and everywhere.
Altough we are often deafened by a crescendo of moral claims, particulary regarding human rights, democracy, and fundamental rights and freedoms from the White House or State Department and Number 10 Downing Street or White Hall, such rhetorics are often so subjectively and narrowly defined as to reflect American or British economic and strategic interest. It is never informed by a self-less, bleeding-heart morality of an Archbishop Desmond Tutu, or Mother Theresa, or the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury; that sees inustice as injustice and seeks justice, anywhere and everywhere, with the same convictions against human suffering and exploitation without unterior motives than that the victims deserve justice and wellbeing that we all claim to fight for, for others and ourselves.
A classic example where doublespeak and double standards have been so blatantly manifest in the face of unparalleled injustice, is in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and American, British, and generally Western attitudes to the plight of Palestinian Arabs in Palestine. The Western position, led by the USA, taken the invariable line that Israel is always right, even when innocent Palestinian children and women are massacred in cold blood, in callous display of superior military power and state terrorism financed by the West. And Israel always gets away with it because it is a strategic American and Western ally in the Middle East, with a strong, well-organised international Zionist lobby groups, with strategic global stranglehold on mass media and international finance and industry. No one can do as little as question the conduct of the racist and apartheid Israeli government without being set on by its defenders through the myriad global media outlets they control. Politicians like Michael Ignatieff Deputy Leader of Canada's Liberal Party, who let down their guards and speak candidly and with conscience, wake up to regret as the possibility of their political career falling apart stare them in the pages of those broadsheets and they are forced to take back their words.
Consequently, the asymmetrical Palestinian struggles for justice and self-determination, is misrepresented simply as "terrorism", the moral outrage to which must offset and erase that of the justice claims of Palestinians dispossessed of their lands and homes and rights and locked in concentration camps in their own homelands. Palestinian recourse to self-help and resistance in the face of international collusion with Israel against them, is characterised simply as mindless terrorism.
The framing of Palestinian resistance as "terrorism" against a "democratic" and "civilised" Israel, which is the occupier and oppressor, but absolved of all moral responsibilities by so-called Palestinian "terror" tactics, is inversely not different from the framing of the Zimbabwean struggles against Anglo-American imperialism, British neo-colonialism, and historical dispossesion of blacks of their lands and rights, whose claims for justice, must be superseded by narrowly, subjectively, and self-interestedly defined human rights and democratic rights claims to entrench British and American interests through patronised opposition groups such as the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC)and its shallow leader Morgan Tsvangirai.
More often than not, the beneficiaries of superpower doublespeak in post cold war unipolar or multipolar world are states; recent exceptions being a non-state party such as the Albanian terrorists in Kosovo, who were fighting against a former socialist state of Yugoslavia or Serbia, which the USA and Western Europe were bent on dismantling, to continue accelerating the disintegration and absorbtion into NATO, of former Warsaw Pact bloc states, and the strategic isolation and containment of Russia, as well as encirclement of a rising China. In cases such as Zimbabwe opposition groups inside of normal politics are supported by the West against states and leaders like Robert Mugabe, who are less favourably disposed to Western interests and unamenable to obsequious acquiescence with Western moral doublestandards and ideology of power and domination.
Half-hearted encouragement but non-adoption of opposition in Uganda, where the regime and its leader is considered a Western hatchet man, and yet Uganda's human security situation in the north of the country have been graver and huamn rights and democratic credentials as a matter of policy have been worse than Zimbabwe's, prove our arguments on Western self-interests and moral trade offs.
As a state, Uganda benefited from US unilateralism after 9/11 attacks. But Uganda's speical relationship with the West, particualarly Britain and the USA, goes back to when Yoweri Museveni was a guerrilla leader and after he came to power in 1986. As insurgents, the National Resistance Movement/ Army (NRM/A) were supported by the West against the popularly elected government of Milton Obote. And when Musevni came to power in 1986, after a coup détat had deposed Milton Obote and the Uganda People's Congress (UPC) earlier in July of 1985, Museveni made a radical break with his marxist rhetoric and past, to embrace IMF / World Bank imposed economic liberalisation measures and social adjustments policies that was to firmly put him into the Western circle as a trusted hatchet man in Africa. This meant, as a state and government formed by former non-state elements the West helped bring to power, Museveni and the Ugandan state were assured of international diplomatic, political, and moral protection from the West, and the only superpower left standing, the US.
Until 9/11 2001 attacks in the US, the international community or the West had turned a blind eye to the genocide in northern Uganda, and tacitly gave Museveni a free hand in brutally suppressing insurgency there, in the process of consolidating power over the country and legitimising his violent seizure of power despite the 1985Nairobi Peace Accord. As far as the West and Museveni were concerned, Uganda was peaceful and prospering. Any suggestions to the contrary- as their acolytes such as John Prendergast of the Centre for American Progress and Enough! today do not tire of reminding the world- were the work of diaspora groups "rabidly" opposed to the Museveni government, abettors of Lord's Resistance Movement / Army (LRM/A) child abduction and terrorism, and who are out of touch with what progress and strides Uganda had made on human rights and social development front and ought to be treated by the West on the same plane as terrorists.
After 9/11, America, through the Coalition of the Willing, on which Yoweri Museveni opportunistically jumped, could now openly support its man in Kampala, against insurgents in the north. Without wasting time, the LRA and its leaders, were designated as international terrorist group. Labels of "terrorism", as used against legitimate claims of Palestinians against international and Israeli injustices, was meant to intimidate critics and shortcircuit legitimate national and regional debates about the political nature of the Ugandan conflict, and the failures and ravages of the military option, and the imperatives for a peaceful, negotiated settlement. As a result, the LRA insurgency, as well as official proscription of political parties and their activities, as symptoms of broken politics under Museveni, were discussed separately despite the apparent conjunctions of claims and charges against the government by civic opposition groups and proponents of the LRA.
Since Museveni serves American and British economic and strategic interests in the Great Lakes Region of East and Central Africa, Britain and USA are willing to prop up his government and ally with the Ugandan state against its critics and opponents in the country, the region and internationally. Dividends from such support was the quick indictments of the LRA by the nascent International Criminal Court (ICC), after Museveni- standing shoulder to shoulder in London with Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the ICC Prosecutor- conveniently referred the matter to the ICC. This was a culmination of a whirlwind diplomatic offensive by Museveni through Western capitals, taking him to Washington, and ending in London.
The failures by human rights groups, social movements, Ugandan and particularly Acholi Civil society and its diaspora to effectively oppose the expedient designation of the LRA by Washington as a terrorist group, and subsequent referal by Museveni to and indictments by the ICC; or reframe the debate on legitimate northern Ugandan socio-political grievances on the origins, the convenient use of the conflict northern population and Musevni's political opponents, marked the first instance of the failure of third party intervention in northern Uganda. After the ICC indictments, it was obvious that any further search for a political solution was futile, since the dominant international powers had already defined the problems and the framework under which solutions ought to be pursued. It was clear that Museveni's own responsibility and role in rights violations in Uganda, particularly northern Uganda, was once again going to be shaded from the searching glare of international justice.
Once again, like in Palestine or Zimbabwe, when people's aspirations for justice conflict with Western interests, "terrorism" or "dictatorship" and other permutations are used to subvert legitimate criticism, debate and opposition to the status quo, and to reframe the issues and debate to render the original rights and justice claims illegitimate.
2. Failure by human rights organisations to lead on a more appropriate and just framework for peace in northern Uganda.
Although human rights groups such as Amnesty International (AI) and Human Rights Watch (HRW), kept a catalogue of claims, counter-claims, and denials of rights violations, including arbitrary arrests, torture, rapes, and extrajudicial killings, by armed groups, they weakened their positions by coming across as if they were more interested in assessing which party has killed or violated rights more than the other party. Language and phraseologies such as, Museveni and the NRM/A have committed atrocities but their record is an improvement compared to previous regimes, is simply irresponsible, to say the least. Killings and other crimes against humanity and war crimes, should not have a numerical threshold or degree of barbarism in order for it to be a legitimate candidate for our sympathy and moral outrage. Even only one violation, must be treated for what it is and attract proportionate punishment.
Although both AI and HRW criticised the partial indictments of only the LRA by the ICC, they both supported Washington's characterisation of the LRA as a "terrorist" group, while knowing it was politically convenient, and aimed to shield Museveni from political accountability. Moreover, their call for both sides in the northern Uganda conflict to be brought to account, were feeble, and largely celebrated the LRA indictments, to the detriments of offering critical assessments of the complexities of the northern Uganda conflict and the limitations in the ICC Rome Statutes. Knowing fully well that any investigations were limited to July 2002 when the ICC came into being, these organisations and their leaders knew accountability and justice would not be fully rendered, given the most horrendous violations in the northern Ugandan conflict took place before 2002, and that all parties to the conflict had some political and command responsibilities to take and accounting to do for the behaviour of their forces.
Aware of these shortcomings, and their own familiarity with recent and emergent international special war crimes and crimes against humanity tribunals practices, these principal international human rights organisations were well-placed to lead the debate in the search for a more efficacious and appropriate framework for war termination and search for justice in northern Uganda. They forgot their own reports and others' writings on both parties, including the voices of the victims. That they failed to speak up and speak out more loudly than they did, can be attributed to their own immersion into the socio-political and ideological realism of the international politics and policies of their own home countries in the West.
While both HRW and AI have regional units throughout the world, they are American and British in origins, and do share the dominant social and political values of these societies. Like other social movements, there is a cross-pollination between and among personnel in the not-for-profit sector and those in government in their respective countries. Some start their careers in government departments, and move on to social movements, while others cut their teeth within the social movements and move to government departments or serve in advisory roles as policy experts on respective regions of the world.
But the omission of bodies such as HRW and AI, pale in comparison to the overt adoption or positioning with official Washington policies; or working with the regime and government of Uganda, to distort and misinform on the key issues and history of the conflict. Such organisations include Enough, and Invisible Children. It is doubtful, what level of genuine commitment to ending the conflict in northern Uganda and lessening human sufferings these groups and their principals have, than to promote their own careers, create jobs for themselves, and raise a lot of money in the process with negligible portions actually going to support the niche causes in northern Uganda they identify with. While they do raise their funds from the American public, other funding sources are also undoubtedly accessed through USAID and other federal government sources. It is therefore reasonable to assume that they may not bite too much, the hand that feeds them. Hence, their closeness to and similarity with official Washington policies and positions on the northern Uganda conflict, is not accidental.
In our view, giving uncritical support to Washington's convenient characterisation of the LRM/A as a terrorist organisation after 9/11; and letting the ICC referal and partial indictments of the LRM/A slide without a spirited debate for its limitations and inappropriateness for a just peace, compared to a special tribunal for instance, open up these human rights organisations to accusations of shirking responsibility, after they led the war baying for the blood of all rights violators in the conflict through their detailed thematic reporting. This marked the second wheel falling off the beat-up justice vehicle, in its tortured and bumpy ride over the murky northern Uganda rights terrain.
3. Code of silence among international humanitarian agencies and their willingness to work within and support unjust conditions.
Part of the failures of third party intervention in northern Uganda can be attributed to the lack of objective and impartial confidential or open reporting by humanitarian agencies of the political and social conditions they work in, rather than simply tweak donor emotions and consciences with symptoms of conflicts arising from either state policies or non-state militia groups actions. Although some humanitarian agencies in Uganda catalogued LRM/A atrocities against civilians, there were scantly any documenting similar abuses by government forces.
It is understandable that host states regulate the work and actions of such agencies. However, it is inexcusable that such organisations, even if forbidden to comment on political and human rights matters by their charters, would not have the conscience and courage to abandon working in conditions where their work would complement the illegal policies and actions of insurgents or state parties in the violations of fundamental human rights. For instance, in northern Ugnada, a UN mandated organisation such as the World Food Programme (WFP) tolerated local state officials in northern Uganda requiring aid recipients to produce NRM party cards in order to be served their food aid and other rations in the concentration camps. Essentially, displaced camp populations were being forced to join and register as members of the NRM party, at a time the country was preparing for multiparty elections in 2006 for the first time in twenty years under Museveni.
Furthermore, the Ugandan government never accepted to declare northern Uganda a disaster area, despite entreaties from humanitarian aid organisations, who needed such official policy to allow them to scale up their work and pour more resources against the degraded human security situation in the region. Moreover, while it was reluctant to declare northern Uganda a disaster area, for fear it would invite legitimate international presence and scrutiny, the Ugandan government completely neglected to house, feed, treat and care for the camp population, but left them to fend for themselves. Even then, the humanitarian aid community said nothing, but silently moved in and worked to sustain a government policy which was clearly a violation of international humanitarian law on internal displacement. Additionally, they worked in silence, with the unwritten codes to see nothing, hear nothing and say nothing, even as atrocious violations, including rapes and extrajudicial killings are perpetrated by government troops in the camps they helped manage and serve.
For the last twenty-three years, aid and development agencies, including UN mandated agencies-from UNICEF, WPF,UNDP-and voluntry agencies such as OXFAM, World Vision, Danish Refugees Council, International Rescue Committee (IRC), and many others; as well as those affiliated with governments, such as DANIDA of Denmark, CIDA of Canada, DFID of the UK, USAID, of the USA, to mention but a few, drove through Acholi and past civil populations being stopped and forced by the government army and state agents, to perform forced, unpaid labour on roads throughout northern Uganda. School Children, children, pregnant women, the elderly, the sick and infirm, were subjected to these humiliations, while a cross section of the entire so-called international community went by with as little as questioning the proprieties of such state actions, or taking up the matter with government through quiet diplomacy and protests, or report it to thier respective governments. That the practice did not stop, even today, persuade us to conclude that it was ignored by the world, in its zeal to protect and shield Yoweri Museveni and his forces from international justice.
By the time these blind, deaf and dumb field managers, programmes coordinators, and country representatives of these organisations remnisce about their experiences in northern Uganda in their memoirs as Jan Egeland did, it will certainly be too late to help achieve justice for the people of northern Uganda. In our assessment, while some aid and development organisations did commendable work in northern Uganda, they also wittingly or unwittingly, became complicit in the abortion of justice for the victims of the conflict, by accepting and continuing to work under conditions and within policies and actions parameters that propped up unjust conditions that contributed to rights violations by the Ugandan state against citizens it had primary responsibility to protect and provide for once they were deliberately uprooted from their normal settlements by government policy. We consider this another example of the failure of third party intervention in northern Uganda.
4. The fourth factor for failure is loss of autonomy and voice by victim civil society groups in northern Uganda and their diaspora.
Civil society groups and leaders, both in-country and their diaspora, uncritically accepted to be co-opted by and onto agenda of external aid groups, human rights fraternities, and so-called third-party peacebuilding and conflict transformation capacity building groups. As a result, civil society lost the opportunity to self-determinedly define the problems and outline their goals, objectives, and expectations for war-termination agreements and subseauent peace. Kacoke Madit (KM), Acholi Religious Leader's Peace Initiatives (ARLPI) and Acholi Traditional leaders, as partners and stakeholders, chose to be both neutral and to be led by outsiders in setting and defining agenda for peace.
In particular, ARLPI and Acholi Traditional Leaders, were especially mistaken in their thinking and believing that the peace they sought was the same as the peace America, Britain and their Western allies pursued in Uganda and the region. While the Acholi civil society groups took their search for peace seriously and perceived peace almost literally and as pacifists informed by Christian private and social morality; and their own individual and collective suffering as victims; Western donors and assumed partners were informed by realist morality of states-to pursue the best objectives and advantage for American or British interests without any overt commitments to fixed moral latitudes and straight jackets. Suave diplomats often took care to speak in diplomatese, always leaving room for ambiguity and flexibility in interpreting their partnership and support and for everyone on both sides to find in it, at least something that seems to cater to their own particular interests. Unsophisticated and without any reasons to doubt good intentions, Acholi religious and traditional leaders took the notion of the whiteman's burdens, too seriously for their own good and any possibility of a just peace in northern Uganda.
