Genocide or Just Another “Casualty of War”? – Part I: The Interpretive Context of Intrigue

By Todd David Whitmore March 01, 2010
Analyzing Matters
Photograph of photo wall at the Kagali Genocide Memorial Centre.
Download PDF: Whitmore, Genocide or Just Another

Editor’s Note (December 22, 2010): Dr. Todd Whitmore of the University of Notre Dame published his peer-reviewed article “‘If They Kill Us, At Least Others Will Have More Time to Get Away’: The Ethics of Risk in Ethnographic Practice” in our most recent issue (issue 3, spring 2010). In that article, Dr. Whitmore develops a theological framing of ethnography as both a research method and an ethical practice. Since the publication of “If They Kill Us,” Dr. Whitmore has been in conversation with Practical Matters about the publication of documents, dating from the 1980s, that he received while doing research in Northern Uganda (available at musevenimemo.org). These documents attribute to the sitting President of Uganda, Yoweri Museveni, the intent to commit acts of genocide against the Acholi people, an ethnic group situated in Northern Uganda, as early as the 1980s.

Over the summer of 2010, Practical Matters undertook an academic review process, which included experts in Ugandan history and politics, to evaluate both the authenticity of these documents and the ethical implications of publishing them. While the reviewers generally supported the journal in a decision to publish the documents, Practical Matters decided that it is not the most appropriate medium in which to make these documents available. Practical Matters, the journal’s editors and advisors concluded, cannot adequately contribute to securing the safety of persons in Uganda who might face retaliation as a result of the publication of these documents.

The journal did, however, decide to publish Whitmore’s analysis of these documents, which is available here. In this piece, Whitmore examines the historical and political situation in Northern Uganda that, he thinks, renders the documents’ purported provenance and authenticity likely. He also explores the ethical implications of publishing them in an online format. The editors and advisors of Practical Matters feel that it is important to provide Whitmore a public context in which to practice the ethic he prescribes in “If They Kill Us.”

Readers who wish to send me their comments can do so to musevenimemo@gmail.com.

To understand why Ageno Komakec gave me the document, it is necessary to grasp the broader context of intimidation and desperation that drives the dynamic of intrigue.

The Broad Context: Intimidation and Desperation

When I first arrived in Uganda in 2005, entry to northern Uganda required vetting by Lieutenant Colonel Shaban Bantariza, the Director of Public Relations and Information for the Uganda Peoples’ Defense Forces (UPDF), the military wing of the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) government. The meeting was cordial. I told him my purpose, that I was a theology professor from the University of Notre Dame in the United States seeking to go to northern Uganda to study traditional Acholi culture and Christianity, particularly Roman Catholic Christianity. Lt. Col. Bantariza asked if I was a journalist, and I said no. He asked if I had a camera, and I showed him my small four megapixel Olympus C-750. He asked what I was going to use the photos for, and I replied that they would be for the classroom and my research. He accepted my response and wished me well.

Between seventy and seventy-five percent of the people in Acholiland identify themselves as being Roman Catholic. In the rural areas, this percentage reaches as high as eighty-five to ninety percent. In addition, about ninety percent of Acholi at the time of my early research trips lived in Internally Displaced Persons camps, away from the major towns like Gulu where most researchers stay. For these reasons, when I returned in 2006, I decided to live in some of the camps. There I came under considerable scrutiny. In one of the camps, a resident warned me: “If someone comes up to you and asks how long you are staying, do not tell them. They are spies. Asking how long a visitor is staying is against Acholi hospitality. No one would ask you that except spies. Do not tell them. Just tell them you do not know. Be vague.” I had been living in a wattle and daub hut, and had frequent visitors. Some were curious, others sought help of some sort or money; most of them were friends of my host. One afternoon, two men I had not seen before came to visit and sat, without asking, in some foldout chairs in front of my hut. After initial greetings and pleasantries, they asked me what I was doing in the camp. I told them. They asked how long I was staying. Having been alerted, I answered, “I am not sure.”

