As we have already seen,33 in November 1994 President Museveni discussed the possibility of overthrowing Mobutu with a number of Congolese opponents. Although they decided not to act at the time, this had not prevented the Ugandan External Service Organization (ESO) from helping the PLC. Col. Kahinda Otafiire, one of the key Ugandan Secret Service operatives and a friend of President Museveni, had recruited into the PLC a young, idealistic, and dynamic young Mutetela named André Kisase Ngandu. Over the next two years Kisase was going to become “Uganda’s man” in eastern Zaire, looking for ways of eventually turning the PLC from a micro-guerrilla band into a more serious military force. In the meantime, in spite of its limited size, the PLC could be used to retaliate in case of Zairian incursions.
On June 17, 1994, a group of undisciplined Zairian soldiers crossed the Ugandan border near Arua in West Nile and looted everything they could get, taking back with them two Ugandans as prisoners.34 As this came in the wake of some WNBLF cross-border actions, the ESO sent the PLC boys across from Bundibugyo to attack the FAZ in reprisal. They were allowed to retreat back into Uganda after their hit-and-run raid, and Uganda’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs denied the whole thing on September 2.35 At the same time Kampala was pressuring UNHCR to repatriate the so-called Amin’s refugees from Province Orientale since they provided the ready pond where Sudanese agents were fishing for WNBLF recruits.36 Meanwhile, arms trafficking kept growing between Zaire, Sudan, and northern Uganda, with disastrous consequences for the civilians.37 But soon a new dimension was going to be added to this already strained situation.
In January 1995 a Muslim group calling itself the Uganda Muslim Liberation Army (UMLA) formally declared war on the National Resistance Movement (NRM) government. The reasons given for this in its communiqué were rather hazy: the UMLA accused Museveni of having killed Muslims in 1979 at Nyamitaga, near Mbarara.38 and later in 1983 at Butambala, near Mpigi.39 But there were two interesting points in the document: first, there was an obvious effort at presenting Museveni as an enemy of the whole Ugandan Muslim community by using somewhat contorted “historical” arguments;40 second, most of the document’s signatories were Muslim Baganda, a completely new development: in the past, and notably during the 1981–1986 bush war against Obote, the Baganda Muslim community had given the NRA discreet but significant support. Historically it is not exaggerated to say that in early 1981 it was the timely financial and political support of Prince Badru Kakungulu that enabled Museveni to turn his small band of outlaws (he had twenty-six men) into a more efficient armed organization.41 It was soon apparent that the puzzle of this role switch had more to do with Baganda factional politics than with Islam. During the bush war of 1981–1986 and its immediate aftermath the Baganda, who had been the main target of Obote’s repression, supported the NRA. But soon after the end of the war the old and well-known ultramonarchist tendencies that had triggered the whole Ugandan catastrophe back in the 1960s began to resurface. The monarchists, in an effort at resuscitating their movement, targeted Museveni for a number of imagined ills designed to mobilize Baganda opinion against the central government. It was partly to appease these neomonarchists that Museveni restored the kingdom of Buganda in 1993, albeit in a diminished and nonpolitical form.42 But this “clipped restoration” was exactly what the neomonarchists could not accept. A number of them secretly created the Allied Democratic Movement (ADM) in London in January 1995. Later ADM documents are politically very crude,43 but they belie the tradition of the men who had pushed Kabaka Mutesa II into his ill-conceived confrontational politics of the 1960s. In the 1990s, even though the new Ugandan regime enjoyed the full support of the United States and even though the Soviet Union had disappeared, these same people still called Museveni a communist. Talking with them made one feel like a time traveler, for their argumentation in the late 1990s was still pure 1965 Kabaka Yekka vintage, complete with its right-wing cold war rhetoric.44 These were upper-class Protestant Baganda, but political opportunism was soon going to bring them into a most unnatural alliance with the radical Muslim UMLA Lumpenproletariat.