The more sophisticated KM, the Acholi diaspora headquartered in London, UK, boxed itself into neutrality and aspirations of a mediator, to try to coax the LRA and the Uganda government into negotiations and peaceful settlement. In our view, KM should have been the more articulate and autonomous voice of the Acholi civil society as it had originally set itself to. However, a partnership with Conciliation Resources (CR)-a peace and conflict organisation that helps communities build capacities for conflict transformation-seemed to have imposed limitations in KM thinking that it should only be a neutral and honest broker, rather than a victim with justice claims against both the LRA and the government of Uganda.
Having done superb advocacy and lobbying that exposed the tragedies of northern Uganda to the world, KM's work was embarrassing Museveni and his Western allies internationally with Western citizens in their own countries. It became necessary thereore, for Museveni's allies to do damage control, by pouring humanitarian aid into northern Uganda through their development arms, while doing nothing to prod Museveni towards a political solution to the conflict and democratic reforms in the country. As part of their and Museveni's strategy, the Acholi diaspora needed to be isolated from organised Acholi civil society at home. Soon, American and British, as well as European Union development agencies and their representatives, started to deal directly with ARLPI or Acholi Traditional leaders, independently of KM and leading Acholi diaspora personalities. While these civil society groups were not openly told to stay away from KM, they were never encouraged either, to seek guidance and act in consultation and collaboration with KM as a more informed section of the Acholi civil society.
The strategy of isolating the KM from Acholi civil society required that Acholi at home and their political leaders viewed Acholi diaspora with suspicion, as the financiers and political wing of the LRM/A. By the logic of such allegations, the diaspora was responsible for aiding the crimes the LRA were accused of perpetrating on the hapless civilians. And just for good measure, elements of the Acholi Parliamentary Group (APG) was encouraged by government disinformation to regard Acholi diaspora as rivals, rather than allies. To achieve maximum effect, the same disinformation was planted among Acholi diaspora, claiming that some KM elements were in the pay of Museveni as external agents. This completed the circle of suspicion and distrust among friends and colleagues, leading to paralysis and disintegration of Acholi civil society.
The disintegration of Acholi civil society forelosed any thoughts of Acholi civil society occupying an autonomous middleground in a mediated process, between the LRA and the government of Uganda, demanding accountability and responsibility for their behaviour and actions in the northern Uganda conflict, and to ensuring that the need for such accountability are not conveniently negotiated and bargained away by the two belligerents to escape responsibility. It is possible that the outcome out of the Juba Peace Process would have been different, had an autonomous and active Acholi civil society voice existed to counterbalance either party's attempt to subvert the process to minimise their role and need for accountablity in the conflict, or detract from the objectives of the peace the people expected.
The absence of an active and effective Acholi civil society organisation or collective leadership, with a clear idea of the objectives for peace for the Acholi people, made for a flawed process design for the Juba Peace Process, and significantly contributed to the failings of third party intervention and mutually acceptable and just mediated settlement of the northern Uganda conflict.
5. Fifth, the credibility and neutrality of mediators.
Perhaps the last straw that broke the camel's back, and ensured that third party intervention and mediation to the northern Uganda conflict achieved nothing resembling a just and mutually concluded negotiations and agreements, were the choice and perceived partiality and bias of mediators.It would seem that the UN Secretary General and those donor countries that sponsored the process, did not do their homework, but if they did, they certainly had no regard for the mediation principles of impartial regard.
As matters of informed consent, Joaquim Chissano, a former Mozambican president, is a close ally and personal friend of Yoweri Museveni, before and after both men were in power. While there is nothing to suggest that he could not rise above personal friendship to shepherd the parties through the Juba Peace process to deliver a just and credible peace for northern Uganda, knowing that he was a personal friend to one of the parties, should have disqualified him as a honest and neutral mediator. The fact the UN Secretary General did not find this important, raises concerns that the odds were stacked against the non-state party.
Furthermore, the UN Secretary General appointed Chissano Special Envoy to LRA Affected Areas, but not to Uganda or Northern Uganda, in contrast to Sudan, Congo, and other conflict areas around the world. This was nothing but deference to Museveni's and his powerful allies' objections to any official international recognition of the political legitimacy of the LRA insurgency. As far as Museveni is concerned, the LRA is not fighting the Ugandan government but the Acholi civilians, through acts of common brigandage, rather than insurgent contestation of the Ugandan state.
All these point to carefully planned actions by a network of powerful states and internation figures to protect Museveni from exposure and possible indictments for his role in northern Uganda genocide. Such suspicion were recently justified, when Chissano addressed the UN Security Council, calling it to fully back the decision by Uganda, DRC Congo, and Southern Sudan to attack the LRA in their hideout in Garamba forest. Can he still remain a honest broker and mediator?
Third, the decision to maintain Riek Machar Teny Dhurgon, the Southern Sudanese Vice President of Sudan People's Liberation Movement / Army (SPLM/A) administered Government of Southern Sudan (GoSS, as chief mediator, and to retain Juba as the venue for negotiations, despite LRA protests early in agenda-setting stage of the process, beggared belief. It is well known that the SPLM/A were and are close allies of Museveni, and jointly took part in Operation Iron Fist, to drive out the LRA from bases in SPLM/A controlled Southern Sudan in 2001. Since then, thousands of Ugandan troops have been deployed in Southern Sudan.
From the foregoing, unless someone did not do their research, the decisions to appoint Joacquim Chissano envoy, and to LRA Affected Areas rather than Uganda or Northern Uganda; the retention of Riek Machar as Chief Mediator and Juba as host city for the talks over LRA protests, compromised the needs for active and perceived neutrality and impartiality, and raise plausible grounds to believe someone somewhere acted in bad faith. Which suggests that, the Juba Process was not meant to achieve more than it did, but to cheaply accomplish what the current three-nation military action is hoped to achieve in the jungles of DRC Congo-to apprehend or kill Joseph Kony and his senior lieutenants.
In conclusion, self-destructively-trusting Acholi civil society leaders; humanitarian aid and development organisations working in Uganda; human rights groups; powerful international interests and states; the ICC; poor process design and faulty mediation process in Juba; all worked individually and interactively; consciously and unconsciously, to ensure that third party intervention and mediation of the northern Uganda conflict failed and Yoweri Museveni shielded from international scrutiny and accounting for his role in the northern Uganda genocide. As we said when the talks started, Museveni has never been interested in a negotiated settlement, but outright military victory at whatever costs.
Even before the final stocks are taken, there is no doubting the damning verdict that Third Party Intervention & Mediation-the outsiders looking in-failed in northern Uganda. The last nail on the coffin of third party mediation, aka the Juba Peace Process, was dealt by Uganda's decision -at the behest of the USA- to cobble together a coalition of DRC Congo and Southern Sudan, for high noon showdown in Garamba with Joseph Kony and the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). However, the failures as processes, can be accounted for by five inter-related components of actors and their framing of the northern Uganda conflict.
1. First on the list is superpower-small-states politics, and the structure of global inter-states and multilateral international / regional politics.
2. The second one is perceptions and actions of international human rights organisations.
3. Third, is the code of silence among international humanitarian agencies, particularly in favour of a state and the status quo, and the willingness to work with and support unjust conditions.
4. The fourth factor is loss of autonomy and voice in the process by victim civil society groups in northern Uganda and their diaspora.
5. Fifth, the credibility and neutrality of mediators foretold of doubts in viability and impartiality of the Juba Process
1. superpower-small-states politics
Lately, public international law, particularly human rights law and multilateral governance, are being gate-crashed by non-state entitities, people, groups, particularly social movements, as legitimate and primary stakeholders who are in the first line of fire when normal politics and states fail. However, high politics, that is international relations and diplomacy, as well as multilateral governance, is stil the preserve and relations of states. Moreover, states conduct their affairs to maximise the welfare of their citizens, by pursuing advantage in their self-interests. As such, any claims to a normative criteria or conduct in the international behaviour of states, is defined by a realist morality-a mix of pragmatic, case-by case, self-interested, and flexible apporach to security and strategic issues, rather than following an inflexible, standard template of moral matrix that would apply uniformly to similar cases under similar conditions anywhere and everywhere.
Altough we are often deafened by a crescendo of moral claims, particulary regarding human rights, democracy, and fundamental rights and freedoms from the White House or State Department and Number 10 Downing Street or White Hall, such rhetorics are often so subjectively and narrowly defined as to reflect American or British economic and strategic interest. It is never informed by a self-less, bleeding-heart morality of an Archbishop Desmond Tutu, or Mother Theresa, or the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury; that sees inustice as injustice and seeks justice, anywhere and everywhere, with the same convictions against human suffering and exploitation without unterior motives than that the victims deserve justice and wellbeing that we all claim to fight for, for others and ourselves.
A classic example where doublespeak and double standards have been so blatantly manifest in the face of unparalleled injustice, is in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and American, British, and generally Western attitudes to the plight of Palestinian Arabs in Palestine. The Western position, led by the USA, taken the invariable line that Israel is always right, even when innocent Palestinian children and women are massacred in cold blood, in callous display of superior military power and state terrorism financed by the West. And Israel always gets away with it because it is a strategic American and Western ally in the Middle East, with a strong, well-organised international Zionist lobby groups, with strategic global stranglehold on mass media and international finance and industry. No one can do as little as question the conduct of the racist and apartheid Israeli government without being set on by its defenders through the myriad global media outlets they control. Politicians like Michael Ignatieff Deputy Leader of Canada's Liberal Party, who let down their guards and speak candidly and with conscience, wake up to regret as the possibility of their political career falling apart stare them in the pages of those broadsheets and they are forced to take back their words.
Consequently, the asymmetrical Palestinian struggles for justice and self-determination, is misrepresented simply as "terrorism", the moral outrage to which must offset and erase that of the justice claims of Palestinians dispossessed of their lands and homes and rights and locked in concentration camps in their own homelands. Palestinian recourse to self-help and resistance in the face of international collusion with Israel against them, is characterised simply as mindless terrorism.
The framing of Palestinian resistance as "terrorism" against a "democratic" and "civilised" Israel, which is the occupier and oppressor, but absolved of all moral responsibilities by so-called Palestinian "terror" tactics, is inversely not different from the framing of the Zimbabwean struggles against Anglo-American imperialism, British neo-colonialism, and historical dispossesion of blacks of their lands and rights, whose claims for justice, must be superseded by narrowly, subjectively, and self-interestedly defined human rights and democratic rights claims to entrench British and American interests through patronised opposition groups such as the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC)and its shallow leader Morgan Tsvangirai.
More often than not, the beneficiaries of superpower doublespeak in post cold war unipolar or multipolar world are states; recent exceptions being a non-state party such as the Albanian terrorists in Kosovo, who were fighting against a former socialist state of Yugoslavia or Serbia, which the USA and Western Europe were bent on dismantling, to continue accelerating the disintegration and absorbtion into NATO, of former Warsaw Pact bloc states, and the strategic isolation and containment of Russia, as well as encirclement of a rising China. In cases such as Zimbabwe opposition groups inside of normal politics are supported by the West against states and leaders like Robert Mugabe, who are less favourably disposed to Western interests and unamenable to obsequious acquiescence with Western moral doublestandards and ideology of power and domination.
Half-hearted encouragement but non-adoption of opposition in Uganda, where the regime and its leader is considered a Western hatchet man, and yet Uganda's human security situation in the north of the country have been graver and huamn rights and democratic credentials as a matter of policy have been worse than Zimbabwe's, prove our arguments on Western self-interests and moral trade offs.
As a state, Uganda benefited from US unilateralism after 9/11 attacks. But Uganda's speical relationship with the West, particualarly Britain and the USA, goes back to when Yoweri Museveni was a guerrilla leader and after he came to power in 1986. As insurgents, the National Resistance Movement/ Army (NRM/A) were supported by the West against the popularly elected government of Milton Obote. And when Musevni came to power in 1986, after a coup détat had deposed Milton Obote and the Uganda People's Congress (UPC) earlier in July of 1985, Museveni made a radical break with his marxist rhetoric and past, to embrace IMF / World Bank imposed economic liberalisation measures and social adjustments policies that was to firmly put him into the Western circle as a trusted hatchet man in Africa. This meant, as a state and government formed by former non-state elements the West helped bring to power, Museveni and the Ugandan state were assured of international diplomatic, political, and moral protection from the West, and the only superpower left standing, the US.
Until 9/11 2001 attacks in the US, the international community or the West had turned a blind eye to the genocide in northern Uganda, and tacitly gave Museveni a free hand in brutally suppressing insurgency there, in the process of consolidating power over the country and legitimising his violent seizure of power despite the 1985Nairobi Peace Accord. As far as the West and Museveni were concerned, Uganda was peaceful and prospering. Any suggestions to the contrary- as their acolytes such as John Prendergast of the Centre for American Progress and Enough! today do not tire of reminding the world- were the work of diaspora groups "rabidly" opposed to the Museveni government, abettors of Lord's Resistance Movement / Army (LRM/A) child abduction and terrorism, and who are out of touch with what progress and strides Uganda had made on human rights and social development front and ought to be treated by the West on the same plane as terrorists.
After 9/11, America, through the Coalition of the Willing, on which Yoweri Museveni opportunistically jumped, could now openly support its man in Kampala, against insurgents in the north. Without wasting time, the LRA and its leaders, were designated as international terrorist group. Labels of "terrorism", as used against legitimate claims of Palestinians against international and Israeli injustices, was meant to intimidate critics and shortcircuit legitimate national and regional debates about the political nature of the Ugandan conflict, and the failures and ravages of the military option, and the imperatives for a peaceful, negotiated settlement. As a result, the LRA insurgency, as well as official proscription of political parties and their activities, as symptoms of broken politics under Museveni, were discussed separately despite the apparent conjunctions of claims and charges against the government by civic opposition groups and proponents of the LRA.
Since Museveni serves American and British economic and strategic interests in the Great Lakes Region of East and Central Africa, Britain and USA are willing to prop up his government and ally with the Ugandan state against its critics and opponents in the country, the region and internationally. Dividends from such support was the quick indictments of the LRA by the nascent International Criminal Court (ICC), after Museveni- standing shoulder to shoulder in London with Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the ICC Prosecutor- conveniently referred the matter to the ICC. This was a culmination of a whirlwind diplomatic offensive by Museveni through Western capitals, taking him to Washington, and ending in London.
The failures by human rights groups, social movements, Ugandan and particularly Acholi Civil society and its diaspora to effectively oppose the expedient designation of the LRA by Washington as a terrorist group, and subsequent referal by Museveni to and indictments by the ICC; or reframe the debate on legitimate northern Ugandan socio-political grievances on the origins, the convenient use of the conflict northern population and Musevni's political opponents, marked the first instance of the failure of third party intervention in northern Uganda. After the ICC indictments, it was obvious that any further search for a political solution was futile, since the dominant international powers had already defined the problems and the framework under which solutions ought to be pursued. It was clear that Museveni's own responsibility and role in rights violations in Uganda, particularly northern Uganda, was once again going to be shaded from the searching glare of international justice.
Once again, like in Palestine or Zimbabwe, when people's aspirations for justice conflict with Western interests, "terrorism" or "dictatorship" and other permutations are used to subvert legitimate criticism, debate and opposition to the status quo, and to reframe the issues and debate to render the original rights and justice claims illegitimate.
2. Failure by human rights organisations to lead on a more appropriate and just framework for peace in northern Uganda.
Although human rights groups such as Amnesty International (AI) and Human Rights Watch (HRW), kept a catalogue of claims, counter-claims, and denials of rights violations, including arbitrary arrests, torture, rapes, and extrajudicial killings, by armed groups, they weakened their positions by coming across as if they were more interested in assessing which party has killed or violated rights more than the other party. Language and phraseologies such as, Museveni and the NRM/A have committed atrocities but their record is an improvement compared to previous regimes, is simply irresponsible, to say the least. Killings and other crimes against humanity and war crimes, should not have a numerical threshold or degree of barbarism in order for it to be a legitimate candidate for our sympathy and moral outrage. Even only one violation, must be treated for what it is and attract proportionate punishment.
