The Real Museveni

Museveni prefers militarist (violent) approach in the resolution of problems and issues but would also, at times, put forward a dissembling scheme,while preparing a military solution. Both on personal and public Affairs, there is no ethic, moral values or law which he would not either discard, flout or bend in order for him to achieve his designs. Museveni's propensity for bloodshed did not start in Luwero.

The UPC government contained this mass killer within the Luwero Triangle. The Okello and Okello Junta facilitated the killer and now he brutalizes the whole country.

Ugandans, who, for whatever reason, have not seen Museveni as a killer or think that they would be safe because they are close to him are in for a rude shock. Museveni kills not only those he sees or regards as his enemies but also those closest to him. I cite some examples:

33. In Tanzania in the early 1970s, a number of Ugandans who were very close to Museveni disappeared and have not been seen again. They included Mwesiga Black, Raiti Omongin, Miss V. Rwaheru (Museveni's housekeeper) and Martin Mwesiga (brother of Frank Mwine of the Uganda Commercial Bank). In the case of Martin Mwesiga, his sister Margaret, who was living and working in Arusha, personally told me in 1974 in Dar es Salaam the murky story about the disappearance of her brother.

NOTES: The "Miss V. Rwaheru" who Obote is talking about here is Hope, the sister of Valeriano Rwaheru. Rwaheru was with Museveni at Ntare School and he was one of the first people to join FRONASA in 1971. One day we shall tell you the details of how Rwaheru met his death.

That woman Hope, the sister of Rwaheru, is the biological mother of Museveni's son, Lt. Col. Muhoozi Kainerugaba. If you remember there used to be a radio talk show called Andrew Mwenda Live. One time Obote was interviewed around 2001 or 2002 where he mentioned this Hope, Museveni's first wife.

In that interview, Obote asked several times to the host Andrew Mwenda to explain where Muhozi's mother is, but no one could answer the question.

Augustine Ruzindana in one of his interviews with the Weekly Observer talked of how Museveni abandoned the FRONASA camp in Tanzania to go on a honeymoon "with his wife", using money intended for FRONASA. That wife was Hope. The current First Lady Janet Kataha is the second wife of Museveni.

What happened is that Museveni murdered Hope in Tanzania. Some Ugandan exiles who were in Tanzania say he shot her, others say he killed her with a machete, but no one is sure how.

We cannot yet confirm what really happened. But after he murdered Hope, the Tanzanian government arrested him and he spent about six months in jail until President Julius Nyerere got him out. That is why when you read his book by the name "Sowing The Mustard Seed", you will notice that he does not talk about much FRONASA activity in 1974. That was the year when he killed Hope.

The gist of Margaret's story is that on several occasions in 1973, she asked Museveni about the whereabouts of her brother, who until he disappeared, was always with Museveni. Margaret told me and others that on each such occasion, Museveni gave her a different version of where Mwesiga was, ranging from Mwesiga being alive and well but on a mission abroad to Mwesiga undergoing a secret course.

Late in 1973, Margaret said, Museveni told her that her brother had died in a battle in Mbale in February 1973. One of those present when Margaret gave this account was Enoka Muntuyera, the father of the present Commander of the NRA, Major General Muntu. Enoka and another Ugandan told Margaret that they had stayed in the same hotel as Museveni and Mwesiga in Tabora, Tanzania, in April 1973.

Margaret had travelled to Dar es Salaam with another brother, Magara, to enlist my help for Magara to get a place in the University of Dar es Salaam. Magara who after his graduation joined the UNLA, defected and joined the NRA in 1981. In 1983, when he was on an NRA mission in a Kampala suburb, someone rang the Police to say that Museveni was in a house in the suburb.

The house was surrounded and its occupants were asked to come out without their arms but instead the occupants opened fire. Magara died in the shoot-out. Two of Magara's NRA colleagues were taken alive; they were wounded. The two told the Police that as far as they knew, the mission was known only to Museveni, the house was safe and they got there at night as they had done previously. Margaret and Frank, Sister and Brother of Mwesiga and Magara are now in very lucrative positions.

34. In early 1979 after the capture of Ankole by the Tanzanian troops, Museveni organized hooligans, mostly from the two Refugee Camps, Rusinga and Nakivale, and led them in attacks and massacres of Muslims. He led the hooligans to the Kakoba Coffee Factory and burnt it down. He also organized an assault to burn down his former school, Ntare, but this was frustrated when patriotic Ugandans appealed to the Tanzanian troops to restrain Museveni which they did. In Mbarara Town, Museveni, the son of an itinerant immigrant, lived in Omugabe's Palace.

