Museveni Awards Himself Medal For Plunging Country Into War 42 Years Ago

Yoweri Museveni and his younger brother received The Order of Katonga

Photo: YouTube

On Monday, Generals Yoweri Museveni and his younger brother received The Order of Katonga (Kiswahili: Nishani ya Katonga) during the 42nd celebrations of Tarehe Sita, a Kiswahili word meaning the sixth day.

This day commemorates the February 6, 1981 when the five-year guerilla war that brought Gen. Museveni to power was launched, with an attack on Kabamba Military Barracks.

The award is the highest military decoration of the Ugandan Honours System.

It is natural for dictators to award themselves.

Idi Amin’s self-bestowed titles were legion: “His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, CBE, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular.”

In Liberia, when Master Sgt. Samuel Kanyon Doe seized power through a military coup on 12 April 1980 by attacking the Liberian Executive Mansion and killing President William R. Tolbert Jr, he was a semiliterate career soldier.

Before long, though, he became the proud holder of a master’s degree in political science he was awarded by the University of Liberia.

″They got all their Ph.D.s in their books, I got a Ph.D. in M16 (guns),″ he once said. Books is a Liberian pidgeon word for education.

What dictator Museveni received on Monday belongs to such a rogue’s gallery. Beyond the obvious, however, the award arose out of the bush war which was waged against the legitimately elected regime of Milton Apollo Obote. We know this because Gen. Museveni has long since ditched his original reason for going to the bush; he originally claimed that he went to the bush because the 1980 elections were rigged.

Today, he calls the 1980 elections “the spark” but blames the instability of Uganda since 1964, when the Uganda People’s Congress and the royalist Kabaka Yekka parted ways over the Lost Counties, as the real reason he went to bush!

That means rigging or no rigging, there was going to be war after the 1980 elections.

This is tragic because an estimated 500,000 Ugandans died in this war. And that’s simply because Gen. Museveni needed a justification, any justification, to unleash hell on Ugandans.

So the murderous National Resistance Army (NRA) pitched camp in a forest near Matuga-Migadde road, about 17 miles from Kampala in Bulemezi County, Luwero District. Then, the war continued (from the attack on Kabamba) in earnest.

In 1983, January, the NRA was on the run after what Gen. Museveni dubbed “Obote’s Grand Offensive” in which, he claims, 40 companies were deployed against the NRA for about 4 months.

This offensive happened along the Kapeka-Kiwoko axis in Luwero, the Matuga-Kirolo-Masuliita axis in Mpigi District, the Makulubita-Semuto axis in Luwero District, the Kiboga-Lwamata axis in Mubende District and the Butema-Kijunjubwa axis in Hoima and Masindi Districts.

The Uganda National Liberation Army (UNLA), according to Gen. Museveni, had its infantry make use of medium artillery comprising batteries of 122mm howitzers, 12-barrelled Katyushas and 130mm field guns operated by North Koreans. In order to protect itself from this “Grand Offensive”, the NRA turned the Ugandans of Luwero and Mpigi districts into human shields!

Not since the 1890s when the Catholics were evacuated from Kyaggwe and Protestants evacuated from Budu to Kyaggwe had Ugandans witnessed such massive human displacements.

More than 1.5 million Ugandans were forced to march out of their homes and from their ancestral lands in February and March of 1983 in order to provide cover for the NRA as it tucked tail and retreated from Nakeseke County, Kyadondo and Busiro counties to Singo (Lukoola) then into the Ngoma area.

The government forces could not cynically bomb this human exodus and when it (the government) tried to isolate NRA bandits from the human hordes, it often failed.

The NRA thus escaped but at the cost of thousands of lives as the sickly, weak and elderly died during the this mammoth trek.

To compound matters, being cultivators, the Ugandans forced on this deathly trek could not cultivate any land while on the move and so many starved.

Gen. Museveni speaks proudly of this event which he attempts to compare to Operation Dynamo, the evacuation from Dunkirk, which involved the rescue of more than 338,000 British and French soldiers from the French port of Dunkirk between 26 May and 4 June 1940.

The evacuation sometimes referred to as the Miracle of Dunkirk, helped boost British fortitude to take on the axis powers namely, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Militarist Japan.

Of course Gen. Museveni’s “evacuation” was no Dunkirk. Instead, it was a dastardly act which transgressed International Humanitarian Law (IHL) by turning innocent Ugandans into human shields.

Indeed, IHL describes the use of Human Shields in warfare as “a method of warfare where the presence of civilians or the movement of the civilian population, whether voluntary or involuntary, is used in order to shield military objectives from attack or to shield, favor or impede military operations.”

It is one of the greatest tragedies in Uganda that terrorists are awarded for breaking humanitarian laws.

The Order of Katonga is such an award and it will be dumped into litter basket of history when Uganda is finally free of Gen. Museveni’s junta.

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