Although both AI and HRW criticised the partial indictments of only the LRA by the ICC, they both supported Washington's characterisation of the LRA as a "terrorist" group, while knowing it was politically convenient, and aimed to shield Museveni from political accountability. Moreover, their call for both sides in the northern Uganda conflict to be brought to account, were feeble, and largely celebrated the LRA indictments, to the detriments of offering critical assessments of the complexities of the northern Uganda conflict and the limitations in the ICC Rome Statutes. Knowing fully well that any investigations were limited to July 2002 when the ICC came into being, these organisations and their leaders knew accountability and justice would not be fully rendered, given the most horrendous violations in the northern Ugandan conflict took place before 2002, and that all parties to the conflict had some political and command responsibilities to take and accounting to do for the behaviour of their forces.
Aware of these shortcomings, and their own familiarity with recent and emergent international special war crimes and crimes against humanity tribunals practices, these principal international human rights organisations were well-placed to lead the debate in the search for a more efficacious and appropriate framework for war termination and search for justice in northern Uganda. They forgot their own reports and others' writings on both parties, including the voices of the victims. That they failed to speak up and speak out more loudly than they did, can be attributed to their own immersion into the socio-political and ideological realism of the international politics and policies of their own home countries in the West.
While both HRW and AI have regional units throughout the world, they are American and British in origins, and do share the dominant social and political values of these societies. Like other social movements, there is a cross-pollination between and among personnel in the not-for-profit sector and those in government in their respective countries. Some start their careers in government departments, and move on to social movements, while others cut their teeth within the social movements and move to government departments or serve in advisory roles as policy experts on respective regions of the world.
But the omission of bodies such as HRW and AI, pale in comparison to the overt adoption or positioning with official Washington policies; or working with the regime and government of Uganda, to distort and misinform on the key issues and history of the conflict. Such organisations include Enough, and Invisible Children. It is doubtful, what level of genuine commitment to ending the conflict in northern Uganda and lessening human sufferings these groups and their principals have, than to promote their own careers, create jobs for themselves, and raise a lot of money in the process with negligible portions actually going to support the niche causes in northern Uganda they identify with. While they do raise their funds from the American public, other funding sources are also undoubtedly accessed through USAID and other federal government sources. It is therefore reasonable to assume that they may not bite too much, the hand that feeds them. Hence, their closeness to and similarity with official Washington policies and positions on the northern Uganda conflict, is not accidental.
In our view, giving uncritical support to Washington's convenient characterisation of the LRM/A as a terrorist organisation after 9/11; and letting the ICC referal and partial indictments of the LRM/A slide without a spirited debate for its limitations and inappropriateness for a just peace, compared to a special tribunal for instance, open up these human rights organisations to accusations of shirking responsibility, after they led the war baying for the blood of all rights violators in the conflict through their detailed thematic reporting. This marked the second wheel falling off the beat-up justice vehicle, in its tortured and bumpy ride over the murky northern Uganda rights terrain.
3. Code of silence among international humanitarian agencies and their willingness to work within and support unjust conditions.
Part of the failures of third party intervention in northern Uganda can be attributed to the lack of objective and impartial confidential or open reporting by humanitarian agencies of the political and social conditions they work in, rather than simply tweak donor emotions and consciences with symptoms of conflicts arising from either state policies or non-state militia groups actions. Although some humanitarian agencies in Uganda catalogued LRM/A atrocities against civilians, there were scantly any documenting similar abuses by government forces.
It is understandable that host states regulate the work and actions of such agencies. However, it is inexcusable that such organisations, even if forbidden to comment on political and human rights matters by their charters, would not have the conscience and courage to abandon working in conditions where their work would complement the illegal policies and actions of insurgents or state parties in the violations of fundamental human rights. For instance, in northern Ugnada, a UN mandated organisation such as the World Food Programme (WFP) tolerated local state officials in northern Uganda requiring aid recipients to produce NRM party cards in order to be served their food aid and other rations in the concentration camps. Essentially, displaced camp populations were being forced to join and register as members of the NRM party, at a time the country was preparing for multiparty elections in 2006 for the first time in twenty years under Museveni.
Furthermore, the Ugandan government never accepted to declare northern Uganda a disaster area, despite entreaties from humanitarian aid organisations, who needed such official policy to allow them to scale up their work and pour more resources against the degraded human security situation in the region. Moreover, while it was reluctant to declare northern Uganda a disaster area, for fear it would invite legitimate international presence and scrutiny, the Ugandan government completely neglected to house, feed, treat and care for the camp population, but left them to fend for themselves. Even then, the humanitarian aid community said nothing, but silently moved in and worked to sustain a government policy which was clearly a violation of international humanitarian law on internal displacement. Additionally, they worked in silence, with the unwritten codes to see nothing, hear nothing and say nothing, even as atrocious violations, including rapes and extrajudicial killings are perpetrated by government troops in the camps they helped manage and serve.
For the last twenty-three years, aid and development agencies, including UN mandated agencies-from UNICEF, WPF,UNDP-and voluntry agencies such as OXFAM, World Vision, Danish Refugees Council, International Rescue Committee (IRC), and many others; as well as those affiliated with governments, such as DANIDA of Denmark, CIDA of Canada, DFID of the UK, USAID, of the USA, to mention but a few, drove through Acholi and past civil populations being stopped and forced by the government army and state agents, to perform forced, unpaid labour on roads throughout northern Uganda. School Children, children, pregnant women, the elderly, the sick and infirm, were subjected to these humiliations, while a cross section of the entire so-called international community went by with as little as questioning the proprieties of such state actions, or taking up the matter with government through quiet diplomacy and protests, or report it to thier respective governments. That the practice did not stop, even today, persuade us to conclude that it was ignored by the world, in its zeal to protect and shield Yoweri Museveni and his forces from international justice.
By the time these blind, deaf and dumb field managers, programmes coordinators, and country representatives of these organisations remnisce about their experiences in northern Uganda in their memoirs as Jan Egeland did, it will certainly be too late to help achieve justice for the people of northern Uganda. In our assessment, while some aid and development organisations did commendable work in northern Uganda, they also wittingly or unwittingly, became complicit in the abortion of justice for the victims of the conflict, by accepting and continuing to work under conditions and within policies and actions parameters that propped up unjust conditions that contributed to rights violations by the Ugandan state against citizens it had primary responsibility to protect and provide for once they were deliberately uprooted from their normal settlements by government policy. We consider this another example of the failure of third party intervention in northern Uganda.
4. The fourth factor for failure is loss of autonomy and voice by victim civil society groups in northern Uganda and their diaspora.
Civil society groups and leaders, both in-country and their diaspora, uncritically accepted to be co-opted by and onto agenda of external aid groups, human rights fraternities, and so-called third-party peacebuilding and conflict transformation capacity building groups. As a result, civil society lost the opportunity to self-determinedly define the problems and outline their goals, objectives, and expectations for war-termination agreements and subseauent peace. Kacoke Madit (KM), Acholi Religious Leader's Peace Initiatives (ARLPI) and Acholi Traditional leaders, as partners and stakeholders, chose to be both neutral and to be led by outsiders in setting and defining agenda for peace.
In particular, ARLPI and Acholi Traditional Leaders, were especially mistaken in their thinking and believing that the peace they sought was the same as the peace America, Britain and their Western allies pursued in Uganda and the region. While the Acholi civil society groups took their search for peace seriously and perceived peace almost literally and as pacifists informed by Christian private and social morality; and their own individual and collective suffering as victims; Western donors and assumed partners were informed by realist morality of states-to pursue the best objectives and advantage for American or British interests without any overt commitments to fixed moral latitudes and straight jackets. Suave diplomats often took care to speak in diplomatese, always leaving room for ambiguity and flexibility in interpreting their partnership and support and for everyone on both sides to find in it, at least something that seems to cater to their own particular interests. Unsophisticated and without any reasons to doubt good intentions, Acholi religious and traditional leaders took the notion of the whiteman's burdens, too seriously for their own good and any possibility of a just peace in northern Uganda.
The more sophisticated KM, the Acholi diaspora headquartered in London, UK, boxed itself into neutrality and aspirations of a mediator, to try to coax the LRA and the Uganda government into negotiations and peaceful settlement. In our view, KM should have been the more articulate and autonomous voice of the Acholi civil society as it had originally set itself to. However, a partnership with Conciliation Resources (CR)-a peace and conflict organisation that helps communities build capacities for conflict transformation-seemed to have imposed limitations in KM thinking that it should only be a neutral and honest broker, rather than a victim with justice claims against both the LRA and the government of Uganda.
Having done superb advocacy and lobbying that exposed the tragedies of northern Uganda to the world, KM's work was embarrassing Museveni and his Western allies internationally with Western citizens in their own countries. It became necessary thereore, for Museveni's allies to do damage control, by pouring humanitarian aid into northern Uganda through their development arms, while doing nothing to prod Museveni towards a political solution to the conflict and democratic reforms in the country. As part of their and Museveni's strategy, the Acholi diaspora needed to be isolated from organised Acholi civil society at home. Soon, American and British, as well as European Union development agencies and their representatives, started to deal directly with ARLPI or Acholi Traditional leaders, independently of KM and leading Acholi diaspora personalities. While these civil society groups were not openly told to stay away from KM, they were never encouraged either, to seek guidance and act in consultation and collaboration with KM as a more informed section of the Acholi civil society.
The strategy of isolating the KM from Acholi civil society required that Acholi at home and their political leaders viewed Acholi diaspora with suspicion, as the financiers and political wing of the LRM/A. By the logic of such allegations, the diaspora was responsible for aiding the crimes the LRA were accused of perpetrating on the hapless civilians. And just for good measure, elements of the Acholi Parliamentary Group (APG) was encouraged by government disinformation to regard Acholi diaspora as rivals, rather than allies. To achieve maximum effect, the same disinformation was planted among Acholi diaspora, claiming that some KM elements were in the pay of Museveni as external agents. This completed the circle of suspicion and distrust among friends and colleagues, leading to paralysis and disintegration of Acholi civil society.
The disintegration of Acholi civil society forelosed any thoughts of Acholi civil society occupying an autonomous middleground in a mediated process, between the LRA and the government of Uganda, demanding accountability and responsibility for their behaviour and actions in the northern Uganda conflict, and to ensuring that the need for such accountability are not conveniently negotiated and bargained away by the two belligerents to escape responsibility. It is possible that the outcome out of the Juba Peace Process would have been different, had an autonomous and active Acholi civil society voice existed to counterbalance either party's attempt to subvert the process to minimise their role and need for accountablity in the conflict, or detract from the objectives of the peace the people expected.
The absence of an active and effective Acholi civil society organisation or collective leadership, with a clear idea of the objectives for peace for the Acholi people, made for a flawed process design for the Juba Peace Process, and significantly contributed to the failings of third party intervention and mutually acceptable and just mediated settlement of the northern Uganda conflict.
5. Fifth, the credibility and neutrality of mediators.
Perhaps the last straw that broke the camel's back, and ensured that third party intervention and mediation to the northern Uganda conflict achieved nothing resembling a just and mutually concluded negotiations and agreements, were the choice and perceived partiality and bias of mediators.It would seem that the UN Secretary General and those donor countries that sponsored the process, did not do their homework, but if they did, they certainly had no regard for the mediation principles of impartial regard.
As matters of informed consent, Joaquim Chissano, a former Mozambican president, is a close ally and personal friend of Yoweri Museveni, before and after both men were in power. While there is nothing to suggest that he could not rise above personal friendship to shepherd the parties through the Juba Peace process to deliver a just and credible peace for northern Uganda, knowing that he was a personal friend to one of the parties, should have disqualified him as a honest and neutral mediator. The fact the UN Secretary General did not find this important, raises concerns that the odds were stacked against the non-state party.
Furthermore, the UN Secretary General appointed Chissano Special Envoy to LRA Affected Areas, but not to Uganda or Northern Uganda, in contrast to Sudan, Congo, and other conflict areas around the world. This was nothing but deference to Museveni's and his powerful allies' objections to any official international recognition of the political legitimacy of the LRA insurgency. As far as Museveni is concerned, the LRA is not fighting the Ugandan government but the Acholi civilians, through acts of common brigandage, rather than insurgent contestation of the Ugandan state.
All these point to carefully planned actions by a network of powerful states and internation figures to protect Museveni from exposure and possible indictments for his role in northern Uganda genocide. Such suspicion were recently justified, when Chissano addressed the UN Security Council, calling it to fully back the decision by Uganda, DRC Congo, and Southern Sudan to attack the LRA in their hideout in Garamba forest. Can he still remain a honest broker and mediator?
Third, the decision to maintain Riek Machar Teny Dhurgon, the Southern Sudanese Vice President of Sudan People's Liberation Movement / Army (SPLM/A) administered Government of Southern Sudan (GoSS, as chief mediator, and to retain Juba as the venue for negotiations, despite LRA protests early in agenda-setting stage of the process, beggared belief. It is well known that the SPLM/A were and are close allies of Museveni, and jointly took part in Operation Iron Fist, to drive out the LRA from bases in SPLM/A controlled Southern Sudan in 2001. Since then, thousands of Ugandan troops have been deployed in Southern Sudan.
From the foregoing, unless someone did not do their research, the decisions to appoint Joacquim Chissano envoy, and to LRA Affected Areas rather than Uganda or Northern Uganda; the retention of Riek Machar as Chief Mediator and Juba as host city for the talks over LRA protests, compromised the needs for active and perceived neutrality and impartiality, and raise plausible grounds to believe someone somewhere acted in bad faith. Which suggests that, the Juba Process was not meant to achieve more than it did, but to cheaply accomplish what the current three-nation military action is hoped to achieve in the jungles of DRC Congo-to apprehend or kill Joseph Kony and his senior lieutenants.
In conclusion, self-destructively-trusting Acholi civil society leaders; humanitarian aid and development organisations working in Uganda; human rights groups; powerful international interests and states; the ICC; poor process design and faulty mediation process in Juba; all worked individually and interactively; consciously and unconsciously, to ensure that third party intervention and mediation of the northern Uganda conflict failed and Yoweri Museveni shielded from international scrutiny and accounting for his role in the northern Uganda genocide. As we said when the talks started, Museveni has never been interested in a negotiated settlement, but outright military victory at whatever costs.
Wednesday 17 December 2008
Northern Uganda: Children of lesser moral worth?
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 Southern Sudanese Vice President Riek Machar, and at the later stages, the appointment of a UN Scetretary General's Representative to the LRA Affected Areas, the former Mozambican President, Joachim Chissano. This lent the needed international moral support and diplomatic goodwill lacking in the previous attempts in 1994, 1998, and 2004, which was more or less a do-it-yourself (DIY)peacemaking initiated by either of the parties or civil society groups.
Unfortunately, all these efforts and the gains out of Juba, even if it had remained inconclusive, pending the signitures of the principal protagonists, Ugandan dictator Yoweri Museveni, and LRA leader Joseph Kony, stand to be undone by the latest recourse to military means. It is partly why we believe, all peace-loving people of the world, child rights fraternities, and human rights collectives and the humanitarian communities, ought to condemn dictator Yoweri Museveni's itchy, trigger-happy fingers.
The other reason is that, dictator Yoweri Museveni and his NRM/A government failed or rather neglected to protect thousands and thousands of abducted northern Ugandan children, while he turned his gaze towards Rwanda and Congo, where he was fighting to install his comrades-in-arms, Paul Kagame and the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF), who had been part of Museveni's NRA in Uganda. Moreover, Uganda could afford to send thousands and thousands of Ugandan troops into the Democratic Republic of Congo, where they ousted former dictator Mobutu Ssesesekou. However, for 23 years, the same Ugandan forces could not deal a death blow to the LRA, composed predominantly of abducted children of northern and eastern Uganda. Museveni only started to concern himself with abductions of children, when it served his political purposes at home and abroad.
