2017
UN and other observers accuse President Kiir’s troops of genocide against ethnic groups suspected of rebel sympathies.
ZAIRE/CONGO
1994-6
Hutu militants in Zairean refugee camps mobilize to retake Rwanda.
NOVEMBER 1996
Rwanda’s army invades the Zairean refugee camps and herds most refugees home. Thousands flee, and are tracked down and slaughtered by Rwandan soldiers.
MAY 1997
The AFDL, assisted by the Rwandan and Ugandan armies, topples Zairean leader Mobutu Sese Seko. AFDL leader Laurent Kabila assumes power and renames the country the Democratic Republic of Congo.
1998
Rwanda and Uganda reinvade Congo and begin supporting myriad rebel groups who fight among themselves and against the Congolese army and local militia groups
1999-2003
The Ugandan army occupies Ituri region, killing thousands and looting some $10 billion in gold, timber and other natural resources. Rwanda becomes the world’s leading exporter of Coltan, necessary for the manufacture of modern electronics. Most of this is also looted from Congo.
2000s
Rwandan/Ugandan backed rebels, including CNDP and M23 continue to wreak havoc in eastern Congo.
SOMALIA
1993
American-led UN relief mission ends in disaster when two Black Hawk helicopters are shot down and eighteen U.S. servicemen are killed.
2004-2006
Islamists and Ethiopian-backed secularists battle for power in Somalia.
JUNE 2006
The Islamists take power in Somalia; Museveni briefs his generals about forthcoming mission to Somalia.
CHRISTMAS 2006
The Ethiopian Army, with U.S. assistance, invades Somalia and topples the Islamists.
2007-PRESENT
Uganda sends African Union peacekeeping troops to Somalia. Al-Shabaab, formerly the armed wing of the Islamists gains support and takes over large parts of the country. Ugandan troops, supported by the U.S. and Britain, continue to battle Al-Shabaab to the present day.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. . . .This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
—Dwight Eisenhower
I’ve been a public health consultant for over 20 years. In Rwanda, I carried out field research among villagers too frightened to speak to me for fear that government spies would report them if they complained about ethnic discrimination. In Ethiopia, I met listless, starving children in villages denied sufficient food aid because of suspected anti-government sentiment. In Uganda, I interviewed mothers whose children had died of malaria because the president’s cronies looted foreign aid programs meant to pay for medicine and bed nets. Most of the humanitarian programs I worked on were supported by U.S. tax dollars, but they were no match for the U.S.-backed tyrants who caused the problems in the first place.
The fine work of humanitarians alone won’t make poor countries prosper. A nation is built on shared expectations that laws will be followed; that rights won’t be trampled; that killers will be punished; that doctors and teachers will be paid what they are owed. If we fail to maintain these fragile promises, even the U.S. would collapse, for those obligations are the foundation of development itself.
In recent years, the East African nation of Uganda has become notorious for warlord Joseph Kony’s killing fields, and for a government that attempted to criminalize homosexuality. In fact, Uganda’s history is far more interesting, not least because of its role in America’s calamitous War on Terror.
The story opens as the Cold War was ending and Washington awoke to growing anti-Western sentiment among Muslims throughout the Middle East. In the Horn of Africa and its nearest neighbors in eastern Africa, a new political map based on a revised vision of national security took shape. Before long, articles listing the fraction of Muslims in different African countries began appearing in policy journals, along with warnings about “lawless bazaars” in diamond and other gemstone markets, and rumors of an underground trade in yellowcake from the continent’s uranium mines.
In trying to comprehend this perceived threat, the U.S. and its allies—wittingly, and otherwise—formed military partnerships with African dictators who, while promising to fight terrorism, stoked up six wars in eastern and central Africa that left millions dead and fueled the rise of the vicious Somali terrorist group Al-Shabaab. This book explores how this happened, providing another glimpse of the post-truth world that brought us the Iraq war and other crises in the Middle East and beyond.
Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni has been the eye of this storm. Since his rebel insurgency took power in 1986, his government has received over $20 billion in development assistance, an unknown amount of classified military aid, and $4 billion in debt relief. At the same time, Uganda’s benefactors have allowed Museveni to shape events to serve his own bloody ambitions. The result has been mayhem in Rwanda, Congo, Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia, and Uganda itself. This book isn’t a comprehensive history of these interlinked wars, which have been ably covered by others. Here I focus on what we know about how Museveni either intensified or created these conflicts de novo.
Museveni’s genius has been to capitalize on Western ambivalence about Africa’s capacity for democracy and self-determination. Thus, with America and Europe’s blessing, he used our generous foreign aid to turn Uganda into a military dictatorship dressed up to look like a democracy. Uganda has a Parliament, a court system, a lively press, and a pyramidal elected governance structure at the village, district, and regional levels. But these institutions operate at the mercy of a far more powerful paramilitary structure of Museveni-appointed Resident District Administrators, District Internal Security officers, Village Defense Committees, and a shadowy network of unofficial security organs that control their own arsenals, override the decisions of elected officials, and close NGOs, newspapers, and radio stations deemed unfriendly to the regime.
Uganda is not North Korea; many Ugandans openly express political opinions. The latest corruption scandals, the poor state of public services, and the peccadillos of ruling party politicians are widely covered in the media. But denouncing the president himself or members of his family, speaking out or reporting on serious human rights abuses, or simply becoming too politically powerful can land you in jail on trumped-up charges, or far, far worse. Wise Ugandans censor themselves.
Museveni’s strategy resembles the “100 Flowers” campaign of his boyhood hero Mao Zedong, who in 1956 encouraged China’s citizens to express their opinions of the communist regime and then sent the “rightists” who did so critically to prison labor camps. This enabled Mao to flush out the most dangerous “counter-revolutionaries” as cheese in a mousetrap eliminates mice. What for Mao was a one-off experiment is for Museveni a continuous policy of exposing dissent and then silencing it by paying off or harassing his most articulate and courageous critics.
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