COMMENT: Dishonoring Uganda’s refugees

The aim of that intervention was to replace the ruling Islamic Courts Union with a more secular government. But the routing of the ICU, which was led by relative moderates, backfired badly, by radicalising the group’s youth wing, al-Shabaab. Today, al-Shabaab, one of the world’s most frightening radical Islamist terrorist groups, controls much of the Somali countryside. The group has also attacked shopping centers, restaurants, and schools in neighboring countries, including Nairobi’s Westgate Mall in 2013 and Garissa University in northeastern Kenya, where 417 students were killed in 2015.

Finally, Uganda is home to hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where conflict has been raging since 1996. That crisis began when the Ugandan and Rwandan armies invaded and toppled the aging dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko – and then invaded again two years later, with the aim of toppling Mobutu’s successor, Laurent-Désiré Kabila.

Mobutu was no angel; while his people languished in poverty, he decorated his lavish jungle palace with Murano glass chandeliers, quaffed pink champagne, and built a private airport that could land the Concorde. But after his ouster, life for the Congolese people became immeasurably worse, as Ugandan- and Rwandan-backed militia groups, including the notorious March 23 Movement, wreaked havoc on the country. Ugandan military officers, including members of Museveni’s family, have also been accused of looting billions of dollars’ worth of gold, diamonds, and other natural resources from Congo’s eastern provinces. The number of casualties – not just from the violence, but also the collapse of health services and other consequences of state failure – is probably in the millions.

What Guterres and Uganda’s donors need to understand is that Museveni is a trickster, like the hare in a classical African folktale. Since coming to power by force more than 30 years ago, he has cooperated with the West’s War on Terror, and championed the neoliberal economic reforms pushed by the World Bank. These pro-Western policies have earned him near-total impunity, along with over $20 billion worth of military and development assistance.

Because of corruption, the aid money provided to Uganda has done little to improve the wellbeing of the Ugandan people, whose rates of illiteracy, mortality, and poverty surpass those of many neighboring countries. According to US government surveys, Uganda’s children are among the world’s least likely to complete primary school, and are nearly twice as likely as children in Kenya and Rwanda to die.

While Museveni and his cronies preside over what one American diplomat has called an “all-you-can-eat corruption buffet,” the West’s continued support for him prevents the region’s people from controlling their own destinies and fuels further crises.

Guterres’ decision to co-host the refugee event in Kampala with an author of the calamities in the refugees’ homelands dishonored the victims he hoped to assist. Uganda needs diplomatic pressure to stop stoking conflicts, not another opportunity to profit from Western naiveté.

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Helen C. Epstein teaches at Bard College. Her book, Another Fine Mess: America, Uganda and the War on Terror, will be published in September.

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Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2017.
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