Читать книгу Another Fine Mess - Helen Epstein - Страница 11
ОглавлениеEvery gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. . . .This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
—Dwight Eisenhower
I’ve been a public health consultant for over 20 years. In Rwanda, I carried out field research among villagers too frightened to speak to me for fear that government spies would report them if they complained about ethnic discrimination. In Ethiopia, I met listless, starving children in villages denied sufficient food aid because of suspected anti-government sentiment. In Uganda, I interviewed mothers whose children had died of malaria because the president’s cronies looted foreign aid programs meant to pay for medicine and bed nets. Most of the humanitarian programs I worked on were supported by U.S. tax dollars, but they were no match for the U.S.-backed tyrants who caused the problems in the first place.
The fine work of humanitarians alone won’t make poor countries prosper. A nation is built on shared expectations that laws will be followed; that rights won’t be trampled; that killers will be punished; that doctors and teachers will be paid what they are owed. If we fail to maintain these fragile promises, even the U.S. would collapse, for those obligations are the foundation of development itself.
In recent years, the East African nation of Uganda has become notorious for warlord Joseph Kony’s killing fields, and for a government that attempted to criminalize homosexuality. In fact, Uganda’s history is far more interesting, not least because of its role in America’s calamitous War on Terror.
The story opens as the Cold War was ending and Washington awoke to growing anti-Western sentiment among Muslims throughout the Middle East. In the Horn of Africa and its nearest neighbors in eastern Africa, a new political map based on a revised vision of national security took shape. Before long, articles listing the fraction of Muslims in different African countries began appearing in policy journals, along with warnings about “lawless bazaars” in diamond and other gemstone markets, and rumors of an underground trade in yellowcake from the continent’s uranium mines.
In trying to comprehend this perceived threat, the U.S. and its allies—wittingly, and otherwise—formed military partnerships with African dictators who, while promising to fight terrorism, stoked up six wars in eastern and central Africa that left millions dead and fueled the rise of the vicious Somali terrorist group Al-Shabaab. This book explores how this happened, providing another glimpse of the post-truth world that brought us the Iraq war and other crises in the Middle East and beyond.
Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni has been the eye of this storm. Since his rebel insurgency took power in 1986, his government has received over $20 billion in development assistance, an unknown amount of classified military aid, and $4 billion in debt relief. At the same time, Uganda’s benefactors have allowed Museveni to shape events to serve his own bloody ambitions. The result has been mayhem in Rwanda, Congo, Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia, and Uganda itself. This book isn’t a comprehensive history of these interlinked wars, which have been ably covered by others. Here I focus on what we know about how Museveni either intensified or created these conflicts de novo.
Museveni’s genius has been to capitalize on Western ambivalence about Africa’s capacity for democracy and self-determination. Thus, with America and Europe’s blessing, he used our generous foreign aid to turn Uganda into a military dictatorship dressed up to look like a democracy. Uganda has a Parliament, a court system, a lively press, and a pyramidal elected governance structure at the village, district, and regional levels. But these institutions operate at the mercy of a far more powerful paramilitary structure of Museveni-appointed Resident District Administrators, District Internal Security officers, Village Defense Committees, and a shadowy network of unofficial security organs that control their own arsenals, override the decisions of elected officials, and close NGOs, newspapers, and radio stations deemed unfriendly to the regime.
Uganda is not North Korea; many Ugandans openly express political opinions. The latest corruption scandals, the poor state of public services, and the peccadillos of ruling party politicians are widely covered in the media. But denouncing the president himself or members of his family, speaking out or reporting on serious human rights abuses, or simply becoming too politically powerful can land you in jail on trumped-up charges, or far, far worse. Wise Ugandans censor themselves.
