Another Fine Mess. Helen Epstein
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