Yoweri Museveni
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Museveni is viewed as part of a new generation of African leaders.Yoweri Kaguta Museveni (born April 1944, Kigali, Rwanda) has been President of Uganda since January 29, 1986. Yoweri Kaguta Museveni was born of a migrant Rwandese peasant father and mother. His parents migrated to Uganda in the early 1940s and settled in the Ntungamo area of western Uganda. His mother, Esteri Kokundeka, re-married a cattle herder, Amos Kaguta and Museveni adopted his step-father's surname as his middle name. Museveni attended the Kyamate elementary school, Mbarara High School, and Ntare School. After completing high school, he failed to gain entry into Makerere University College in Kampala, Uganda, and was recommended to the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania by President Milton Obote. At the university between 1967 and 1970 where he read Political Science, he developed his Marxist political outlook and belief that Africa's problems could be solved by the population engaging in a guerrilla struggle.
On completion of his university education, Museveni joined the Ugandan intelligence service and was a close aide to Obote. When the army commander General Idi Amin seized power in a military coup in January 1971, Museveni and a group of friends opposed to Amin went to Tanzania with the intention of launching an armed insurrection against the new military regime. In 1972, Museveni formed the Front for National Salvation (FRONASA), a Marxist guerrilla group. FRONASA, operating from Tanzania and from inside Uganda, adopted a covert method to achieve its objectives. It pursued a policy of kidnapping and assassinating key Ugandan public officials and political leaders in order to discredit the Amin regime which, by late 1972, was already drawing hostility from western nations like Britain, the United States, and Israel. Among the prominent Ugandan public figures assassinated by FRONASA agents were the former Prime Minister of Uganda, Benedict Kiwanuka, the former secretary general of Obote's Uganda Peoples' Congress party, John Kakonge,
Idi Amin's Foreign Minister Michael Ondoga, a Roman Catholic clergyman, Father Clement Kiggundu, and the director of the state-run television, James Bwogi. FRONASA men also kidnapped and murdered an elderly Israeli woman, Dora Bloch, who had been left behind in Uganda after the Israelis attacked Entebbe town to rescue hostages aboard an Air France plane in 1976. They hoped that this murder would be blamed on Amin and lead to another attack by Israel. As Amin's government lost credibility, he invaded Tanzania in 1978 to claim the Kagera province for Uganda. Tanzania launched a counter-attack.
In April 1979 when the Amin government fell, Museveni was named the new Minister of State for Defence by the interim UNLF administration that had replaced Amin. In 1980, Museveni announced his candidacy for the Ugandan general election of December that year. Although he was a senior official in the ruling Military Commission in mid 1980, he expressed concern that the election would be fraudulently awarded to the Uganda People's Congress party led by the deposed and exiled former president Milton Obote.
After the return to power by Obote in December 1980, Museveni set about preparing to launch the guerrilla war he had vowed to launch if those elections were awarded to Obote and his party. On February 6, 1981, Museveni and a band of over 30 armed men attacked an army installation in the central Mubende district and thereby started their guerrilla war against Obote.
As a rebel leader operating out of central and western Uganda, Museveni ruthlessly ordered the assassination of some of his key commanders close to him whom he considered a threat to his power. One of the most controversial issues of the five-year civil war that ensued was the claim that up to 300,000 civilians had been massacred in an area in central Uganda known as the Luwero Triangle.
The Museveni-led faction called the National Resistance Army blamed the massacres on the government troops while the government blamed it on Museveni. In an autobiography serialised by a Kenyan-Ugandan newspaper, The Monitor in April 2005, the former president Milton Obote repeated his charge that Museveni had instructed his guerrillas to commit atrocities against civilians in order to blame them on and discredit his government. Nevertheless, the news of the massacres and other reported human rights violations between 1981 and 1985 brought international criticism to the Obote government and increased support for Museveni's rebel force. An army coup on July 27, 1985 ousted Obote and replaced him with his former army commander, Lieutenant-General Tito Okello. The Okello government sought to enter a peace agreement with Museveni's National Resistance Army. A peace agreement signed in Nairobi, Kenya on December 17, 1985 broke down and the civil war resumed.
On January 26, 1986, the Museveni-led faction declared victory when they overran the capital Kampala and toppled Okello's government. For the first five years in office between 1986 and 1991, the new government under Museveni enjoyed widespread international support and the economy that had been damaged by the civil war began to recover as Museveni renounced his Marxist outlook and adopted western-funded liberal market fiscal policies. From 1990, Museveni turned his interests to regional African affairs. In October 1990, Rwandese Tutsi refugee soldiers within the Ugandan army mutinied and headed for Rwanda where they hoped to overthrow the government of the
Hutu president Juvenal Habyarimana. The leader of this rebel army the Rwandan Patriotic Army and a former Ugandan Defence minister Major-General Fred Rwigyema was assassinated two days into the assault, reportedly on orders from President Museveni of Uganda. The Uganda government strenuously denied many media reports that it supported the Rwandan refugee army. In February 1994, Museveni hatched a secret plot to assassinate Habyarimana by shooting down his jet. The plane carrying Habyarimana and the president of Burundi, Cyprien Ntibatunganya, was shot down by two missiles over the Kigali airport on April 6, 1994 by Ugandan military officials.
