by Sam Childers
The presidential residence, State House, is in Entebbe, south of Kampala on Lake Victoria. As we turned up the short driveway, we saw a huge, white, two-story residence with big wings on both sides and a covered porch over the center entrance, where our driver stopped in front of the staff member waiting for us. We walked up a short, wide flight of stairs and through the main door. The rooms inside had high ceilings and bright colors—red carpets, white furniture, and elegant red, green, and gold drapes tied back at tall windows where the equatorial sun streamed through. After a short wait, President Museveni came into the room and greeted us warmly. The president has a full face, a shaved head, a gray mustache, a big smile, and large friendly eyes that both reflect his love for his people and conceal a steely sense of purpose. As usual, he was wearing a Western-style business suit for his interview.
I shook the president’s hand and said, “Mr. President, I’m Sam Childers. Do you know who I am?”
He smiled his big smile and said, “Of course I know who you are. You’re the reverend from the north. I know you very well.” Uganda is about the size of Oregon. You don’t go there and do what I do without attracting the government’s attention.
I sometimes went to the front lines and preached to the Ugandan soldiers before they went into battle. The size of the groups varied from a handful to maybe three hundred tall, lanky African men dressed in camo and holding their AKs and RPG launchers, standing and sitting around in a clearing. I saw concentration and concern in their eyes but no fear, as I spoke to them about God’s love and protection. One underequipped company had come back a few days after I spoke to them, marching and shouting and singing praise songs. I was at their camp and heard them a long way off. Three hundred fearless men singing at the top of their lungs is one of the most incredible sounds in the world. If we’d had a roof, the singing would have rattled it. Along with the singing I heard heavy engines, followed by the clank of tank treads. They had captured tanks and a big supply of ammo. They’d gone in with confidence and little else, yet all their needs had been supplied.
I had seen President Museveni from a distance once in Gulu when my men and I had just come back from Sudan. The law in Uganda says whenever we come back from Sudan we have to turn in our weapons at the army barracks in Gulu. President Museveni was speaking at the barracks that day, and when I got out of the truck I was only fifty or sixty feet away from him.
Sam and soldiers back in 2004 on the front lines looking for LRA
So when a truck pulled up with Sudanese soldiers—one white guy and the rest black—all carrying machine guns and dressed in camo, what was the president to say? “Who’s the white guy?” He knew who I was long before I knew him.
The crew set up their lights, turned on the camera, and Gary got his interview. The big excitement for me, though, came after the interview with CBN when my soldier Deng and I got to have a one-on-one conversation with the president. He was interested in my work with the orphans and wanted to assure me he thought the LRA was on the ropes and would be beaten soon. Like all presidents, he talked as though the war was over and won, though it was years after that before the LRA was actually out of Uganda. The one thing I liked most about Museveni was that I could tell he was not going to be defeated by these dangerous, crazy rebels. He wasn’t going to be backed down by the LRA or his political opposition or anyone else. He was not even going to be intimidated by a madman like Joseph Kony.
Hearing Museveni reminded me once again of my dad’s lesson: the first step to winning a fight is intimidating your opponent before the fight begins. Some people can be intimidated very easily, but not this president. In 1970 he joined the Ugandan intelligence service under President Milton Obote but escaped to Tanzania a year later when General Idi Amin came to power. Eventually he helped overthrow the brutal dictator Amin, rebelled against Obote, and in 1986 was sworn in as president of Uganda after a series of military uprisings. He is a fighter and always has been.
Museveni is also truly a servant of Christ. Although he doesn’t use his position to impose his beliefs on anybody else, he’s always willing to talk about his faith. He’s been a Christian since he was in high school. He told us that for many, many years God has kept him alive. But he said he walked away from the church at one time in his life because members, knowing he was a soldier, asked, “How can you be what you say you are? How can a gun-toting soldier be a born-again Christian?”