His reasoning for the massacres of the Muslims, the burning of the coffee Factory, etc. was that in so doing the "wrath" of the "wananchi" (citizens) was being expressed against the Amin regime. It was immaterial to Museveni that the hooligans he was leading were not citizens and that the victims were citizens. What was of greatest importance was to show in the most unmistaken form that he was the new ruler in Ankole and that terror including massacres were to be instruments of his rule.

35. Museveni entered Uganda in early January 1979 in the company of the Tanzanian troops. Contrary to propaganda, he had no army which he left behind either in Tanzania or Mozambique and had no such army anywhere in Uganda. When his hooligans were restrained from attacking Ntare School and after they had dynamited Public Buildings in Mbarara Town, he began to raise an army.

In the second part of February 1979, he returned to Dar-es-Salaam where, at a meeting with me, President Nyerere determined that Museveni would henceforth lead the Ugandan component of forces then fighting against Amin. From Dar es Salaam Museveni, now the Supreme Commissar, went to Rakai and Masaka Districts where, again, in order to show the "wrath" of the citizens, much destruction was wrought. Houses of the affluent were dynamited as were Public Buildings, including Tropic Inn (Hotel).

From there Museveni proceeded to Fort Portal which had fallen to the Tanzanian troops. In Fort Portal, like in Mbarara, Museveni stayed in the Omukama's Palace which was intact and furnished. In 1987 Elizabeth Bagaya, then Museveni's friend and Ambassador to the USA, in a tele-cin video, charged that "Obote's soldiers" destroyed in the 1960s her father's Palace; the same Palace in which Bagaya and Amin once stayed when she was Amin's Foreign Minister and in which Museveni stayed in 1979 when Obote was in Tanzania and had no soldiers in Fort Portal.

It is known that Museveni ordered the destruction of the Palace when on April 11, 1979, David Oyite Ojok announced over Radio Uganda the fall of Kampala. The Supreme Commissar was said to have been very furious that someone else and not him had announced the fall of Amin.

NOTES: It has been believed for many years that during the 1979 war, the Tanzanians and the civil defence force known as Jeshi la Wanainchi (JW) are the ones who bombed Masaka and Mbarara towns. That is not true. Obote gives us the correct version.

It was the leader of FRONASA, Yoiweri Museveni, who ordered his men to plant dynamite around the public buildings and blow them up. The operation was led by the then FRONASA field commander, Eriya Mwine, popularly known by the names Brig. Chefe Ali when he was an NRA commander.

It is also Museveni who ordered the palace of the king of Toro to be blown up in the same way, as Obote explains. When we see the Batooro giving Museveni all their support, more so the Royal Family, we can see that Ugandans have been fooled by Museveni for so long.

44. The issue had been compounded in April 1979. On April 13, 1979, Lule, the new President of Uganda, was sworn by Justice Sam Wambuzi on the 1963 Oath - the "Sovereign State of Uganda" and not on the 1967 Oath, the "Republic of Uganda". Within days, George Kanyeihamba, Lule's Attorney General and Minister of Justice, produced Proclamation No. I of 1979 (New Constitution) and Lule signed it.

The National Consultative Council (NCC) was not consulted. In the Kanyeihamba/Lule Proclamation, certain chapters of the 1967 Constitution were left intact, others were amended but Chapter IV - the Executive; i.e., the Presidency was completely deleted. The effect was that by the Proclamation, Lule ceased to be the President of Uganda. This ludicrous situation arose because way back in 1971, Kanyeihamba had been fascinated by the Amin coup and wrote a piece in the Transition Magazine about how Amin came with a "Bang".

In 1979, Kanyeihamba simply copied Proclamation No. I of 1971 but failed to notice that, as a populist ploy, Amin had in that Proclamation pretended to abolish the Office of the President which he later reinstituted. A new Proclamation was hurriedly issued to restore Lule's Presidency but Lule had taken the same Oath as Sir Edward Mutesa had taken and was therefore ipso facto a constitutional and not an Executive President. Edward Rugumayo and the Personnel of the UNLF Secretariat, particularly those who came to be known as the "Gang of Four" were also no fools. They knew that Lule was in a corner and they pressed their advantage. That forced Lule to go to the Interim-Parliament and to announce that from thence onwards governance would be on the basis of the 1967 Constitution, the very Constitution which was anathema to him on April 13, only weeks back.

45. The Mwanza meeting of June 8 and 9, 1979 was held to resolve the crisis within the UNLF. I have given at length the essential elements of the crisis, a political and constitutional crisis which was of great import, to show what part Museveni played in it.

At Mwanza, Museveni was indifferent when the crisis was under discussion. He became alive and highly animated in the afternoon of the second day when new arrangements were discussed for the deployment of Tanzanian troops following the collapse of the Amin forces on June 3.