Museveni’s strategy resembles the “100 Flowers” campaign of his boyhood hero Mao Zedong, who in 1956 encouraged China’s citizens to express their opinions of the communist regime and then sent the “rightists” who did so critically to prison labor camps. This enabled Mao to flush out the most dangerous “counter-revolutionaries” as cheese in a mousetrap eliminates mice. What for Mao was a one-off experiment is for Museveni a continuous policy of exposing dissent and then silencing it by paying off or harassing his most articulate and courageous critics.
The arrest and torture of dissidents is done quietly. In early morning phone calls, government thugs intimidate editors and journalists to ensure the gravest abuses receive little attention. Uganda’s insecure intelligentsia assures Western diplomats that stories of abuses are mere rumors. Aware that overt military rule would hurt his image internationally, Museveni dons a trademark floppy hat and civilian clothes and justifies the brutality of his security forces to donors with the claim that the opposition is planning to “riot” or commit terrorist acts. During elections, towns across the country fill with tanks, teargas trucks, and lines of soldiers in riot gear carrying machine guns. Security personnel fill out multiple ballots and poll results are routed electronically through computer networks run by operatives who alter vote counts so that Museveni invariably wins.
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 Research Bureau, Amin’s dreaded security apparatus that inflicted terror on Ugandans. When Obote returned to power in the 1980s, he stripped the Rwandan Tutsis of civil rights and ordered them back over the border or into the refugee camps. Those who refused to go were assaulted, raped, and killed and their houses were destroyed.
As the end of the Cold War drew near, the plight of the Tutsi refugees finally came to the attention of the West, which began pressuring Rwanda’s government to allow the refugees to return. At first, Rwanda’s President Juvenal Habyarimana refused. Rwanda was among the most densely populated countries in the world, and its people, dependent upon peasant agriculture, needed land to survive. The population had grown since the refugees left, and Rwanda was now full, Habyarimana said. However, by August 1990, international pressure had forced him to agree, in principle, to a negotiated return of the refugees. Unfortunately, the Tutsi refugees, dreaming of their lost dominion, were no longer interested in negotiation. They wanted power, not just passports. They invaded Rwanda two months later.
During the three and a half year civil war that preceded the genocide, Ugandan operatives supplied the RPF with weapons in violation of the UN Charter, Organization of African Unity rules, a UN Security Council Resolution, various Rwandan ceasefire and peace agreements, and Museveni’s own promises.
The U.S. embassy in Kampala monitored the traffic in weapons and personnel between Uganda and the RPF inside Rwanda but did nothing to stop it; nor did the George H. W. Bush or Clinton administrations impose sanctions on Uganda such as foreign aid cuts or an arms embargo. On the contrary, U.S. foreign aid to Uganda nearly doubled during this period. In 1991, Uganda purchased ten times more U.S. weapons than in the preceding forty years combined.
As Rwanda’s increasingly weak Hutu-dominated government reluctantly acceded to the RPF’s demands for power, Hutu extremists who had long feared a Tutsi onslaught from Uganda roused the population using the specter of a return to a time, still fresh in the memory of older people, when the Tutsis made them feel like slaves in their own country. Four months before the genocide, the CIA accurately predicted that panicked Hutus could unleash extreme violence, resulting in up to half a million deaths. By then, the Rwandan government had been rightly subjected to an arms embargo. However, the Clinton administration continued to arm Uganda, which continued to arm the RPF.
By July 1994, hundreds of thousands of people had been killed, the vast majority of them innocent Tutsis who had nothing to do with the RPF, including children and even infants. The hatred the Hutu extremists unleashed represents the worst that human beings are capable of. But in considering what led to this disaster, it’s important to bear in mind that the violence wasn’t spontaneous. It emerged from a century or more of injustice and brutality on both sides, and although the genocidaires struck back against innocents, they were provoked by heavily armed rebels, supplied by Uganda, while the U.S. looked on as tensions mounted. In the years that followed, President Clinton has repeatedly apologized for failing to support a UN force to end the genocide; neither he nor President H.W. Bush have ever apologized for allowing Uganda to create the conditions that their own CIA maintained could lead to genocide.
