Luwero War

99. The UPC Government knew that the DP leaders were giving support to Museveni in Luwero but could not prove it legally. Paul Ssemogerere, the President General of the DP was tackled by me and other members of the Government on the matter throughout the four and one-half years. He flatly denied any DP involvement in the Luwero war on the side of Museveni.

Now that the Secretary General has "revealed" the "truth" which is the DP motto, Ssemogerere has the choice of continuing lying or accepting what Kitariko has disclosed. In either way, the UPC will take this crucial issue of Parliamentary democratic rule versus rule of the gun to the electorate and expose the DP for supporting the gun at the expense of the lives of our fellow citizens. Expose the DP leaders for their rapacity to continue to support Museveni in return for offices from whence they eat crumbs from Museveni's high table.

100. The "international publicity" which Kitariko disclosed is now silent in the face of genocide in the North and East. It was a concentrated propaganda against the UPC Government. The international media took up the conspiracy and saturated the world with one-sided stories in which the UPC Government allegedly committed all kinds of despicable atrocities in Luwero and Museveni who started the war was painted as defender of the people!

A month after Museveni was sworn in as President, a Panorama team of the BBC was in Uganda. In their Panorama TV program (Gavin Hewit), the BBC team actually asserted that Luwero was "Obote's war to exterminate the Baganda"!

101. Luwero District as Ugandans know was, in fact, the most cosmopolitan of all the Districts in Uganda. Luwero was inhabited by practically all the major ethnic groups in Uganda. Had the UPC Government or Obote alone, as alleged by Hewit truly had such designs, Luwero was the least of all the 6 Districts in Buganda to have been chosen for "the extermination of the Baganda"!.

It was not the BBC alone which during the Luwero war and after charged the UPC Government only of the atrocities of that war. All the great broadcasting stations and the great newspapers in Europe and North America did the same. They are still at it.

102. Museveni published a pamphlet - "Selected Articles on the Uganda Resistance War" - in 1985. In the pamphlet Museveni speaks of large areas of Luwero which were "No-go" areas for "Obote's army". After the war and more than four years after the end of the Luwero war in August 1985, no foreign journalist has gone to those "No-go" areas which were under the control of Museveni in order to prove the correctness of their concentrated propaganda against the UPC Government; instead the International Media have shied away from going to those areas in Luwero which Museveni governed and to observe how well Museveni governed his areas of Luwero.

More than four years after Museveni took the reign of government, nothing of the kind has seen the light of day. Museveni himself who loves and lives on propaganda (lies) has not seen it fit to take foreign journalists in the areas he governed and where homes, schools, dispensaries, granaries, etc. remained intact on account of his protection.

103. Museveni has not done so for two reasons. First, because he waged his war as a terrorist onslaught on whoever, anywhere, did not accept him as leader of Uganda and secondly, to destroy institutions of good government replacing them by his own schemes for a militarist control of Uganda. There were more atrocities in the "NO-GO" areas.

104. Museveni launched his war with attacks not against UNLA units or barracks but against peasants in rural Luwero and against bus passengers. Museveni's first victims at the beginning of the Luwero war were two. These were:

105. Ugandans from the North and East who had made their homes and lived in Luwero for years; and

106. Members of the UPC in Luwero District.

107. Those in the two groups were attacked and thousands were massacred in their homes which were then ransacked and burnt. The massacres spared no one; men, women and children perished as Museveni and his men set the District ablaze. A stampede followed.

Even those who were not in the two groups took flight in their thousands to the District Headquarters, and Police Stations within the District. They fled with nothing but the clothes they happened to be wearing at the time of flight.

105. The number of victims in Luwero Town and at Police Stations was so massive that the UPC Government appealed to the International Community for assistance in the resettlement of the destitutes in other parts of Uganda. That much is a matter of fact and record.

106. The UNLA had no transport and fuel was in short supply throughout the country when Museveni launched his terrorist onslaught. Museveni, therefore, had nearly two weeks spreading terror, death and arson in villages and individual homes. Public service vehicles, including buses full of passengers, were blown up by the NRA.

107. Except for the Banyarwanda Tutsi refugees, the terror, death and arson which the NRA launched caused tumult and apprehension even to those whose homes had been spared. That apprehension increased as the war progressed and when all able-bodied Banyarwanda Tutsi refugees who were employed by land owners and ranchers in Luwero left their employment and joined the insurgents.

The ignominy of former farm-hands, herdsmen and house servants (Banyarwanda Tutsi refugees) ordering their former employers to provide food and other demands to the insurgents in addition to the horror and terror the NRA had created, made the NRA detested. As the war proceeded, the exigencies of the war made Museveni to seek for recruitment into the NRA from within Luwero.

