COLUMN ONE : Ambition and Dread in Uganda : The nation is struggling to escape its bloody past and become the pride of Africa. But a booming economy and moves toward democracy are shadowed by insurrection.

They can be intensely small, these skirmishes for Africa’s future. Like the duel between the cornerstone and the land mine in the red-dirt frontier of northern Uganda.

At an essential moment of their history, Ugandans are building the new pride of Africa--and simultaneously threatening to blow it up.

Uganda was a human slaughterhouse during the reign of Idi Amin, the bloodthirsty general who was the nation’s self-proclaimed “President for Life” from 1971 to 1979.

Today this small nation, just over half the size of California, has come to embody big hopes that Africa will outgrow its brutal history and triumph over its hardships.

A darling of development bankers and high-risk investors, Uganda enjoys one of the fastest-growing economies in Africa. Nine years of relative political stability and an eager embrace of Western open-market policies has revitalized agriculture and attracted new manufacturing and resource development.

The country is progressive in realms where Africa has been stubbornly backward, such as providing opportunities for women. And through a public education campaign that is both explicit and extensive, Uganda is forthrightly facing its AIDS crisis--one of the most tragic in all of Africa.

President Yoweri Museveni is internationally regarded as a pathfinder for a new generation of forward-looking African leaders.

But, for all that, these are nail-biting days for Ugandans, and for others whose optimism about the continent is all but exhausted. Uganda’s next moves may be as significant as any in its history: Can it devise a new political system to keep the nation moving forward? Can it contain a growing insurrection without sliding back into its awful past?

The fight for Uganda’s future can be witnessed just 75 miles from Gulu, itself a day’s drive north from the capital, Kampala. This is a landscape of rolling equatorial forests and scrub savannah, lowland swamps and dense agriculture. When people are clear of the roadways, baboons move out to catch the sun.

Most of this part of Uganda is bright red--the color of the dirt--and practically everything else is bright green, from banana trees to 10-foot-tall grass. The air is warm and clean and faintly tropical.

Near Gulu, the government and private investors laid a proud cornerstone last month for a $1-million, 60-bed tourist lodge near the Nile’s fabled Murchison Falls.

This gamble on Uganda’s future envisions “eco-tourism” growing into the nation’s No. 1 source of foreign exchange in about a decade. That’s if the world can be convinced that 7% annual economic growth, cheery pop music on the radio and contagious congeniality are the real Uganda, not the madness of tyrant Amin, whose clumsy brutality took the lives of hundreds of thousands, cost millions more their tranquillity and disfigured Uganda’s reputation throughout the world.

After all, today’s Ugandans reason, memories of Amin are receding, and this is the age of eco-tourism. Who wouldn’t want to visit the Nile at its source, see the Ruwenzori “Mountains of the Moon,” explore forests teeming with birds and alive with chimpanzees and gorillas?

Uganda claims to be ninth in the world in the diversity of its mammals. The country is home to 35% of Africa’s butterfly species and half its bird varieties. Some even envision yachting trips on Lake Victoria.

“Individual Ugandans may be poor, but we are liberally endowed with riches,” says Eric Edroma, director of national parks.

Since the reigns of Amin, and another savage dictator, Milton Obote, Uganda has enjoyed calm, but not quite peace. Today, Amin is in exile in Saudi Arabia and Obote in Zambia, but the countryside of Uganda still stews with trouble. That side in the fight for the nation’s future can also be found in the blazing sunshine and elephant grass near Gulu. Here in the north, disgruntled soldiers of Uganda’s past created a faux-religious rebellion now called the Lord’s Resistance Army.

From the start of Museveni’s presidency in 1986 these rebels, originally called the Holy Spirit Movement, have been an irritant. But now, they seem to be recasting themselves into an Islamic-supported insurrection. With a ragtag band of zealots, a kidnaped cadre of young fighting “slaves” and fresh weapons from Islamic supporters, they are spreading terror and death.

So Uganda’s tourism ministers and half its 50,000-member army are sometimes deployed side by side--even on the same day--in the northern region. And both find their abilities taxed by the ordeals of modern Africa.

This skirmish between Uganda’s ambition and dread occurs at a volatile moment, just as the country prepares for a six-month transformation from a revolutionary government to a democracy. Or to something less.

Within six months, Uganda is scheduled to adopt a new constitution that will define its structure of governance and to conduct nationwide elections for chief of state and Parliament. The expressed goal is to secure the gains Uganda has made since 1986 and add the framework for a lasting political system.

‘We Need Our Luck’

“Look how far we’ve come in nine years. Imagine if we had known peace for 30 years,” says Joseph Walakira, a Kampala worker and father of five. “. . . Now we need our luck. But we have not always been lucky.”

It is a hot afternoon on the frontier. On this day, the mango trees droop with such bounty that the air is moist with the scent of overripe fruit. Uganda is a nation usually blessed with rain and food.

