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Uganda: Our People Embrace Peace
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GUEST COLUMN
19 September 2006
Posted to the web 19 September 2006
Yoweri Kaguta Museveni
The world may rest assured that the people of Uganda eagerly embrace the promise of peace and an end to the colonially generated violence, fascism and terrorism orchestrated by the Arab chauvinist regime of Sudan for the last 40 years.
In 1966, the then Prime Minister of Uganda, Milton Obote, overthrew the independence constitution that had only operated for four years, by use of military means. He replaced it with his own constitution, which the terrorized members of parliament (MPs) found in their mail boxes, after they had "passed it."
That constitution overthrew the decentralized form of government and concentrated all the powers in the hands of the president. Conveniently, Oboto declared himself president under the new constitution he had written, having dispensed with President Edward Mutesa.
This treachery was the genesis of the "political and constitutional crisis" of Uganda that went on until 1993 when, finally, under the National Resistance Movement (NRM) government, a constituent assembly was elected, democratically, by universal suffrage.
Ugandan society suffered mightily in the intervening years. Idi Amin killed about 500,000 persons between 1971 and 1979.
Then Obote returned for a second round of tyranny from 1980 to 1985, targeting civilians in the Luwero Triangle, where 300,000 perished. Half a million others were forced into exile from West Nile, the home of Idi Amin, and they fled to Congo and Sudan.
The NRM eventually won the civil war in 1986. The NRM and its predecessor organization, Front for National Salvation, had been fighting, almost continuously, for a total of 16 years. The NRM that won this civil war was comprised of patriotic revolutionaries that despised sectarianism; respected the peoples' human rights by punishing, harshly, soldiers and other criminals that engaged in extra-judicial killings of civilians; supported democracy - the denial of which had been the beginning of the Ugandan constitutional-political crisis way back in 1966; were for Pan-Africanism so as to strengthen the voice and capacity of the black people as well as other Africans; and were determined to modernize Uganda through industrialization, export-oriented growth and social transformation.
Over the past 20 years, the NRM has:
- Brought down HIV-prevalence from 30% in some urban centres in 1986 to a national average of 6.4%;
- Increased primary school enrollment from 2.5 million to 7.7 million;
- Increased universities from one to 18 (including private ones)
- Increased the share of industry as a portion of GDP from 8% to 22.2%, thereby causing a decline of agriculture as a percentage of GDP from 62% to 31.1% by maintaining an annual average rate of GDP growth of 6.3 %, while the GDP size of Uganda has more than tripled in the last twenty years.
Additionally, constitutionalism was restored in 1995; democratic elections are held every five years; a multi-party system, banished by Obote in 1969, has been restored; and a thorough going decentralization was put in place.
All these achievements were scored in spite of the terrorism campaign launched against Uganda by the Sudan government in northern Uganda, West Nile and the Rwenzori region of western Uganda - in partnership with Mobutu of Congo in respect of the latter two. Sudan executed this terrorism through a group calling itself the Lords Resistance Army (LRA) and other terrorist groups such as West Nile Bank Front (WNBF) and Allied Democratic Forces (ADF).
The Arab chauvinist regimes of Sudan did not want to be neighbors with a Uganda led by black nationalists. They apparently feared that if the black nationalists are allowed to entrench themselves in Uganda, they might eventually extend solidarity to their southern Sudanese black brothers, who had been fighting to throw off the Arab yoke since 1955, when the British left.
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The Arab chauvinists, therefore, tried to overthrow our government by re-equipping the elements of the defeated former colonial army of Uganda - which had also served Obote and Amin) - that had fled into Sudan. After failing to overthrow the NRM government, the Sudanese Arab chauvinists aimed to destabilize Uganda or intimidate its government into becoming another stereotypically pliant, quisling black regime, with no qualms about selling out the interests of Africa.
With vile intentions, the Sudanese opened three fronts against us, using Ugandan agents: Kony's LRA in the Acholi area (North-Central), WNBF of Juma Oris in West Nile, and ADF, through Congo, in western Uganda. These multiple fronts were supposed to over-stretch Uganda's Army (UPDF) so as to lead to our regime's collapse or capitulation.
We prevailed on all the three fronts, defeating the ADF especially, after our intervention in Congo in 1997. We also defeated WNBF in West Nile and pushed both the Sudan army and Kony's army from our common border. The Sudan regime, in the end, was forced to negotiate with our Black brothers in southern Sudan, leading to the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in 2005.
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