The recruitment was carried with appalling massacres and brutalities. Massacres increased because Ugandans in Luwero wanted nothing to do with the insurgents at a time when Museveni was desperate for more men to join the NRA.

108. Museveni solved the problem through a combination of terror and deceit. One of his methods which he used repeatedly was to send a unit of the NRA wearing the uniform of the UNLA (both sides wore the same uniform) into a village. The men of the NRA would then round up and assemble the villagers - men, women and children - in one place and announce that they were men from "Obote's army" and were searching for the insurgents who were known to be in the village.

The peasants, of course, denied harboring the insurgents. Such denials brought beatings and ransacking of homes which were then followed by the ultimate terror, the shooting of some of the villagers - men, women and children. The shootings were signals to another unit of the NRA to come to the "rescue of the villagers from the terror of Obote's soldiers".

109. The second NRA unit wearing assorted civilian dress would then come to the village and fire a few shots in the air. Those shots were signals to the first NRA unit to depart "hurriedly" from the place of the gathering and move into nearby plantations, tall grass or whatever could conceal them from the assembled peasants.

The mission of the second NRA unit, in such cases, was to get recruits which was done in most villages, by persuading the villagers to leave their homes and be taken to "zones" which were "safe" and under the control of the NRA. The villagers left their homes with whatever they could carry.

Whatever remained in the homes and useful to the NRA, the first unit of the NRA this time emerging from places of concealment would take; homes however, would be further ransacked or destroyed.

110. As Museveni's recruitment drive proceeded, citizens from different villages who managed to reach Kampala or Luwero Town or Bombo barracks gave reports of attacks in a number of scattered villages by the "UNLA" which were followed by the arrival of the NRA in those same villages and then the exodus of the villagers.

The UNLA Officers were at first puzzled and disbelieved such reports on the ground that no UNLA troops had been sent or had the capacity to go to the named villages. Reports continued to be received and reconnaissance in force was eventually mounted.

The result was horrifically shattering; whole villages had no people; homes and other structures had been either burnt or ransacked; further afield corpses were found without heads.

111. The Uganda Freedom Movement (UFM) led by the late Andrew Kayiira attacked Kampala at the beginning of February 1982, with an apparent objective of taking the City. The UNLA easily repelled the UFM who, when withdrawing towards Mityana, were ambushed and disarmed by the NRA.

A meeting between Kayiira and Museveni was arranged and held at the camp of the latter. In March 1982, the UNLA stormed the UFM base in a forest West of Kampala. Amongst those found and arrested at the base were men and women who had gone with Kayiira to Museveni's camp. Those men and women recorded statements which further cleared the puzzle of the corpses without skulls.

112. The gist of the statements made by the UFM men and women was that on arrival at Museveni's camp, the UFM delegation was taken by Museveni on a tour of the perimeter of the camp. The perimeter, had all round, they recorded, heads of men, women and children in their hundreds some already dry but some were fairly fresh.

At the end of the tour, the statements said, Museveni took the UFM delegation to a large grass hovel in which were heaps of human heads and thick layer of fresh blood everywhere except a small area near the door to the hovel. Here, in the hovel, according to the men and women of the UFM delegation, Museveni told Kayiira: - "This is what we do to people who don't agree with us".

113. The UFM delegation were not the only people to make statements on torsos found by the UNLA in scattered areas of Luwero or human heads in Museveni's camps. Men and women who escaped from the NRA dragnet of terror and massacres as well as those who escaped from the NRA training camps also made statements which told of attacks on villages, the deception used to uproot the peasants from their homes, the subsequent massacres of those considered unfit to serve the NRA military or those who were seen as unnecessary burden to the NRA.

Those who escaped from training camps told of the ordeals they underwent in their villages when "Obote's soldiers" attacked the villages only to find out later in the NRA training camps that the same men of "Obote's soldiers' were in fact leaders in and members of the NRA.

114. From the statements made by the Kayiira delegation, those who escaped from the NRA dragnet or from the training camps and by the NRA deserters, the methods Museveni was using to turn the people against the UPC government and for recruits became clear. The problem was how to evolve counter measures.

NOTES: In case you did not know it, the NRA during their war in Luwero had a firing squad which was set up by their commander in chief Yoweri Museveni to eliminate NRA deserters. The head of this NRA firing squad was a commander called Paul Kagame.

Also, this squad used to use small blunt hoes called "akafuni" to kill villagers with a blow on the head in order to save on bullets and not to attract attention to their position.

  13 Dec 2008

  14 Dec 2008