Dear All, I thought this would be an interesting for those with "Barifa at Heart". This is an article posted on the Cyber forum such as ours, called Ugandans at heart.
We probably would learn or understand the sources spewing orders from above better! Happy and Prosperous 2011. Gilbert ----- Forwarded Message ---- From: Ochan Otim <[email protected]> To: [email protected]; [email protected] Sent: Tue, December 28, 2010 7:08:33 AM Subject: {UAH} Arua Bishop Odoki sat silently through Museveni's abusive speech against northerners. Salim Saleh ‘committed crimes against humanity in DRC’ Written by: The Editor on 27th December 2010 Arua Bishop Sabino Ocan Odoki sat silently through a Museveni speech that used abusive language against northerners. The Museveni Memo on Northern Uganda. Today we continue with Prof Todd Whitmore’s analysis on the Museveni memo on northern Uganda. In today’s piece, Prof Whitmore asks why the UN has stopped short of indicting Yoweri Museveni and his brother Caleb Akandwanaho with crimes against humanity for what they have done in Northern Uganda and in the DRC. Here is his report: The case of Uganda’s presence in the DRC is important because it helps to establish a documented pattern of behavior whereby economic greed and politico-military power join and issue forth in repeated atrocity. The conclusion of the 2010 UN report is unstinting. The political and economic agenda of the Ugandan government caused “massive and widespread violations of human rights and international law.” The authors of the report are clear that they constitute a fact-finding rather than a judicial body; still, they do not hesitate to place these violations under the descriptions of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The only difference between NRM/UPDF behavior in the DRC and that in northern Uganda is that in the former the greed is for precious gems and minerals and in the latter it is for arable land. The outcome for the resident civilians has been the same. In the meantime, President Museveni [had] promoted his brother Saleh to full General and [had] recently made [him] the Minister of State for Microfinance. This, despite the fact that Saleh has been implicated several times in schemes where he uses his military position, granted by his brother Yoweri Museveni, for personal financial gain. Early allegations of corruption led to Saleh being dismissed as Army Commander, but Museveni reappointed him as Senior Presidential Advisor on Defense and Security. Saleh had to leave this latter post because of a bank scandal and an arrangement where he gained $800,000 from the sale of junk helicopters to the army. Still, he continued to be promoted in rank. Now there is the UN evidence of crimes against humanity, war crimes, and possibly genocide in the DRC. It is clear, then, that the aim of Museveni and Saleh has not been that of security and peace in either the DRC or northern Uganda. Rather, it has been the accumulation of wealth, whether in the form of precious gems and minerals or arable land. Moreover, as documented in the UN mapping report, they have demonstrated in the case of the DRC that they are hardly averse to “reducing the population” where the presence of civilians is an obstacle to the accumulation of wealth. Together, Museveni and Saleh function as the political and economic wings of the Museveni family regime, now going on twenty-five years. The connecting link between the political and economic wings is a military designed and trained to meet the objectives precisely as Museveni and Saleh have constructed them. Neopatrimonialism: The Link Connecting NRM Actions in Acholiland and the DRC The above facts fall into place when we understand Museveni’s regime as a form of rule that political scientists call “neopatrimonialism.” A political order constitutes a neopatrimonial regime when political authority is personalized in the relationships between the primary leader—in this case Museveni—and his clients, often family members—in this case Salim Saleh—who people the bureaucracy. Michael Bratton describes such a regime this way: “Corruption, clientelism, and ‘Big Man’ presidentialism—all dimensions of neopatrimonial rule—tend to go together as a package.” Rune Hjalmar Espeland and Stina Petersen take neopatrimonial analysis and use it to assess the military in Uganda. They note that, as a practice, neopatrimonial rulers use their personal authority to bypass formal and merit-based structures of military advancement. Such rulers “often prefer their own ethnic group for prominent military positions, or else long-term political allies or family members.” Saleh is all three—clan member, political ally, and brother. Espeland and Petersen go on to point out that neopatrimonial rulers “often encourage corrupt, yet individually benefitting business practices within the military.” The aim of such an arrangement is to keep the members of the military loyal. Disloyalty results, minimally, in loss of income for the officers. This explains why, despite multiple instances of being caught in corrupt practices, Saleh continues to be promoted and given added powers. In fact, when an embezzlement scandal broke regarding illicit payments to “ghost soldiers” —one way officers pad their income is to list non-existent soldiers on their payroll—Museveni placed the corrupt Saleh on the committee to investigate the situation. Espeland and Petersen’s article demonstrates that the loyalty- and income-producing purpose of the military in neopatrimonial regimes results in an unprofessional military. The authors cite the neopatrimonial structure of the Musveni regime as a key reason for the inability of the NRA/UPDF to defeat the LRA. Despite the President’s repeated fervent claim to have the desire to defeat the LRA, maintaining client relationships with those in the military—relationships that allow and even encourage individual enterprise on the part of the officers at the expense of the local population as part of the agreed-upon arrangement with the officers—is more important than developing a level of military professionalism that is capable of victory in the conventional sense. For instance, strategic planning does not take into account that high numbers of the armed forces are “ghost soldiers” padding the officers’ income; when it is time to go to battle, these officers cannot say that the soldiers do not exist without implicating themselves, and so they enter engagements with far fewer personnel than planned. It is not by accident, then, that NRA/UPDF soldiers have been proficient at terrorizing the local populace but muddling in their ability to fight the LRA. It is important to note, however, that “unprofessional” does not in all instances mean “haphazard.” In fact, as we will see further below, the NRA/UPDF have often been brutally efficient in pursuing their purpose: to repress civilian populations and exploit local resources for personal wealth and gain. The issue is not whether the NRA/UPDF have been organized or not, but rather what they have been organized for. In addition to fleeing at the sight or even rumor of