In fact, the ADM and the UMLA were born at the same time and both were led by Baganda. But there was a clear sharing of responsibilities: the ADM recruited among ordinary Baganda (who are mostly Christians), while the UMLA recruited beyond the very small Baganda Muslim community and also got non-Baganda Muslims, who tend to be at the bottom of Ugandan society.45 The two rebel movements complemented each other and cleverly exploited the complex interweaving of ethnic and class politics typical of most of today’s Africa: the core leadership of the two organizations was the same (radical Baganda neomonarchists in search of troops to fight Museveni), but the rank and file was anything they could pick up, mostly very poor people from a variety of tribes. The movement soon grew impressively. Later it was interesting to talk with Uganda People’s Defense Force (UPDF) officers, who seemed puzzled as to what the guerrilla force was all about. There were two things that seemed to deeply disturb them: one, that the guerrillas were not an ethnic group; two, that the prisoners they captured in Bundibugyo told them they had been promised money to fight. The going rate was about 500,000 shillings for an ordinary fighter (enough to buy a kiosk from which to sell cigarettes and sodas at the bus stop) and 5 million shillings for an officer (enough to buy a taxi). The UPDF officers were NRA veterans who said, “We fought for an ideal. How can these people fight for money, especially so little money?” It was hard for them to accept that, though their “ideal” had brought them a certain bit of prosperity, they were now facing the very people whom the “Ugandan economic miracle” had passed by. The notion that this social marginalization was not attached to any given tribe, as had been the case in the past, seemed even stranger.46
Since the 1987 monetary reform Uganda has averaged a 5 percent yearly rate of economic growth, which puts it in the very limited group of IMF African success stories of the past fifteen years.47 But the product of that growth has been extremely unevenly distributed. NRM cadres and their political cronies skimmed the cream off the top and very little was left for ordinary Ugandans. The Baganda conservatives who hated Museveni knew they could play on that growth-induced social marginality. They were bourgeois, but they knew that there was a Lumpenproletariat they could use, either among the young rural unemployed or among the city street kids. And because the Muslim community represented a very large proportion of that Lumpenproletariat, for historical reasons going back to the place of Muslims in Uganda’s colonial society, a satellite Muslim organization was an essential tool both in recruiting and in getting outside support from the Sudan. This was a strange alliance, and the good Protestant Anglo-Baganda bourgeois leadership that prided itself on its monarchic extremism felt somewhat ill at ease about this tactical alliance with Khartoum’s radical Islam.48
The first UMLA military efforts proved abortive. Its forces were defeated in a series of encounters at Buseruka, near Lake Albert in Bunyoro, on February 20–28, 1995. The survivors fled to Zaire, where they settled near Bunia. The reasons for their defeat were simple: they were city boys (and girls: approximately 20 percent of the guerrillas were female) without much knowledge of the terrain; they were a multiethnic group with almost no local sympathies;49 and their armament was limited. But in Bunia they soon made interesting new contacts. The Sudanese Army Security Services were at the time using the Bunia airfield to bring supplies both to the Rwandese Interahamwe and to the WBNLF. Both groups were hostile to the NRM regime and therefore worth supporting, from Khartoum’s point of view. Although based in Zaire, this was a Sudan-driven operation because Mobutu was far too weak to provide anything except the physical ground from which to operate. But in Bunia the Sudanese found the vanquished UMLA fighters licking their wounds and took them in hand. Although Khartoum already knew about the UMLA, it had so far worked more closely with the radical Ugandan Muslim movement known as Tabliq. The Tablighi Jama’at, born in India in the 1920s, had initially been a pietist and revivalist Muslim sect
that started to spread worldwide in the 1950s and eventually reached Uganda.50 Tabliq “missionaries” had penetrated the Uganda Muslim Youth Association in the early 1980s, at a time when the Uganda Muslim community was still trying to recover from its embarrassing association with the Idi Amin dictatorship. By the 1990s the result of this initially rather mild faith renewal movement was the birth of a native Ugandan militant fundamentalism with strong connections to the Sudan.51 In 1991 the Tabliq occupied by force the Kampala Central Mosque; four people were killed, many were wounded, and hundreds were jailed and later tried in huge public trials. Whatever help Khartoum had channeled to the nascent UMLA before 1995 had gone through the Tabliq movement of Sheikh Jamir Mukulu, which had strong connections with the international fundamentalist networks and with Sudan.52 It was from the Khartoum-sponsored fusion between ADM and UMLA in Zaire that the present Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) was born.53 But the key element in that union was that the Sudanese operators soon realized that without a good peasant grounding in local realities, the guerrillas would be defeated again. This is why they worked at incorporating the guerrilla force into the remnants of NALU, the old Bakonjo Rwenzururu movement of the Ruwenzori Mountains.54
In August 1995 the Sudanese army operating inside Zaire with WNBLF support took the small strategic towns of Kaya and Oraba from the SPLA in order to secure their supply lines and disrupt those of the SPLA. They celebrated their victory by shelling the Sudanese refugee camp at Koboko on Ugandan territory from the Zairian side of the border. The Sudanese government was then at its most militant, having tried to assassinate Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in June in Addis-Ababa during an OAU meeting, and President Museveni felt there was enough international leeway to allow him to retaliate strongly. So the UPDF attacked the LRA inside Sudan in September and October 1995, pushing all the way to Owinyi-Kibul in a common operation with the SPLA.
