FUNDING AFRICAN SUFFERING IN THE WAR AGAINST TERRORISM

BY A SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT IN AFRICA

Though given little publicity in Britain, an Irish missionary working for the Mill Hill Fathers was shot dead on the road past Mount Toror in Karamoja, Uganda, together with his driver and cook on 21.3.02. This atrocity would have been laid at the door of the Karamojng warriors had it not been for witnesses who escaped in a vehicle who drew up behind. The one in charge of the makeshift road-block beckoned the occupants to reverse and get out of their vehicle, but the driver noticed he had removed the safety-catch from his AK-47, so told the health-worker with him that if he obeyed, he would go without him. So saying, he drove on. The two armed men knew were adept at their task for they shot repeatedly from behind through the metal of the back door hitting the driver three times in the back. Two bullets made superficial wounds; the third entered near the spine going up into his collar-bone, missing the lungs. With hazard-lights flashing, he drove at speed to Kotido to tell the tale of the two men in full army kit. Their bootmarks were than tracked to the UPDF camp nearby. Within four days Corporal Omedio and Private Muhammad were court-martialled and publicly shot by firing-squad in Kotido before they could speak to anyone outside the army. A rumour was spread that robbery was the motive, but nothing had been stolen.
The Uganda Human Rights Commission, appointed it seems to put Museveni’s actions generally in a good light, turned up in Kotido on Maundy Thursday, interviewed officials and passers-by in the town before returning south for Easter. Among the Jie of Nakapelimoru was where any investigation should have started, for it was there in his parish that Revd. Fr. Declan O’Toole began his paschal ministry. At dawn on 9.3.02 an army contingent went into all the homes to flush out the whole population with batons, including a woman whose umbilical cord had not yet been cut from childbirth. Children were beaten; small girls, a harmless, mentally-ill girl, the old, the blind, the lame, and infirm bore the scars 19 days later. Bones and skulls were broken. Twelve women were raped. A 6-year-old boy was killed, but hidden with grass on the hill. A young man was bayoneted and hidden under a rock at the top of the hill (but by 28.3.02, hyenas had dragged out the remains too decomposed even for them). A youth was stabbed in the groin. The army stopped the LC5 Chairman, the senior locally elected representative, from going there. All were made to lie in the dry-season sun from 6am to 4pm. Women were kicked in the stomach and pregnant women hit on the side. Then the priest called Apalopus arrived, ‘Why this treatment … even for a man who had just shaved his head in mourning for his wife?’. They hit him on the head. He went to report the matter to the commanding officer and then to the Irish embassy who made representations to the government. ‘That is why that Muzungu (white) was killed … They shot him.’

A disarmament programme in for the Karamojong in Uganda is being used as an excuse for systematic brutality, writes a special correspondent.

The excuse for this systematic brutality, exhibited in various places, is a disarmament programme for the Karamojong, who had even volunteered some 10,000 guns. However army elements have seen this as an opportunity to exact revenge on the feared and despised pastoralists, taking their cattle, persecuting, and killing. This is not merely an expression of Ugandan hatred, for Uganda has long been pressed internationally to ensure security. USAID has sought proposals addressing violent conflicts having a cross-border dimension ‘to reinforce the objectives of the USAID/Mission’. Oxfam, whose Karamoja director is from the bitter enemies of Katakwi, issued a report comparing the Karamojong to the Joseph Kony’s insurgents, recommending that, ‘Disarmament of the Karimojongs should be treated as part of a wider plan for regional disarmament under the auspices of Inter-Governmental Authority on Development’. So it was that Clare Short attended the next summit meeting 10-11.1.02 in Khartoum where the terrorist acts of 11.9.02 were top of the agenda. ‘As we saw in Afghanistan collapsing States, where people live in poverty and misery, provide opportunities for international terrorists to organise and hide themselves’, she said before going, borrowing an American analysis of Africa. She chaired bilateral talks between Uganda and Sudan to ensure co-operation to eliminate the Lord’s Resistance Army and the cross-border arms trade to Karamoja.

The disarmament programme in Karamoja is funded by inter-governmental donors, including a small grant from the UK, who are strangely reluctant to take any credit for the application of their taxpayers’ money. Museveni called EU envoys to his tented camp at Kangole among the Bokora in Karamoja last month to show them that the programme was ‘going on well despite some drawbacks’. He appealed to their sense of ‘enormous investment opportunities’, such as gold mining, ‘now that security is being restored to the region’, in asking ‘for their assistance to help Karamojong settle into peaceful and productive lives’. In Moroto and Kotido the army is obliging to the populace to forsake the loose cloth suka and kanga in favour of trousers, shirts, and dresses for the sake of decency and security, reminding of Amin’s army shooting tens of thousands of Karamojong for protesting against his clothes edict. Rashly soldiers chose the mother of a former MP, David Pulkol, to force her beads down her throat, but there they found a voice in the capital. The violence is never even-handed. Since the Bokora section of the Karimojong has succeeded in obtaining the sympathy of the government, it is the Jie tribe, long enemies of the surrounding and more populous Karimojong and Dodoso¡, which is being scapegoated for the cattle-raiding of all.

Yet it is not only the USA and the UK that take strategic decisions. Provoked by the army programme from their ‘love’ for Museveni, various Jie groups were saying that they would completely throw off the rule of his government and would if necessary pay taxes to Kenya. As the UPDF has stepped up its campaign against the Jie, burning and shelling the homesteads of the Panyangara Jie after they raided 60 cattle from the Bokora for the bloodwealth of their late parish priest, 5,000 have emigrated with their livestock to Kenya, where they will launch retaliatory action from across the border. This indicates the contingency of the Ugandan state on supra-national and sub-national forces. That world powers should back the state against those whom it would seek to oppress does not guarantee its legitimation; indeed it could expose the latent fact that Karamojong have never identified themselves as Ugandans nor trusted the government of strangers, ngimoe. The state is just another raider.