In January 2017, two researchers presented data suggesting that Americans and Europeans born in the 1980s are far less likely to say that living in a democracy is “essential” than their grandparents’ generation was. I hope those young people, so complacent about the freedoms their elders fought for on the killing fields of Europe and the streets of Birmingham, Alabama, will read this book and think again.
The Cold War was almost over when Yoweri Museveni’s rebel army seized power in 1986. From its ashes, an old ideology was being reborn and its specter darkened the triumphal atmosphere. The adherents of militant Islam had dreams of Empire, but they were neither of a workers’ nor consumers’ paradise; they were bound together not by citizenship, but by a common creed and violent conception of justice and honor. Militant Islamists had their own schools, hospitals, and charities, their own courts and systems of trade, their own ways of choosing leaders, their own customs concerning gender and sexual behavior, and their own militias. Their economies were based on shadowy, trust-based exchanges of gemstones and weapons. The focus of militant Islamist hatred was America and her allies: their support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine; their links to the corrupt Saudi Royal family; their military presence on the soil of Muslim nations; and their decadent culture which fostered complacency about all of the above.
For its devotees, militant Islam seemed like a cure for a fractured world where the interests of the poor and weak were trampled by American might and greed. For Washington, this frightening movement, responsible for ever-bloodier terrorist attacks against Western and Israeli targets, posed a security conundrum. The terrorists didn’t come from a world they knew, in which monolithic enemies with clear ideologies faced each other with enormous weapons drawn but seldom used. These new enemies weren’t represented by states; they were everywhere and nowhere, and their weapons were deadly, portable, and used without hesitation.
In Africa the stakes were high: an estimated $24 trillion worth of unexploited oil, gold, diamonds, cobalt, uranium, and coltan, the raw material for cellphone and computer chips. Much of this loot lay underground in Uganda’s neighbor Congo—or Zaire, as it was known between 1971 and 1997—that vast, poorly governed country at the heart of the continent. During the Cold War, these resources were kept out of Soviet hands by U.S.-backed thugs such as Zaire’s Marshall Mobutu Sese Seko and the militaristic Apartheid regime of South Africa. But the fall of the Soviets shifted the kaleidoscope, turning former enemies into friends and vice versa. South Africa would soon be free, and the aging and increasingly addled President Mobutu was growing closer to Sudan, where a new Islamist government was recruiting militants throughout the Middle East to expand their own sphere of influence.
In order to confront this new threat, Washington’s security chiefs designated two new types of enemy: “state sponsors of terror”—nations whose governments provided sanctuary to terrorist groups—and “failed states.” Articles about Africa written by security officials give the impression that the authors are describing not societies and cultures with histories going back millennia, but anarchic wastelands where terrorists lurked amid clans, cattle, and dust. In Africa, that meant Sudan and Somalia, respectively.
As in the Cold War, proxy armies would be needed. Officially, U.S. policymakers would say Africans needed to fight their own battles; in reality, Africans would be fighting ours. Wedged between Congo/Zaire, with its enormous mineral wealth, and eastern Africa’s Muslim fringe, predominantly Christian Uganda occupied a crucial geostrategic position. Its leader Museveni was a brilliant military strategist, whose ragtag rebel group had famously toppled Uganda’s much stronger national army.
Since then Ugandan troops have served as a doorstop against what American national security officials see as potential Islamic militant advances across Africa, with troops at one time or another in Sudan, the Central African Republic, and Somalia—as well as Rwanda and Congo, where they removed regimes that although not themselves Islamic, were potential allies of Sudan.
To many Americans and Europeans, the resulting conflagrations—the Rwanda genocide, the Congo wars, the Sudanese civil war, Joseph Kony’s massacres in northern Uganda, the gruesome Sharia amputations in Somalia—must have seemed like distant storms having nothing to do with us. But U.S. advisers and military officials were involved in some of this violence, at times arming one side against the other, at other times doing nothing until tensions built up and then downplaying abuses by our allies, including Museveni.
In 1989, an alliance of military officers and hardline Islamic militants took power in Sudan, and with help from Iran, began plotting to export Islamic revolution across Africa. Sudan’s new leaders gave sanctuary to Osama bin Laden and the head of Egypt’s Islamic Jihad, and permitted others, including the assassins who killed Egypt’s speaker of Parliament in 1991, to be trained on its soil.
Shortly thereafter, Uganda’s army began receiving assistance from the U.S. to train and equip the Sudan People’s Liberation Army—or SPLA—a rebel group that had been battling the government in Khartoum on and off since the 1950s. In retaliation, Sudan’s leaders began funneling weapons to notorious rebel leader Joseph Kony, who has since been indicted by the International Criminal Court on charges of crimes against humanity. The result was more than a decade of war that decimated the people of northern and eastern Uganda and southern Sudan who were caught in the crossfire.
The most disturbing example of U.S. involvement in Museveni’s warmongering was the horror that erupted in Rwanda on April 6, 1994. Over three months, hundreds of thousands of Rwandans were murdered in the most rapid genocide ever recorded. The killers used simple tools—machetes, clubs and other blunt objects, or herded victims into buildings and set them aflame with kerosene. Most of the victims were Tutsis, who comprised about 14 percent of Rwanda’s pre-genocide population. Most of the killers were of majority Hutu ethnicity.
The Rwanda genocide has been compared to the Nazi Holocaust in its surreal brutality. But there is a fundamental difference between these two atrocities. No Jewish army posed a threat to Germany. Hitler targeted the Jews and other weak groups solely because of his own demented beliefs and prevailing prejudices of the time.
The Rwandan Hutu genocidaires, as the people who killed during the genocide were known, were also motivated by irrational beliefs and prejudices, but the powder keg contained another important ingredient. Three and a half years before the genocide, an army of Rwandan Tutsi exiles known as the Rwandan Patriotic Front—or RPF—armed and trained by Uganda, invaded Rwanda and set up camps in the northern mountains. Hundreds of thousands of mostly Hutu villagers fled south, citing killings, abductions, and other crimes in RPF occupied areas.
The RPF represented hundreds of thousands of Tutsi refugees who had fled their country in the early 1960s. For centuries before that, they’d formed an elite minority caste in Rwanda. In a system perpetuated by the German and Belgian colonizers, they treated the majority Hutu peasants like serfs, forcing them to work on their land and sometimes beating them like donkeys. Hutu anger simmered until shortly before independence in 1962, and then exploded in brutal and bloody pogroms against the Tutsi, who fled to neighboring countries. In Uganda, a new generation of Tutsi refugees grew up, but they soon became embroiled in the lethal politics of their adoptive country. Many naturally allied with Ugandan Tutsis and the closely related Hima—Museveni’s tribe—many of whom were opposition supporters and therefore seen as enemies by President Milton Obote. After Amin overthrew Obote in 1971, many Rwandan Tutsis moved out of the border refugee camps. Some tended the cattle of wealthy Baganda; others acquired property and began farming themselves; some married into Ugandan families, and a small number joined the State