Uganda Enjoys Optimism After Years of Slaughter

After five years of war, the bush has closed in on the muddy roads coiling through the countryside of the Luwero Triangle, and the elephant grass is growing up through the bones.

These were the killing fields of Uganda, and the people, trickling slowly back to their abandoned farms and villages, have taken the human skulls from the ditches and dumping grounds and arranged them, for all to see, on roadside boulders and makeshift tables.

A muddy road runs straight through the town of Nakaseke, a line of nearly empty buildings on either side of the road, weeds growing up in front of the buildings, and maybe now 30 to 40 people in residence. These people have returned, hesitantly, in the last three months, and still step gingerly through the tangled growth and the wreckage the soldiers left behind. The bones are everywhere.

The killing stopped in Luwero at the end of January, when guerrilla leader Yoweri Museveni, head of the National Resistance Army (NRA), finally succeeded in a five-year struggle to take political control of Uganda. In effect, Museveni and his fighters ousted two governments--that of President Milton Obote, who took power in a disputed election in 1980, and that of a group of army generals who toppled Obote last July.

Although Museveni comes from the southwest of Uganda, this area, which became infamous in international human rights reports as the atrocity-ridden Luwero Triangle, was where Museveni’s battle was won, though not without a huge price. Thousands of people in this area, including scores in Nakaseke, were killed or driven from their homes by Obote’s soldiers, the Uganda National Liberation Army (UNLA), in one of the harshest counterinsurgency campaigns in African history. The Obote government was convinced that the people here were Museveni sympathizers.

By the end, of course, they were.

The Luwero Triangle, an arc of land covering about 2,100 square miles northwest of the capital city of Kampala, is an area of fertile farmland and small towns once populated by about 750,000 people, most of them members of the Baganda tribe. Most of those who were not killed fled the area or took refuge in the deep bush. Virtually all the towns in the region were emptied. Houses were looted and destroyed.

Operating out of the Bombo Barracks, the army’s command center in the area, a company of National Liberation Army soldiers billeted themselves in Nakaseke for four years. They took over the largest building in town, a three-story brick hotel building.

Now that they are gone, the few people who have come back to Nakaseke have taken the skulls of the people who died at the hands of those soldiers and arranged them on the porch of the building. There are 114 skulls there, arranged in five rows, the empty eye sockets staring out toward the empty road. Leg bones, still bound by bits of wire, are stacked behind the skulls.

Alice Nanyonga is a 35-year-old mother of seven who has returned to the small shop in Nakaseke that she left in 1982, after her husband was killed by a land mine. The soldiers who came when she left took all the stock in the modest store, and even ripped out its light fixtures.

‘We Want to Remember’

“So many people were killed in this place,” she said. “We want to remember. We want to make a small hut for the bones. If you have seen them, it makes you cry. But we want to have them here, because then a daughter can look and say, ‘My father is there.’ Or a son can look and say, ‘My mother is there.’ We want the children to remember the people who are lost.”

Uganda seems more at peace now than it has at any time since the rise of the dictator Idi Amin in 1971. In Kampala, the capital, the gunfire that used to rip through the night has stopped. The National Resistance Army soldiers who man the roadblocks on the routes out of town are polite and sober. Discipline is the watchword of the National Resistance Army soldiers, whose commander (and now president), Museveni, has promised a “new era” in Uganda, an end to tribalism and, above all, an end to the killing that made Uganda the nightmare of black Africa for so long.

“We are very hopeful now,” said Dr. Ben Kawooya, who is now the deputy medical superintendent of Mulago Hospital in Kampala. Kawooya returned to Uganda after nearly 10 years abroad because he believed that Uganda, finally, “has a chance for peace and development.”

“We want this government to succeed,” he said.

Feelings Echoed

Those feelings are echoed by Western diplomats and representatives of international agencies, some of whom have long experience in the country.

“We think that this government has a real chance,” an American diplomat said.

An element of caution is mixed into the optimism, however, for the government still has severe problems to face and a clear direction is not yet apparent in ideology or economic affairs.

The leaders of the National Resistance Army, from Museveni on down, like to identify the base of their support as a “movement” (the National Resistance Movement, the civilian arm of the NRA) that promotes ideals of social and economic justice. But most ordinary Ugandans would probably be content to join any movement that promised peace and a return to some kind of economic normalcy.