Sixty young men, boys and girls line up at an army barracks for their daily bowl of maize and beans. They are not recruits, but survivors. Each tells of being kidnaped from home by the Lord’s Resistance Army.

The girls were forced to work as nurses and camp hands. The boys and young men say they were trained with AK-47s and were being made into reluctant soldiers in the cause of Joseph Kony, leader of the rebellion. Kony is said to claim a direct link to God. Mostly, though, he is portrayed as a vicious crackpot.

“They told us we were going to be their fighters. They warned us we should not escape--they would kill us. . . . I was conscious I was made a slave,” says 20-year-old Otto Bosco. He recalls watching three youngsters clubbed to death for defiance.

In April, Bosco escaped. The government says 3,000 other young abductees also have made their way home. How many remain in forced service is unknown.

In the untamed bush land outside Gulu, the tsetse flies have retired and the mosquitoes have awakened. The moon is orange as it rises through the thorn trees. Cartridges glint in the night light. Ugandan army Brig. Gen. Chefe Ali, with a droopy eyelid and a fierce mustache, is camped here.

Ali commands half of the country’s army in Uganda’s campaign to eradicate the rebels. He is asked: Why has such trouble come to Uganda?

Pure ambition, Ali replies. “Uganda, or for that matter all of Africa, is where everybody thinks they can be president.”

When the general assumed command of the campaign almost a year ago, the rebels were down to a few hundred men. Today, thanks to enslavement and recruitment, they number at least 1,500.

Recently, the rebels attacked a remote trading post and killed 200. They also have begun planting land mines in highway potholes.

“We must make their game a dangerous game,” Ali says, his voice flat with menace. “. . . You can ask me what is the main issue in putting down the rebellion--it’s killing them en masse. That’s what we must do, and we will do within a matter of months.”

Strained Sudan Ties

But Uganda fears that it is up against more than just religious fanatics who want to forbid bicycling, eating white-feathered chickens and working on Sunday. In April, Uganda broke diplomatic relations with the Islamic government of Sudan, accusing its neighbor of supplying arms, training and political indoctrination techniques to the rebels. Suddenly, the Lord’s Resistance Army announced it would forbid working on Fridays and the eating of pork.

“If you had asked me a couple of years ago, I would have said this rebellion was about over. But now, with a third player coming in, I’m afraid it will take years,” says Betty Bigombe, minister of state for pacification of the north. “Naturally, as it goes on, it weakens the government.”

Museveni insists there is no military threat to his government. A former guerrilla commander who rose to power by insurrection, he said in an interview that Sudan “merely has given a blood transfusion to the patient who will die eventually.”

Noisy Rebel Bands

Still, violent unrest erodes Uganda’s reputation for progress and calm. And the trouble is compounded by the sudden emergence of noisy rebel bands in other regions of the country, one of them alleged to be acting in the name of Amin.

The downward spiral has become maddeningly familiar in Africa: Energy and resources are diverted, development is stifled. Citizens grow impatient and resentful. Opposition to the status quo increases. Politicians crack down ever harder. Generals demand a larger share of the budget. Secret police kick down doors and carry people into the night.

Some worry these seeds could sprout again in Uganda.

With the drafting of the new constitution this summer and the scheduling of its first “open” national elections for December, Uganda appeared on the road to what developed nations hoped would be full democracy. But in recent weeks, Museveni has decreed that the country is not ready to permit opposition parties.

The popular president says such parties will inflame ethnic and regional rivalries, as happened in small, nearby Burundi when it rushed into multi-party democracy and tore itself apart. For the next few years, Museveni argues, Ugandans will be better off voting between candidates not aligned with parties. He says democracy should come in steps.

In a rare public rebuke, U.S. Ambassador E. Michael Southwick said in May that Museveni was retreating.

“Despite the remarkable progress that Uganda has achieved, the United States now notes with concern that the stage is being set for the entrenchment of a system of government which falls seriously short of full democracy . . .

“The history of Uganda, like the history of other countries, shows the undesirable, often tragic, consequences of governments which do not allow political competition and human rights.”

Some Ugandans feel they are being pushed too fast with statements such as that.

Fox Odio-Oywelowo, a 26-year-old lawyer, explains: “Those of us who grew up hearing only the sound of the gun, we feel we’ve come a long way, really. We think what we have now is better than anything we have known. And until we’re certain the alternative is better still, we can’t let it go.”

For emphasis, he repeats himself, “For all the period I’ve been alive, I have never known peace until now, you see?”

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Uganda Fact Sheet

* Population: 19,859,000

* Ethnic groups: Bantu, Nilotic, Nilo-Hamitic, Sudanic tribes

* Principal languages: English (official), Luganda, Swahili

* Religions: Christian 66%, Muslim 16%

* Chief crops: coffee, cotton, tea, corn, bananas, sugar

* Resources: copper, cobalt

* Monetary unit: shilling

* Life expectancy: men, 37 years; women, 38

Source: World Almanac