"If you are stupid, you should be enslaved," Museveni said. That’s precisely the policy Museveni has enforced against Luos in Uganda. It’s also what he might wish upon Luos in Kenya. After all, if he advocates the enslavement of "stupid" people, what might he have in store for "mad" people?
[Global: Commentary]
Bullies eventually go too far.
Uganda dictator Yoweri Museveni’s expansionist dream and claims over the Kenyan island of Migingo, accompanied with his blood libel of Luos as “mad” people has backfired.
For the first time, people beyond Uganda are carefully examining the other past utterances and incitement to hate by this man within and without Uganda.
Whereas most people use their powers and skills of persuasion through debates and oratory to gain political support and office, Museveni doesn’t have time for such niceties.
His path to power has been through the barrel of the gun; and along the way and thereafter, he has used incitement to stir hate against his perceived enemies, to gain power and then to maintain his regime.
Museveni started a long time ago.
In his thesis paper, while at the University of Dar Es Salaam in Tanzania, long before he ruled over anything, he praised the virtues of terror. To embolden freedom fighters, he argued, it was good for Africans to see other Africans holding the severed head of a European.
He did not limit his focus to Whites.
In Uganda, he incited hatred towards ethnic Luos by claiming that all Acholis were associated with Idi Amin and Milton Obote since they were all northerners; and therefore they were all culpable in genocide towards non-Nilotic people. No Ugandan will forget one of the past elections in which his party ran a full page newspaper advertisement simply displaying skulls. The implication was that if Ugandans did not vote for him, candidates less hostile to Acholis would allow Nilotics to carry out genocide.
Ironically, it now turns out that the advertisement should have been seen as a warning of what Museveni had in store for Uganda, for Rwanda and DR Congo.
During the earlier era of his regime in Uganda, one of Museveni’s acolytes NRM/A Political Commissar, Commander Karusoke Kajabago argued that in Uganda there were human beings and then there were “biological substances”: Nilotics, specifically the Acholis, belonged to the latter category, the Museveni acolyte claimed.
So successful was Museveni in dehumanizing Acholis that barely a cry was heard when he corralled the entire 2 million population into concentration camps –where the majority still languish and die—using the bogus claim that he was protecting them from Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army.
Kony must be embarrassed—the death rate of Ugandans at the hands of the LRA pales miserably when compared to the number of victims of Museveni’s Luo Pogrom.
In 2005, a survey commissioned, embarrassingly, by Uganda’s own Ministry of Health and The World Health Organization (WHO) concluded that more than 1,000 excess deaths of civilians occurred per week in the concentration camps from hunger, dehydration, and treatable diseases.
Please see: http://www.who.int/hac/crises/uga/sitreps/Ugandamortsurvey.pdf
Elsewhere there were reports of targeted rapes of civilians –both women and men—allegedly by soldiers known to have been HIV-positive.
Since there were more than 200 camps and some had been in existence for more than 20 years, it’s conceivable that more than one million Acholis have been exterminated by Museveni. Not even the International Criminal Court (ICC) has claimed that the number of people killed by Kony –who deserves the indictment handed up by the ICC– come anywhere close to a fraction of this figure.
Unlike the genocide in Rwanda, which was bloody and which was often captured on videotape, and where victims were hacked with machetes, the victims of Museveni’s genocide die slowly; they whither away through hunger, thirst and diseases.
They die through planned neglect. It is tantamount to what could be described as a Brilliant Genocide. The Nazis, who took great pride in their scientific precision, would have been impressed.
Museveni’s pathological hatred of people of Luo heritage knows no bounds and during the U.S. Presidential primaries
he even took a swipe at then Senator Barack Obama in an remark published in a local Uganda paper as a candidate who merely appealed to African Americans; how wrong was he then.
How bitter is he now?
And how did the international community allow this man to get away with such mass murder in Uganda?
Washington helped sustain Museveni’s genocidal tyranny under Bill Clinton and both President George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. Will there be a break under President Obama? The jury is still out.
To begin with, Museveni volunteered as a Western puppet, much like Mobuttu had done during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.
He overthrew the government of Juvenal Habyarimana in Rwanda –it cost more than one million lives—when Washington and London wanted to displace French influence there. He then deposed Zaire’s ailing dictator Mobuttu when he was no longer of any use to the U.S. and U.K.; there again, seven million Congolese paid the price, to open the way for looting of resources by Western companies that don’t want to pay taxes to the government in Kinshasa.
Please see: http://www.icj-cij.org/docket/files/116/10455.pdf
During one visit to Rwanda when most of the corpses had been washed away down the Kegera River, while addressing a rally he is reported to have decried any talk of reconciliation: He said that if someone killed his entire family he would also wipe out that person’s family.
In more recent years, Museveni has done Washington’s bidding by sending Ugandan troops for “peace keeping” in Somalia, even after some of them had already committed genocide in Congo; and he also has allowed Ugandan security guards to serve in Iraq.
But beyond that, Museveni has a brilliant reading of the Western mindset.
A few years ago, he exonerated European slavers while maligning all Black people at the same time, in The Atlantic Monthly, one of America’s leading magazines: The article, not surprisingly appeared under the macabre headline “African Success Story.”
In this September 1994 article, written by Bill Berkley –later a New York Times writer and now a journalism professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, Museveni said he did “not blame white people” for capturing Africans into slavery.
“If you are stupid, you should be enslaved,” Museveni said.
That’s precisely the policy Museveni has enforced against Luos in Uganda. It’s also what he might wish upon Luos in Kenya.
After all, if he advocates the enslavement of “stupid” people, what might he have in store for “mad” people?
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