by Sirocco
Tue Jun 28th, 2005 at 02:32:16 PM EST
BBC News:
Ugandan MPs have voted overwhelmingly in favour of a constitutional amendment allowing President Yoweri Museveni to seek further terms in office.
Earlier, riot police fired teargas to disperse hundreds of people protesting at the prospect of a life president.
The twice-elected leader who came to power in 1986 is currently barred by the constitution from seeking re-election in polls next year.
[snip]
Mr Museveni introduced the 'Movement' system of government to try and prevent the chaos and ethnic conflicts that plagued Uganda throughout the 1970s and early 80s.
While he has defended it as a 'no-party' system, critics say it amounts to one-party rule.
It's time to face it: Yoweri Museveni, hailed in Europe and the US as the finest in a 'new generation of African leaders,' is a self-serving dictator. Those who think otherwise - and they are many - have been taken for a ride. I know for a fact that Museveni has been promising MPs to become his anointed successor; those were conned as well.
Term limits were invented for a reason. Power does, after all, corrupt. As Museveni put it in 1987: "Any president staying in power beyond fifteen years is courting disaster." Evidently he feels better about such courtship now, nearly two decades hence.
Let's take a look, then, at the President's record. Southern Uganda, where the ruling elite has its origins, has enjoyed a fine economic growth. However, in Uganda's three northern provinces a war has raged for 19 years, the entire duration of Museveni's time in office. In this interminable clash with the Lord's Resistance Army - a bizarre cult-at-arms led by the illiterate former altar boy Joseph Kony - up to 30 000 children down to seven years of age have been abducted and forced into slavery as sex toys or guerrilla fighters. Meanwhile, 90 percent of the population have been hoarded into refugee camps ostensibly for their own protection, their villages torched by the Ugandan army. In reality, scant protection is offered, which is why up to 40 000 children 'night commute' to the towns every night, sleeping under open sky or in UNICEF shelters. This is what Museveni affords the children of an ethnic group, the Acholi, that understandably declines to sing his praises.
Why can't the mighty Ugandan army protect the camps from rebel attacks? In part, perhaps, because it isn't quite as mighty as on paper. Thousands of ghost soldiers are alleged to grace its payrolls, the money channeled into warlordism in the northeastern DR Congo - where an estimated 1000 perish every day. Museveni, however, is ever one to turn the tables on his critics:
DR Congo and UN peacekeeping mission in the vast African nation are "preserving" foreign fighters who want to attack Uganda, President Yoweri Museveni has said.
Museveni wrote a letter, seen by Reuters in Kinshasa on Monday, to Congo's President Joseph Kabila last week, complaining about the presence of Ugandan and Rwandan guerrillas in eastern Congo and the lack of disarmament of militia fighters. He warned that Uganda would "react vigorously" if attacked.
"By preserving these terrorists, the Congo government and MONUC are preserving and allowing to grow the Great Lakes problem," the letter said. Foreign diplomats in Kinshasa said the letter was authentic.
Uganda was one of six neighbouring countries to send its army into Congo during a five-year war that was officially declared over in 2003 after the foreign armies withdrew and the belligerents joined a transitional government.
But Kinshasa's authority in the mineral-rich east has repeatedly been undermined by Rwandan, Ugandan and Burundian armed groups who terrorise civilians despite the presence of thousands of UN peacekeepers.
According to the Oxford Analytica, the extensive ghost soldier scam is one reason why no peace has been struck with the Lord's Resistance Army:
Should the fighting stop, the government would be unable to continue resisting donor pressure to scale down the size of its armed forces and the budget that goes with it. Army commanders would also have to cut back on their lavish lifestyles and ability to milk the military budget by pocketing the salaries of 'ghost soldiers' and other forms of corruption.
In any case, Museveni has repeatedly frustrated efforts to broker a solution. Instead he prefers to shell the abducted children from the air. But then, as he said a few years ago after a vicious bout of abductions: "By now they are HIV-infected anyway."
Speaking of HIV: In the 1990's Uganda was the only country in sub-Saharan Africa to experience a significant drop in HIV prevalence. The winning formula was education, especially encouraging the use of condoms. But now Museveni has publicly condemned condoms as inappropriate for Ugandans, placed new restrictions on their import, and let his ministers tout abstinence instead as a prevention strategy. This, as Human Rights Watch documented in an 80-page report released in March, is a surefire recipe for failure. But at least it is also sure to have pleased the first lady, Janet Museveni - a Christian fundamentalist who has scolded groups teaching youth about condoms and called for a 'national virgin census.'
Human Rights Watch and similar detractors can be charmed in other ways, Museveni believes. The government is now spending £350 000 spiffing up its fading image on the human rights front:
Hill & Knowlton, one of the world's biggest PR firms, will be working with the government, trying to build bridges with lobby groups such as Human Rights Watch, which has been highly critical of Mr Museveni.
The PR firm has itself been criticised in the past for working with governments such as Indonesia and Turkey, whose human rights records are dubious.
[snip]
Last month, Human Rights Watch accused Ugandan authorities of arresting two opposition MPs on "apparently trumped up charges". The human rights group also claims that the Ugandan security forces use torture as a tool of interrogation.
I am sure the Bush administration, whose darling Museveni is, doesn't mind so much. But maybe Europe should?
