”Another
Fine Mess: America, Uganda and the War on Terror” by Helen C Epstein is a
shocking book about the regime of Yoweri Museveni in Uganda, with some excursions to
neighboring Rwanda, governed by Paul Kagame, an old associate of Museveni. Both
Museveni and Kagame are backed by the United States and “the international
community”. The book was published in 2017.
According
to the propaganda still touted by many Western media outlets, Museveni´s
administration in Uganda, while of course not perfect, is nevertheless better
than the African average. It´s less corrupted, less repressive, more free
market oriented, even slightly feminist. Museveni is pictured as the savior of
Uganda from the brutal dictatorships of Idi Amin and Milton Obote. Above all,
Museveni is fighting Hutu genocidaires in Rwanda and the mysterious cult “the Lord´s
Resistance Army” (LRA) in northern Uganda. In the same vein, Museveni´s allies
in Rwanda, the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) are always pictured as the good liberal or slightly leftist guys fighting the already mentioned Hutu extremists. I
readily admit that I used to believe all this myself once. Well, almost. It
*was* difficult to believe that Paul Kagame in Rwanda did not rig the elections
which gave him essentially all votes, especially since his tribe (the Tutsi) is
a small minority hated by the majority Hutu…
Clearly, I
didn´t know half of it.
Judging by
this book and its scholarly sources, Museveni is not much better than Amin and
Obote, only smarter at rising “democratic” Potemkin villages and promoting them
to a gullible Western audience. Uganda is really a one-party state with rigged
elections and widespread repression against the political opposition. The
ruling party, the NRM, is civilian in name only, actual power in the state
being in the hands of the military and the secret service. As for being less
corrupted than other African nations…well, no, not really. Museveni and his
cronies systematically steal millions of dollars in aid money, take hefty
bribes from foreign companies, and loot the national treasury (most of Uganda´s
civil service is financed by the World Bank and other foreign donors). While the
NRM is officially anti-tribalist, most political conflicts in Uganda seem to
revolve around ethnic affiliation. Museveni comes from the southern Hima tribe,
which is related to the Tutsi in Rwanda, thus explaining why the Ugandan leader
is so adamant in his support for Kagame and the RPF. He is simply aiding his
ethnic cousins across the ex-colonial borders. Museveni´s two main domestic
targets are the Baganda, the erstwhile dominant ethnic group in Uganda, and the
northern tribes, who backed Amin and Obote (both northerners themselves). The
northern Acholi have been subjected to repression of near genocidal proportions
by the NRA or UPDF (the Ugandan army). Sorting out who´s who in the many-sided
Ugandan conflict isn´t always easy, one reason being the propensity of the
NRA to carry out false flag operations by attacking civilians dressed in the
uniforms of their enemies…
Museveni
was originally a Marxist firebrand, but seems to have flip-flopped even before
the Cold War properly ended. Shortly after taking power in 1986, Museveni
became a prime US asset in Central and East Africa, even being invited to
Ronald Reagan´s private ranch in California. The Tutsi RPF, then still in exile
in Uganda, were also trained in the United States. Interestingly, RPF leader Paul
Kagame was trained in the art of “psy-ops” (propaganda), something he has put
to good use after becoming acting Rwandese leader in 1994. Museveni has
intervened militarily in Rwanda (through his RPF proxies), the Congo (alongside
the RPF), South Sudan (through the SPLA of John Garang, an old friend from his
Marxist days) and even Somalia, always with the full knowledge and backing of
the United States. In Somalia and Sudan the fight was against Islamists, making
Museveni´s Uganda part of the US-led War on Terror (in the Ugandan-Sudanese
border regions, the NRA also fought Joseph Kony´s bizarre cult LRA).
In Rwanda,
the Ugandan-backed RPF supposedly stopped the Rwandan genocide of 1994, in
which hundreds of thousands of Tutsis were brutally murdered in a matter of
months by extremist Hutu militias. Epstein believes that the RPF killed almost
as many Hutus in “revenge”, many of them innocent civilians, and that the Hutu
had good reasons to fear the return of the Tutsi to power, the Tutsi being the
traditional aristocracy of Rwanda which for centuries treated the Hutu as
virtual slaves. Most sensationally, Epstein claims that the airplane of
Rwandese Hutu president Juvenal Habyarimana was shot down, not by Hutu
extremists critical of the president´s concessions to the RPF, but by the RPF
themselves. If so, the RPF had no intention of sharing power with Habyarimana –
note also that it was this assassination which triggered the genocidal violence
in the country.
Uganda and the RPF then invaded the Congo, overthrowing Mobutu
Sese Seko, an old US ally who had become a nuisance after the end of the Cold
War, replacing him with ex-Marxist and ex-petty warlord Laurent Kabila,
destroying the democratic opposition to Mobutu in the process. Uganda and the
RPF looted the mineral riches of eastern Congo, hotly coveted in the West,
while supporting various marauding militias with a taste for murder, rape and plunder.
Literally millions of people have been killed in the Congolese war, a war
originally triggered by the Ugandan-RPF invasion of the country in 1996-97.
Finally,
some observations of my own. During the 1990´s, even radical leftists swallowed
the Museveni-Kagame psy-ops. Many Trotskyists supported the RPF when it invaded
Rwanda and overthrew the “pro-Western” Hutu regime and its extremist militias.
Well, the Hutu regime was pro-French and pro-Belgian, but since the RPF were pro-American,
I have to say that the “anti-imperialist” angle feels somewhat moot. Another
leftist argument in favor of the RPF was that they were multi-ethnic and tried
to stop the anti-Tutsi genocide. One particularly dogmatic Trotskyist group in
the UK argued that the RPF had both Tutsi, Hutu and Twa in its leadership.
Since the Twa were Pygmies living in the rain forests, that would indeed be sensational
– I would love to shake the hand of this Pygmy commander of the “Revolutionary”
Patriotic Front! Even more leftists supported Kabila, apparently in the belief
that they were witnessing a genuine socialist revolution (led by an old comrade
of Che Guevara, to boot), rather than a CIA-Uganda-Tutsi psy-op/black-op of
*major* proportions. To give the devil his due, Kabila later broke with his
Ugandan and Tutsi patrons, instead accepting aid from “leftist” regimes in
Angola, Namibia, Zimbabwe and South Africa, so I suppose the local
anti-imperialistas were on somewhat firmer ground here…
As for
myself, I used to believe all the above (except the “Twa” and “socialist
revolution” stuff – I argued it was a democratic revolution), so reading “Another
Fine Mess” wasn´t a very pleasant experience. I probably won´t take leftists
seriously ever again after this! That being said, I have to say that Epstein
sounds awfully naïve in some parts of her book. I happen to think the old fox
(or was it hare) Museveni is right about Western-style democracy not working in
Africa due to the fissiparous nature of tribalism. That may be a self-serving
truth, but it´s a truth nevertheless (it´s also a truth honored only in the
breach by Museveni, whose political party is just as tribalist as those of his
mostly banned opponents). Also, Epstein´s criticism of the War on Terror is
absurd – should the West simply accept that Sudan or Egypt falls to the Muslim
Brotherhood and even worse groups? The only alternative to using proxies such
as Museveni (or some altogether nicer guys, say the YPG in northern Syria) is
to send hundreds of thousands of American troops to the Middle East or darkest
Africa for an indefinite time…
“Another
Fine Mess” isn´t a pretty story, and unfortunately I don´t think the future of
Africa will be any better. In fact, I strongly suspect that we´ve only seen the
dress rehearsal for the *really* brutal conflicts of the future. Let´s just
hope we don´t have to take sides in those ones…
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