This was the second camp I had lived in, and by that time I had been told both directly and indirectly by any number of Acholi people that doing research was not enough to justify my presence in northern Uganda. How was I going to help them? I had been thinking about various projects—agricultural support and training among them—and testing out my ideas with the people I met. When I told my two visitors about this, one wanted to enlist me in supporting a beekeeping and honey business he sought to start. I told him that I would think about it along with the other suggestions I received. Before they left, I asked them their names—they, again in contrast to Acholi cultural practices, had not provided them yet—because I wanted to remember with whom I met, particularly if they were interested in any development project I might undertake in northern Uganda. Later, I asked an active camp resident if he had heard of these two men and if they were NRM. He said that he had not heard of them, but that he would check it out. The next day he told me that they were not only NRM but they were not even from the camp. They had not just happened across me.

At another camp, the Government Security Officer or “GiSO” stopped me on the main road through the camp: “You have failed to see me.” I told him that I had stopped by his place twice to report my presence, but that he was not there. He stiffened and responded, “So, you have still failed to see me.” He continued, “I have direct contact with the President. I can call him whenever I want. If he is in London, whenever. I have been an intelligence officer for fifteen years, including in Sudan. Some people come here and say bad things about [the camp]. And you? What shall I say you are doing here?” I told him, “I am an academic. I am studying traditional Acholi religion.” He replied, “So we cooperate. I have to tell the higher command what you are up to. They already know that you are here. They wonder, ‘What is the muno doing there?’ Now I can tell them what you are doing. They had some mistaken ideas.”

It is in this context of government suspicion and control that people seeking to get information out of the country have approached me. One such person, in a camp near the town of Kitgum, arranged to meet me in the back room of a sundries store:1

“I need your help. God has sent you to me. I have kept careful documentation. I have kept a diary for ten years. Everything is there. Names. Dates. You know about the mass grave under the tree by the parish compound. I know the commander who did this. I can give you the names of people in the ground.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to be my Charlie Wilson.”

“Who is Charlie Wilson?” (This was before the Hollywood movie on Wilson came out.)

“The man who campaigned in the United States on behalf of the mujahadeen in Afghanistan. He got Congress to recognize what was going on there. To give support.”

“But I am not a lobbyist. I do not know how to go about lobbying Congress. I am an academic. I write things. Articles.”

“Look at me. I cannot even make love to my wife. They tied a cord around my testicles and forced me to jump off of a box. They kept me in a room with two inches of water for eight days. I had no way to relieve myself except in a bucket in a corner, and they never emptied it. It overflowed. You know it overflowed. There was no way for me to lie down to sleep. Eight days. When my wife first came to the prison, they just said, ‘We do not know where he is.'”2

“If I write about you, won’t the UPDF be angry and come after you?”

“All I have is the truth. They have taken everything else. They can do nothing to me that they have not already done. I am not afraid of death. They have already taken my life. My only hope is in the truth.”

This is the dynamic of the context of intrigue: intimidation and desperation. If anyone dares speak out, government personnel move in to intimidate. When CBS Radio of Uganda reported on riots in Kampala in September 2009, the government-controlled Broadcasting Council shut it down and revoked its license, charging that the station was seeking to “mobilize and incite the public.”3 After Voice of Radio Lango radio hosted an April 2010 show with opposition presidential candidate Olara Otunnu, Museveni himself made several telephone calls to the station owner—who is also an NRM legislator—to “ask” that the station publicly apologize, which it did. On the show, Otunnu called for open investigations into the actions of all armed groups—including Museveni’s National Resistance Army (NRA), the precursor of the current UPDF government army—involved in the 1980-1985 bush war in Uganda. Otunnu also charged Museveni with enabling the conflict in northern Uganda. It was made clear that failure to apologize on the part of the station would lead to its closure and, perhaps, threaten the station owner’s future with NRM leadership. More recently—October 2010—the Uganda Revenue Authority’s Customs Department, under orders from an unnamed “another arm of the government,” seized boxed copies of a book critical of Museveni at Entebbe International Airport where they arrived for distribution in Uganda.4 A May 2010 Human Rights Watch report, A Media Minefield: Increased Threats to Freedom of Expression in Uganda, articulates the overall situation this way:

[There have been] increasingly arbitrary state attacks on the media as the ruling party faces more and more public and open criticism. Since the previous political campaigns in 2005, at least 40 criminal charges have been levied against journalists and talk show panelists. In some cases, these threats are overt, such as public statements by a resident district commissioner that a journalist should be “eliminated,” or a police summons on charges of sedition, incitement to violence, or promoting sectarianism for criticizing government action in a newspaper article. In many more cases, the threats are covert, such as phone calls—some anonymous and others from well-known ruling party operatives—intimating violence or loss of employment if a journalist pursues a certain issue or story.5

Because of the government intimidation, people, through desperation, approach persons like me to get the word out. To such people, my protestations that I am an academic, an academic theologian at that, are irrelevant. If truth is to be heard at all, then I, and people like me, must be key conduits for its dissemination.

