EAST AFRICA-POLITICS: Warm Relations May Send Rebels Packing

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Jul 23 1996 (IPS) - Dr James Obita is an elusive man. Finding the representative of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) here, especially to comment on rebel activities in Uganda, is like looking for a needle in a haystack.

He answers no telephone calls. Most of the time, Obita says, his line is inundated with calls from Uganda, many of which are directed against the LRA. “That’s why we don’t answer calls whenever the phone rings,” he told IPS recently in a rare face-to- face interview.

Obita, 47, is one of the top LRA leaders wanted in Uganda in connection with the “mass killings of civilians” in the strife- torn north of the country.

Last week, President Yoweri Museveni said the rebel leader, and his cohorts, would soon be kicked out of Kenya as part of a new policy designed to improve relations between the two East African neighbours.

“The governments of Uganda and of Kenya have agreed that no opponents of each other’s government uses either territory for any kind of opposition,” President Museveni said.

“I think the Kenyan government will throw him (Obita) out soon and he will go either to Khartoum (Sudan) or elsewhere,” added the Ugandan President, following a four-day state visit to Kenya last week.

Kenyan officials have declined to comment on Museveni’s statement that the two countries have agreed not to allow opponents of each other’s governments to use their territories, or on whether Obita may soon be chucked out.

But an official in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed that relations between the two countries have improved. “I think relations are very good compared to 10 years ago when Museveni came to power,” said the official, who declined to be named.

A number of Ugandan dissidents with diverse groups are reportedly living in Kenya.

Prominent among them is Major Herbert Itongwa of the rebel National Democratic Alliance (NDA), which Ugandan authorities have linked to a series of attacks on police stations last year. The renegade officer has a 5000 U.S.dollar price tag on his head in Uganda for alleged murder and kidnapping.

Itongwa, a former Ugandan government soldier, who hit the headlines here early this year, is said to be living in one of the refugee camps in Kenya.

An internationally known Ugandan dissident living in Kenya is Alice Lakwena. In 1986, the ‘voodoo priestess’ attracted thousands of peasants from the northern Acholi tribe to fight against the southern-dominated National Resistance Army (NRA) of President Museveni.

Followers of Lakwena’s Holy Spirit Movement (HSM) were motivated by a combination of ethnic loyalty, superstition and, in some cases, fear. They engaged the NRA in what were virtually suicidal attacks, because they fought with no weapons believing that they were protected by Lakwena’s magical powers.

The rebellion was crushed in late 1987, forcing the leader to flee to Kenya, where she was imprisoned for four months for illegal entry.

After serving her prison term, Lakwena was transferred to Ifo refugee camp, some 600 kilometres northeast of the capital Nairobi, where she now lives.

By law, Lakwena is restricted to the camp and travels only after obtaining a special permit from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) or from the Kenyan government.

On the other side of the fence in Uganda, the most known Kenyan dissident was self-style “Brigadier” John Odongo. Kenya accused Uganda of habouring Odongo, who headed a rebel group known as February Eighteen (FERA).

Last year, he was granted political asylum in Ghana by the government of President Jerry Rawlings in a bid to stave off the tiff between Nairobi and Kampala caused by his presence in Uganda.

Apart from Odongo, it’s not clear whether there are any other Kenyan dissidents living in Uganda. “I’m not sure if Kenya has any prominent dissident in Uganda for it to worry about,” says an African diplomat here. “If it does, then the person must be a nobody who cannot pose any security threat to President Daniel Moi’s regime.”

Relations between Kenya and Uganda hit rock bottom when Museveni came to power in January 1986.

The relations began to warm up in January, when Kenya extradited to Uganda eight Ugandan dissidents, under the spirit of good neighbourliness. This move was widely seen here as aimed at diminishing the LRA officials’ right of abode in Kenya.

Museveni hopes that, once deported from Kenya, the LRA officials will have nowhere to go, except perhaps Sudan, whose relations with Uganda are far from friendly.

The LRA, headed by herbalist Joseph Kony and propagating an idiosyncratic version of Christianity, began its fight against Museveni’s NRA in 1987, shortly after the defeat of the Holy Spirit Movement. Lawkena is Kony’s cousin.

The Kampala government alleges that the LRA has bases in Sudan from which it launches its raids into Uganda. Khartoum, on the other hand, says that Uganda supports the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA).

Asked recently whether improved relations between Kampala and Nairobi would affect him, Obita, who holds a PhD from the University of New Wales in Australia, told IPS: “Yes, there is always that possibility”.