The Rwandan army was no match for the RPF, and as the rebels advanced on the capital, more than a million Rwandan Hutus fled into neighboring Zaire—now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo—and settled in enormous refugee camps only a few miles from the Rwandan border. Most were women and children, but at least 30,000 of them were members of the former Rwandan army and militia groups that had carried out the genocide. With help from Zaire’s President Marshal Mobutu Sese Seko they began arming themselves to re-take their country. Because the genocidaires blamed Uganda for their problems, they also formed alliances with Sudan-backed anti-Museveni rebels camped in eastern Zaire.
Tensions between Uganda and Rwanda on one side, and Zaire and Sudan on the other had been building for years, and a crescendo was not long in coming. In 1996, the new Rwandan army, now known as the Rwandan Patriotic Army, or RPA, invaded the camps and herded most of the refugees back to Rwanda, where they live under Tutsi domination to this day. Hundreds of thousands of others fled deeper into Zaire and on to other countries. In the years that followed, Rwanda’s largely Tutsi army tracked thousands of them down in the jungles of Congo, and even on the streets and slums of other countries, and killed them in cold blood. We’ll never know who was innocent and who was an ex-genocidaire. The aim was vengeance, not ethnic extermination, but there’s little doubt that the killings amount to war crimes.
When Comrades Go to War, a detailed account of the Congo conflict by political scientists Philip Roessler and Harry Verhoeven, describes how U.S. Special Forces provided advanced training for the lethal commandos that would carry out these attacks only a few months later, but there is no evidence that the Americans knew what the commandos were about to do. Then the RPA, along with the Ugandan army and a new rebel group known as the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (or AFDL), which had been created, trained and armed by Uganda and Rwanda, marched to the Zairean capital Kinshasa, toppled Mobutu, and installed their own man, an addled Marxist and former kidnapper and gemstone trafficker named Laurent Kabila as president of Zaire. He renamed the country Democratic Republic of Congo and quickly fell out with his Rwandan and Ugandan backers, and war resumed in 1998. Kabila was assassinated in 2001 and replaced ten days later by his son Joseph. Although atrocities continue even now, the worst of the war was more or less over by 2003, by which time hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—of people had died in what scholars now refer to as Africa’s Great War.
For five years, Museveni’s army occupied a huge mineral-rich swathe of Congolese territory, where his generals looted some $10 billion worth of gold and other natural resources while backing proxy militias who massacred and raped thousands of Congolese.
In addition to the mayhem he created in Rwanda, Congo, Sudan and northern Uganda, Museveni also provoked or worsened at least two other African conflicts. In 2006 Museveni helped persuade the Bush administration to assist Ethiopia’s brutal invasion of Somalia that nearly flattened the capital Mogadishu, causing more than half the Somali population to flee. The invasion provided the notorious terrorist group Al-Shabaab, until then a relatively small band of thugs, with the moral fervor to attract massive Gulf support, expand its ranks and metastasize into a full-fledged member of the Al Qaeda terrorist network.
Then in 2014, Uganda joined the South Sudan civil war on the side of the nation’s ruthless president Salva Kiir Mayardit, greatly prolonging that conflict, at the cost of thousands of lives. Humantiarian groups and UN diplomats called for an arms embargo that would have effectively censured Uganda’s intervention, but they were overruled by President Obama’s National Security Advisor Susan Rice. Kiir eventually won the war and his army then proceeded to “eliminate” pockets of resistance around the country. Anyone suspected of disloyalty was in severe danger, and innocent men, women, and children were massacred. As famine loomed in 2016, the UN Human Rights Commission warned that the country was on the brink of genocide.
Museveni’s contacts with Washington began early. Between 1987 and 1989, he met with President Ronald Reagan three years in a row, visited Reagan’s California ranch, and hired a public relations firm run by Reagan’s son-in-law Dennis Revell. Such close and frequent intercourse with U.S. presidents is unusual for any African leader, let alone a greenhorn, as Museveni was then. He has since had far more contact with high-level American and British officials than any other living African leader, and Western policymakers continue to publicly applaud him as a peacemaker, even as his army wreaks havoc in much of eastern and central Africa.
What explains this strange infatuation with Museveni? Is it just “Muddling in Bumbledom,” as British historian Christopher Hamlin calls policymakers’ all-too-human tendency to make mistakes when faced with situations they don’t understand?
Or is it something else?
Here’s what I think: all across Africa, elders still entertain children with fables about the powerful elephant, the angry lion, and the dopey hyena. The principal hero is always a weak but shrewd little creature—usually a hare or small antelope—who outsmarts them all with cunning and trickery. The stories are rooted, wrote the distinguished Africanist Alice Werner, in a deep conviction that the strong must not always win; the underdog must also have his day. When it comes to post–Cold War U.S.–Africa relations, Museveni has modeled himself on the wily, clever hare, and cast America’s national security officials as the dim-witted lions, elephants, and hyenas. Whether they know it or not, he manipulates them at his pleasure by playing on their fears, and then leaving them flummoxed and humiliated in the midst of pandemonium they helped create but don’t understand, while he leaps unscathed from one briar patch to the next.
In 1990, Museveni insisted he didn’t support the RPF invasion of Rwanda; he then pretended his army didn’t invade Zaire and had nothing to do with the toppling of Mobutu or the ongoing slaughter in the east of that country. In 2006, Museveni joined the George W. Bush administration as it waded into yet another quagmire, this time in Somalia. In exchange for placing Uganda’s army in the midst of this deadly and seemingly unwinnable war, Museveni’s government has since collected hundreds of millions of dollars; in 2014, Museveni claimed to be sending his army into South Sudan to protect and evacuate Ugandan civilians when in fact he was sending it to prop up the cruel dictatorship of President Salva Kiir Mayardit. In every case, the U.S. government could have tried to stop him, but did not.
Most Americans think Africa is a low priority in Washington, but since 1997, the Africa staff of the National Security Council has tripled, and long before 9/11, the Pentagon began planning a network of military installations right across the continent from Somalia to Senegal. Now known as the U.S. Africa Command, or Africom, it is part of the global garrison created by the U.S. after the Cold War that today spans much of the northern hemisphere. A description of Africom was first shared publicly in a 2000 article in the military journal Parameters in which Navy Commander Richard Catoire pointed to the predominance of Islamic cultures north of the Sahara and the mineral rich expanses of central Africa, which he characterized as a vast dystopia of warlords, arms dealers, and humanitarian tragedies. “U.S. policy alone,” he wrote ominously, “may not secure all of America’s regional interests.” A permanent military force would therefore be needed.
Today, the 60 or so Africom bases, camps, compounds, port facilities, fuel bunkers, and other sites are predominantly manned by local African militaries, but can accommodate U.S. forces when necessary. They conduct drone strikes, counterinsurgency drills, and intelligence gathering. When asked the purpose of all this, Africom officials typically point to humanitarian missions: tracking down the notorious warlord Joseph Kony in the Central African Republic, or trying to rescue the schoolgirls kidnapped by Nigeria’s Boko Haram militants. However, Africom officials themselves admit that their main aim is to preserve “the free flow of natural resources from Africa to the global market.” Kenyan journalist Christine Mungai calls Africom a “hippo trench”: Hippos attack some 3,000 people a year and Africans living near lakes sometimes build trenches around their gardens because hippos can’t jump. In this case, the hippos are Islamic militants, or anyone else who might be interested in Congo’s precious natural resources.
Uganda is a crucial transport and logistics hub for Africom, which maintains at least three installations in the country, at Entebbe, Kitgum, and Kasenyi. Year after year, Museveni’s U.S.-trained army has proven highly effective in crushing nascent democracy movements, both in Uganda and in other countries. There appears to be no policy to restrain Museveni or other African tyrants from using America’s large and growing military assistance to repress the aspirations of their people for democracy or rein in a tyrant’s ambitions to plunder and destabilize other countries. The political implications of this are chilling.
In 2009, a wave of protest spread from Iran to the Arab world. It then crossed the Sahara desert, inciting uprisings against autocratic leaders in Burkina Faso, Burundi, Senegal, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, as well as in Uganda. No one knows what set it off, but one of the triggers may have been the election in November 2008 of Barack Obama, whose hero was Abraham Lincoln and whose most famous campaign speech honored those who “through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk . . . [narrowed] that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.”
One person who took notice of Obama’s election was a stocky, bespectacled 40-year-old Ugandan journalist named Lawrence Kiwanuka Nsereko, who lived in a second floor apartment in a run-down building near Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. Lawrence had been fighting to bring democracy to his country since he was 14 years old. He’d been a child soldier, a reporter, an editor, a democracy activist, and a political candidate. He’d seen his newspaper offices ransacked, his party headquarters torched, friends and colleagues killed. He’d been arrested and tortured and narrowly escaped assassination himself. But he wasn’t giving up now.
After Lawrence fled Uganda in 1995, nearly every physical copy of The Citizen, the newspaper he worked for, was destroyed. Two copies of each issue had been sent to Uganda’s main university library, and others were stored in the newspaper’s offices, but my own efforts to find them 20 years later nearly proved futile. The offices no longer existed and at the university, one librarian after another told me he had never heard of the publication. But during and for a few years after the Cold War, the U.S. government microfilmed nearly every periodical in the world; copies of many issues of The Citizen are stored in the Library of Congress, where I found them in 2015. Eventually, a courageous Ugandan intellectual made additional copies available to me in Kampala. In order to see them, I had to meet him at night and hide behind a bookcase. He would not tell me why such precautions were necessary, but as I turned the pages, I realized they told an extraordinary and little known story about some of the worst humanitarian tragedies since World War II.
Along with others, Lawrence witnessed the early moves in this brutal game and tried to warn Western diplomats. The journalists’ efforts made no difference. The administrations of Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Clinton, George W. Bush and, alas, Obama as well, continued to provide Museveni with vast amounts of foreign aid, more open trade arrangements, and a quiet but steep increase in military assistance. Throughout the years of mayhem, decisions concerning the deployment of Ugandan troops would be made by Museveni alone or in consultation with U.S. national security officials, often without the democratic niceties of parliamentary or public debate. As long as Museveni cooperated, or appeared to cooperate, the U.S. and other Western nations ignored his corruption, rigged elections, and outrageous human rights abuses against Ugandans, Sudanese, South Sudanese, Rwandans, Congolese, and Somalis.
The reasons why U.S. security officials allowed Museveni to get away with this are known only to themselves. The rest of us may conclude, along with one of Lawrence’s journalist colleagues, that Museveni simply “bewitched the Americans.” The purpose of this book is to try to break that spell, for it is part of an escalating global paroxysm of violence in which states, rebels, militants, deranged individuals and over-zealous police and soldiers now vie daily for the bloodiest headlines.
There is a solution. Every nation on earth has signed on to the simple provisions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: States must never kill, torture, silence, or otherwise abuse their own citizens or those of other nations, ever. In 1989, America renewed its promise, broken during the Cold War, to fight for the realization of human rights wherever we have influence. Then, in a turn astonishing for its cynicism, one president after another broke it yet again by backing tyrant allies, funding rebel armies, invading other nations without cause, and ignoring the interests of people in much of the Middle East, Africa and South Asia—while claiming to be acting in the name of democracy.
This militarism has set a moral tone for the world, inciting others to rebel, retaliate, or simply join in the chaos. It affects every one of us. The only way to stop it is to renew the pledge—and stick to it this time—to work continually for the human rights of everyone, everywhere.
The many Ugandan politicians, activists, journalists and others working still for freedom will never succeed without a shift in U.S. policy. Martin Luther King could not have ended Jim Crow had the Cold War not forced the U.S. to confront its shameful racist policies; Nelson Mandela could never have brought down Apartheid had the end of the Cold War not heralded the Soviet Union’s decline. The heroic Ugandans described in this book need a similar shift, in this case American recognition that the War on Terror has not only failed, it has become itself a source of terror.
Africa’s future matters. It is home to over one billion people, a number expected to quadruple in the next 90 years. Some African economies are already among the fastest-growing in the world, and the continent will soon become the source of much of the world’s oil. But Africa can also seem like a perennial heart of darkness, wracked with hunger, poverty, and war without end.
But what if the story is different? What if the darkness is in our own hearts—as Joseph Conrad himself suspected? What if Western leaders’ naïve dealings with African strongmen short circuits the power Africans might otherwise have over their own destiny? What if the aid we give sometimes entrenches corruption, impunity, brutality, and terror? What if our policymakers’ singleminded focus on Africa’s natural resources and other strategic interests is itself at the root of the continent’s lawlessness? What if the condescending assumption that poor people of color are incapable of self-government and are more tolerant of oppression is wrong? What if the belief that Africa’s politics are naturally more emotional and its wars more spontaneous and primitive than ours blinds us to the damaging effects of our own foreign policy? I didn’t set out to ask these questions, but after many years working in various African countries, I couldn’t get them out of my head.
How Your Taxes Support Corruption and Dictatorship in Uganda
U.S. foreign aid to Uganda comes from three main sources:
The U.S. Agency for International Development—or USAID—supports NGOs. This money is closely audited and relatively difficult to steal.
The U.S. Department of Defense supplies the Ugandan military with cash, training, equipment and weapons. Information about DOD projects is classified. U.S. taxpayers are not entitled to know how much money is spent on what.
The World Bank and other multilateral organizations like the Global Fund for AIDS, TB, and Malaria directly fund Uganda’s general and/or sectoral budgets such as health, transport, education and so on. This money is intended to pay teachers, doctors and nurses; build roads and run ministries. It is seldom audited, is relatively easy to steal and has been the subject of numerous multi-million dollar scandals involving high-level Ugandan officials.
A Note on Sources
Political repression and the destruction of records and archives make covering recent African history particularly challenging. The inspiration for this book came from reading old copies of The Citizen and other Ugandan publications, whose reporting, in retrospect, has turned out to be remarkably accurate. Reporting these stories at the time took enormous courage.
In much of Africa, local scholars and journalists are often dismissed as politicized and untrustworthy, especially if their views are at odds with U.S. policy. This is not only unfair; it is also dangerous, because while local sources may have interests, the well-groomed spokespersons for the West’s autocratic allies do too. Even journalists in the supposedly free world are subject to subtle government influence. In 2010, Yale economist Nancy Qian found that during the Cold War, major U.S. news outlets including The New York Times and the Washington Post were significantly less likely to report on human rights abuses committed by developing country governments that were U.S. allies than those considered Soviet-leaning. In some cases, the State Department’s Human Rights Bureau downplayed our allies’ abuses; in others, editors and journalists knew they risked being denied access to government briefings and insider tips if they didn’t toe the U.S. government’s line. There’s no reason to think such mechanisms stopped operating after the Berlin Wall fell.
The failure to consult and take seriously local dissident sources like The Citizen has led many Western diplomats, journalists and academics to deny the existence of Museveni’s torture chambers; to assert that Museveni’s election victories are uncontroversial, to claim that Ugandan rebel groups have no legitimate grievances against Museveni’s government, to maintain that the atrocities in northern Uganda were the fault of the deranged warlord Joseph Kony alone, and to commit other deadly blunders described in this book.
