UGANDA-POLITICS: Museveni Takes Command OF The War In The North

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Dec 12 1996 (IPS) - Uganda’s army which repelled a rebel invasion in the southwest last month, is yet to quell an eight- year uprising in the north, despite a redoubling of efforts.

President Yoweri Museveni has personally taken command in the war against rebels of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), and has moved his headquarters from Kampala to Gulu, a town some 200 kilometres north of the Ugandan capital.

The Ugandan leader has vowed to flush out the rebel movement from the region.

LRA secretary-general Dominic Wanyama, in a statement made available to IPS on Wednesday, said the LRA however, was not intimidated by Museveni’s presence in the north.

“This is the kicking of a dying horse,” he said.

“Museveni will be the luckiest to survive up to the end of the war at the front line where he has placed himself. Like many of his fallen commanders in the region, death is calling him rather than the military victory which he expects,” Wanyama added.

Last week a top Ugandan army officer, Major-General David Tinyefunza, quit his position as senior military advisor to Museveni after giving testimony to a parliamentary committee in Kampala about the conduct of the war in the north.

Maj-Gen Tinyefunza was widely quoted by local and international news organisations as telling the committee that: “Now the president is in Gulu in sandbags. If all these big commanders can’t fight (LRA leader Joseph) Kony and it requires Museveni to go into sandbags…this country is in trouble. It shows there is something basically wrong with this country.”

He also reportedly told the committee that the soldiers were not fighting, because they were tired and morale is low.

Maj-Gen Tinyefunza’s outburst came five months after the Ugandan military had launched a six-month operation on Jul. 1 to wipe out the eight-year rebellion and troops were deployed throughout Gulu district.

President Museveni appointed his half-brother, Maj-Gen Salim Saleh, in charge of the troops in the north. Upon assuming command in Gulu, Maj-Gen Saleh publicly announced that the war would be over by Oct. 1.

But the war continues and now, President Museveni is picking up the pieces to end the LRA’s rebellion.

Headed by herbalist Joseph Kony, the LRA began its fight against Museveni’s National Resistance Movement (NRM) government in 1987, shortly after the defeat of a rebellion by the Holy Spirits Movement, led by Kony’s cousin Alice Lakwena.

The LRA is dominated by people from the Acholi ethnic group, which straddles the Uganda/Sudan border. Its goal is to rule Uganda on the basis of the 10 biblical commandments.

While in Gulu, Museveni will also be directing the war against the West Nile Bank Front (WNBF) in the adjoining West Nile region. Recently, an LRA official told IPS that the LRA and the WNBF were coordinating their activities against the Museveni government.

The WNBF is dominated by people from the West Nile region — Madis, Lubgaras, Aringas and Nubians — who had formed the bulk of the army of former dictator Idi Amin. The group’s leader, Col. Juma Oris, was himself a senior official in Amin’s regime.

After Amin’s ouster in 1979, many of his henchmen fled to neighbouring countries, mainly Sudan and Zaire, from where they later infiltrated Uganda.

They made headlines in May when a group of 300 WNBF rebels who had entered Uganda from southern Sudan, raided an army barracks in Koboko, a remote town some 600 kilometres northwest of Kampala. The rebels also blew up part of a bridge in the West Nile and ambushed a Red Cross truck.

The Ugandan government has often charged that the LRA and the WNBF use bases in Sudan as a springboard for raids into Uganda.

Sudan counters the claims with allegations that Uganda is supporting the rebel Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), which temporarily drove the Ugandan insurgents from refugee camps in southern Sudan in the 1980s.

The war-weary Museveni’s troops are also battling rebels of the exiled Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) in southwestern Uganda, on the border with Zaire.

ADF, which Museveni claims gets its military assistance from Sudan, invaded Uganda last month. The invasion coincided with the fighting in eastern Zaire between government soldiers and the Banyamulenge rebels.

Uganda retaliated by pursuing an army of fleeing ADF rebels deep inside Zaire. ‘

“Museveni’s UPDF (Uganda Peoples Democratic Forces) is militarily involved in the ongoing war in eastern Zaire where they have captured big territories including towns which they are now controlling jointly with the Rwanda and Burundi Tutsi armies, shielding a handful of the so-called Banyamulenge rebels,” Wanyama of the LRA said.

The Banyamulenge, who are related to Museveni’s Banyangkole tribe, are ethnic Tutsis who went to Zaire from modern-day Burundi and Rwanda some 200 years ago.

And, according to Wanyama, Museveni wants to revive the old Tutsi empire that extended from southern Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, northwestern Tanzania up to eastern Zaire.

Despite the growing military pressure on him, Museveni has ruled out talking with the rebels in Uganda.

“My inclination is that I would not like to talk to a person like Kony. I regard him as a terrorist, as a criminal. I would rather like to get rid of him,” he told journalists during a recent visit to Kenya.

Human rights groups like Amnesty International have accused the LRA of committing atrocities ranging from the cutting of human ears, mouths and feet to the abduction of school children.