We do not give a hoot about Joseph Kony and those indicted by the International Criminal Court with him, even though we have well-founded moral reservations about the other commanders because they were abducted as children and grew up and rose through the LRA ranks. Moreover, those who were more senior to them in the LRA command structure and hierarchy; men like Brig. Banya and Brig. Kolo, who were not abducted but joined the rebellion as adults and former soldiers, and in fact trained and deployed the children who now stand accused of the deeds of the rebellion together with Kony, are free men in Uganda, after they escaped and joined dictator Museveni as agents.
Similarly,Yoweri Museveni can go to hell, we will not shed a tear; because he is the chief architect and author of the genocide in northern Uganda, Rwanda and the DRC Congo and the Great Lakes Region of East and Central Africa. After losing an election he could not win in 1980, he fomented a tribal war that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in central Uganda, which he and his Western backers chiefly blamed on his opponents and the former government army. Additionally, he was the first to introduce and use children as child soldiers in combat in Uganda and the region.
Moreover, Museveni's scorched-earth counterinsurgency strategies in northern and eastern Uganda, ensured crops, foodstuffs and livestock were looted and burnt, and the population driven at bayonet points into makeshift camps without making provisions for them. Once in the camps controlled by security forces, they were raped and sodomised and killed by government security services and militias. Consequently, northern and eastern Uganda is today unrivalled as a poster for poverty, human misery arising from wilfull neglect and failures of government policies and a breakdown of normal politics. And as the most despicable and diabolical site of war crimes and crimes gainst humanity in the first decades of the 21st Century.
Therefore, both Joseph Kony and Yoweri Museveni are obverse sides of the same coin. There is simply nothing to choose between the two. Fortunately for Museveni, he wields the power of government and the state. International relations being relations of states, he has ready support and protection of those powerful global interests he serves in the region. Reports that this latest combined attacks on the LRA may have been aided by American intelligence and technology, say a lot about why dictator and war criminal Museveni has alluded the searing gaze of international justice.
Our problem with the latest attacks on the LRA is borne out of history. In 2001, the NRA/UPDF overran LRA bases in Southern Sudan. The aftermaths was that, it renewed brutal and devastating retaliatory incursions by the LRA into northern and eastern Uganda, after a long lull and relative peace similar to the one the people in the region have known for the last two years. That onslaught by the Ugandan government, dubbed Operation Iron Fist, came despite warnings from peace and humanitarian groups, that it would worsen the situation in the region. Moreover, it came at a time when there were overtures for peace, and a real possibility that, a negotiated settlement was within grasp.
Unfortunately, like in 1985 and 1994, the people were sorely disappointed, because dictator Museveni chose to flex his muscles rather than honour a peace agreement or negotiate a peaceful solution.
We and the people of northern Uganda, particularly those who hoped against hope,that their children, abducted by the LRA, after the state failed to protect them, might return home with the conclusion of a peace deal, comdemn the latest gratutitous and indiscriminate use of deadly force against women and children held captive by the LRA. However long it was going to take for Joseph Kony to finally relent and give himself up to the ICC prosecutors or whatever authorities, we and they were prepared to wait, as long as it held the hope that those children still in captivity will be able to finally return. Or that, with a peaceful deal or conclusion, once all those in the LRA have returned, parents, wives, and children and even grand children, can finally put a closure to their long wait for a home-coming for long-lost loved ones with joy or to come to terms with the heart-wrenching reality that they are dead- and among the nameless and faceless left to the beast of the wild on the battlefields-and mourn their losses.
Despite the fact many thousands of abducted children have been killed in the conflict, as parents, partners and relatives, they still clung to the elusive hope that, may be, just may be, they were alive and well in the ranks of the LRA, and with a peace deal, they would have eventually come home. They are the parents who have been unfortunate-living with the dreadful unknowns and the possibility that they are waiting for children who may never come home. And now, their dread may have just become a reality, as the expediency for political power have once again trumped the morality of rights and the need to exercise political power in the interest of the people.
What George Bush, Salvar Kir, Joseph Kabila, and Yoweri Museveni have done, is to tell the people of northern and eastern Uganda, including their abducted children in the ranks of the LRA, that their interests do not count, and that they inhabit a lesser moral world. Because the action is neither to protect the population and the children of northern and eastern Uganda,nor to rescue those in captivity with the LRA. Even if it were to apprehend Kony on the ICC warrant, how many more lives must be lost to bring one man to justice, in addition to the lives he is accused of brutally ending?
In our opinion, the LRA were too far away to pose any more credible threats to the people of northern and eastern Uganda, let alone the Ugandan state. This latest action has therefore more to do with Museveni's paranoia of an LRA force sitting somewhere, a ready and battle-hardened and tested force that his opponents in the country or region could potentially easily reactivate and use against him. With the ruling NRM/A political fotunes having been but all spent, Museveni faces uncertain political future after 2011. And with a new man in Washington come January 20th, it is unclear what political realignments will take place globally and regionally.
Therefore, the LRA and northern Ugandan dynomite could not be left unattended, particularly with loose wires of atrocities running back to 1980s that anyone could ignite and blow up to take down every significant figure involved in the northern war theatre and genocide. It is a risk dictator Museveni would rather not take. Someone would rather have to dig around to find an entry point than to latch onto open and unresolved issues, particularly with the controversies around the partiality of the ICC in the Ugandan indictments, and Museveni and his forces not garnering even a passing interested gazes from the ICC investigators and prosecutor.
Whatever the outcome of this latest military offensives against the LRA; and whenever Joseph Kony pays his debts and dues for his role in the debacles of northern Uganda, the last chapter will have not yet been written on the case. Until fellow traveller and prince of the macabre, dictator and war crimes and crimes against humanity suspect, dictator Yoweri Musevreni, also has his day in court or pays his debts and dues, the jury is out.
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 Southern Sudanese Vice President Riek Machar, and at the later stages, the appointment of a UN Scetretary General's Representative to the LRA Affected Areas, the former Mozambican President, Joachim Chissano. This lent the needed international moral support and diplomatic goodwill lacking in the previous attempts in 1994, 1998, and 2004, which was more or less a do-it-yourself (DIY)peacemaking initiated by either of the parties or civil society groups.
Unfortunately, all these efforts and the gains out of Juba, even if it had remained inconclusive, pending the signitures of the principal protagonists, Ugandan dictator Yoweri Museveni, and LRA leader Joseph Kony, stand to be undone by the latest recourse to military means. It is partly why we believe, all peace-loving people of the world, child rights fraternities, and human rights collectives and the humanitarian communities, ought to condemn dictator Yoweri Museveni's itchy, trigger-happy fingers.
The other reason is that, dictator Yoweri Museveni and his NRM/A government failed or rather neglected to protect thousands and thousands of abducted northern Ugandan children, while he turned his gaze towards Rwanda and Congo, where he was fighting to install his comrades-in-arms, Paul Kagame and the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF), who had been part of Museveni's NRA in Uganda. Moreover, Uganda could afford to send thousands and thousands of Ugandan troops into the Democratic Republic of Congo, where they ousted former dictator Mobutu Ssesesekou. However, for 23 years, the same Ugandan forces could not deal a death blow to the LRA, composed predominantly of abducted children of northern and eastern Uganda. Museveni only started to concern himself with abductions of children, when it served his political purposes at home and abroad.
We do not give a hoot about Joseph Kony and those indicted by the International Criminal Court with him, even though we have well-founded moral reservations about the other commanders because they were abducted as children and grew up and rose through the LRA ranks. Moreover, those who were more senior to them in the LRA command structure and hierarchy; men like Brig. Banya and Brig. Kolo, who were not abducted but joined the rebellion as adults and former soldiers, and in fact trained and deployed the children who now stand accused of the deeds of the rebellion together with Kony, are free men in Uganda, after they escaped and joined dictator Museveni as agents.
Similarly,Yoweri Museveni can go to hell, we will not shed a tear; because he is the chief architect and author of the genocide in northern Uganda, Rwanda and the DRC Congo and the Great Lakes Region of East and Central Africa. After losing an election he could not win in 1980, he fomented a tribal war that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in central Uganda, which he and his Western backers chiefly blamed on his opponents and the former government army. Additionally, he was the first to introduce and use children as child soldiers in combat in Uganda and the region.
Moreover, Museveni's scorched-earth counterinsurgency strategies in northern and eastern Uganda, ensured crops, foodstuffs and livestock were looted and burnt, and the population driven at bayonet points into makeshift camps without making provisions for them. Once in the camps controlled by security forces, they were raped and sodomised and killed by government security services and militias. Consequently, northern and eastern Uganda is today unrivalled as a poster for poverty, human misery arising from wilfull neglect and failures of government policies and a breakdown of normal politics. And as the most despicable and diabolical site of war crimes and crimes gainst humanity in the first decades of the 21st Century.
Therefore, both Joseph Kony and Yoweri Museveni are obverse sides of the same coin. There is simply nothing to choose between the two. Fortunately for Museveni, he wields the power of government and the state. International relations being relations of states, he has ready support and protection of those powerful global interests he serves in the region. Reports that this latest combined attacks on the LRA may have been aided by American intelligence and technology, say a lot about why dictator and war criminal Museveni has alluded the searing gaze of international justice.
Our problem with the latest attacks on the LRA is borne out of history. In 2001, the NRA/UPDF overran LRA bases in Southern Sudan. The aftermaths was that, it renewed brutal and devastating retaliatory incursions by the LRA into northern and eastern Uganda, after a long lull and relative peace similar to the one the people in the region have known for the last two years. That onslaught by the Ugandan government, dubbed Operation Iron Fist, came despite warnings from peace and humanitarian groups, that it would worsen the situation in the region. Moreover, it came at a time when there were overtures for peace, and a real possibility that, a negotiated settlement was within grasp.
Unfortunately, like in 1985 and 1994, the people were sorely disappointed, because dictator Museveni chose to flex his muscles rather than honour a peace agreement or negotiate a peaceful solution.
We and the people of northern Uganda, particularly those who hoped against hope,that their children, abducted by the LRA, after the state failed to protect them, might return home with the conclusion of a peace deal, comdemn the latest gratutitous and indiscriminate use of deadly force against women and children held captive by the LRA. However long it was going to take for Joseph Kony to finally relent and give himself up to the ICC prosecutors or whatever authorities, we and they were prepared to wait, as long as it held the hope that those children still in captivity will be able to finally return. Or that, with a peaceful deal or conclusion, once all those in the LRA have returned, parents, wives, and children and even grand children, can finally put a closure to their long wait for a home-coming for long-lost loved ones with joy or to come to terms with the heart-wrenching reality that they are dead- and among the nameless and faceless left to the beast of the wild on the battlefields-and mourn their losses.
Despite the fact many thousands of abducted children have been killed in the conflict, as parents, partners and relatives, they still clung to the elusive hope that, may be, just may be, they were alive and well in the ranks of the LRA, and with a peace deal, they would have eventually come home. They are the parents who have been unfortunate-living with the dreadful unknowns and the possibility that they are waiting for children who may never come home. And now, their dread may have just become a reality, as the expediency for political power have once again trumped the morality of rights and the need to exercise political power in the interest of the people.
What George Bush, Salvar Kir, Joseph Kabila, and Yoweri Museveni have done, is to tell the people of northern and eastern Uganda, including their abducted children in the ranks of the LRA, that their interests do not count, and that they inhabit a lesser moral world. Because the action is neither to protect the population and the children of northern and eastern Uganda,nor to rescue those in captivity with the LRA. Even if it were to apprehend Kony on the ICC warrant, how many more lives must be lost to bring one man to justice, in addition to the lives he is accused of brutally ending?
In our opinion, the LRA were too far away to pose any more credible threats to the people of northern and eastern Uganda, let alone the Ugandan state. This latest action has therefore more to do with Museveni's paranoia of an LRA force sitting somewhere, a ready and battle-hardened and tested force that his opponents in the country or region could potentially easily reactivate and use against him. With the ruling NRM/A political fotunes having been but all spent, Museveni faces uncertain political future after 2011. And with a new man in Washington come January 20th, it is unclear what political realignments will take place globally and regionally.
Therefore, the LRA and northern Ugandan dynomite could not be left unattended, particularly with loose wires of atrocities running back to 1980s that anyone could ignite and blow up to take down every significant figure involved in the northern war theatre and genocide. It is a risk dictator Museveni would rather not take. Someone would rather have to dig around to find an entry point than to latch onto open and unresolved issues, particularly with the controversies around the partiality of the ICC in the Ugandan indictments, and Museveni and his forces not garnering even a passing interested gazes from the ICC investigators and prosecutor.
Whatever the outcome of this latest military offensives against the LRA; and whenever Joseph Kony pays his debts and dues for his role in the debacles of northern Uganda, the last chapter will have not yet been written on the case. Until fellow traveller and prince of the macabre, dictator and war crimes and crimes against humanity suspect, dictator Yoweri Musevreni, also has his day in court or pays his debts and dues, the jury is out.
Friday 12 December 2008
Sentamu, Tutu and Raila Odinga: Which African Lives Matter?
Key Words: Desmond Tutu, John Sentamu, Raila Odinga, Gordon Brown, Internaional Community, Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe, African Union (AU), Yoweri Museveni; Paul Kagame, Laurent Nkunda, DRC Congo
If you believe the Western media, the Western coalition that calls itself and its will that of the international community, you would be forgiven if you thought Zimbabwe is the worst place to be right now on earth, and Robert Mugabe, the only African leader who has been in power more than 10 years. You might also easily think that Zimbabwe is the only place in Africa or the world, where elections have been controversial and contested. And you would also be forgiven if you thought Zimbabwe is the only place where people have or are dying of political violence as a result of a contested state legitimacy.
Listening to Raila Odinga, John Sentamu, or Condeeleeza Rice, you would think that all the dictators and those who suppress political freedom and use state violence to brutalise their opponents are all in the Hague and were deposed by the will and action of the international community led by a righteous British and American governments.
"If no troops are available, then the AU must allow the UN to send its forces into Zimbabwe with immediate effect, to take over control of the country and ensure urgent humanitarian assistance to the people dying of cholera."
Raila Odinga, Prime Minister of Kenya
"Robert Mugabe and his henchmen must now take their rightful place in The Hague and answer for their actions."
Dr John SentamuArchbishop of York.
"I am still really appalled at the inability of the international community to deal with tyrants. Robert Mugabe should have gone a long time ago." Condoleezza Rice, US secretary of state.
We want to remind you dear reader, that dictators Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, Paul Kagame of Rwanda, Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia, all rule their countries with iron fists; opposition are suppressed, jailed, murdered or forced to flee at the perils of death. In the case of Uganda, elections have thrice been stolen by the incumbent, but we have not seen the West adopt the opposition in Uganda or finger Museveni for ths Hague. This even when he has for years confined two million people in northern Uganda in concentration camps, ostesibly to protect them from insurgents, when the truth is also that the region is opposition stronghold and Museveni wanted to control the population and deny the opposition any meaningful organising there since the army controls who goes in and out of the camps and to do what. Opposition rallies or mere gatherings are routinely broken up with brute force by the military police disguised in riot police gears.
But have we heard the USA or Britain raise any objections to their behviour, corruption and human rights violations? No; not at all. Instead, these dictators are rewarded with military and other economic largesse that give them the capacity to brutalise their citizens. The USA and Britain are their most ardent and faithful diplomatic, moral, political and material benefactors because these are their dictators and ruling in the strategic interests of British and American finance and world domination strategies.
In contras the problem in Zinmbabwe is instigated by agents of the West and their collaborators in MDC with Tsvangirai as their leader, while discontents in Uganda, Rwanda, and Ethiopia are conditioned by internal consitions of the people there who genuinely desire change that can benefit them but not only a clique connected to the rulers and their Western backers and frontmen.
We applaud the common sense and refusal of the African Union (AU) to cave in to the propaganda and join the Western bandwaggon on Robert Mugabe and Zimbabwe- bashing.