On the Zaire front Crisp us Kiyonga, who was President Museveni’s Bakonjo representative, felt obliged to deny Ugandan support for the PLC,55 but the relationship had become common knowledge in Bundibugyo since PLC fighters were taking part in the local coffee-smuggling operations from Zaire that partially financed their movement. Through the early months of 1996 both the old NALU and the Tabliq networks kept recruiting young men in their different social environments. But the Sudanese had not yet managed to bring them together and an early UMLA-Tabliq attack on Kisoro ended in failure.56 The Muslim community was split between its pro-Museveni and pro-Khartoum choices, and in June 1996 the Tabliq tried to murder Suleiman Kakeeto, a moderate Uganda Supreme Muslim Council leader who had publicly disavowed the guerrillas; as for Sheikh Jamir Mukulu, he fled to Khartoum just before the Internal Service Organization (ISO) could arrest him.57
Meanwhile, fighting was spreading in the north and in West Nile. The result of this increase in military operations was that Uganda was forced to go back on the demobilization program it had started with World Bank support in 1994, with a target of cutting down the UPDF from 90,000 to 40,000 men.58 In June 1996 the Ministry of Defense had to review its budget and reinvest the $29 million it had so far saved through the demobilization exercise, after letting go about 12,000 men.
As the Rwandese army began to launch its operation against the refugee camps in South Kivu in September, it was immediately obvious that given the degree of Sudanese support for the Zaire-based Ugandan guerrillas, Kampala was going to take advantage of the general conflagration to do its own bit of cross-border cleanup.59 The question was: Up to where and with what political agenda? The answers would become clearer only gradually, in the following months, after the refugee problem was taken care of in the most brutal and radical fashion.
Far from the Great Lakes: the Angolan conflict
Although the Angolan conflict was also to play a fundamental role in the later Zairian conflagration, its nature was fundamentally different from the Sudanese-Ugandan transborder skirmishes just described. First, Angola is a very large country (1,246,000 square kilometers, or almost half a million square miles), and the fighting was spread out over its territory rather than limited to the relatively small areas where Zaire, the Sudan, and Uganda meet; second, Portuguese colonialism was in a category of its own and so was its legacy; third, Angola was a key theater of cold war struggles, which had left an enormous backlog of conveniently forgotten unpaid political bills; and fourth, Angola is a much richer country than either the Sudan or Uganda, which allowed its process of national destruction to be carried out with an impressive array of military means quite unknown in other parts of the continent, except for Ethiopia.
The Portuguese colonization of Angola theoretically dated to the sixteenth century, but in practice less than 15 percent of the territory was under actual government control at the time of the 1885 Berlin Conference, and it was between that date and the fall of the Portuguese monarchy in 1926 that the takeover of the hinterland was carried out in a very painful manner.60 Portuguese colonialism had been archaic in several ways. Its economic policies harked back to a kind of outmoded physiocratic model that, if it had been a permanent temptation for the French or the British, had never been applied elsewhere in Africa with such a relentless absolutism. This trait was to leave an enormous legacy to the postcolonial state in terms of its love for totalitarian state control. Another unusual feature of Portuguese colonization was the large white presence throughout the colonial period, a white presence that not only kept growing but even greatly increased just as the colony exploded into revolt.