This is the context within which I received further documentation of NRM wrongdoing. In a break in a conversation I was having with a man on Ugandan cultural matters, he asked whether I could take some documents to the United States for him. Back at the compound at which I was staying, I opened the document packet he had given me and made a follow-up call. I was leaving the following day, and wanted to be sure that this is what he wanted transported. Most of the documents were already available on the internet and so did not require transport in hard copy. Being on the web, they were also moot from a security standpoint, though government intelligence officers might not view it that way. The next day, in fact, intelligence officers descended upon the compound at which I was staying—which was the home of a religious community—and demanded to see the guest book and me. They had tapped our phone call. Community members later told me that the intelligence officers said, “We know that he had permission from Shaban Bantariza to go to the North, but now he is talking to dissidents.” In other words, they had been tracking me since I had first arrived two years earlier.

Fortunately, I had left before they arrived. Extrajudicial security forces have multiplied and grown under Museveni’s government. A Human Rights Watch document reports, “Official and ad hoc military, security, and intelligence agencies of the Ugandan government have proliferated, practicing illegal and arbitrary detention and unlawful killing/extrajudicial executions, and using torture to force victims to confess to links to the government’s past political opponents or current rebel groups.”6 Chief among the extrajudicial security and intelligence agencies are the Violent Crime Crack Unit (VCCU)—dubbed “the Black Mambas,” a breed of snake in Uganda, by the press—and the Joint Anti-Terrorism Taskforce (JATT). “Terrorism” is defined broadly to include “opposing the state.” “Sedition” is similarly broad and includes written or oral statements “aimed at bringing hatred, contempt, or disaffection” towards the President or the government. The extrajudicial security and intelligence units regularly take civilians into ungazetted—that is, not publicly listed, as required by the 1995 Ugandan Constitution—detention centers where torture is a regular practice.7 Again, Human Rights Watch:

Forms of torture in use in Uganda include kandoya (tying hands and feet behind the victim) and suspension from the ceiling of victims tied kandoya, “Liverpool” water torture (forcing the victim to lie face up, mouth open, under a flowing water spigot), severe and repeated beatings with metal or wooden poles, cables, hammers and sticks with nails protruding, pistol-whipping, electrocution, male and female genital and body mutilation, death threats (through showing fresh graves, corpses and snakes), strangulation, restraint, isolation, and verbal abuse and humiliation. Some of these practices have resulted in the death of detainees in custody.8

An informal survey of detainees who had been held in a center for “political” suspects found that ninety percent of them had been tortured.9

The judiciary is often powerless to do much about the security and intelligence units. In one of the most high-profile cases, the government charged Kizza Besigye, the main opposition candidate for the presidency, with treason during the campaign leading up to the 2006 election. The High Court released Besigye and the others being tried with him on bail, but before they could leave the building, members of the Black Mamba unit swooped in and rearrested and detained the men in military prison. The American analogy would be if George W. Bush had John Kerry arrested during the 2004 campaign for the U.S. Presidency, and then, when the Supreme Court released Kerry, a Special Ops team forcibly entered the courthouse and took him to Guantanamo.

I am not sure whether or not I would have been taken into custody for questioning if I had not left before the security officers arrived. One foreign scholar of Uganda whom I know was taken in for questioning during one of his research trips. Another had his computer smashed by security forces. I doubt very much that I would have been tortured. President Museveni has to balance competing aims. The first aim is to rule Uganda in perpetuity. To ensure this, he led—some would say forced—the change in the Uganda constitution to remove term limits to the presidency and has stacked the Electoral Commission with political friends. However, given his changeover from avowed Marxist to World Bank-supported “new breed of African leader,” he also has to appear sufficiently democratic to Western states. At one point, over fifty percent of the Ugandan federal budget came from foreign aid. It is now at about forty percent.10 Torturing a U.S. citizen is not in the NRM’s interest.

