By Timothy Kalyegira
Feb 20 - 26, 2005
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In the first part of these series on the history of Uganda's intelligence services, last Sunday, Timothy Kalyegira traced espionage back to Bunyoro's King Kabalega in the 1800s right up to the State Research Bureau under Lt. Col. Farouk Minawa in the 1970s. In this second part of the series, we start with 1980 and the return of Dr Milton Obote to the Ugandan presidency. Due to public demand, the series, initially meant to run in two parts, will now continue next Sunday: - The National Security Services, Following the removal of President Lule in June 1979 and the installation of Mr Godfrey Lukongwa Binaisa, there grew the impression that a plan was afoot to return former President Milton Obote to Uganda in some prominent way, if not eventually as President. Many opposed that idea. Someone clearly was trying to create the impression of a nation that was ungovernable and insecure. Like Obote and Amin before him, President Binaisa's natural instinct was to use the security service network as insurance for his power. During a trip to Kenya on the pretext of meeting Pope John Paul II, Binaisa arranged to buy electronic surveillance equipment from President Daniel arap Moi's government. Uganda was also faced with another security threat. Mr Museveni had fought the 1978-79 Tanzania-Uganda war at the head of a 9,000-man force named the Front for National Salvation (Fronasa), while Oyite-Ojok had headed Kikosi Maalum (Special force or brigade in Kiswahili), the bigger fighting group strongly allied with Obote. These two major forces, it was understood, would form the bulk of the new Uganda National Liberation Army (UNLA). The UNLA continued, as at independence, to look like an army of Acholi and Langi tribesmen. It did not have many faces of, say, Banyankole and Banyarwanda soldiers, most of who were in Fronasa. What angered Lule and Oyite-Ojok more was that as minister of state for defence, Museveni was in charge of the purchase of uniforms and equipment for the new army and seemed to be siphoning off state resources to his Fronasa men. Although Mr Amon Bazira as NSS' director made an astoundingly accurate forecast of the Rwanda genocide in 1994 and the turmoil into which the Great Lakes region would be thrown into in 1998 if the continued exile of the Tutsi in Uganda were not resolved, the NSS failed to identify the source of the rising political violence and also to trace the whereabouts of the Fronasa soldiers. The 1980 elections On June 4, three parties; the Makerere University-based Uganda Nationalist Movement, the Uganda Labour Party and Fronasa merged to form a new party – the Uganda Patriotic Movement (UPM). The UPM's interim chairman and candidate was Yoweri Museveni. Mr Jehoash Mayanja-Nkangi was the candidate of the Conservative Party, a monarchist and federally inclined group. The size of crowds that followed the UPC and DP clearly pointed to a close and eventful vote on December 10, the day of the election. The UPC was granted a disproportionate amount of airtime on the state-run Radio Uganda and Uganda Television. The government-owned Uganda Times newspaper did likewise. Meanwhile, the UPC was reporting that its supporters were being harassed and beaten up by UPM youth wingers. On August 13, at a rally in Mukono town, Museveni criticised Ssemogerere for "telling the people of Uganda that the DP has already won the election." Finally, on November 26, at a press conference in Kampala, Ssemogerere said he was satisfied that the Military Commission had made the best effort to oversee a free and fair election. Two things are noteworthy here:
The intelligence service did not see the possible connection between these UPM youth wingers and the 9,000 Fronasa fighters who had disappeared and who might now be soldiers disguised as civilians. On Election Day, December 10, 1980, as the first results started coming in, the pattern started indicating that although close at first, with the DP doing especially well in the populous Buganda region, the UPC was in the position of a slight lead. The DP supporters started to celebrate. At that point, Muwanga, the Military Commission chief and Obote sympathiser, ordered the national election commission to halt announcement of incoming results. Then something that most Ugandans may not know about happened. The UPC candidate, Obote, had been monitoring the results from his Kololo home with his top aides over radio and at election commission headquarters. When Muwanga announced that the Military Commission would now take charge of the publishing of the results, Obote was furious. He stormed out of his home and went to the Nile Mansions (today's Nile Hotel) where Muwanga had his offices. Obote angrily told Muwanga to reverse his decision, arguing that an act like that would bring the whole election into question and forever taint the reputation of the UPC and democracy in Uganda – yet in Obote's mind, the UPC seemed likely to have won the election anyway. The truth is that the election process, as the British newspaper the Scotsman reported on May 22, 1981, had been engineered in what the paper called "creeping rigging" to assure the UPC of a landslide victory. This, however, does not take away the fact that the UPC was enormously popular throughout Uganda, especially the south-western, northern, eastern and north-eastern areas. Why, though, did Muwanga decide to take control of the election results? The reasons are complicated. It is likely that Muwanga wanted to gain a special