Number of Whites in Angola
1869
1902
1931
1940
1950
1960
1970
3,000
13,000
60,000
44,000
79,000
172,000
335,000
Sources: Gervase Clarence-Smith, “Capital Accumulation and Class Formation in Angola,” in David Birmingham and Phyllis Martin, eds., History of Central Africa (London: Longman, 1983), 2: 191; G. Clarence-Smirh, The Third Portuguese Empire (1825–1975): A Study in Economic Imperialism (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1985). Figures have been rounded off to the nearest thousand; the huge 1970 figure includes over 50,000 soldiers.
Many of the whites were uneducated, and in 1960 an estimated twenty thousand were jobless, living by selling lottery tickets, begging, shining shoes, or pimping for their African wives and concubines.61 Sexual promiscuity had resulted over the years in a large number of mestiços,62 whose social and class interests were distinct from those of the whites and from those of the native Africans, but were often quite close to those of the assimilados, the educated blacks the Portuguese were co-opting into their culture on the basis of language.63 The general impression given by the Portuguese system is of a Creole time warp somehow keeping an increasingly precarious foothold in the contemporary world.
The cost of living was high and salaries were modest… . Bachelors lived in small hostels where alcoholism and prostitution were rife… . The effects of this persistent poverty were a mixture of radicalism and racism… . Some Whites, like the radicals in Algeria, went as far as joining the clandestine Communist Party. But radicalism generally went together with a virulent racism. Newly arrived immigrants were provided with a shelter and some form of income, often at the expense of the Africans. Skin colour was used as much as possible to gain advantage and the discourse of the Whites was as racist as that prevalent in South Africa and Rhodesia… . This mixture of poverty, radicalism, solidarity and racism accounted for the hysterical determination of the white community not to give in to African nationalist demands in 1961, in strong contrast with the Belgian Congo.64
Luanda’s first nationalist organization was the MPLA, founded in 1956; it was practically an overseas offshoot of the then clandestine Portuguese Communist Party. The movement was the political expression of the semi-Portuguese proletarian petty bourgeoisie that both hated Salazari
st oppression and feared the rural African masses.65 Both traits were going to last. In that same year another movement was created in Leopoldville, the União das Populações de Angola (UPA). Its leader, Holden Roberto, was a Mukongo assimilado. But he was also a Baptist, and the religious difference was to prove a key factor in the contribution to the nationalist movement. The UPA was “black African” with a nativist ideology and a Protestant support network. The war of independence started in early 1961.
The UPA, which was soon renamed Frente Nacional de Libertação de Angola (FNLA), was essentially a Bakongo movement. Most of its adherents were Bakongo, and they came from all the Bakongo territories, including the Cabinda Enclave, the French Congo, and the Belgian Congo. But other black Angolans also tended to gravitate toward the FNLA, as the MPLA was perceived as the party of radical whites, assimilados, and mestiços.66 The FNLA was at ease in Leopoldville,67 which was not the case with the Marxist MPLA. The movement’s leadership left for Brazzaville as soon as Massemba-Debat’s radical coup provided them with a more congenial environment (in November 1963), and it began training a small armed militia with the help of the Cubans, who had just arrived in Brazzaville to support the new regime. In 1964 Jonas Savimbi, an Ovimbundu assimilado and FNLA militant, decided to break away from the Front, which he found “too ethnically oriented,” meaning controlled by Bakongo elements. By 1966 he had created his own organization, UNITA, which recruited mostly among the Ovimbundu and which began to fight the Portuguese from the east.68 Savimbi based himself in Zambia, where he made contacts that were to stand him in good stead later. His small movement was seen by the Portuguese as an ideal spoiler for the much more dangerous FNLA and MPLA, and the colonial army concluded a nonaggression pact with him, the better to fight the other two movements.69 In this cutthroat climate outside support for one or the other movements immediately took on an added internal dimension. By November 1974 the MPLA and the FNLA were fighting each other in an effort to control the Zairian border and the capital. On January 15, 1975, the Portuguese Movimento de Forças Armadas, which had overthrown the fascist regime in Portugal, got the three movements to sign the Alvor Agreement, which provided for a tripartite government at independence. But the MPLA, which had been gaining increasing control of the capital, decided to dispense completely with the Alvor Agreement and to kick out all UNIT A and especially FNLA militants from Luanda. On November 11, 1975, it proclaimed unilaterally the Popular Republic of Angola, which was soon recognized by the Eastern Bloc, by the European powers, and by most Third World countries, but not by the United States. A new civil war had taken the place of the independence struggle.
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