To answer the second question—one I’m real familiar with—I look at Luke 22:36 where Jesus says to his disciples, “He who has no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one.” Jesus was not condoning violence, but the time was coming soon when he would be betrayed and crucified. What Jesus was saying was, “The world is about to change and things are going to get real crazy. So I’m telling you, you will have to stand up for yourself.” I’m also partial to the Holman Christian Standard Bible translation of verse 37: “For I tell you, what is written must be fulfilled in Me: And He was counted among the outlaws. Yes, what is written about Me is coming to its fulfillment.” Outlaws! I like that.
The president went on talking to me. “I backed away from the church because of what people were saying about me. But I never backed away from God.” I knew exactly what he meant. Look at the Old Testament. Some of the greatest believers who ever lived were fighters who turned away from their Lord at times but did great things for him too. Moses killed an Egyptian and covered up the crime. Samson destroyed an entire army—with a donkey’s jawbone, no less. King David was still a boy when he killed Goliath; he later fell in love with Bathsheba and sent her husband to certain death in battle. And the list goes on. I think God likes a fighter.
It used to be that our presidents in the United States were fighters like Museveni and other African leaders I’ve met. These men don’t just serve their country; they fight for their country. Beginning with Harry Truman, every U.S. president was on active duty in the military until Bill Clinton was elected in 1992 over George H. W. Bush, who had been the youngest naval aviator in World War II and was shot down in the Pacific. Nowadays we put people in positions of leadership who neither fought nor served. Personally, if somebody’s not willing to stand and fight for our country, I don’t know why we would want hin leading it.
There’s no doubt Museveni has his faults and opponents. I believe he knows he has made some mistakes—some wrong decisions—but I also believe that those situations forced those decisions. He is a man of peace and righteousness and justice. He has shown incredible patience in dealing with the LRA. As I write this, a cease-fire is in place, but the rebels keep stalling on an agreement. The government has tried and tried to hold the rebels to a deadline. For over a year they’ve been saying, “This is the last day. This is the last time. If they don’t agree on this, it’s over; we’re gonna come in and get them.”
Museveni is being pressured to keep the talks going. I know what he would like to do—he’d like to wipe them all out! Museveni is a smart man who knows you can’t tame a mad dog. But because of political considerations, because of pressure from the people, he’s trying to keep giving the LRA a chance. If I were his cabinet advisor, I’d say he’s given enough chances. Now he needs to rule with an iron fist. He needs to tell them, “I gave you a deadline, you ignored it, so now we’re going to kill you all.”
Another great African leader was John Garang de Mabior, who was elected president of Southern Sudan in January 2005 but died tragically only six months later. I loved John Garang. He was a brave man and a dedicated statesman. To me he was the George Washington of Southern Sudan. Like a lot of other people, I suspect John was killed because he was about to be too successful in leading the people of Southern Sudan to a historic level of freedom and prosperity. John was from the Dinka tribe, like many of my soldiers. Even though he was orphaned by the time he was ten, he won a scholarship to Grinnell College in Iowa and got a BA in economics there. He went to graduate school in Tanzania, where, as a member of the University Students’ African
Revolutionary Front, he met Yoweri Museveni. Garang spent eleven years in the Sudanese army, then returned to the U.S. for a master’s in agricultural economics and a PhD in economics at Iowa State. He also took American military training at Fort Benning, Georgia.
In 1983 Garang led a battalion of soldiers to defect against the Sudanese government that was oppressing its own people, Christians and animists in the south who didn’t want to convert to Islam as the government demanded. He helped start the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army and led it for more than ten years, winning support from Uganda and other neighboring countries.
Omar al-Bashir took control of Sudan in a military coup in 1989, suspending political parties and enforcing a strict Islamic legal code. Garang and his forces stood for freedom in the south and eventually negotiated a historic power-sharing agreement that recognized the semiautonomous country of Southern Sudan. In a historic meeting on January 9, 2005, the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) formally ended the war between the Khartoum government and the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army. Garang was named first vice president of Sudan and president of Southern Sudan. He was the first Christian and the first southerner to make it to such a high place in government. The CPA calls for independent elections in 2011, at which time the people in the region will decide for themselves whether to rejoin Sudan or be permanently established as an independent country.
