Monitor Online | Charles Onyango-Obbo
ANALYSIS: The two generals have fought themselves to a draw
The Kampala government and Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army rebels have agreed a ceasefire, and the possibility of ending the 20-year northern conflict (now Africa's longest active war) seems likely - though history teaches us to wait before we declare it over.
This is as good a point as any to ask what the two generals, Kony and President Yoweri Museveni, have achieved. Even, more crucially, what impact this war has had - and will have - on Uganda.
Museveni and Kony's publicly stated goals in this conflict are certainly not the real objectives they sought in the northern war. Museveni stated variously that his government wanted to restore the rule of law, and end impunity by the "old backward forces".
Museveni failed to introduce the rule of law in the north, and the inability of the army to comprehensively defeat the LRA meant that the rebels continued to terrorise Ugandans in the region for most of the last 20 years. Furthermore, it didn't help that in the first 10 years or so of the rebellion, the UPDF too was guilty of some of the most gruesome human rights abuses.
Kony failed to take power, and therefore remained as far away from introducing rule by the 10 Commandments today, as he was when he started his war. Today, though, Uganda is a multiparty democracy. Whether Kony had a role in forcing Museveni's hand will be debated for a long time to come.
There are those who believe that the war in the north gave Museveni the perfect excuse to keep a lid on competitive politics and have a one party state for 20 years. Other analysts, however, think that the failure to achieve a quick military victory against a rag tag rebel group undermined the credibility of Museveni's rule-by-the-military plans, turned into his Achilles heel, and forced his regime to find new sources of legitimacy in opening up the political space.
The unintended consequences of the conflict, and what many suspect to be the private agenda of the two warriors, however, are the areas where the long-term effects will be felt.
For Museveni to consolidate the victory that he gained as head of the rebel NRA in 1986, the colonial-era myth that the people of northern Uganda were "natural warriors" who couldn't be defeated by, as someone once put it, "the feeble cattlekeeping, matooke-eating" southerners needed to be destroyed. It was a myth, anyway, so it was always easy for anyone who set out to do so to smash it. However, it needed to be done in dramatic and very public fashion "for all to see for themselves".
In a particularly instructive episode in the early years of the conflict, inside sources say Museveni met with senior army officers to discuss the wider dynamics of the rebellion. An officer at the meeting said the people of Acholi were fighting, because they felt the NRM was threatening "their great civilisation."
That was waving a red flag in front of Museveni, who allegedly promptly asked: "Oh, the Acholi have a great civilisation? So where are their great ruins and monuments?"
In any event, critics argue, for Museveni it became important to "break the back of the north", and making rebellion very
unattractive.
The turning point in the conflict was probably in January 1987, when the UPDF (then the NRA) killed over 350 rebels of the LRA forerunner, the Holy Spirit movement led by Alice Lakwena, at a single bloody battle at Corner Kilak. Some critics of that war still argue that Corner Kilak was a massacre of innocent non-combatant civilians.
Nevertheless, the scale of the slaughter brought to the world the magnitude of the conflict, and offered a good glimpse of what was to come in later years.
In strict military terms, beyond that point, there was nothing that the Museveni government would gain. Indeed a year later, the government signed a peace deal with the more regular armed group fighting in the region, the Uganda People's Democratic Movement, and four years later the war in the Teso region ended too.
However, factors beyond Uganda's borders kicked in. The war in southern Sudan intensified, as with the end of the cold war, a new "enemy" in the form of "Islamic fundamentalism" emerged. And with the collapse of the Haile Mengistu military dictatorship, a new "frontline" to prevent the march of "Islamic fundamentalism " into central Africa and southwards in East Africa emerged.
This brought renewed western, particularly American, support for the Sudan People's Liberation Army, and Uganda and post-Mengistu Ethiopia became important "frontline" states against the "fundamentalist" threat. Uganda and Ethiopia therefore became the SPLA's regional quartermasters.
The outcome for Uganda and Ethiopia, however, were different. Uganda had the LRA, so Khartoum supported it in retaliation and as a continuation of its war against the SPLA. Ethiopia didn't have an LRA, so it didn't suffer the consequences that Uganda did.
Indeed, in a rare moment of frankness years later, Museveni did acknowledge that if political mistakes hadn't been made inside Uganda, Khartoum wouldn't have had an LRA to exploit.
What were some of these mistakes? When the NRM took power in 1986, it promised multiparty elections in 1990. As 1990 approached, it became clear that the government's priorities had changed.
Having done nothing to write a new constitution for four years, it announced the formation of a Constitution Review Commission in 1990. It then gave the excuse of the absence of a new constitution, among others, to postpone the elections it had offered to hold.
However, already the elections for the lower Resistance Councils, and the interim Parliament, the National Resistance (NRC), had created pressure to differentiate between the "good" and "bad" people, to use the language of the period. The "bad" people were the multipartyists (in the south and west), and those who were associated with past armies and leaders (in the east and north). The "good" people were the NRM supporters.
Evidence of this shift towards a hard line is that the ban and criminalisation of political parties' activities came in 1992.
Before that, their activities had merely been suspended.
The result of these developments is that the government took a retrogressive view of the north, which resulted into a deep sense of alienation that Kony fed on. With a new godfather in Khartoum, the nightmare that was to become the LRA rebellion was complete.