News that the AU, and also particularly South Africa, and Tanzania, have rejected the Western contrived hysteria that Zimbabwe has gone to the dogs and the only means left to rescue it is the use of imperialist force to topple the government of Robert Mugabe, is welcome indeed to all Pan-Africanists and those committed to social justice not as a means of earning a living but as moral convictions and self-determination.
As Africans and survivors of genocide through slavery and brutal colonisation, by Britain and other Western powers, we reject the selective reporting of Western mass media, human rights organisations and agencies who take their cues from the departments of foreign affairs and that of state, of their home countries. These organisations are in some cases staffed by imperialist forces bent on sabotaging African liberation and progress. As they did with the colour-coded counter-revolutions in Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia and former Soviet Russia, they will deliberately work to ignite discontent and fan the flames of despondency and counter-revolution to scare the population into the laps of Western imperialism and rapacious capitalist eocnomic bondage.
Progressive governments and leaderships in Africa and in all former colonised lands, need to wake up to the cold reality that Western aid and human rights organisations are trojan horses, and are in the trade they are in, not by any tinge of moral persuasion and calling, but to deepen the policies and ideologies of dominaion and control of other people and societies; and also to to earn a living for themselves. In any case, it is their country first, wrong or right. It is therefore incumbent upon Africans and African leaders and Pan-Africa, to begin to clearly define its interests and build capacity to defend those interests when threatened by those who still are keen on enslaving its peoples.Such clearly defined Pan-African, African, national interests codified by the AU and ratified by all African governments and Pan-Africa, enjoin African governments and peoples, collectively or individually, to take action to defend the interests of the African people, when contravened or threatened by external forces or quislings such as Morgan Tsvangirai.
Western or African interests?
When we step back and reflect on cholera outbreak the hysteria over Zimbabwe, particularly coming in the wake of a cholera outbreak with a death toll of under 600, we are dumbfounded that some Africans who would normally pass for serious-minded persons, would think that the problem of cholera in Zimbabwe is worse than the genocide in Darfur, the Rwanda and Uganda-induced rebellion in Eastern Congo, and the debacles that is Somalia. We believe, if there are any places anywhere on the African continent where the world and Africa needed to devote their attention and efforts now, it is Darfur, Eastern Congo, northern Uganda and Somalia. In fact we have a suggestion for Raila Odinga: if he is a true bleeding heart for African lives, rather than a mere new Anglo-American imperialist puppet on a string, he should turn his gaze on Eastern Congo and close the border with Uganda so no goods can go through until Museveni and Kagame bring the rebellion in Eastern Congo to a close to save African lives.
What the West want in Zimbabwe has nothing to do with saving African lives or advancing the welfare of Africans in Zimbabwe, but imperialist control and domination of Zimbabwe through quislings like the MDC, so that the land reforms that would improve the lot of Africans, does not proceed as planned by ZANU-PF and comrade Mugabe. The war against Robert Mugabe and the people of Zimbabwe is a war against African liberation, independence and freedom, started by Tony Blair, in the name of regime change because comrade Mugabe and ZANU-PF would not compromise on land reforms for Africans.
So eminent Africans such as Desmond Tutu, John Sentamu, and a leader such as Raila Odinga, despite their honourable past and forcefulness of character and integrity, must on the case of Zimbabwe, be ignored or dismissed for what they are: deeply misguided and misinformed do-gooders who have lost their bearings.
As long as the straw the anti-Mugabe cabal of misled, politically naive and unconscious Africans and their Western backers grasp at is simply free and fair elections, and that Comrade Robert Mugabe has been in power too long, and therefore must leave; or that there must be power-sharing with the opposition and a stooge and reactionary like Morgan Tsvangirai, without taking stock of history and the scale of the deprivation of the African masses in Zimbabwe and the struggles they had to wage and the reasons for such struggles; Tutu, Oginga, and Sentamu, can continue to lick Imperial Britannia's boots, but they will have no relevance to the aspiration of the African peoples today.
What about DRC Congo?
The person we pity the most is Archbishop Tutu; because he is the most reasonable and self-less person-righ up there with Nelson Mandela-and a true friend of the poor, the oppressed, and disadvantaged from the slums of Soweto to the shamelessly UN-run concentration camps that they call refugee camps in occupied Palestinian lands. We are therefore at pains, to see Archbishop Desmond Tutu, throw his lot with the imperialist forces and their mouthpieces in Africa and the Western world.
As for Raila Odinga and Archbishop John Sentamu, we are not sure about their integrity. Raila Odinga, traded a cheap ministerial position, a sham power and a sham change, and its privileges, for the true aspirations of the long suffering Kenyan people for real change and real indepnendence so that they can be masters of their own destiny. As long as Raila Odinga continues to speak on Zimbabwe but ignores the plight of Kenyans from Mathera to the landless in the Rift Valley and Western Kenya; or close his eyes to the genocide next door in northern Uganda, and the dictator Yoweri Museveni, who like Mugabe has been in power for over two decades; or fail to see the man-made disaster in Eastern Congo-rather than the natural outbreak of cholera in Zimbabwe- he has no credibility.
Archbishops Tutu and Sentamu can be forgiven, for they are men of the cloth and sometimes, their biblical lenses, betray their naivety and simplifications of complex and interacting issues and claims that cannot be addressed by rhetorical and irrational Sunday sermons to the poor and how they must accept their current destitution because they have a wealth of inheritance stored for them on high. And if not material, then it is spiritual.
It is however paradoxical that both Tutu and Sentamu, should call for external invasion of Zimbabwe, to topple the ZANU-PF government, arrest and deliver Robert Mugabe to the International Criminal Court, allegedly as a means of liberating the people of Zimbabwe from tyranny and suffering. Apparently, it is ok for foreign imperial forces to kill some Zimbabweans, in order to save some. We know that foreign invasion of a country means killing its people as we have seen in the self same efforts in regime change and imposition of democracy in Iraq. Neither Tutu nor Sentamu can tell the world and the people of Iraq that they are better off since Mission Accomplished.
In their convoluted views, it is a crime, for ZANU-PF and Robert Mugabe, to stand up for the interests of the majority of Zimbabweans- not just some urban and Ndebeleland elite, or white farmers and settlers whose intrests coincide with those of the imperialists- and say no to recolonisation of Zimbabwe; or compromise on the need for social and economic justice through agrarian land reforms to benefit millions of ordinary Zimbabweans dispossessed by British colonialism. But you will not hear Desmond Tutu and John Sentamu speak about the injustices of British colonialism, UDI and Ian Smith, and the fact that the grievances that led to the Chimurenga, remain largely unmet, and are at the heart of the current struggles in Zimbabwe. The struggle pits comrade and and patriot and Pan-Africanist Robert Mugabe and the revolutionary ZANU-PF, against the counter-revolutionaries and collaborators with the forces of reactions, organised on electioneering around Morgan Tsvagirai and his British allies who want to roll back the gains wrested from the defeated British imperialism and UDI racialism in 1980.
We would have taken these men of the cloth seriously, were they not prompted to call for external invasion of Zimbabwe by an outbreak of cholera epidemic, which is a natural occurrence due to poor sanitation, which also directly arise from poverty, whose genesis and conditions have been historical for Zimbabwean Africans who are victims of British colonialism.
The paradox is that, Archbishops Sentamu, Desmond Tutu, and Prime Minister Raila Odinga and their master, Gordon Brown, are not ashamed of themselves, to latch onto the tragedy of 600 deaths due to cholera in Zimbabwe, but are quiet, or not speaking in the same tone and rallying the world to put a stop to the plight of millions of the people of DRC Congo, killed, maimed, displaced and desperate as a result of violence perpetrated by Laurent Nkunda, Paul Kagame, Yoweri Museveni and their Western benefactor's political and economic interests in the Great Lakes Region of East and Central Africa. Moreover, Archbishop Sentamu, a native of Uganda, has been mum on his own country, where dictator Yoweri Museveni has ruled with an iron fist for 23 years, killed hundreds of thousands in Luwero before seizing power, and orchestrated a genocide in northern Uganda where hundreds of thousands have perished and two million people confined in concentration camps without food, sanitary facilities and other social and economic amenities as called for by international humanitarian law.
Furthermore, if these prelates and Raila Odinga were concerned about the loss of lives of Africans, Zimbabwe might have been on their list, but it could not have certainly eclipsed Darfur, Somalia, the DRC Congo, and northern Uganda, if the concerns were primarily with human tragedy per se without other vested economic and strategic interests. For Britain at least, it is very clear that, had there not been White British settlers in Zimbabwe, Gordon Brown would have been as quiet on Zimbabwe as he has been on northern Uganda, Eastern DRC, Somalia, Ethiopia and elsewhere where Western-backed dictators are busy oppressing fellow Africans in the economic and strategic interests of the West. Gordon Brown and Britain, with its allies, bankroll dictatorships of Yoweri Museveni and Paul Kagame, and are responsible for the deaths in northern Uganda, Eastern DRC Congo, and DRC Congo itself.
The question we want to put to Prime Minister Raila Odinga, the newest British imperialist Headman and slave-driver in East Africa is: Which African lives matter to you, sir? Why are you not speaking out on northern Uganda, DRC Congo, Darfur, and Ethiopia? At least for DRC Congo, you could even have an impact by blocking all goods traffic to Rwanda until they rein in Laurent Nkunda to stop him from generating the human tragedy in Eastern Congo. As we have suggested, show you care for all Africans, but not only those the British dedcied are of more strategic geopolitical interests, by closing your borders with Uganda to underline your African policy and determination to put an end to all needless bloodletting in Africa in the name of political power.
And for prelates Tutu and Sentamu, isn't it only god who gives and takes away? And which African children of god have more precious lives than the others, or they are all the same and precious to god?
We tip our hats to the correct leadership of Jakaya Kikwete of Tanzania, as Chair of the AU; and to South Africa, for insisting on an African solution and repudiating any notion of the use of force on a progressive African government and state.
If you believe the Western media, the Western coalition that calls itself and its will that of the international community, you would be forgiven if you thought Zimbabwe is the worst place to be right now on earth, and Robert Mugabe, the only African leader who has been in power more than 10 years. You might also easily think that Zimbabwe is the only place in Africa or the world, where elections have been controversial and contested. And you would also be forgiven if you thought Zimbabwe is the only place where people have or are dying of political violence as a result of a contested state legitimacy.
Listening to Raila Odinga, John Sentamu, or Condeeleeza Rice, you would think that all the dictators and those who suppress political freedom and use state violence to brutalise their opponents are all in the Hague and were deposed by the will and action of the international community led by a righteous British and American governments.
"If no troops are available, then the AU must allow the UN to send its forces into Zimbabwe with immediate effect, to take over control of the country and ensure urgent humanitarian assistance to the people dying of cholera."
Raila Odinga, Prime Minister of Kenya
"Robert Mugabe and his henchmen must now take their rightful place in The Hague and answer for their actions."
Dr John SentamuArchbishop of York.
"I am still really appalled at the inability of the international community to deal with tyrants. Robert Mugabe should have gone a long time ago." Condoleezza Rice, US secretary of state.
We want to remind you dear reader, that dictators Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, Paul Kagame of Rwanda, Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia, all rule their countries with iron fists; opposition are suppressed, jailed, murdered or forced to flee at the perils of death. In the case of Uganda, elections have thrice been stolen by the incumbent, but we have not seen the West adopt the opposition in Uganda or finger Museveni for ths Hague. This even when he has for years confined two million people in northern Uganda in concentration camps, ostesibly to protect them from insurgents, when the truth is also that the region is opposition stronghold and Museveni wanted to control the population and deny the opposition any meaningful organising there since the army controls who goes in and out of the camps and to do what. Opposition rallies or mere gatherings are routinely broken up with brute force by the military police disguised in riot police gears.
But have we heard the USA or Britain raise any objections to their behviour, corruption and human rights violations? No; not at all. Instead, these dictators are rewarded with military and other economic largesse that give them the capacity to brutalise their citizens. The USA and Britain are their most ardent and faithful diplomatic, moral, political and material benefactors because these are their dictators and ruling in the strategic interests of British and American finance and world domination strategies.
In contras the problem in Zinmbabwe is instigated by agents of the West and their collaborators in MDC with Tsvangirai as their leader, while discontents in Uganda, Rwanda, and Ethiopia are conditioned by internal consitions of the people there who genuinely desire change that can benefit them but not only a clique connected to the rulers and their Western backers and frontmen.
We applaud the common sense and refusal of the African Union (AU) to cave in to the propaganda and join the Western bandwaggon on Robert Mugabe and Zimbabwe- bashing.
News that the AU, and also particularly South Africa, and Tanzania, have rejected the Western contrived hysteria that Zimbabwe has gone to the dogs and the only means left to rescue it is the use of imperialist force to topple the government of Robert Mugabe, is welcome indeed to all Pan-Africanists and those committed to social justice not as a means of earning a living but as moral convictions and self-determination.
As Africans and survivors of genocide through slavery and brutal colonisation, by Britain and other Western powers, we reject the selective reporting of Western mass media, human rights organisations and agencies who take their cues from the departments of foreign affairs and that of state, of their home countries. These organisations are in some cases staffed by imperialist forces bent on sabotaging African liberation and progress. As they did with the colour-coded counter-revolutions in Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia and former Soviet Russia, they will deliberately work to ignite discontent and fan the flames of despondency and counter-revolution to scare the population into the laps of Western imperialism and rapacious capitalist eocnomic bondage.
Progressive governments and leaderships in Africa and in all former colonised lands, need to wake up to the cold reality that Western aid and human rights organisations are trojan horses, and are in the trade they are in, not by any tinge of moral persuasion and calling, but to deepen the policies and ideologies of dominaion and control of other people and societies; and also to to earn a living for themselves. In any case, it is their country first, wrong or right. It is therefore incumbent upon Africans and African leaders and Pan-Africa, to begin to clearly define its interests and build capacity to defend those interests when threatened by those who still are keen on enslaving its peoples.Such clearly defined Pan-African, African, national interests codified by the AU and ratified by all African governments and Pan-Africa, enjoin African governments and peoples, collectively or individually, to take action to defend the interests of the African people, when contravened or threatened by external forces or quislings such as Morgan Tsvangirai.
Western or African interests?
When we step back and reflect on cholera outbreak the hysteria over Zimbabwe, particularly coming in the wake of a cholera outbreak with a death toll of under 600, we are dumbfounded that some Africans who would normally pass for serious-minded persons, would think that the problem of cholera in Zimbabwe is worse than the genocide in Darfur, the Rwanda and Uganda-induced rebellion in Eastern Congo, and the debacles that is Somalia. We believe, if there are any places anywhere on the African continent where the world and Africa needed to devote their attention and efforts now, it is Darfur, Eastern Congo, northern Uganda and Somalia. In fact we have a suggestion for Raila Odinga: if he is a true bleeding heart for African lives, rather than a mere new Anglo-American imperialist puppet on a string, he should turn his gaze on Eastern Congo and close the border with Uganda so no goods can go through until Museveni and Kagame bring the rebellion in Eastern Congo to a close to save African lives.
What the West want in Zimbabwe has nothing to do with saving African lives or advancing the welfare of Africans in Zimbabwe, but imperialist control and domination of Zimbabwe through quislings like the MDC, so that the land reforms that would improve the lot of Africans, does not proceed as planned by ZANU-PF and comrade Mugabe. The war against Robert Mugabe and the people of Zimbabwe is a war against African liberation, independence and freedom, started by Tony Blair, in the name of regime change because comrade Mugabe and ZANU-PF would not compromise on land reforms for Africans.
So eminent Africans such as Desmond Tutu, John Sentamu, and a leader such as Raila Odinga, despite their honourable past and forcefulness of character and integrity, must on the case of Zimbabwe, be ignored or dismissed for what they are: deeply misguided and misinformed do-gooders who have lost their bearings.
As long as the straw the anti-Mugabe cabal of misled, politically naive and unconscious Africans and their Western backers grasp at is simply free and fair elections, and that Comrade Robert Mugabe has been in power too long, and therefore must leave; or that there must be power-sharing with the opposition and a stooge and reactionary like Morgan Tsvangirai, without taking stock of history and the scale of the deprivation of the African masses in Zimbabwe and the struggles they had to wage and the reasons for such struggles; Tutu, Oginga, and Sentamu, can continue to lick Imperial Britannia's boots, but they will have no relevance to the aspiration of the African peoples today.