The United States and other Western countries for their part depend on Uganda—strategically located as it is with radical Islam-influenced Sudan to the north, chaotic Democratic Republic of Congo and rebuilding Rwanda to the west, and unstable Kenya to the east—as an ally and staging ground.11 The United States is loathe, therefore, to criticize the Ugandan government.12 The dominant account of Uganda and the conflict in the North is that the economic success of the former is due to Museveni’s enlightened policies and the tragedy of the latter is due strictly to the madness of Joseph Kony and the LRA. When Museveni had political opponent Kizza Besigye imprisoned during the 2006 campaign, some countries withheld aid to Uganda;13 the United States not only continued but increased aid at the time. There is little incentive on the United States government’s part to highlight NRM abuses. This is the international situation that Ugandans face if they dare to be critical of the government.

This also is the political context within which Ageno Komakec approached me with the document that I am now making available. The dynamic of intimidation and desperation forced her to position me as the one possibility for getting out evidence of what she held to be the truth. I can now turn to discuss the provenance of the document, which also goes towards supporting its authenticity.

The Specific Context and Provenance of the Document: A Tragic Love Story

Soon after Museveni’s victory in the 1980-1985 bush war, Virginia Kajumba became a clerical worker in the offices of the newly formed National Resistance Movement. She also was in love with an officer in the National Resistance Army, Major Okello Kolo, an Acholi. They talked of marriage. He wanted to move with her to his home area in northern Uganda. She resisted the suggestion. In the letter she sent him, she makes her case by citing the Book of Genesis on how a man must leave his mother and father—and thus his homeland—to join his wife. (The full letter is available for viewing at musevenimemo.org.) So that Kolo would know that Kajumba’s refusal to go to northern Uganda was based not on a lack of love for him but rather on a concern about the stability of the North—a concern rooted in reality—she sent with the letter a copy of a memo that she had seen, perhaps even typed herself, in the NRM offices, the memo that I am making public. When Ageno Komakec gave me a copy of the memo, she also handed to me a copy of Kajumba’s letter. It displays both her love for Kolo and her concern about what will become of life in the North under the Museveni regime. “I am sure that you were born for me and I for you…. For this reason I enclose herewith M7’s [Museveni’s] diabolical directive to his brother.”

When Major Kolo read the memo that came with the letter, he was livid. He then went to the home of a friend to vent his anger about Museveni, and Ageno Komakec was one of the persons present. Kolo vowed to quit the NRA; the friend warned him, “You don’t just quit the army. They don’t let you.” It is unclear from my sources whether Kolo formally resigned. What one source did tell me, however, is that he left Kampala and went to northern Uganda. It appears that he did not adequately mask his frustration with Museveni from others, however, because the NRM had another Acholi NRA officer, Fred Tolit, follow Kolo and, according to the source, have him killed. Tolit was one of the first Acholi officers from previous president Milton Obote’s Ugandan National Liberation Army (UNLA) to join the NRA. He later became the NRM’s director of military intelligence and has achieved the rank of brigadier general. According to my source, Tolit saw to it that the orders to kill Kolo were carried out successfully.

Virginia Kajumba’s warning to Kolo to burn her letter and the memo was prescient. “Read and burn it at once. If you allowed anyone to see it then buy a coffin for my body.” Kolo did not burn the memo or Kajumba’s letter. He and the friend made copies of both, with Kolo giving the friend explicit instructions to make the documents public “should something happen” to Kajumba and him. The friend feared losing his own life, but Ageno Komoakec later sought to fulfill Kolo’s instructions. The exact way in which the NRM found out about the stolen memo is not clear. Did someone see the original or a copy in Kolo’s possession and later tell NRM leaders? Or was it inferred from his words or actions that he either had the memo or knowledge of its contents?  Whatever else the government knew, it came to suspect Kajumba of having taken the document and shown it to Kolo. Some time after Kolo’s death, Kajumba, according to a source of mine, “was disappeared by the army.”

Ageno Komakec kept the document secret for twenty years. Making it public would place her own life at risk, and what she knew of the NRM’s response to Okello Kolo and Virginia Kajumba gave credence to her fears. Foremost, however, she wanted to be sure that all of the people other than herself who could be at risk by the disclosure of the memo had already died. I take both Kajumba’s willingness to risk her life to show it to Kolo and Komakec’s willingness to risk hers to show it to me to constitute two pieces of evidence that count towards the memo’s authenticity. Kajumba pleaded that Kolo not only keep the document secret but also burn it in order to protect her life. Now that Kajumba is long dead, Komakec has asked the opposite of me. She tried, without success, other avenues of getting the memo into public view before giving it to me to make it widely available. I told her that I would think about it, and I have.