John Garang is the reason why there is any hope of permanent peace in Southern Sudan today.
I had seen John speak to big crowds several times; he had heard about my work and had seen me around the country. In spring 2004 he invited me to one of the UN-sponsored peace talks leading up to the January 2005 agreement. I was completely blown away to get an invitation, but it wasn’t as spur-of-the-moment as I thought it was at first. By that time, I’d been fighting and helping the Sudanese for seven years; Garang had obviously been keeping an eye on me.
The new president of Southern Sudan, Salva Kiir Mayerdit
I had wanted to meet John Garang, and I wasn’t too far from Naivasha, Kenya, where the peace talks were going on. We got a message to John and he told his people, “This is a good place for the reverend. Bring him. Let that reverend come to me.” So I actually spent two days participating in the peace talks. Even though I had no U.S. government connection, I was a white American who thought his cause was good enough to come across the ocean and help fight for it.
The talks were at a luxurious resort called the Naivasha Simba Lodge on Lake Naivasha, about an hour and a half from Nairobi. It is a tropical paradise. The lake is surrounded by lush green plants, and if you stand there a minute, you may see a monkey or giraffe on the shore, a heron or cormorant sail in for a landing on the surface, or a hippopotamus or two playing in the water. The place is absolutely beautiful, with gray two-story buildings surrounded by luxurious green landscaping and even a few tall trees. Looking across the lake, you can see an inactive volcano, Mount Longonot, looming up through the mist. Flowers are a flourishing local industry, and there were huge, fresh, fragrant arrangements everywhere. The UN must have been writing a big check for all of this.
Deng, President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni of Uganda, and Sam
One of my most cherished memories of that time—and one of the things that touched me most deeply at the meeting—is what John did when I got there after the group had already started eating lunch. He moved the man sitting next to him and placed me on his right side to eat. It was so awesome. I sat down and bowed my head for a quick silent prayer, but John saw me and said to the people in Arabic, “Let the reverend pray.” Everybody in the room—maybe twenty people—stopped eating, and I blessed the food for the whole group. Obviously there were a lot of non-Christians there, but it didn’t matter.
Head officials at peace talks in 2005
You could tell all the ones who were Arabs because of their ghutra (head wraps) and thobe (long robes). There were anywhere between six and twenty-five people or so, depending on the meeting. Sometimes we met out by the two swimming pools on a big stone terrace. There was mahogany outdoor furniture scattered around, upholstered in green with matching sun umbrellas. Other times we sat around the garden area in a sea of plants and blossoms. It was very pretty, but the longer I sat there, the clearer it was that humanitarian concerns were not on anybody’s radar. All they talked about was oil. After a whole day of meetings, there was all this talk about coming to a final agreement on the oil revenue sharing and all that. But to me the subject of a true peace talk should be, how do we stop these women and children and civilians from getting killed every day?
I sat back and listened to everybody and kept my mouth shut. At this point we were sitting around a table out on a veranda, and everyone kept talking about oil, oil, oil.
I thought, Let’s talk about the children. When are we going to get to the children?
The scramble for oil in Sudan is ruthless, lawless, and endless. Oil now generates 92 percent of Sudan’s export revenue, but the industry remains unregulated and corrupt. The Sudanese government has no clear standard for regulating the industry and no way to enforce what little regulation there is. The oil companies don’t care anything about the population or the land itself, and in the absence of accountability, they take advantage of both. The huge oil profits go to a tiny group of northern Sudanese elite.
Though Southern Sudan was supposed to get half the $5 billion-plus in annual oil revenues from four hundred thousand-plus barrels of daily production in the agreement, everybody knew the government of Sudan wasn’t reporting production accurately and were almost certainly cheating on the numbers. All the while, oil companies were contaminating soil and ground water, and the government was driving the locals from their homes to make room for more oil exploration (from Sudan—Whose Oil? a newsletter by IKV Pax Christi, April 2008).