LRA being in the vicinity, the NRA/UPDF, according to multiple reports, committed its own acts of violence and even atrocity. The results for the populace in northern Uganda have been disastrous. Espeland and Petersen state: “As a military strategy, the regime failed to defeat the LRA but politically they controlled most of the civilian population for two decades.” As we have seen, this has been the plan all along: control of the people—and land—in the North. The authors conclude that the humanitarian crisis that followed was a “direct outcome of the military approach to the region pursued by President Museveni.” As we will see in more detail in the next section, the Acholi people, according to Museveni, are not people at all. Given the present lull in the NRM-LRA conflict, at least within Uganda, Museveni and Saleh can no longer use military force, at least not in the same way as before, as a means to cause and take advantage of social disruption in order to procure wealth. They must at least appear to be taking normal political channels, and this Museveni and others in the NRM have tried to do. Starting in 2007, Museveni sought to allocate 40,000 hectares of land in the North to the Madhvani Group for a sugar cane plantation, a number that he reduced to 20,000 hectares when faced with opposition. If such a deal goes through, the central government will have a forty percent stake in the plantation. Another case occurred when the central government gave one billion Ugandan shillings to twenty army officers and government officials to take land in the North that was already under customary tenure, resulting in the eviction of families from their land. A case of local officials getting in on the act occurred when the members of the Amuru District Land Board applied for 85,000 hectares of land for themselves, an application that, if successful, would have evicted—that is, again, displaced—10,000 people from their land. More recently, Museveni, Saleh, and Museveni’s son, Lt. Col. Muhoozi Kainerugaba, have been cited by the anti-corruption NGO Global Witness for arranging “security” for newly found oil deposits in ways that enhance themselves financially. Although the dynamics are still neopatrimonial in these more recent cases, accessing the natural resource of land is more difficult because there is no longer the social disruption of armed conflict to act as a screen for forced displacement and military rule in northern Uganda. Museveni must at least appear to be following the rule of law in order to continue to receive the high rate of foreign aid to which he has become accustomed. To his advantage is the fact that, for the geopolitical reasons indicated earlier, U.S. officials want and need to interpret Uganda’s politics not as neopatrimonial but as democratic and law-abiding. Until this structural situation of mutually reinforcing interests changes, the de facto burden of public proof will always be on those who interpret Ugandan government’s polity as something other than democratic, even when such interpreters have the far greater evidence in their favor. The memo I received is one more—and one more significant—piece of that evidence. The Language of the Memo: The Acholi as “Backward,” “Chimpanzees” and “Monkeys” So far, we have seen that the memo is consistent with both the earlier and later policies of Museveni and Saleh towards northern Uganda. As we have also seen, whenever domestic persons or organizations—whether members of the media, ministers of parliament, or NGO representatives—have spoken out about the arrangement and situation just described, Museveni has used his plenary political power to silence the critics. This is a large part of why, even given the evidence presented above, the actions of Museveni and his military, according to Espeland and Petersen, “have received much less attention by scholars than the atrocities of the LRA.” However, Museveni has gone well beyond merely suppressing these accounts and has gone on to provide and justify his own. It is at this point that the language of the memo is important. The author of the memo refers to “the backward northerners.” This language of backwardness and, its analogue, primitiveness is consistent with Museveni’s own public and documented statements. Indeed, statements from the President to this effect bookend the conflict in northern Uganda. As early as 1987, in reference to the fight with the Holy Spirit Movement—the Acholi precursor to Kony’s LRA—Museveni claimed, “This is a conflict between modernity and primitivity.” As late as 2006, at the installation of Sabino Odoki as Auxiliary Bishop of Gulu, and just a month before the ceasefire with the LRA, Museveni declared, “We shall transform the people in the north from material and spiritual backwardness to modernity.” Thus from the beginning of the conflict up to the ceasefire agreement, Museveni has drawn upon the lexicon of backward/primitive versus civilized/modern to frame the situation. His making such statements at the installation of an Acholi bishop indicates that he is hardly ashamed of such language. It is noteworthy that his use of these terms bridges his switch from Maoist/Marxist guerilla to World Bank neo-liberal. The one constant is his affirmation of what anthropologists describe as a unilinear view of social evolution. Museveni makes clear in his autobiography that, in his words, “the laws of social evolution” drive his policies. The use in the memo, then, of the terms “Chimpanzees” and “Monkeys” is a consistent continuation of his frequent usage of the words “primitive” and “backward” to denote the Acholi. The link between the two is the language of evolution as a means of distinguishing peoples—again, it is a language much more basic to Museveni’s lexicon than the differences between Marxism and neo-liberalism. Primitive versus modern is simply the social evolutionary articulation of the biological evolutionary distinction of monkey versus human. In other words, chimpanzee = monkey = primitive = backward; human = civilized = modern. Sometimes Museveni describes the Acholi as primitive not-yet-humans; at other times he describes them as animals incapable of ever becoming human. The underpinning language of unilinear evolution is the same, and the violent policies and acts they are used to justify on behalf of “civilized” and “modern” humanity are little different. http://str8talkchronicle.com/?p=11287 -- Sign the Stop the Genocide in Northern Uganda Petition to President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda at http://www.petitiononline.com/savacoli/petition.html -- If the elections were held today, who would you vote for? Vote now by visiting the link below: http://ekitibwakyabuganda.wordpress.com/vote-for-president-now/ . Don't also forget the UAH awards at:http://ssubi.wordpress.com/polls/ .To unsubscribe from this group, send email to Ugandans-at-Heart [email protected] or [email protected]. Also visit the 'UAH' Blog at: http://ugandansatheart.wordpress.com/ -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.
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