What about DRC Congo?
The person we pity the most is Archbishop Tutu; because he is the most reasonable and self-less person-righ up there with Nelson Mandela-and a true friend of the poor, the oppressed, and disadvantaged from the slums of Soweto to the shamelessly UN-run concentration camps that they call refugee camps in occupied Palestinian lands. We are therefore at pains, to see Archbishop Desmond Tutu, throw his lot with the imperialist forces and their mouthpieces in Africa and the Western world.
As for Raila Odinga and Archbishop John Sentamu, we are not sure about their integrity. Raila Odinga, traded a cheap ministerial position, a sham power and a sham change, and its privileges, for the true aspirations of the long suffering Kenyan people for real change and real indepnendence so that they can be masters of their own destiny. As long as Raila Odinga continues to speak on Zimbabwe but ignores the plight of Kenyans from Mathera to the landless in the Rift Valley and Western Kenya; or close his eyes to the genocide next door in northern Uganda, and the dictator Yoweri Museveni, who like Mugabe has been in power for over two decades; or fail to see the man-made disaster in Eastern Congo-rather than the natural outbreak of cholera in Zimbabwe- he has no credibility.
Archbishops Tutu and Sentamu can be forgiven, for they are men of the cloth and sometimes, their biblical lenses, betray their naivety and simplifications of complex and interacting issues and claims that cannot be addressed by rhetorical and irrational Sunday sermons to the poor and how they must accept their current destitution because they have a wealth of inheritance stored for them on high. And if not material, then it is spiritual.
It is however paradoxical that both Tutu and Sentamu, should call for external invasion of Zimbabwe, to topple the ZANU-PF government, arrest and deliver Robert Mugabe to the International Criminal Court, allegedly as a means of liberating the people of Zimbabwe from tyranny and suffering. Apparently, it is ok for foreign imperial forces to kill some Zimbabweans, in order to save some. We know that foreign invasion of a country means killing its people as we have seen in the self same efforts in regime change and imposition of democracy in Iraq. Neither Tutu nor Sentamu can tell the world and the people of Iraq that they are better off since Mission Accomplished.
In their convoluted views, it is a crime, for ZANU-PF and Robert Mugabe, to stand up for the interests of the majority of Zimbabweans- not just some urban and Ndebeleland elite, or white farmers and settlers whose intrests coincide with those of the imperialists- and say no to recolonisation of Zimbabwe; or compromise on the need for social and economic justice through agrarian land reforms to benefit millions of ordinary Zimbabweans dispossessed by British colonialism. But you will not hear Desmond Tutu and John Sentamu speak about the injustices of British colonialism, UDI and Ian Smith, and the fact that the grievances that led to the Chimurenga, remain largely unmet, and are at the heart of the current struggles in Zimbabwe. The struggle pits comrade and and patriot and Pan-Africanist Robert Mugabe and the revolutionary ZANU-PF, against the counter-revolutionaries and collaborators with the forces of reactions, organised on electioneering around Morgan Tsvagirai and his British allies who want to roll back the gains wrested from the defeated British imperialism and UDI racialism in 1980.
We would have taken these men of the cloth seriously, were they not prompted to call for external invasion of Zimbabwe by an outbreak of cholera epidemic, which is a natural occurrence due to poor sanitation, which also directly arise from poverty, whose genesis and conditions have been historical for Zimbabwean Africans who are victims of British colonialism.
The paradox is that, Archbishops Sentamu, Desmond Tutu, and Prime Minister Raila Odinga and their master, Gordon Brown, are not ashamed of themselves, to latch onto the tragedy of 600 deaths due to cholera in Zimbabwe, but are quiet, or not speaking in the same tone and rallying the world to put a stop to the plight of millions of the people of DRC Congo, killed, maimed, displaced and desperate as a result of violence perpetrated by Laurent Nkunda, Paul Kagame, Yoweri Museveni and their Western benefactor's political and economic interests in the Great Lakes Region of East and Central Africa. Moreover, Archbishop Sentamu, a native of Uganda, has been mum on his own country, where dictator Yoweri Museveni has ruled with an iron fist for 23 years, killed hundreds of thousands in Luwero before seizing power, and orchestrated a genocide in northern Uganda where hundreds of thousands have perished and two million people confined in concentration camps without food, sanitary facilities and other social and economic amenities as called for by international humanitarian law.
Furthermore, if these prelates and Raila Odinga were concerned about the loss of lives of Africans, Zimbabwe might have been on their list, but it could not have certainly eclipsed Darfur, Somalia, the DRC Congo, and northern Uganda, if the concerns were primarily with human tragedy per se without other vested economic and strategic interests. For Britain at least, it is very clear that, had there not been White British settlers in Zimbabwe, Gordon Brown would have been as quiet on Zimbabwe as he has been on northern Uganda, Eastern DRC, Somalia, Ethiopia and elsewhere where Western-backed dictators are busy oppressing fellow Africans in the economic and strategic interests of the West. Gordon Brown and Britain, with its allies, bankroll dictatorships of Yoweri Museveni and Paul Kagame, and are responsible for the deaths in northern Uganda, Eastern DRC Congo, and DRC Congo itself.
The question we want to put to Prime Minister Raila Odinga, the newest British imperialist Headman and slave-driver in East Africa is: Which African lives matter to you, sir? Why are you not speaking out on northern Uganda, DRC Congo, Darfur, and Ethiopia? At least for DRC Congo, you could even have an impact by blocking all goods traffic to Rwanda until they rein in Laurent Nkunda to stop him from generating the human tragedy in Eastern Congo. As we have suggested, show you care for all Africans, but not only those the British dedcied are of more strategic geopolitical interests, by closing your borders with Uganda to underline your African policy and determination to put an end to all needless bloodletting in Africa in the name of political power.
And for prelates Tutu and Sentamu, isn't it only god who gives and takes away? And which African children of god have more precious lives than the others, or they are all the same and precious to god?
We tip our hats to the correct leadership of Jakaya Kikwete of Tanzania, as Chair of the AU; and to South Africa, for insisting on an African solution and repudiating any notion of the use of force on a progressive African government and state.
Saturday 6 December 2008
Chasing Kony's elusive signature another grand scheme to not do anything for the masses of northern Uganda
Key Words: Acholi; Juba Peace Talks; Joseph Kony; LRM/A,; Yoweri Museveni; NRM/A; Genocide; Uganda; Peace; Reconstruction; Development; Programme; PRDP; Acholi Autonomy; Acholi Secession; Just Peace; Northern Uganda; ICC; LRA Indictments.
With a central government in full control of every inch and facets of life of the country, and the local governments fully functional,why must disbanding camps, resettling people to their own land, rehabilitation and reconstruction work rest so perilously on Joseph Kony's illegible signiture on the worthless Juba documents?
We have come to the conclusion, and the full realisation and firm belief that, the latest comedic episode from the Juba Pantomime, is a grand excuse on the part of those in governmnent, position of power and authority, to actually continue not to do anything for and about northern Uganda mass suffering.
Therefore, the time may have come, for Acholi as the principal victim of the war, to really speak independently and with a mind to looking out for its own interest; wanting better for itself, but not always passively waiting for crumbs to be thrown its way. It must begin to think of organising itself and use mass action and political means to stand on its own two feet and chart a more promising future for itself.
Acholi leaders -and I mean those who are leaders, not pretenders-must stop being shunted off to Juba and wherever in search of Joseph Kony, or doing other people's biddings. There is nothing that will come out of Juba any more than it has already transpired on the ground in Acholiland since hot hostilities ended there two years ago.
There is no more violence in northern Uganda. Its leadership ought to get down to civic governance and engage the problems that confront their people now. Let each level of government in Acholi: from sub-counties, Counties, Town Councils, municipalities, district councils, and if necessary, collaboration between and among neighbouring district councils, get down to work within their areas of jurisdiction and respond to the needs and provide the services they are elected, established, and mandated to do.
The camps need to be disbanded and people resettled to their own ancestral lands. Resources need to be scoped and secured to provide for the needs of people, rehabilitate hospitals, dispensaries, schools, and repair roads and bridges. To the best of my knowledge, these things do not have to wait for Joseph Kony's signaiture, or incaceration, or even death for someone to begin acting on them. What is stopping the central government from embarking on massive programmes and work to alleviate suffering in Acholi and put the people back on their feet?
Acholi must stop operating on Yoweri Museveni's agenda and time table of buying time while people's lives and the future of a whole race is further jeopardised. Acholi has the capacity, but lack the will power, to step up and be counted and confront people like Ochora, that they do not have planning authority or mandate for the city or the district. Theirs is only central government oversight, and only on programmes the central government funds. Let us make it clear that, they cannot demand accountability for what they neither generate nor provide.
Perhaps it is because Nobert Mao has provided weak leadership and surrendered the civic, political leadership of Gulu district to Col. Ochora, Brig. Otema Awany, and Richard Todwong, that Ochora can meddle even with the running and planning authority of Gulu Municipality. What power and authority did Col. Ochoro draw on to deploy police to stop the mayor from addressing townspeople, or order the municipality to shelve plans for paving roads within its jurisdictions and their boundaries of Gulu Municipaltiy? Why must paving the road, which is already a safety hazard to motorists, townspeople and a drag on businesses within the municpality, wait until 2010, when the municipaltiy has the resources and the planning authority to do so?
It is all because Ochora would rather the NRM/A government does it, on their own politically motivated time table and with Southern Sudan, rather than Acholi or Gulu Municipality in mind. In doing so, they can hope to push it as some political capital investment to later say that the NRM/A government cares and those like Ochora, Todwong, and other NRM clowns who may want to stand for parliament in 2011, can hope to draw down on it and spend it to endear themselves to the populace.
But if you thought Ochora was alone in meddling where he ought not to, then you are mistaken. How about Norbert Mao, Chairman of the district council, and DP presidential candidate in-waiting-characteristically more mouth than substance and relevance- harping on the issues of nightclubs and disco halls and noise pollution in the municipality? Whoa! What happened to the Municipality, the Mayor, and the Public Health officer, tackling this problem or speaking on it?
Unless I am mistaken, this must ideally be for some municipal bye-law enforces, regulating such businesses and the planning units, zoning, where such businesses can be located and their times of operation, which would be a condition for licencing. However, it is not a district council issue. How does Nobert Mao, a whole Chairman of the district council get to take interest in this, rather than the municipal authorities? Are they this idle even in Gulu District Council? Well, I am sure there are a lot more noble things outside Gulu Municipality that the chairman could have found to yap to the media about, if he was looking for something to do or say in order to show that he is actually doing something.
I guess things must be at a stand-still in Acholiland. Blame it all on Joseph Kony, who has for his own self-interest, rejected to sign on the bogus Juba Peace Agreement. But it has been two years since hostilities ceased in northern Uganda. We do not, and we should not buy the nonsense that without Joseph Kony's signiture, nothing can be done and life must be put on hold. At least, we know that, Gulu, Kitgum, Pader, Lira, Apac, and other northern and eastern towns flourished during the last 23 years when the insurgency was at some of its hottest peaks.
In fact, there is hardly any green, open, public spaces in Gulu or Kitgum. As far as they are concerned, development is mortar and brick. Indicating that, the war did not stop the political and business class, from trading in the aid that were meant for the people in the camps; from swindling NUSAF and NURP I and II funds to build mansions, castles, hotels, commercial properties, and other symbols of conspicuous consumptions in Gulu, Kitgum, Pader, and other places looted money and resources could be concealed and also flaunted.
It was only the people in the camps who were shortchanged. The excuse was insecurity, so no one and no aid could reach them. It was a convenient pretext for political leaders and their cronies to swindle aid from reaching those it was meant for. And now that there is no more war, the golden and holy grail of pretext is Joseph Kony's coveted signature. It is nothing but grand excuse to do nothing about the plight of the people of northern Uganda, knowing that it is difficult, if not impossible and most unlikely, that Kony would sign on the dotted line, given his concerns.
Seriously, Joseph Kony's signature or non-signature on the dotted line of the useless Juba Peace Agreement - which lies infront of me in all its uselessness as I write this-brings nothing of value to the displaced people of northern Uganda than we have already had in the last two years with the cessation of hostilities. If the government has not already poured in significant and massive resources into the problems of northern Uganda two years after active conflict ceased there, there is nothing to convince me that this will change magically with the illegible signature of Joseph Kony legitimising the incomprehensible Juba Peace Agreement and its six agenda items.
What remains in contention, is Kony's personal safety and interests. Now ask yourself, what is an agreement, if by its conclusion, you are still unsure about the things that are most important to you and the motivations for your going to the negotiation table in the first place? Is is a disagreement or an agreement; and if it is an agreement, agreement on what and between who and whom if Joseph Kony, as the principal to the negotiation, does not agree with the areas and terms that most affect his personal self-interest? But the Juba processes and those who harp for his signature, want to deny him the autonomy to make his own decisions on the issues in question.
In our view, neither the Ugandan state nor any peace agreement, can negotiate away Kony's indictment by the ICC. We would in good faith, advise Joseph Kony, to go to the Hague and defend himself....and hoping that he can win. But should he lose, as it may well be, he should prepare himself to serve out his jail terms there. By the same token, we would like to in good faith, tell Joseph Kony that, anyone who tells him there is a way around the ICC issue either through a peace negotiation or the Ugandan state or even a third country of asylum, that person is lying and does not have his best interest at heart.
Barring any UN change of mind, it is best for Joseph Kony, through his lawyers, to give himself up to the ICC in the Hague. We give this advice with the understanding that the people and leaders of northern Uganda, and the global human rights fraternity are committed to equitable justice and will continue to campaign for a special tribunal to be set alongside to complement the ICC process, so that all violators since the beginning of the conflict in 1986, are brought to justice.Those of us from northern Uganda particularly, must never be satisfied with half-measures, until justice is done. We should therefore treat every gain or setbacks, as the beginning, but not ends in themselves.
We do not entertain the ludicruous suggestion that a special division of the Uganda high court could try war crimes and crimes against humanity suspects, including Joseph Kony and other elements of the LRA. It is therefore, silly, for anyone worth their claims to leadership to think and say that we must move forward with the glaring shortcomings of the Juba process and agreement, as well as the unfairness and partiality of the ICC indictments, which gave birth to the impractical and unrealistic Juba framework in the first place. No doubt, we applaud and stand to defend its unintended positive consequence in the cessation of hostilities, and must work against anyone fomenting conflict again in the name of the suffering people of northern Uganda. We do know justice has not been done on their behalf, but that will not come through another war, but impartial international justice.
On the other hand, as existentialists, if Joseph Kony has the capacity and means to stay in the bush with his fighters and live out the ICC indictment, and if that is the kind of life he feels he is now doomed to live, we absolutely have no objections, as a personally and existentially determined options to the injustice of the Hague and calumny of a possible trial in Uganda. In fact, as people who are committed to a just and equitable peace in northern Uganda, and bearing in mind the political, partial, and convenient nature of the ICC indictments of only the LRA for the northern Uganda genocide, we would actually be ambivalent to such a move by the LRA, as long as they do not plan to resume hostilities in northern Uganda, do not harass civilians, and if at all, only confront armed elements of the repressive state and regime of Yoweri Museveni.
It is time for political clarity and clear leadership in Acholi. Joseph Kony does not have the power and authority of the state and government in Uganda; but Yoweri Museveni does. It is nonsensical therefore, to blame the current state of our people-after two years of cessation of hostilities and relative peace and with Kony thousands and thousands of miles away - on the refusal of Joseph Kony to sign the Juba Agreement. If anything, it is the failures of the national and local government leadership in Uganda and Acholi, that the people have been left on their own, as they were for 23 years while the conflict lasted.