position in the UPC government, should the party win and form the next government. The UPC had several fanatical leaders who had campaigned energetically for Obote. Among them were the party's secretary general Dr John Luwuliza Kirunda and such men as Chris Rwakasisi, Edward Rurangaranga, Dr Adonia Tiberondwa, Dr James Rwanyarare, Patrick Masette Kuya, Dr David Anyoti, Dr Moses Apiliga, and Samuel Odaka. Perhaps Muwanga, always the schemer and long-range thinker, wanted to appear as the kingmaker and secure special favour with Obote. Needless to say, the intelligence services were unable to influence the explosive situation so that Uganda comes out the better for it. The five-year civil war that would follow was, therefore, a war without basis and the NSS intelligence service failed to foresee and therefore forestall that war. The National Security Agency, Meanwhile, although he had threatened to start a guerrilla war should the election be rigged, the defeated UPM's Museveni said little. He moved from Kololo to the Bugolobi suburb and seemed to feel no personal bitterness toward Obote. Seated one day with some friends and UPC supporters, Museveni joked that Obote had always had a liking for light-skinned women. Here then is another wonder of Uganda's intelligence services. Anybody should have known the history and personality of Museveni – his unflagging determination to be president of Uganda since his teenage years at Ntare School in Mbarara. Museveni had made clear in broad daylight that if he felt the election were rigged, he would take to "the bush" and fight the UPC government. The government should have known that once Museveni's Fronasa entered Mbarara in February 1979, most of the 9,000 fighters rather than be integrated into the new UNLA army, had vanished. After all, where did Museveni get the confidence to announce publicly that he would start a guerrilla war? Might the 9,000 be lying in wait to be ordered to battle? Nobody bothered to keep Museveni and his family and close supporters under close surveillance. He went and bought some land in the present Nyabushozi County and claimed he was taking up dairy farming. Nobody in security noted that. Perhaps most astonishing of all, no security agent, it seems, noted it when Museveni, driving a pickup mini-truck, parked outside the UPC headquarters at Uganda House on Kampala Road on February 5, 1981, casually came out, stood on the pavement, looked over the newspapers and bought a copy of the UPC party paper, The People. He entered his pickup and drove away towards Makindye. The next day, Museveni and some 36 men, 27 of them armed, attacked the Kabamba army barracks in Mubende District, launching the war. The UPC government in December 1980 formed a new counter intelligence service named the General Service Unit (GSU). At the last minute, however, President Obote decided against the name, thinking that it would remind many people of his 1960s GSU agency. It was instead called the National Security Agency (Nasa). Its director-general was a quiet, unassuming Muganda man named Kasendwa-Ddumba. He was part of the GSU in the 1960s and had been trained in Israel. The deputy director-general was Obote's cousin named Nathan Engena while the head of security affairs was Deo Kijjambu. The man in charge of screening applicants of passports and immigration was Peter Owat, and the head of interrogation was Ben Onen. The Nasa training academy in Kampala was located along the Ggaba-Munyonyo Road at Amin's former retreat, Cape Town Villas. Some training of the Nasa agents also took place at the Milton Obote Foundation building in Bugolobi. Why was Museveni not tailed? Practically all the chefs who prepared and served meals for Obote, his family and staff at State House Entebbe after 1980 were from the Banyoro tribe, while most of his closest circle of personal bodyguards were from the Teso tribe. Obote, a Langi, was almost unable to think of politics in terms of tribe. Obote's naïve attitude led him to neglect the secrecy that often is required to conduct the unpleasant business of state. In January 1971, he had carelessly passed down instructions for the arrest of Idi Amin, who turned around and launched a coup. So here Obote was again, 10 years later in January 1981, celebrating his victory at Kololo oblivious of the plans unfolding in the mind of a 36-year-old man seated before a TV set in a Makindye house. But how about Nasa? Surely, naivety is not part of the spy trade. What happened to them? Once again, Obote's attitude comes in. Kasendwa-Ddumba was hardly the man to think into the dark motives of people. Efficient, modest in temperament, he was not the person that comes to mind when the "atrocities" of the second Obote government are recalled in the usual cliché of a history we have never scrutinised to separate lie from fact. Obote also appointed Mr Chris Rwakasisi (now on death row in Luzira prison) as the minister of state in the office of the President, charged with security. The image of Rwakasisi is the one that usually represents the image of a chaotic and "atrocity-filled" 1980-'85 period when Obote was in charge. This we now know from the recollections of "Bush war memories" through the years: many ordinary Ugandans, including priests were involved in the anti-Obote guerrilla campaign and the Roman Catholic's Emmanuel Cardinal Wamala was in full know of what Museveni and another rebel leader, Andrew Kayiira, were doing. The UNLA was often impulsive, indisciplined, and brutal toward the civilian population. On May 27, 1982, speaking in Bushenyi, Obote