Museveni told the meeting that with the assistance of Tanzanian Commanders, he had raised from within Western Uganda and trained more than ten thousand troops, three thousand of whom were in the West Nile and more would be sent there if the situation warranted and Tanzanian troops could therefore be withdrawn from the West Nile zone.

As for the Kampala zone, Museveni said that he had seen a proposal that the UNLA, under the command of Tito Okello and Oyite Ojok, be deployed there but he did not approve that proposal. He charged that the UNLA Officers were lax on discipline and had a fixation with legal niceties including Court-Martial.

He then threw a bombshell when he told the meeting that in his army, he had ordered many executions without "colonial legal niceties". Today, friends of Museveni's cite cases of Courts-Martial as evidence of proper and legal conduct of the affairs of wayward soldiers. I will show that Museveni's Courts-Martial are a sham and illegal and that they are essentially summary executions.

46. Museveni was the Minister of State for Defense in the 1979 post-Amin Government. He was also the Vice-Chairman of the Military Commission of the Uganda National Liberation Front (UNLF) founded at Moshi, Tanzania, in March 1979, in a Conference of some then Ugandan exiles. In both capacities, Museveni wielded considerable powers. Although President Lule, and later President Binaisa assumed the office of the minister of Defense, it was Museveni who ran the Ministry and administered it as he wished. The Military Commission was moribund until it seized power in May 1980. Museveni remained Vice-President of the Commission until the General Elections held in December 1980.

47. Museveni's period as Minister of State for Defense was noted on three counts: -

1. He embarked on a large scale recruitment of a private army outside the Uganda National Liberation Army (UNLA) which was founded at the Moshi Conference. This was without the approval of the Lule/Binaisa Cabinet or of the then Interim-Parliament.
    
2. At the fall of Lule, voted out by the National Consultative Council (NCC) of the UNLF, Lule supporters staged peaceful demonstrations in Kampala. Museveni personally led a contingent of troops in indiscriminate shooting of the demonstrators. This was in the third week of June 1979. In July and August of the same year, 15 (fifteen) highly qualified professionals were gunned down in their houses in Kampala. In three known cases, Museveni reached the scenes of crime within minutes of the shootings, allegedly to "console", mark the word "console", the widows!
    
3. The Ugandan contingent which together fought with the Tanzanian soldiers numbered around 1,300 men. I was their political leader. Museveni entered Western Uganda from Tanzania alone, of course in the company of Tanzanian troops. That was in January 1979. He immediately embarked on the recruitment of Banyarwanda (Tutsi) refugees who were in Refugee Settlements close to Tanzania border. The men were trained and armed by Tanzanian troops.

48. During the rule of the Military Commission, there was no Minister of Defense. The Commission as a Collegiate, handled all military matters. Thus Paulo Muwanga, David Oyite-Ojok, Zed Maruru and William Omaria curbed with some difficulties, Museveni's senseless killings. At the beginning of its rule, the Military Commission, with one dissenting voice - Museveni's - pledged and committed itself to holding multi-Party General Elections within the period the Moshi Conference had appointed. The period appointed was "within eighteen months after the total liberation of Uganda". Amin's forces were defeated and driven out of Uganda on June 3, 1979.

It is a credit to the members of the Military Commission (minus Museveni) that they kept the pledge. In meetings of the Commission and of the Interim Parliament, Museveni was vehemently opposed to elections. His pet point was that Uganda was in a revolution and election was not necessary. Museveni even went to Tanzania and Mozambique where he appealed, in vain, to Presidents Nyerere and Samora Machel to stop the elections.

NOTES:
After the 1979 war, the UNLA split into two axes. The Kikosi Maluum axis of Col. Tito Okello and Lt. Col. David Oyite Ojok was deployed in central Uganda, including Kampala. The other axis, FRONASA, led by Museveni, was deployed in northern Uganda right up to West Nile.

It seems the idea was that the mainly Acholi and Langi soldiers in the UNLA might take revenge on West Nile because of how they had suffered under Amin's rule. So they felt it better to send the mainly Bantu FRONASA to West Nile. That was a big mistake because they sent a killer called Museveni there. Museveni went on a killing spree with West Nilers will never forget.

Obote, in this document we are reading, also implicates Museveni in the murders of prominent Ugandans in and around Kampala in 1979. We shall give you details of these killings with time. These murders included Mulago Hospital doctors, businessmen, civil servants, and other people.

In the second part, we shall go with Obote to Luwero Triangle where the NRA operated and see what he said about Museveni's role there and what Museveni's NRA did.

  12 Dec 2008

  13 DEc 2008