Those of us who recognhise this, should no longer keep quiet, while those responsible cling onto the flimsiest of excuses to shield their personal , political, policy and leadership failures to understand and respond to the needs of people in northern and eastern Uganda, especially Acholiland.Or at worst, find a bullet-proof excuse to continue to do nothing significantly for the suffering people of northern and eastern Uganda. Moreover, Kony's sinature is not worth anything for the ordinary people of northern Uganda, except as a big stick for dictator Museveni and his international brotherhood to hold over the head of Joseph Kony to order good behaviour and acquiescence with dictator Museveni's political will and wishes in northern Uganda.
Whatever their excuses, it is time we and the world began to say: dictator Yoweri Museveni Must Go! No political power should be worth, even a single life of even the least of the citizenry, let alone genocide and jeopardising the lives of more than two million people.
With a central government in full control of every inch and facets of life of the country, and the local governments fully functional,why must disbanding camps, resettling people to their own land, rehabilitation and reconstruction work rest so perilously on Joseph Kony's illegible signiture on the worthless Juba documents?
We have come to the conclusion, and the full realisation and firm belief that, the latest comedic episode from the Juba Pantomime, is a grand excuse on the part of those in governmnent, position of power and authority, to actually continue not to do anything for and about northern Uganda mass suffering.
Therefore, the time may have come, for Acholi as the principal victim of the war, to really speak independently and with a mind to looking out for its own interest; wanting better for itself, but not always passively waiting for crumbs to be thrown its way. It must begin to think of organising itself and use mass action and political means to stand on its own two feet and chart a more promising future for itself.
Acholi leaders -and I mean those who are leaders, not pretenders-must stop being shunted off to Juba and wherever in search of Joseph Kony, or doing other people's biddings. There is nothing that will come out of Juba any more than it has already transpired on the ground in Acholiland since hot hostilities ended there two years ago.
There is no more violence in northern Uganda. Its leadership ought to get down to civic governance and engage the problems that confront their people now. Let each level of government in Acholi: from sub-counties, Counties, Town Councils, municipalities, district councils, and if necessary, collaboration between and among neighbouring district councils, get down to work within their areas of jurisdiction and respond to the needs and provide the services they are elected, established, and mandated to do.
The camps need to be disbanded and people resettled to their own ancestral lands. Resources need to be scoped and secured to provide for the needs of people, rehabilitate hospitals, dispensaries, schools, and repair roads and bridges. To the best of my knowledge, these things do not have to wait for Joseph Kony's signaiture, or incaceration, or even death for someone to begin acting on them. What is stopping the central government from embarking on massive programmes and work to alleviate suffering in Acholi and put the people back on their feet?
Acholi must stop operating on Yoweri Museveni's agenda and time table of buying time while people's lives and the future of a whole race is further jeopardised. Acholi has the capacity, but lack the will power, to step up and be counted and confront people like Ochora, that they do not have planning authority or mandate for the city or the district. Theirs is only central government oversight, and only on programmes the central government funds. Let us make it clear that, they cannot demand accountability for what they neither generate nor provide.
Perhaps it is because Nobert Mao has provided weak leadership and surrendered the civic, political leadership of Gulu district to Col. Ochora, Brig. Otema Awany, and Richard Todwong, that Ochora can meddle even with the running and planning authority of Gulu Municipality. What power and authority did Col. Ochoro draw on to deploy police to stop the mayor from addressing townspeople, or order the municipality to shelve plans for paving roads within its jurisdictions and their boundaries of Gulu Municipaltiy? Why must paving the road, which is already a safety hazard to motorists, townspeople and a drag on businesses within the municpality, wait until 2010, when the municipaltiy has the resources and the planning authority to do so?
It is all because Ochora would rather the NRM/A government does it, on their own politically motivated time table and with Southern Sudan, rather than Acholi or Gulu Municipality in mind. In doing so, they can hope to push it as some political capital investment to later say that the NRM/A government cares and those like Ochora, Todwong, and other NRM clowns who may want to stand for parliament in 2011, can hope to draw down on it and spend it to endear themselves to the populace.
But if you thought Ochora was alone in meddling where he ought not to, then you are mistaken. How about Norbert Mao, Chairman of the district council, and DP presidential candidate in-waiting-characteristically more mouth than substance and relevance- harping on the issues of nightclubs and disco halls and noise pollution in the municipality? Whoa! What happened to the Municipality, the Mayor, and the Public Health officer, tackling this problem or speaking on it?
Unless I am mistaken, this must ideally be for some municipal bye-law enforces, regulating such businesses and the planning units, zoning, where such businesses can be located and their times of operation, which would be a condition for licencing. However, it is not a district council issue. How does Nobert Mao, a whole Chairman of the district council get to take interest in this, rather than the municipal authorities? Are they this idle even in Gulu District Council? Well, I am sure there are a lot more noble things outside Gulu Municipality that the chairman could have found to yap to the media about, if he was looking for something to do or say in order to show that he is actually doing something.
I guess things must be at a stand-still in Acholiland. Blame it all on Joseph Kony, who has for his own self-interest, rejected to sign on the bogus Juba Peace Agreement. But it has been two years since hostilities ceased in northern Uganda. We do not, and we should not buy the nonsense that without Joseph Kony's signiture, nothing can be done and life must be put on hold. At least, we know that, Gulu, Kitgum, Pader, Lira, Apac, and other northern and eastern towns flourished during the last 23 years when the insurgency was at some of its hottest peaks.
In fact, there is hardly any green, open, public spaces in Gulu or Kitgum. As far as they are concerned, development is mortar and brick. Indicating that, the war did not stop the political and business class, from trading in the aid that were meant for the people in the camps; from swindling NUSAF and NURP I and II funds to build mansions, castles, hotels, commercial properties, and other symbols of conspicuous consumptions in Gulu, Kitgum, Pader, and other places looted money and resources could be concealed and also flaunted.
It was only the people in the camps who were shortchanged. The excuse was insecurity, so no one and no aid could reach them. It was a convenient pretext for political leaders and their cronies to swindle aid from reaching those it was meant for. And now that there is no more war, the golden and holy grail of pretext is Joseph Kony's coveted signature. It is nothing but grand excuse to do nothing about the plight of the people of northern Uganda, knowing that it is difficult, if not impossible and most unlikely, that Kony would sign on the dotted line, given his concerns.
Seriously, Joseph Kony's signature or non-signature on the dotted line of the useless Juba Peace Agreement - which lies infront of me in all its uselessness as I write this-brings nothing of value to the displaced people of northern Uganda than we have already had in the last two years with the cessation of hostilities. If the government has not already poured in significant and massive resources into the problems of northern Uganda two years after active conflict ceased there, there is nothing to convince me that this will change magically with the illegible signature of Joseph Kony legitimising the incomprehensible Juba Peace Agreement and its six agenda items.
What remains in contention, is Kony's personal safety and interests. Now ask yourself, what is an agreement, if by its conclusion, you are still unsure about the things that are most important to you and the motivations for your going to the negotiation table in the first place? Is is a disagreement or an agreement; and if it is an agreement, agreement on what and between who and whom if Joseph Kony, as the principal to the negotiation, does not agree with the areas and terms that most affect his personal self-interest? But the Juba processes and those who harp for his signature, want to deny him the autonomy to make his own decisions on the issues in question.
In our view, neither the Ugandan state nor any peace agreement, can negotiate away Kony's indictment by the ICC. We would in good faith, advise Joseph Kony, to go to the Hague and defend himself....and hoping that he can win. But should he lose, as it may well be, he should prepare himself to serve out his jail terms there. By the same token, we would like to in good faith, tell Joseph Kony that, anyone who tells him there is a way around the ICC issue either through a peace negotiation or the Ugandan state or even a third country of asylum, that person is lying and does not have his best interest at heart.
Barring any UN change of mind, it is best for Joseph Kony, through his lawyers, to give himself up to the ICC in the Hague. We give this advice with the understanding that the people and leaders of northern Uganda, and the global human rights fraternity are committed to equitable justice and will continue to campaign for a special tribunal to be set alongside to complement the ICC process, so that all violators since the beginning of the conflict in 1986, are brought to justice.Those of us from northern Uganda particularly, must never be satisfied with half-measures, until justice is done. We should therefore treat every gain or setbacks, as the beginning, but not ends in themselves.
We do not entertain the ludicruous suggestion that a special division of the Uganda high court could try war crimes and crimes against humanity suspects, including Joseph Kony and other elements of the LRA. It is therefore, silly, for anyone worth their claims to leadership to think and say that we must move forward with the glaring shortcomings of the Juba process and agreement, as well as the unfairness and partiality of the ICC indictments, which gave birth to the impractical and unrealistic Juba framework in the first place. No doubt, we applaud and stand to defend its unintended positive consequence in the cessation of hostilities, and must work against anyone fomenting conflict again in the name of the suffering people of northern Uganda. We do know justice has not been done on their behalf, but that will not come through another war, but impartial international justice.
On the other hand, as existentialists, if Joseph Kony has the capacity and means to stay in the bush with his fighters and live out the ICC indictment, and if that is the kind of life he feels he is now doomed to live, we absolutely have no objections, as a personally and existentially determined options to the injustice of the Hague and calumny of a possible trial in Uganda. In fact, as people who are committed to a just and equitable peace in northern Uganda, and bearing in mind the political, partial, and convenient nature of the ICC indictments of only the LRA for the northern Uganda genocide, we would actually be ambivalent to such a move by the LRA, as long as they do not plan to resume hostilities in northern Uganda, do not harass civilians, and if at all, only confront armed elements of the repressive state and regime of Yoweri Museveni.
It is time for political clarity and clear leadership in Acholi. Joseph Kony does not have the power and authority of the state and government in Uganda; but Yoweri Museveni does. It is nonsensical therefore, to blame the current state of our people-after two years of cessation of hostilities and relative peace and with Kony thousands and thousands of miles away - on the refusal of Joseph Kony to sign the Juba Agreement. If anything, it is the failures of the national and local government leadership in Uganda and Acholi, that the people have been left on their own, as they were for 23 years while the conflict lasted.
Those of us who recognhise this, should no longer keep quiet, while those responsible cling onto the flimsiest of excuses to shield their personal , political, policy and leadership failures to understand and respond to the needs of people in northern and eastern Uganda, especially Acholiland.Or at worst, find a bullet-proof excuse to continue to do nothing significantly for the suffering people of northern and eastern Uganda. Moreover, Kony's sinature is not worth anything for the ordinary people of northern Uganda, except as a big stick for dictator Museveni and his international brotherhood to hold over the head of Joseph Kony to order good behaviour and acquiescence with dictator Museveni's political will and wishes in northern Uganda.
Whatever their excuses, it is time we and the world began to say: dictator Yoweri Museveni Must Go! No political power should be worth, even a single life of even the least of the citizenry, let alone genocide and jeopardising the lives of more than two million people.
Thursday 4 December 2008
Rwanda Stirs Deadly Brew of Troubles in Congo
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/04/world/africa/04congo.html?hp=&pagewanted=all
Rwanda Stirs Deadly Brew of Troubles in Congo
Rwanda Stirs Deadly Brew of Troubles in Congo
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
Published: December 3, 2008
KIGALI, Rwanda — There is a general rule in Africa, if not across the world: Behind any rebellion with legs is usually a meddling neighbor. And whether the rebellion in eastern Congo explodes into another full-fledged war, and drags a large chunk of central Africa with it, seems likely to depend on the involvement of Rwanda, Congo's tiny but disproportionately mighty neighbor.
Jerome Delay/Associated Press
A REBELLION IN CONGO Laurent Nkunda, center, a rebel leader in Congo, was an officer in Rwanda's army. It is widely believed that Rwanda backs Mr. Nkunda; Rwanda denies it.
Jerome Delay/Associated Press
Park rangers loyal to the CNDP make their way through the Virunga National Park near the Ugandan border in eastern Congo.
The New York Times
Many of the most powerful people in Congo have close ties to Rwanda's elite in Kigali.
Jerome Delay/Associated Press
A BROTHERHOOD OF NEIGHBORS Rebel soldiers surrounded their leader, Laurent Nkunda, at a rally in eastern Congo last month. Many Rwandan soldiers are said to be members of the rebel force.
There is a long and bloody history here, and this time around the evidence seems to be growing that Rwanda is meddling again in Congo's troubles; at a minimum, the interference is on the part of many Rwandans. As before, Rwanda's stake in Congo is a complex mix of strategic interest, business opportunity and the real fears of a nation that has heroically rebuilt itself after near obliteration by ethnic hatred.
The signs are ever-more obvious, if not yet entirely open. Several demobilized Rwandan soldiers, speaking in hushed tones in Kigali, Rwanda's tightly controlled capital, described a systematic effort by Rwanda's government-run demobilization commission to send hundreds if not thousands of fighters to the rebel front lines.
Former rebel soldiers in Congo said that they had seen Rwandan officers plucking off the Rwandan flags from the shoulders of their fatigues after they had arrived and that Rwandan officers served as the backbone of the rebel army. Congolese wildlife rangers in the gorilla park on the thickly forested Rwanda-Congo border said countless heavily armed men routinely crossed over from Rwanda into Congo.
A Rwandan government administrator said a military hospital in Kigali was treating many Rwandan soldiers who were recently wounded while fighting in Congo, but the administrator said he could be jailed for talking about it.
There seems to be a reinvigorated sense of the longstanding brotherhood between the Congolese rebels, who are mostly ethnic Tutsi, and the Tutsi-led government of Rwanda, which has supported these same rebels in the past.
The brotherhood is relatively secret for now, just as it was in the late 1990s when Rwanda denied being involved in Congo, only to later admit that it was occupying a vast section of the country. Rwanda's leaders are vigilant about not endangering their carefully crafted reputation as responsible, development-oriented friends of the West.
Senior Rwandan officials do not deny that demobilized Rwandan soldiers are fighting in Congo, but they say the soldiers are doing it on their own, without any government backing.
"They are ordinary citizens, and if their travel documents are in order, they can go ahead and travel," said Joseph Mutaboba, Rwanda's special envoy for the Great Lakes region.
But according to several demobilized soldiers, Rwandan government officials are involved, providing bus fare for the men to travel to Congo and updating the rebel leadership each month on how many fighters from Rwanda are about to come over. Once they get to the rebel camps, the Rwandan veterans said, they flash their Rwandan Army identification cards and then are assigned to a rebel unit.
"We usually get a promotion," said one fighter who was recently a corporal in the Rwandan Army and served as a sergeant in the rebel forces last month. He said that he could be severely punished if identified and that Rwandan officials and rebel commanders told the fighters not to say anything about the cooperation.
Another cause for suspicion is Rwanda's past plundering of Congo's rich trove of minerals, going back to the late 1990s when the Rwandan Army seized control of eastern Congo and pumped hundreds of millions of dollars of smuggled coltan, cassiterite and even diamonds back to Rwanda, according to United Nations documents.
Many current high-ranking Rwandan officials, including the minister of finance, the ambassador to China and the deputy director of the central bank, were executives at a holding company that a United Nations panel in 2002 implicated in the illicit mineral trade and called to be sanctioned. The officials say that they are no longer part of that company and that the company did nothing wrong. Nonetheless, eastern Congo's lucrative mineral business still seems to be heavily influenced by ethnic Rwandan businessmen with close ties to Kigali.
Some of the most powerful players today, like Modeste Makabuza Ngoga, who runs a small empire of coffee, tea, transport and mineral companies in eastern Congo, are part of a Tutsi-dominated triangle involving the Rwandan government, the conflict-driven mineral trade and a powerful rebel movement led by a renegade general, Laurent Nkunda, a former officer in Rwanda's army.
Several United Nations reports have accused Mr. Makabuza Ngoga of using strong-arm tactics to smuggle minerals from Congo to Rwanda and one report said that he enjoyed "close ties" to Rwanda's president, Paul Kagame. This week a rebel spokesman said that Mr. Makabuza Ngoga was on Mr. Nkunda's "College of Honorables," essentially a rebel advisory board. Mr. Nkunda's troops recently marched into areas known to be mineral rich — and areas where ethnic Rwandan businessmen are trying to gain a foothold.