It triggered off a genocide in which an estimated 800,000 people were killed.
Most international opinion to this day still assumes the assassination was carried out by either the Rwanda Patriotic Army or the French military.
In July 1994, the Rwandan rebels with Ugandan army help overrun Kigali and took power.
In 1995, Uganda cut off diplomatic relations with Sudan after accusing Sudan of supporting a Ugandan rebel band, the Lord's Resistance Army, which was accused of killing and maiming civilians in the Gulu and Kitgum districts.
Residents of the two districts in 1996 said that these atrocities such as cutting off victims' lips and noses were being committed by Ugandan troops.
This rebellion, at its height, caused the internal displacement of about 1.5 million Ugandans. In 1996, Rwanda and Uganda attacked Zaire in order to oust its leader, Mobutu Sese Seko. He was ousted in 1997 and Laurent Kabila installed. In 1998, Rwanda and Uganda invaded Zaire again to overthrow Kabila. Hundreds of thousands of Congolese civilians were massacred by Rwandan and Ugandan troops on orders from President Paul Kagame of Rwanda and Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, in order to discredit Kabila's regime.
Troops from both countries also plundered the country's rich mineral deposits and timber.
Members of the Museveni family have been accused of personally profiting from the looting of natural resources in the eastern part of the DRC, and the government has also been criticized for aggravating the Ituri conflict, a sub-conflict of the Second Congo War. In 2000, Rwandan and Ugandan troops who were once military allies and now deployed in the Congolese city of Kisangani, exchanged fire on three occasions, leading to tensions and a deterioration in relations between Kagame and Museveni which persisted right until May 2005.
Museveni has won praise from Western governments for privatising state enterprises, cutting government spending and urging African self-reliance.
Perhaps Museveni's most remarkable accomplishment has been his successful campaign against AIDS. During the 1980s, Uganda had one of the highest rates of HIV infection in the world, but now Uganda's rates are comparatively low, and the country stands as a rare success story in the global battle against the virus. Under Museveni, Uganda is governed under the Movement system. All political activities are banned and although to some degree people are allowed to air their opinions, any public gathering whose purpose is political is considered treason. Anyone standing for office must do so as an individual without any supportive system behind them. In a violent and heavily rigged presidential election in 1996,
Museveni defeated Paul Ssemogerere of the Democratic Party. The rigging of the 2001 presidential election also let to Museveni's triumph over his former personal physician Colonel Kiiza Besigye. In 2003, a campaign was started by Museveni's supporters to open up the limits to the presidential terms imposed by the 1995 constitution. Museveni started feeling isolated and moved to purge his administration of his former supporters like his childhood friend Eriya Kategaya and a cabinet minister Jaberi Bidandi Ssali. The western world, which had been a firm supporter and financier, started expressing concern over this apparent move to change the constitution by Museveni. In March 2005, the Irish Rock star and anti-poverty campaigner, Bob Geldof, publicly called on Museveni to respect the constitution and desist from any move to change the constitution. Museveni's government staged a demonstration outside the British embassy in Kampala to condemn Geldof and the British government and to express their support for Museveni.
On May 1, 2005, a former U.S ambassador to Uganda, Johnnie Carson, wrote an article in the Boston Globe, in which he attacked Museveni's record and accused the Ugandan leader of seeking to prolong his stay in office in order to protect his family which had consistently been accused of buying up most of the companies privalized by the government and plundering national wealth.
Britain, Uganda's former colonial ruler, announced in May 2005 that it was cutting back on its foreign aid to Uganda and was followed by the government of the Republic of Ireland. The World Bank later followed the same course by issuing a report severely criticizing the Museveni government and the embezzlement of government money by the Museveni family. As the support that he had enjoyed from the West began to crumble, Museveni moved to revive his damaged international standing by hiring a British-based public relations firm. The Museveni government also moved to imtimidate the Ugandan media, accusing it of spreading the negative image of the president and his family that was developing rapidly in Europe and North America by late May 2005.
External links
Museveni profile on NNDB ( http://www.nndb.com/people/161/000092882/)Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoweri_Museveni"
Categories : 1944 births | Ugandan politicians | Current national leaders
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NB: I hope you will find time to read and sign a petition to stop the Northern Uganda carnage at: http://www.petitiononline.com/savacoli/petition.html
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