<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Museveni hasnt changed heart Date: Sun, 23 Feb 2003 23:54:56 -0500 From The Monitor Feb 23, 2003 Museveni hasn't changed heart, only strategy By Muniini K. Mulera In Toronto Letter to A Kampala Friend Dear Tingasiga: One of the things President Yoweri Museveni recognised years ago was that all he needed to govern Uganda was to retain control of the military and a monopoly on the means of violence; to remain in the good books of the donor countries, especially the USA and Britain, and to keep the rural peasants under his spell. It is his changing fortunes with one of these constituencies that has forced President Museveni, a very hard-line opponent of multi-party politics, to "make a tactical compromise" on multiparty politics in order to realise the "strategic objectives" of the Movement. While acknowledging that it was not his personal wish to return to multiparty politics, the president claimed that the people who had opened their markets to Uganda were the ones who wanted his regime to open political space to multiparty politics. True, the donors have been getting impatient with the reversal of the democratisation process in Uganda. Furthermore, now that there is an acceptable leadership in Kenya, the donors have discounted the price that they had attached to the Museveni presidency for more than a decade. That they could now decant him onto the heap of abandoned darlings of the West was not lost on Mr Museveni. However, his claim that the Americans and Europeans would abandon Uganda itself just because there was a one-party state was patently false. The West has never allowed lack of democracy in any country to interfere with trade and investment opportunities. Even the most totalitarian regimes have benefited from Western investment and largesse as long as the rulers could guarantee security of Western interests. So President Museveni could have happily continued to thumb his nose in the faces of his American and European benefactors, telling them to go to hell with their multi-parties, fully aware that they would not abandon him as long as he was lord of all he surveyed. The real problem is that Museveni is no longer lord of all he surveys. It is his weakened hold on the security situation in the country that has persuaded him [and perhaps his benefactors] that he should become the new champion of multiparty politics. President Museveni's most important constituency has been the army. It has been his main source of power and legitimacy, notwithstanding the pretences about popular democracy. Like his predecessors, Mr Museveni serves at the pleasure of the military. The day he loses total control of the army, his era will come to a very rapid, and probably messy, end. Similarly, as long as the armed rebellions that challenged him in his 17 year-reign remained narrow-based ethnic militiamen, he could rightly dismiss them as more of a nuisance than a serious threat to his regime. But all this seems to have changed. There is evidence to suggest that the once militarily invincible son of Kaguta has become vulnerable. Of course we do not know the percentage of the UPDF that is solidly loyal to the president. He himself may not have the exact figures. However, a few recent developments are worth noting. First, in the aftermath of the disputed presidential elections of 2001, a number of army officers were either harassed, arrested, sidelined or sent "for further military training." Even the army commander, Lt. Gen. Jeje Odongo was demoted to some unnamed ministerial desk, replaced by Maj. Gen. James Kazini, a loyal soldier from the president's ethnic group. Many officers and soldiers, including at least four colonels who fought alongside Mr Museveni during the resistance war against the Obote II regime, have fled the country. There is credible evidence that some of them have organised themselves into a major fighting force, a move whose implications would not be lost on President Museveni. Second, a bizarre summons issued to all senior army officers to report to army headquarters, Bombo, ostensibly to be fitted with ceremonial uniforms, was probably an attempt to do a head count to determine who was still around, who was still loyal and who should be arrested "for his own safety." Third, the Presidential Protection Unit (PPU) was formally converted into an elite force, the Presidential Guard Brigade (PGB) similar to Field Marshal Mobutu Sese Seko's Special Presidential Division (DSP). Just like Mobutu's outfit, which had his son Capt. Kongolo Mobutu among its officers, the PGB has in its ranks Maj. Muhoozi Kainerugaba, Museveni's upwardly mobile 29-year - old son who is the Commanding Officer of its motorised infantry. The creation of a military brigade to guard the president three years before the complete transition from military to civilian rule is an interesting development. Could it mean that the Commander in Chief has lost confidence in the main army and needs a group that he can depend on to protect him and his family in the tough days ahead? Could it also mean that the youthful Museveni is not planning to retire anytime soon? One definite reason for the PGB is that Mr Museveni has made so many enemies, both internal and external, that he needs a small army to look after his health. One enemy that must be worrying him is the new rebel group whose leaders and fighters may be as serious and formidable as his own NRA guerrillas of 20 years ago. Though this new threat has been underplayed by the Kampala regime, with the government and army keeping up the fiction that their Operation Iron Fist was the final assault on Joseph Kony's blood-thirsty LRA, there is mounting evidence that a new and entirely different rebel group is a reality. Museveni's letter to British Minister Clare Short in which he accused Rwandan President Maj. Gen. Paul Kagame of fomenting war against Uganda; the government's claims that a People's Redemption Army [PRA] was being trained by two former UPDF colonels; Lt. Gen. Museveni's personal charge of the war in northern Uganda at a time when Kony's LRA had been supposedly decimated; Maj. Kakooza Mutale's volunteering of his services to the war effort, something that he had not done even at the peak of Kony's terror; reports that James Opoka, a former member of Col. Besigye's presidential campaign team, was leading a fighting force somewhere in the north; the spate of arrests of politicians who were allegedly collaborating with the new rebels; claims by some Congolese adventurers that Ugandan rebels were indeed training in Eastern Congo; the government's recent spending spree on military hardware and a huge increase in the military budget at a time when the old rebellions in ! the north and the west of the country have been defeated. Clearly, Mr Museveni no longer enjoys a monopoly of the means of violence, and with his army's complete loyalty no longer assured, this may have been the last straw that pushed him to change course on political parties. He had to "make a tactical compromise" in order to deny the rebels a cause for launching a war against his regime. Thus those who are celebrating his decision to support a return to multiparty politics should take a deep breath and recognise that President Museveni has not had a change of heart, but a change of strategy. The fact that he is imposing his will on the Movement [to change course] in spite of the majority view which would have preferred the status quo, should be a reminder that even under a multiparty system, it would remain Mr Museveni's way, or no other way. Indeed if his word is enough to grant Ugandans a return to multiparty politics, then would his word not be enough to revert to a one-party state should he tire of an irritating official opposition? If he can give, he can also take away. In my view, the struggle should not be just for multiparty politics. The real struggle should be for a culture and practice of true democracy. Successful multiparty politics can only occur in a democratic environment, with the necessary institutions for democracy, the rule of law and a natural commitment to human rights. It should not be President Museveni's decision to grant or deny Ugandans the type of political arrangement under which they should be governed. Even if he is clothed in the garb of a multi-partyist, Museveni is not the man to superintend a transition to real democracy. February 23, 2003 12:39:16
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