Photo by Trocaire.  Creative Commons License 2.0.

 

Notes

  1. A notable exception is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s April 2010 report on the Ugandan Electoral Commission. See Milton Allimadi, “Clinton Issues Critical Report on Preparations for Uganda Elections,” Black Star News, April 27, 2010, http://www.blackstarnews.com/news/122/ARTICLE/6499/2010-04-27.html. Clinton offered a follow-up report in September 2010 that remained critical but offered some positive comments as well. See Tabu Butagira, “Clinton’s New Report Praises and Attacks Electoral Commission,” The Monitor, September 24, 2010, available athttp://allafrica.com/stories/201009240530.html. It will be interesting to follow the United States government’s response to the election. The U.S. Foreign Operations Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2010 directs Secretary Clinton to work with other countries to monitor both the preparations for the election and the election itself. Of course, monitoring elections by itself is not sufficient to assure the rule of law in a country.
  2. United States military personnel regularly carry out trainings in Uganda, and the last major offensive by the NRM/UPDF against the LRA was supported by seventeen United States advisors and $1 million in fuel. On U.S. advisory support for the UPDF attack on the LRA in the December 2008 “Operation Lightning Thunder” see Jeffrey Gettleman and Eric Schmitt, “U.S. Aided a Failed Plan to Rout Ugandan Rebels,” New York Times, February 6, 2009,http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/07/world/africa/07congo.html?ref=lords_resistance_army. “Operation Natural Fire 10” is a relatively recent (October 2009) joint exercise in northern Uganda where the U.S. trained military teams from Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi. See Kevin J. Kelley, “Uganda: Big U.S. Military Exercise for Northern Region,” The East African(October 12, 2009), available at http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=15641.
  3. Anders Sjogren, “Global Power Relations and State Formation in Uganda,” in Globalization, Imperialism, and Resistance, eds. Lars Lindstrom, Mats Warn, and Bjorn Beckman (Stockholm: PODSU, 2007), 35-58.
  4. Human Rights Watch, “State of Pain,” 4.
  5. Human Rights Watch, “State of Pain,” 4. See also Human Rights Watch, “Uprooted and Forgotten.”
  6. Human Rights Watch, “Open Secret: Illegal Detention and Torture by the Joint Anti-terrorism Task Force in Uganda,” April 8, 2009,http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2004/03/28/state-pain-0.
  7. Human Rights Watch, “State of Pain: Torture in Uganda,” 16, no. 4A, (March 2004): 4, http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2004/03/28/state-pain-0.
  8. Human Rights Watch, “A Media Minefield: Increased Threats to Freedom of Expression in Uganda”, May 2, 2010,http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2010/05/02/media-minefield-0.
  9. Charles Mwanguhya Mpagi, “Government seizes pro-Besigye book,” The Monitor, October 10, 2010, http://www.monitor.co.ug/News/National/-/688334/1029370/-/item/0/-/7en95rz/-/index.html. The book is Olive Kobusingye, The Correct Line?: Uganda Under Museveni(Milton Keynes: AuthorHouse, 2010).
  10. Museveni reopened CBS radio, a Bagandan station, in October 2010, in an effort to woo Bagandan votes. The Bagandan people had had a falling out with Museveni after he attempted to seize the Bagandan kingdom land
  11. So far, I have verified this story with two other sources. For more on the human rights abuses of the Ugandan military, see, Human Rights Watch, “Uprooted and Forgotten: Impunity and Human Rights Abuses in Northern Uganda,” Sept. 20, 2005, http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2005/09/19/uprooted-and-forgotten-0.
  12. I have also given this person’s name to Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the International Criminal Court, and other offices so that they can monitor his well-being in the event that he is identified by the government
  13. The countries that withheld aid were the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.

 

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Analyzing Matters Issue 3: Ethnography and Theology Peer Reviewed
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By Todd David Whitmore
Todd David Whitmore is Associate Professor of Christian Ethics in the Department of Theology and Faculty Fellow in the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame.