Exploits of Gen Museveni, Uganda’s self-styled master fighter

 

 

Politics

He has described himself as a Ssabalwanyi, or master fighter.
It was not a battlefront title, but one he conferred upon himself in October 2011 while rubbishing allegations made by a Tullow official that they believed the President likely received inducements from an Italian oil firm, Eni, to influence Uganda’s decision-making about the nascent sector.

Gen Yoweri Museveni, the founder of the National Resistance Army rebel group that brought him to power in 1986, is a man of many hats from which the feather of war shines.

He is one of few sitting presidents to be spotted in public clutching an AK-47 assault rifle or donning military fatigue, with a four-star general’s full insignia, to attend a civilian and religious function.
That is Uganda’s leader of 35 years: a former rebel leader-turned-president who transformed the rag-tag fighting band into a formidable multi-force and modern military renamed the Uganda People’s Defence Forces (UPDF).

As the country’s top diplomat, Gen Museveni has injected the army into the heart of Uganda’s politics and as a vanguard of foreign policy by deploying them over the years in neighbouring countries and region.

NRA rebel leader
Whereas the 27 or so rebel groups he has defeated during his reign could be considered as wars of self-preservation and regime survival, Gen Museveni has retailed foreign military interventions as key to securing Uganda, defending pan-African brothers and sisters and insuring the future of Africa against external meddlers and aggressors.

To him, the wars he has fought, more pronounced from 1981 over disputed elections a year earlier, are just wars to which he was provoked.
That five-year guerrilla war in the Luweero Triangle resulted in the deaths of thousands and catapulted Gen Museveni, a former teacher and intelligence officer, into power on January 25, 1986 (although the official record is January 26).

The ascendency to state power by a man who toppled Gen Tito Okello’s short-lived junta, was not going to be welcome by all, more so in northern Uganda, the cradle of the deposed leaders. And it showed shortly afterwards in a way that illuminated the north-south divide and consigned mainly Acholi land to near two-decade insurgency, destruction and deaths.

Seven months after he captured power, Alice Auma Lawkena, a woman who claimed to be a medium with mystic powers, on August 10, 1986, began an eclectic fight to topple Museveni.

With headquarters in Pader, the Holy Spirit Movement, whose fighters smeared themselves with shear nut oil in the belief the oil would melt bullets, made startling frontline gains, coursing up to Jinja – some 90 kilometres to the capital, Kampala – from where they were defeated in 1987.

Lakwena fled to, and lived in, Kenya until her death on January 17, 2007.
Shortly after Auma’s military failure in Jinja, Severino Lukoya, her father, started a fresh rebellion in Kitgum under the guidance of the ‘holy spirit’. 
But unlike his daughter, Lukoya was weak and his group atrophied almost immediately.

LRA rebellion
When that fight collapsed, a one Joseph Kony, a former altar boy variously reported as a cousin of Lakwena, started the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) group in 1987 to wage war against Museveni’s government.   
Kony proclaimed himself the “spokesperson” of God and a spirit medium and his fighters quickly built a reputation of savagery and mass murders against the locals whom he accused of not supporting him.

After years of fighting, the LRA rebels in 2005 fled first to South Sudan and onwards to Garamba parklands in the DR Congo from where they made incursions into the Central Africa Republic.
Kony forces are much diminished, with many of his top lieutenants having either been killed, captured or defected, and the bands in the bush keep escaping more for their own survival.

ADF attacks
The Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) insurgency began in 1995, intensifying in 2013, resulting in hundreds of deaths through indiscriminate bomb attacks in Kampala and elsewhere.
The ADF was formed by Jamil Mukulu, an ultra-conservative Ugandan Muslim, belonging to the Tablighi Jamaat group. Formed in 1989, ADF carried out its first attacks in 1995. 

The conflict gradually intensified, culminating in the 1998 Kichwamba Technical College attack, which left 80 people dead, with 80 more being abducted.
Mukulu was born as David Steven and was baptised as a Catholic, later converting to Islam, adopting a Muslim name and becoming radicalised.