Mr. Makabuza Ngoga said in an interview that he was not doing anything illegal.
"I'm just a businessman," he said. "I work with them all."
A Tale of Two Africas
Rwanda and Congo are polar opposites, a true David-and-Goliath matchup. Crossing the border from Gisenyi, Rwanda, to Goma, Congo, is a journey across two Africas, in the span of about 100 yards.
The two-minute walk takes you from one of the smallest, tidiest, most promising countries on the continent, where women in white rubber gloves sweep the streets every morning and government employees are at their desks by 7 a.m., to one of the biggest, messiest and most violent African states, home to a conflict that has killed more than five million people, more than any other since World War II.
While Congo is vast, Rwanda is packed. While the Congolese are often playful, known for outlandish dress and great music, Rwandans are reserved. While Congo is naturally rich, Rwanda is perennially poor. Yet Rwanda has emerged as a darling of the aid world, praised for strong, uncorrupt leadership and the strides it has made in fighting AIDS and poverty.
The fates of the two countries are inextricably linked. In 1994, Hutu militias in Rwanda killed 800,000 people, mostly minority Tutsis, and then fled into eastern Congo. Rwanda responded by invading Congo in 1997 and 1998, denying it each time initially but later taking responsibility. Those invasions catalyzed years of war that drew in the armies of half a dozen African countries.
When the Rwandan military controlled eastern Congo from 1998 to 2002, it established a highly organized military-industrial network to illegally exploit Congo's riches, according to United Nations documents.
A 2002 United Nations report said that top Rwandan military officers worked closely with some of the most notorious smugglers and arms traffickers in the world, including Viktor Bout, a former Soviet arms dealer nicknamed the Merchant of Death who was arrested this year.
"I used to see generals at the airport coming back from Congo with suitcases full of cash," said a former Rwandan government official who said that if he was identified, he could be killed.
Rwanda may have a lot going for it — a high economic growth rate, low corruption, a Parliament with a majority of seats held by women. But many people here say they do not feel free. When the former government official was interviewed at a Kigali hotel, he abruptly stopped talking whenever the maid walked by.
"You never know," he whispered, nodding toward the young woman who was smiling behind a plate-glass window smeared with soap suds. "She could be a lieutenant."
Scarred by a Genocide Rwanda is tiny, tough and intensely patriotic. Like Israel, it is a postgenocidal state, built on an ethos of self-sacrifice. Its national motto is Never Again.
One oft-cited threat is the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, also known as the F.D.L.R., a mostly Hutu militia that is based just across the border in the green folds of eastern Congo. The militia is thought to number 5,000 to 10,000 fighters. Some of its leaders are wanted "genocidaires" who fled Rwanda in 1994 after massacring Tutsi.
"These guys want to come back and finish the job," said Maj. Jill Rutaremara, a spokesman for Rwanda's Defense Forces.
Mr. Nkunda, the rebel leader, has used the presence of the Hutu militia and the Congo government's failure to disarm it as a rationale for his continued armed struggle. His forces have routed Congolese government troops in the past two months and pushed the region to the precipice of another regional war.
United Nations officials say he has not acted entirely alone, either: they said they observed Rwandan tanks firing from Rwandan territory to support Mr. Nkunda's troops as they advanced in October. Rwandan officials denied this.
Rwandan military officers admit, when pressed, that the Hutu militia has little chance of destabilizing Rwanda. The last time it attacked inside Rwanda was 2001.
Some Western diplomats, Congolese officials and Rwandan dissidents now believe that the Rwandan government is simply using the F.D.L.R. as an excuse to prop up Mr. Nkunda and maintain a sphere of influence in the mineral-rich area across the border.
"These are people who want to make business, and they cover it up with politics," said Faustin Twagiramungu, a former Rwandan prime minister now in exile in Belgium.
Congolese officials say that that the Rwandan government is making no efforts to bring the Hutu militiamen back into Rwanda because Rwanda wants to make sure that any Hutu-Tutsi violence plays out in Congo.
"What's happening in eastern Congo is a Rwandese war is being fought on Congolese soil," said Kikaya bin Karubi, a member of Congo's Parliament.
Rwandan officials dismiss these claims with a confident chuckle.
"We want to deal with these guys here," Major Rutaremara said. "We want them back."
Mr. Mutaboba, the Rwandan government envoy, said the allegations were part of "an organized campaign to distort the whole problem and give it a regional dimension."
"It's not," he said. "It's a Congo problem."
Ethnic and Business Ties
But it may be hard drawing a fine line between Congo and Rwanda, despite the lines on a map. There is a long history of ethnic and business ties that seamlessly flow across the colonially imposed borders, especially among the minority Tutsi who dominate business on both sides, yet at the same time, feel threatened and a heightened sense of community as a result.
For example, several demobilized Rwandan soldiers in Kigali said the vast majority of volunteers who recently crossed the border to fight with Mr. Nkunda were Tutsi. Some of the soldiers said that they had relatives living in eastern Congo and that it was like a second home to them.
According to four soldiers and one employee at the Rwandan demobilization commission, at the end of their monthly meetings, officials at the commission ask for anyone fit and ready to fight to stand up. Sometimes the commission provides bus fare to the border, the soldiers said, and other travel costs. The soldiers usually travel unarmed, picking up weapons on the other side, they said.
One demobilized Rwandan lieutenant who just got back from fighting in Congo looked surprised when asked why he went.
"Why? I am Tutsi," he said. "One hundred percent Tutsi."
Rwanda Stirs Deadly Brew of Troubles in Congo
Rwanda Stirs Deadly Brew of Troubles in Congo
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
Published: December 3, 2008
KIGALI, Rwanda — There is a general rule in Africa, if not across the world: Behind any rebellion with legs is usually a meddling neighbor. And whether the rebellion in eastern Congo explodes into another full-fledged war, and drags a large chunk of central Africa with it, seems likely to depend on the involvement of Rwanda, Congo's tiny but disproportionately mighty neighbor.
Jerome Delay/Associated Press
A REBELLION IN CONGO Laurent Nkunda, center, a rebel leader in Congo, was an officer in Rwanda's army. It is widely believed that Rwanda backs Mr. Nkunda; Rwanda denies it.
Jerome Delay/Associated Press
Park rangers loyal to the CNDP make their way through the Virunga National Park near the Ugandan border in eastern Congo.
The New York Times
Many of the most powerful people in Congo have close ties to Rwanda's elite in Kigali.
Jerome Delay/Associated Press
A BROTHERHOOD OF NEIGHBORS Rebel soldiers surrounded their leader, Laurent Nkunda, at a rally in eastern Congo last month. Many Rwandan soldiers are said to be members of the rebel force.
There is a long and bloody history here, and this time around the evidence seems to be growing that Rwanda is meddling again in Congo's troubles; at a minimum, the interference is on the part of many Rwandans. As before, Rwanda's stake in Congo is a complex mix of strategic interest, business opportunity and the real fears of a nation that has heroically rebuilt itself after near obliteration by ethnic hatred.
The signs are ever-more obvious, if not yet entirely open. Several demobilized Rwandan soldiers, speaking in hushed tones in Kigali, Rwanda's tightly controlled capital, described a systematic effort by Rwanda's government-run demobilization commission to send hundreds if not thousands of fighters to the rebel front lines.
Former rebel soldiers in Congo said that they had seen Rwandan officers plucking off the Rwandan flags from the shoulders of their fatigues after they had arrived and that Rwandan officers served as the backbone of the rebel army. Congolese wildlife rangers in the gorilla park on the thickly forested Rwanda-Congo border said countless heavily armed men routinely crossed over from Rwanda into Congo.
A Rwandan government administrator said a military hospital in Kigali was treating many Rwandan soldiers who were recently wounded while fighting in Congo, but the administrator said he could be jailed for talking about it.
There seems to be a reinvigorated sense of the longstanding brotherhood between the Congolese rebels, who are mostly ethnic Tutsi, and the Tutsi-led government of Rwanda, which has supported these same rebels in the past.
The brotherhood is relatively secret for now, just as it was in the late 1990s when Rwanda denied being involved in Congo, only to later admit that it was occupying a vast section of the country. Rwanda's leaders are vigilant about not endangering their carefully crafted reputation as responsible, development-oriented friends of the West.
Senior Rwandan officials do not deny that demobilized Rwandan soldiers are fighting in Congo, but they say the soldiers are doing it on their own, without any government backing.
"They are ordinary citizens, and if their travel documents are in order, they can go ahead and travel," said Joseph Mutaboba, Rwanda's special envoy for the Great Lakes region.
But according to several demobilized soldiers, Rwandan government officials are involved, providing bus fare for the men to travel to Congo and updating the rebel leadership each month on how many fighters from Rwanda are about to come over. Once they get to the rebel camps, the Rwandan veterans said, they flash their Rwandan Army identification cards and then are assigned to a rebel unit.
"We usually get a promotion," said one fighter who was recently a corporal in the Rwandan Army and served as a sergeant in the rebel forces last month. He said that he could be severely punished if identified and that Rwandan officials and rebel commanders told the fighters not to say anything about the cooperation.
Another cause for suspicion is Rwanda's past plundering of Congo's rich trove of minerals, going back to the late 1990s when the Rwandan Army seized control of eastern Congo and pumped hundreds of millions of dollars of smuggled coltan, cassiterite and even diamonds back to Rwanda, according to United Nations documents.
Many current high-ranking Rwandan officials, including the minister of finance, the ambassador to China and the deputy director of the central bank, were executives at a holding company that a United Nations panel in 2002 implicated in the illicit mineral trade and called to be sanctioned. The officials say that they are no longer part of that company and that the company did nothing wrong. Nonetheless, eastern Congo's lucrative mineral business still seems to be heavily influenced by ethnic Rwandan businessmen with close ties to Kigali.
Some of the most powerful players today, like Modeste Makabuza Ngoga, who runs a small empire of coffee, tea, transport and mineral companies in eastern Congo, are part of a Tutsi-dominated triangle involving the Rwandan government, the conflict-driven mineral trade and a powerful rebel movement led by a renegade general, Laurent Nkunda, a former officer in Rwanda's army.
Several United Nations reports have accused Mr. Makabuza Ngoga of using strong-arm tactics to smuggle minerals from Congo to Rwanda and one report said that he enjoyed "close ties" to Rwanda's president, Paul Kagame. This week a rebel spokesman said that Mr. Makabuza Ngoga was on Mr. Nkunda's "College of Honorables," essentially a rebel advisory board. Mr. Nkunda's troops recently marched into areas known to be mineral rich — and areas where ethnic Rwandan businessmen are trying to gain a foothold.
Mr. Makabuza Ngoga said in an interview that he was not doing anything illegal.
"I'm just a businessman," he said. "I work with them all."
A Tale of Two Africas
Rwanda and Congo are polar opposites, a true David-and-Goliath matchup. Crossing the border from Gisenyi, Rwanda, to Goma, Congo, is a journey across two Africas, in the span of about 100 yards.
The two-minute walk takes you from one of the smallest, tidiest, most promising countries on the continent, where women in white rubber gloves sweep the streets every morning and government employees are at their desks by 7 a.m., to one of the biggest, messiest and most violent African states, home to a conflict that has killed more than five million people, more than any other since World War II.
While Congo is vast, Rwanda is packed. While the Congolese are often playful, known for outlandish dress and great music, Rwandans are reserved. While Congo is naturally rich, Rwanda is perennially poor. Yet Rwanda has emerged as a darling of the aid world, praised for strong, uncorrupt leadership and the strides it has made in fighting AIDS and poverty.
The fates of the two countries are inextricably linked. In 1994, Hutu militias in Rwanda killed 800,000 people, mostly minority Tutsis, and then fled into eastern Congo. Rwanda responded by invading Congo in 1997 and 1998, denying it each time initially but later taking responsibility. Those invasions catalyzed years of war that drew in the armies of half a dozen African countries.
When the Rwandan military controlled eastern Congo from 1998 to 2002, it established a highly organized military-industrial network to illegally exploit Congo's riches, according to United Nations documents.
A 2002 United Nations report said that top Rwandan military officers worked closely with some of the most notorious smugglers and arms traffickers in the world, including Viktor Bout, a former Soviet arms dealer nicknamed the Merchant of Death who was arrested this year.
"I used to see generals at the airport coming back from Congo with suitcases full of cash," said a former Rwandan government official who said that if he was identified, he could be killed.
Rwanda may have a lot going for it — a high economic growth rate, low corruption, a Parliament with a majority of seats held by women. But many people here say they do not feel free. When the former government official was interviewed at a Kigali hotel, he abruptly stopped talking whenever the maid walked by.
"You never know," he whispered, nodding toward the young woman who was smiling behind a plate-glass window smeared with soap suds. "She could be a lieutenant."
Scarred by a Genocide Rwanda is tiny, tough and intensely patriotic. Like Israel, it is a postgenocidal state, built on an ethos of self-sacrifice. Its national motto is Never Again.
One oft-cited threat is the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, also known as the F.D.L.R., a mostly Hutu militia that is based just across the border in the green folds of eastern Congo. The militia is thought to number 5,000 to 10,000 fighters. Some of its leaders are wanted "genocidaires" who fled Rwanda in 1994 after massacring Tutsi.
"These guys want to come back and finish the job," said Maj. Jill Rutaremara, a spokesman for Rwanda's Defense Forces.
Mr. Nkunda, the rebel leader, has used the presence of the Hutu militia and the Congo government's failure to disarm it as a rationale for his continued armed struggle. His forces have routed Congolese government troops in the past two months and pushed the region to the precipice of another regional war.
United Nations officials say he has not acted entirely alone, either: they said they observed Rwandan tanks firing from Rwandan territory to support Mr. Nkunda's troops as they advanced in October. Rwandan officials denied this.
Rwandan military officers admit, when pressed, that the Hutu militia has little chance of destabilizing Rwanda. The last time it attacked inside Rwanda was 2001.
Some Western diplomats, Congolese officials and Rwandan dissidents now believe that the Rwandan government is simply using the F.D.L.R. as an excuse to prop up Mr. Nkunda and maintain a sphere of influence in the mineral-rich area across the border.
"These are people who want to make business, and they cover it up with politics," said Faustin Twagiramungu, a former Rwandan prime minister now in exile in Belgium.
Congolese officials say that that the Rwandan government is making no efforts to bring the Hutu militiamen back into Rwanda because Rwanda wants to make sure that any Hutu-Tutsi violence plays out in Congo.
"What's happening in eastern Congo is a Rwandese war is being fought on Congolese soil," said Kikaya bin Karubi, a member of Congo's Parliament.
Rwandan officials dismiss these claims with a confident chuckle.
"We want to deal with these guys here," Major Rutaremara said. "We want them back."
Mr. Mutaboba, the Rwandan government envoy, said the allegations were part of "an organized campaign to distort the whole problem and give it a regional dimension."
"It's not," he said. "It's a Congo problem."
Ethnic and Business Ties
But it may be hard drawing a fine line between Congo and Rwanda, despite the lines on a map. There is a long history of ethnic and business ties that seamlessly flow across the colonially imposed borders, especially among the minority Tutsi who dominate business on both sides, yet at the same time, feel threatened and a heightened sense of community as a result.
For example, several demobilized Rwandan soldiers in Kigali said the vast majority of volunteers who recently crossed the border to fight with Mr. Nkunda were Tutsi. Some of the soldiers said that they had relatives living in eastern Congo and that it was like a second home to them.
According to four soldiers and one employee at the Rwandan demobilization commission, at the end of their monthly meetings, officials at the commission ask for anyone fit and ready to fight to stand up. Sometimes the commission provides bus fare to the border, the soldiers said, and other travel costs. The soldiers usually travel unarmed, picking up weapons on the other side, they said.
One demobilized Rwandan lieutenant who just got back from fighting in Congo looked surprised when asked why he went.
"Why? I am Tutsi," he said. "One hundred percent Tutsi."
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