Therefore as the elections for the Constituent Assembly (CA) drew closer in 1994, and the first Betty Bigombe-mediated talks with the LRA were virtually in the bag, the need to rally the rest of the country around the "old backward forces" (read the north) was simply too tempting. At that point, the LRA was a local affair, its links with Khartoum not as deep as theywere later to come.
President Museveni abruptly scuttled the talks, accusing the LRA of using the negotiations period to re-organise and resupply.
Whatever the truth, the rhetoric about the "return of the primitive terror of the past" was upped. With the wounds of conflict barely healed, a frightened country closed ranks around the NRM as the" protector", ensuring it a majority in the CA, and allowing it to dictate the constitution it wanted (at that time, the NRM fancied presidential term limits).
The northern bogey had become the most potent electoral drug, and like addicts, Museveni and the hard-line elements in the NRM just returned to smoke more of it during the presidential elections in 1996, and again in 2001.
Three other developments elsewhere were also to eventually add to the big impact of the conflict on the north. First, in October 1990 a big section of the NRA, "deserted" as the Rwanda Patriotic Army to start the war by Rwandese refugees to return to their homeland.
Secondly, by the early 1990s, Aids had taken a big toll on the NRA, and Museveni spoke openly about the disease as the leading threat to national security.
Thirdly, disillusionment with corruption, general incompetence, and the human rights abuses by the NRA was creating a growing pool of resentment, and given the political opposition a new cause that gave them a kiss of life.
The first two factors created a case for rebuilding the army, and therefore increased defence expenditure. The third factor bred the need to politicise the army, as a weapon against a growing civil opposition. And because of corruption, an illicit door was opened for war profiteering.
The Kony rebellion therefore became a political necessity. One, it helped the big push for increased defence expenditure.
Two, it allowed for the creation of ghost soldiers and other scams from which corrupt officers profiteered. Three, it opened a back door for defence money to be diverted to fight off the NRM's and Museveni's opponents.
These outcomes are probably not what Kony wished for in his wildest dreams. They meant that the war against him - both as a military and political effort - would always be badly fought. They allowed him to up the stakes, force the government's hand and end up with outrages like the squalid internally displaced persons camps. Early this year, at nearly 1.6m, the IDP camps in northern Uganda were the largest in the world. That became an international embarrassment for the Museveni government.
Among other things, it ensured that the north would remain an anti-Museveni region, a fact that was to be exploited by Forum for Democracy leader Dr Kizza Besigye in 2001, and perhaps more so in February this year.
The war against Kony handed Museveni's rule its biggest blemish. It helped stoke the anti-northern prejudice, which the NRM exploited to its electoral advantage. But in so doing, Museveni held on to power at a very high political price. Without the northern rebellion, he would probably still be president - at only half the price. Now, whatever the rest of his presidency-for-life brings, his legacy is in tatters.
Just like happened with the late UPC supremo and former president Milton Obote in Buganda after he ordered the attack of Kabaka Mutesa's palace in 1966, and deposed the monarch, antipathy toward Museveni has become part of the DNA of most people from the north who have lived through the hell of the last 20 years.
The length of this conflict was a mixed bag for Kony too. It ensured that, unlike 1994, the terms of the end of the conflict today are international, and therefore the environment for negotiation is better.
His deal with Khartoum, and therefore the ability to survive in southern Sudan, ensured that the UPDF would never definitely defeat him in battle. That allowed him to live to negotiate the current deal, and he can claim that for all the horrible things that have happened in Acholiland, Museveni never broke its people's back.
But if somehow the war forced the Museveni to open up, then Kony was unable to take advantage of the return of multiparty politics. Even as he negotiates, he must continue to hide because the International Criminal Court has indicted him as a war criminal.
Also, because with time electoral politics has grown, there is no juicy position - and groceries - that Museveni can give Kony as part of a settlement.
If you aren't in either Museveni's or Kony's shoes, you can only conclude that at best the two men have fought themselves into a barren draw. The north-south divide, is as deep as it was 20 years ago.
If any of them ever really wanted a democratic society, they are further away from achieving it. For today, the military and security services, and the gun culture, are even more entrenched in Uganda in ways that are harmful to civil politics.
And, according to knowledgeable sources, the government's real agenda for post-northern Uganda, is a recipe for futureconflict. For starters, they allege that the thinking in Museveni's inner court is that the IDPs in Teso and Lango should go back home, but only a few of those in Acholi.
The thinking, the sources say, is that the IDP camps be turned into "urban" areas, and most of the residents should live there. It is a model, ironically, that seems to be inspired by what has happened in the settlements along the Kampala-Gulu, set up by the people who fled the war in the north. They have established small thriving shantytowns where they live and trade, and only go further from the road, not to live in scattered villages.
It would seem one intention of this is not to recreate viable communities in the villages, because they would potentially Make possible future mobilisation for a fresh rebellion.
Secondly, and cynically, in several parts of the north, most extensively in Acholi, IDPs have allegedly sold off their lands at knockdown prices to military entrepreneurs, speculators, and politicians. Acholi, then, could become the next frontier of the big Ugandan land scramble - and possibly its largest population of landless people. That is an explosion combination.
If either Museveni or Kony thought he was sowing mustard seeds in the north, he's wrong. What's growing is poison ivy.
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