called on the army to stop looting and harassing the civilian population as this would win the army more support and make easier their fight against the guerrillas. Some Nasa successes A former Nasa agent named Tony Godwin Masaba, speaking to the New African magazine in its January 1986 issue said this of the head of interrogation in Nasa, Ben Onen: "He could tell, at a glance, who was and who was not a guerrilla. His methods of interrogation never failed and he often persuaded confessed guerrillas to turn informers….He introduced [these informers] at Nakivubo Stadium and they enabled us arrest hundreds of suspects…[That is how] the Uganda Freedom Movement was crushed in 1982." In March 1982, more than 2,000 people were rounded up in operations known as panda gari (Kiswahili for get onto the truck) in order to screen out rebels. On April 7, 1982, more than 10,000 people were rounded up by the police, screened for rebels and most were released unharmed. Hundreds of others were detained. In general, the Ugandan intelligence agency did a professional job under Obote's second administration in so far as neutralising rebels was concerned. As with Amin's State Research Bureau, it was not necessarily true that whoever the security services arrested would disappear and "never be seen again." On May 12, 1982, the government released 237 people detained in Luzira Maximum Security Prison, including Amin's British-born henchman Bob Astles, the first time political detainees had been released since Amin's downfall in April 1979. On July 6, 1982, Internal Affairs Minister Luwuliza Kirunda announced in Parliament that Nasa agents had intercepted a letter from Kayiira to the Libyan ambassador to Kenya on arms that Libya had supplied to the Uganda Freedom Movement (headed by Kayiira). The letter had come to light in the wake of the UNLA capture of some of the arms during an attack by the UFM on the military barracks in Lubiri. "The arms captured have certain markings which give a general indication of the supplier," Luwuliza-Kirunda said. But like the Bureau before it, it failed in the area of intelligence that looks out for the interests of the whole country and not just the regime. As Masaba said: "Our job in the Nasa was to help [Obote] survive." Masaba now lives in London where he works as a freelance journalist. The DP newsletter Munansi in 1984 claimed that the Obote government had killed 100,000 Ugandans. The US embassy in Kampala, without so much as crosschecking this allegation, dispatched it to Washington and it became the "official" figure against which to condemn Obote. The security agency was unable to set out the true picture and help preserve Uganda's reputation worldwide. Impulsive and angry denials were the order of the day. At public rallies, an agitated Obote always referred to the rebels as "bandits". Yet at the same time, Obote remained enormously popular across the country, especially (and significantly) in western Uganda. Only in Buganda did he become increasingly unpopular. If the head of Nasa and many of the country's senior intelligence directors were Baganda, and if the First Lady Miria Obote was a Muganda, why would Obote want to terrorise the Baganda in the Luweero Triangle where some of his own in-laws lived? Who was actually doing this terrorising and blaming it on the UPC government? According to World Bank and IMF figures, for three years after Obote re-took power, Uganda's economy grew rapidly and by 1983, a feeling of well-being was starting to be felt in many urban parts of the country. Radio Uganda and Uganda Television reached their peak of broadcasting excellence during the early to mid 1980s. Young people were engrossed in the new entertainment of the video cassette recorders and break-dancing. The "wet look" perm hairstyle came into vogue all over the country for women. The Kisementi area in Kamwokya became Kampala's largest drinking joint. (These days whenever Uganda's private FM radio stations conduct surveys on what music reminds listeners of the best times of their lives, it is always by a wide margin the music of the early to mid 1980s, the Obote II days.) Obote and his charming and party-happy wife Miria turned State House into a place to dance and make merry for party faithful. The idea that the rebels were fighting to liberate Ugandans from a life of misery brought about by the Obote regime was news to many Ugandans in Kampala, for whom life was generally enjoyable. The Nasa security service was, however, not vigilant. Tensions were creeping into the government and most of all, the army. Also, because the security services were focused on protecting the regime's power, they were unable to gather data on the greatest genuine security threat in Uganda's history that was quietly taking root in the early 1980s: the scourge of HIV/Aids in the south-central Rakai district. In June 1985, President Obote's eldest son, Tony Akaki, a student in Namasagali College in Kamuli district told some close friends that there was trouble developing in the army and he was watching the situation intently. If the president's son 164 km away in boarding school just by monitoring short wave radio broadcasts was aware of a coup taking shape, how much more did the Nasa security service? Why did they not act to prevent plans by the rebellious Acholi UNLA officers, Brig. Bazilio Olara Okello and army commander Lt. Gen. Titus ("Tito") Lutwa Okello? Part 3: the NRM government era and the Police Special Branch |
© 2005 The Monitor Publications.
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