Plan for Villages

The National Resistance Movement plans to organize village “resistance councils” whose elected members would send representatives to district and national councils and thus provide the voice of the people in the governing of the state. Since the villages are only beginning to elect their resistance councils, the effectiveness of the system has yet to be tested.

Meanwhile, some of the higher-ranking members of the movement or the National Resistance Army seem anxious to keep alive the mystique of “the bush,” the crucible that forged a hard core of about 4,000 fighters who provided the base for Museveni’s successful guerrilla campaign. (By the end, his army had more than 10,000 fighters.) The National Resistance Movement has organized a “school for political education” in which men who were not in the war can be indoctrinated by the experience of military training in the bush.

In economic matters, suspense continues to build in Kampala in anticipation of the first budget to be issued by the new government. High-level sources say the finance minister has had two drafts of the budget rejected because they seemed to follow too closely the Western-oriented policies of the International Monetary Fund. Insiders say the minister has one more chance to come up with an acceptable budget.

Currency Overvalued

The most urgent economic problem is the overvaluation of the Uganda shilling, which is trading in the flourishing black market at less than one-third its official value. Government officials speak frequently of their desire for a “strong Uganda showing,” which some observers read as a stiff resistance to a devaluation of the currency.

The country’s economic problems are illustrated by the Ugandan coffee industry. More than 80% of Uganda’s foreign exchange income is earned from coffee. As it stands now, Uganda coffee growers receive less than 20% of the world coffee price when they sell to the official Coffee Marketing Board. By contrast, if a coffee grower can manage to smuggle his coffee across the border to Kenya, the same coffee brings about 60% of the world price.

Western economists have pointed out the discrepancy to the Ugandan government, which has so far indicated that it will try to control the problem by placing tighter controls on smuggling.

Bureaucracy Blamed

The Western economists argue that the problem can be alleviated by the adoption of a realistic exchange rate and by doing away with the 1,500-man bureaucracy of the Coffee Marketing Board, which absorbs nearly 17% of the country’s coffee earnings.

Western economic experts believe that Museveni now has the popular backing to take difficult economic decisions that could have a lasting beneficial effect on the country. Such opportunities are rarely taken by fledgling governments in Africa, even when they assume power on a wave of popular support, because they are often painful at first and new governments are anxious to demonstrate that they will bring instant improvement over their predecessors.

The Museveni government has pledged to cut down on the size of the government payroll, but the ax has not yet fallen. Instead, three new ministries have been added, making a total of 33 ministries for a government of 14 million people. Government-owned corporations are similarly overstaffed.

2 Planes, 1,400 Workers

Uganda Airlines, with only two aircraft, has a staff of 1,400, including an overseas reservations office in Peking, to which it has no flights.

As in many African countries, there is strong sentiment in Uganda against the policies of the International Monetary Fund. Ugandans point to the IMF presence in Uganda during the Obote regime and argue that it did not stop corruption or end the economic woes.

Other economists, however, contend that the economy was in better shape in those years than at any time in the last decade and that, in the end, it was a problem of politics--not economics--that brought Obote’s downfall.

No matter how Museveni guides the economy in the coming weeks, the country is faced with a massive job of repair. Roads, schools and hospitals have been neglected for years and are in desperate shape. Already there are signs of rejuvenation. Street crews are out in Kampala, slowly resurfacing some of the main streets. On the roads leading out of town, children fill potholes with dirt and then stand beside their work hoping to cadge contributions from passing motorists. It is a stopgap, grass-roots system of repair, but it seems to be effective.

For most Ugandans, the greatest blessing of the new regime is the end to the killing. That good will alone may carry the Museveni government through some difficult times and hard decisions.

“No one can know what it was like,” said Daisy Kisitu, whose family ran the Nakaseke hotel that was taken over by the Uganda National Liberation Army forces. She walked around the building, showing a visitor the killing places and the obscene drawings the soldiers left behind, scrawled on the walls with bits of charred firewood.

“In the beginning,” she said, “they took the people behind, in the bush, to kill them. By the end, they just killed them here and let them lay. It was death, everywhere. But now it is over. We are coming back to life.”