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To hang on long enough for the crimes to recede in the distant past; for the evidence to decay; for the witnesses to the crimes to die; and long enough for the survivors and direct victims of the atrocities to become a minority.
The last two weeks of January have been dramatic days in Ugandaâ and elsewhere in the world for almost the same reasons.
On Monday January 24, a ceremony to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Liberation of Second World War Nazi concentration camp was held in the former Auschwitz death camp in Poland to mark its liberation by Soviet troops on Jan. 27, 1945.
Between one million and 1.5 million prisoners - most of them Jews - perished in gas chambers or died of starvation and disease at Auschwitz. Overall, six million Jews were killed in the Nazi campaign.
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| President Museveni greets senior officers at Kololo: Anniversary celebrations are painful to some people, but a cause of happiness for others who have benefitted from the reigning regime (File photo). |
In Uganda, on January 30, 1964, there was an army mutiny. When Defence minister Felix Onama went to sort things out, troops detained him, demanding a pay rise. On January 25, 1970, in an event that continues to shape Uganda's politics in many indirect ways, the commander of the Army's Second Infantry, Brig. Pierino Okoya, and his wife Anna, were shot dead at their home in Gulu.
That murder of Okoya, viewed as a Democratic Party sympathiser, was to shape aspects of the Uganda National Liberation Front Army's conduct of the war against Yoweri Museveni's NRA rebels in Luwero in the early 1980s - and the second coup against Milton Obote in July 1985. The DP backed that coup, and several of its leaders were given ministerial positions.
January 25, 1971, the army overthrew Obote, and Amin became president. On January 24, 1973 guerrillas arrested after the failed September 1972 invasion from Tanzania were executed by firing squad in several towns in Uganda. On January 31, 1977 one of the largest massacres of the Acholi and Langi communities by the Amin army begun in Gulu and Lira towns. On January 21, 1979, a force of the Tanzanian army together with Ugandan exiles, crosses the border and captures Mutukula in retaliation against Amin's invasion of Tanzania in October 1978. And so started the war that was to oust the Amin regime in April.
On January 21, 1985, former President Yusuf Lule and Chairman of the National Resistance Movement died in London, opening the way for Museveni to become both the military and political leader of the organisation.
On January 23, 1986, Museveni's NRA's rebels intensify their attacks on Kampala. On January 25 - the same day as the Amin coup and the murder of Okoya - the game is over. Military ruler Gen. Tito Okello flees to Kenya.
And on January 26, the NRA announces it has captured power. January 29, guerrilla leader Museveni is sworn in as president, promising that the wanton killing of Ugandans was over. We can go on and onâhowever, January 26-29, 1986 didn't mark the end of massacres of Uganda. It was the period that saw the shift of the killing fields back to northern Uganda, and later the western border with the ADF rebellion.
Today, the north still bleeds. In one account, which I recorded many years later from a survivor of the January 31, 1977 pogroms in the north, I was told that Amin's soldiers went around collecting mothers who had breast-feeding babies. They ordered them to put the babies in mortars in which the people usually pounded groundnuts and simsim, and crush the children to pulp. The thing about this, is that it's what Kony's men and other criminal parties are still doing in the north today.
I looked at the footage of the Jews in the Auschwitz concentration camp, and I couldn't help thinking of some of the grim images from the "protected camps" in the north. Violence and crime of this magnitude makes it difficult to heal, and distorts a country's politics and psychology in extreme ways.
Recently I spoke to someone who had just toured Luwero. He told me he had spoken to people who had told him that the reason Luwero has never been fully rehabilitated by the government is precisely because of the suffering that the people there went through during the war.
They believe it's possible some people in the NRA/M having seen how much pain the people of Luwero went through, might have become scared of what would happen if in future they again gave so much to oppose the government in Kampala. The solution? Do only enough to help Luwero rise and squat, but not to stand on its feet again as a tall and proud society.
It might sound illogical, but visiting Luwero after the war, we used to be faced by similar complexities. There were bones of the victims of the UNLA lying in pits, bushes, everywhere. Several of them still had the pangas that killed them stuck into their skulls. Why, we wondered, would a soldier set on killing, and with an automatic rifle and many rounds of ammunition, choose the slow more agonising method of a panga to the bullet?
Perhaps physical elimination is only a small reason the people who carry out massacres as we saw in Luwero, and have witnessed in the north, carry out these atrocities. Another is to control the actions of your opponent's supporters. It would seem, though, that the main reason is for this cruelty is for the future. As with the Rwanda genocide, the Interahamwe forced the Hutu to kill so that the community could unite in opposing the RPA rebels who were advancing on Kigali, and later in collective guilt and protect the leaders of the genocide.
Kony and the LRA use it to create a hardcore of fighters afraid they would be lynched because of their crimes if they gave up. And for a government whose rogue soldiers might have committed atrocities, it's the glue that unites the hardliners in the resolve to hang on: To hang on long enough for the crimes to recede in the distant past; for the evidence to decay; for the witnesses to the crimes to die; and long enough for the survivors and direct victims of the atrocities to become a minority.
You see, Auschwitz, happened in a culture obsessed with recording things, and most survivors moved to live in societies with long life expectancy. So the photos and films, and some witnesses, still exist. That's why, more than 60 years later, it's still a very fresh event. Luwero and northern Uganda happened in a society which doesn't keep records, and where people die early. In another 20 years, all could well have been forgotten. It's not a foolish idea, therefore, to cling on.
(For a chronicle of historic dates in Uganda see "The Uganda Almanac").
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