In your response (below) to Dr. Otunnu's piece in the Foreign Affairs magazine, you inadvertently (I suppose) left out one key fact. That Museveni's government refused to renew Olara Otunnu's passport for a span of three years. That was when the UN was searching for a new Secretary General, and Olara was the top candidate. By denying Olara a Ugandan passport, Mr. Museveni effectively rendered him stateless until a true Pan Africanist country came to his rescue. It is, therefore, hypocritical for you and all Museveni's agents to continually say Otunu abandoned Uganda and changed his nationality.
Irrefutable evidence which will be available for all to inspect indicates, among others, that:
- HIV/AIDS and Ebola were deliberately spread in Acoli by NRA (read Museveni)
- Barlonyo massacre is not as clear cut as you suggest here.
- Acoli DID NOT run to Museveni's concentration camps; they were forced into these epicenters of genocide
- Decongestion program is a sham
- Everything Museveni has done in Acoli more than meets the internationally accepted definition of genocide
- Acoli (including me) do not support Kony and his LRA
- etc, etc
And lastly, from your reaction below, I can safely say your lies are finally beginning to catch up with you (Museveni and his agents of terror). This is a cause for Ugandans to celebrate. Let me end by quoting one concentration camp lodger in a video soon to be released: "Museveni is worse than Idi Amin; at least Amin killed only the person he wanted. Museveni wipes an entire village."
Enjoy defending the indefensible. It is a hot summer indeed!
Ochan Otim
Subject: [UNAANET] OLARA OTUNU:THE TERROR APOLOGIST
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Thu, July 27, 2006 1:06 am
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
NO GENOCIDE IN UGANDA
I wish to respond to the the outrageous falsehoods and distortions contained in Olala Otunus article titled The Secret Genocide published in the July/August 2006 Edition of the Foreign Policy Magazine of the U.S.
The first lie by Olala Otunu is that Government of Uganda has committed genocide in northern Uganda. In response to this lie, I wish to refer to the definition of genocide according to Article 2 of the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, also adopted in its entirety in Art.6 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which is that genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:I wish to make it categorically clear that the Government of Uganda under the National Resistance Movement neither has a policy to commit the above crimes nor has it deliberately committed the above crimes qualified as genocide. On the contrary, the NRM waged a protracted peoples war that delivered the people of Uganda from decades of brutal dictatorship and extrajudicial killings that cost 800,000 lives. The NRM subsequently ushered in the rule of law, deliberate policies for political stability and economic development. Government has been fighting the forces from the past brutal regimes who have transformed themselves many times up to becoming the LRA terrorist group that has been abducting, maiming, raping the people of Northern Uganda and disrupting their lives. The NRM is also on record as having been the only country that stood by the Rwandese while they struggled to liberate their country from a genocidal dictatorship.
- (a) Killing members of the group;
- (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
- (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
- (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
- (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
In the same article Otunu acknowledges the heinous crimes of the terrorist LRA, but he hastens to deny the LRA atrocities by alleging that the LRA and its terror are mere reports to mask more serious crimes by government. He does not tell us how come the U.S Government placed the LRA on the international terrorist list and the ICC indicted the LRA top leadership.
Otunu further alleges that the record of the government of President Yoweri Museveni is many times worse than what he refers to as Ugandan dictator Idi Amins regime. While Otunu cites the terror of Idi Aminis regime, his assertion falls flat on the floor as he fails to cite a single horror attributable to President Yoweri Musevenis government.
He also makes another blatant lie that Uganda is deliberately spreading HIV/AIDS in Northern Uganda. He does not tell us how come the national sero-survey indicates that the rates of HIV/AIDS infection in Gulu are much lower than in urban areas. How can Otunus allegations be labelled against a government that is internationally recognised lead crusader against HIV/AIDS, the crusade accounting for the reduction of the national infection rate from 30% to 6%.
In spite of the fact that the IDPs served as places of refuge for the people of Acholi, Lango and Teso that were fleeing the terror unleashed by the LRA which terror Otunu himself acknowledges in the second paragraph of his article, Otunu, after stating the terror meted by the LRA on the people of Northern Uganda, claims that government has placed the Acholi people in IDP camps. Yet the truth is that the people were forced to the camps by the LRA terrorirsts and were not at all compelled by government but rather were protected by government forces, the UPDF in particular. The LRA made desperate attempts to even attack the IDP camps and , for example at Barlonyo, in 2004 the LRA massacred 200 innocent civilians.
Otunu further equates the IDP camps to concentration camps reminiscent of the Nazi persecution of the Jews. In criticising the conditions of water, sanitation, nutrition etc in the camps, Otunu deliberately avoids blaming the LRA which drove people from their homes and neither does he recognise the efforts by government and development partners to secure and maintain the displaced persons, the efforts of the gallant UPDF which has greatly degraded the LRA, and, among others, rescued 17,000 children from LRA abduction where they were serving as child soldiers and sex slaves.
The uptodate picture is that a Joint Monitoring Committee (Government, Development Partners, the Local Government) is in place and is proceeding well. A programme to return IDPs to their villages is in place and is being implemented. All IDPs in Teso have gone back to their villages. More than 70% of those in Lang are back home. In Acholi, people are moving nearer to their villages, accessing their land, and preparing to return. The programme has the support of development partners and is on course.
For the sake of peace, Government of Uganda has gone out of its way, to give the LRA another chance despite having squandered the previous numerous peace initiatives and persisted in their terror campaign. The peace talks are going on in Juba, between the Uganda Government and LRA under the mediation of the Government of Southern Sudan.
I hope this will help our readers and Otunu who may or may not know what actually happening in Uganda. I must nonetheless state that it should not be surprising that Otunu is an apologist of those moribund forces. Otunu was at the UN where he defended the policy of actual genocide Army of his government which was butchering people; a fact he wants to wish away. He became Foreign Minister for the government that was responsible for the massacre of people whose skulls are in 33 mass graves in Luwero. Otunus brother was the Webmaster of LRA for many years. Otunu abandoned Uganda and changed his nationality. When he became Special Representative of the UN Secretary General for Children in armed conflict he never set foot in Northern Uganda which he claims to love so much.
Ochan Otim
NB: In case you are not aware, there is a petition to stop the Northern Uganda Genocide at: http://www.petitiononline.com/savacoli/petition.html
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