Oil was what was on their minds, and oil was what they kept stewing about.
When you’re at a meeting in Africa, everybody goes around and speaks in turn, and you wait patiently for your opportunity. No interrupting. One of the hardest things about being in Africa for me is learning patience. Finally it was my turn. I wasn’t an official at the talks, but I was there as John Garang’s invited guest, and I had something to say.
I may have started off being a little more sarcastic than necessary. I said, “I thought this was a peace talk. All I’m hearing about is oil. It’s an oil talk. I’ve been here for several hours, and I haven’t heard anything about what we’re going to do to stop the killing. That’s what I want to know. I’ve come to hear what we’re going to do about peace to save these children.”
A couple of people looked at me like, Who are you? U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell had some representatives at the talks, and I heard they got upset with me. One of them asked somebody else, “Who the hell is this white guy?”
The reaction to my comment was a thumbs-up from people who knew me or knew of me well enough to know that I knew what I was talking about. Everybody around the table kept quiet, but I was confident that some of them were silently cheering me on. For political reasons, they couldn’t say what they really felt.
There’s also a frustrating tendency for African leaders to not criticize each other no matter how awful they are. At least I said what I wanted to say. Everybody else had to say and do what they thought was expected of them. I was not suffering under those restrictions.
Some of the participants approved of my comments, and some didn’t, but I’d say it again. I’ve been in Sudan for eleven years now. I know the story. I know why we’re concerned about Darfur. The UN could care less about the dying children in Darfur. Everybody’s concerned about the oil in Darfur. It’s not about the little black children who are dying. It’s not about the genocide that has gone on for so many years. America is so blinded by the money and the politics, we add to the suffering by giving military aid to radical Muslim countries, even when our own economy is in trouble, like it is now. While the U.S. has had a trade embargo agai
nst Sudan for years, the American government sends this corrupt and genocidal bunch $140 million in aid a year. We are sending $140 million to a government that bombs and rapes and murders its own people. Go figure.
I’m a hillbilly from Pennsylvania, but if our country is in a recession and everybody else is cutting back, why is our government still giving out hundreds of millions of dollars to these countries? Why are we selling—even giving—surplus away to them? If we really want to have effective homeland security, let’s stop selling and giving surplus of any kind to radical Muslim countries. Some people say this type of restrictive trade policy would be prejudiced, and America must not be prejudiced. Maybe there was a time to be generous, but in my opinion, 9/11 changed all that.
Those two days of peace meetings meant more to me than any two days I’ve ever spent in Africa. All the fighting, all the suffering, all the days I had malaria, all the days I had diarrhea, all the days I had to drink bad water, all the crap I went through during all those years in Sudan, it was all worth it for those two days. I got to see history in the making. And I got to speak from my heart to the most important leaders in the region. They may have been the two best days of my life.
During an earlier round of talks, Colin Powell had brought a plaque of peace, and it was put on a stone in Naivasha, Kenya, beside a tree of peace that was planted. I got my picture taken with John Garang by this stone. I spoke to John several times on the phone after that, but that was the last time I ever saw him.
John Garang at the peace talks in 2005
John Garang was killed July 30, 2005, f lying back from a visit with Yoweri Museveni at Rwakitura, the presidential country home in southwestern Uganda. The helicopter was Museveni’s presidential helicopter, an Mi-172, that went down during a storm carrying Garang, six advisors, and seven Ugandan crew members. At first he was reported rescued, then confirmed dead the next day. The official cause was pilot error due to inexperience in bad weather. Museveni had owned the helicopter for eight years, and it had just gone through a maintenance check and instrument upgrade. To this day some people believe Garang was assassinated. While the Sudanese government and the head of the SPLA believed bad weather caused the crash, others in the SPLA suspected sabotage. Museveni agreed that “external factors” could not be eliminated. Still others say that the pilot was paid off through the radical Muslims and crashed on purpose. I can say this much: they wanted John Garang dead. Not only was he an educated president, but he was a fighter. This man knew warfare. He was a threat.
