Friends For Peace In Africa

Joint military exercises and training are underway in Kitgum district between the armies of five East African armies and the United States Army. The exercises, code-named "Natural Fire 10", started on Friday Oct. 16, 2009 and are to last ten days.

They involve the armies of Uganda, Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and the United States. The joint U.S.-East African military exercises were first conducted in 1998 in Kenya and the 2009 phase is the tenth, hence the code-name "Natural Fire 10."

These joint military exercises between the U.S. and East African armies point to a bleak 2011 for Uganda.

The Uganda Record assumes, as do most people in Uganda today, that the 2011 general election is going to be rigged as were the 1996, 2001, and 2006 elections.

With the largest and most influential tribe, the Baganda, griping and seething with resentment at President Yoweri Museveni, he now finds himself in exactly the situation that the first and second UPC governments did between 1966 and 1971  and 1980 and 1985.

Now, more than ever before, Museveni must rig the election, if only as an act of clutching at straws in a desperate bid to stay in power.

Just before the 2006 general election, the United States embassy in Kampala invited 60 observers to watch the voting and compile a report on the election. Although the NRM party candidate an incumbent, Yoweri Museveni, was declared the winner and sworn-in for another five-year term as president, this 60-man American team of election observers did not release and has never released their report to the public.

They chose to remain neutral, neither speaking out against the outcome of the election, nor endorsing the outcome.

All this was before Uganda was plunged into a political and security crisis in Sept. 2009 when riots broke out in the central and politically sensitive region of Buganda and the Buganda kingdom clashed with the central government.

These riots --- in most towns and townships of Buganda except Entebbe --- demonstrated what the American election observers, the seven judges of the Supreme Court of Uganda, the media, the opposition political parties, and most public opinion had come to agree on in 2006: the election was won by the FDC president and presidential candidate, Col. Kiiza Besigye.

Now that the riots had taken place and there was a clampdown of the media and the political opposition, it was obvious that Museveni cannot win the 2011 election, even if, in this case, the definition of "winning" includes rigging.

Shortly after the 2006 election, the Chief Justice, Benjamin Odoki, told the former European Union delegate to Uganda, Stig Illing, that the election was clearly rigged but, according to sources, Odoki said the Supreme Court judges did not wish to risk violence and bloodshed by a Museveni refusing to accept defeat.

The fact that this is the way Museveni is viewed by respectable people and foreign diplomats --- a vindictive and violent man who would set the country on fire and order his army to shoot at crowds after losing an election --- speaks volumes about the kind of leader Uganda has.

The next question is, what does the U.S. government think of what lies ahead for Uganda and what will it do?

President Barack Obama, ever the idealist politician, has made clear his administration's criticism of African leaders who continue to drag their country by the collar and flout any rules and laws.

However, Obama has also been humbled and forced to contend with reality in the nine months today, Oct. 20, that he has been in office.

The United States launched two simultaneous wars on Afghanistan in Nov. 2001 and Iraq in March 2003, in response to the Al-Qaeda terror attacks on New York and Washington DC in Sept. 2001.

Whatever the moral justification of these wars, they have both resulted in a haunting return to the nightmare of the 10 year Vietnam War of 1965 to 1975 for the United States and the Afghanistan of 1979 to 1989, in which a superpower engages armed militia burrowed deep in terrain they know well and who then go on to fight a war of attrition that saps first the political, then the military will of the superpower.

As if Iraq and Afghanistan are not nightmare enough, there is a new centre of instability called Pakistan where for the last two weeks, it seems, practically every day has brought reports in the world news of bomb blasts, suicide explosions, and a brazen attack on the Pakistan army's headquarters. And Pakistan has nuclear weapons.

Then there is another, equally unsettling source of disturbance to America: Somalia and lately, Yemen.

Too preoccupied with Afghanistan and Iraq, too worried about the deteriorating situation in Pakistan, bomb blasts that often erupt suddenly in India, and that other, ever-present threat in the form of a nuclear-armed Iran (not to mention the memories of U.S Army Rangers being dragged, dead, through the streets of Mogadishu in 1992 and a Black Hawk combat helicopter being shot down by Somali militia men), Washington has no appetite for another engagement in Somalia.

Into this have stepped Uganda and Burundi, and (discreetly), Ethiopia.

This is the climate that Presidents George W. Bush and now Barack Obama had to operate in. The United States is confronted by the sorts of urgent military and geopolitical anxieties that they will do anything to get themselves out of --- if only they know how.

Uganda's deployment in Somalia has thrown a lifeline to Washington and Washington has no intention of letting go of the services of this sub-contractor. That anxiety governs all the calculations by the U.S. government and the American embassy in Kampala.

Reports of corruption in the NRM government, the violation of human rights, the failure to deliver basic services to its people, these all the U.S. embassy sees and knows.

However, that is not a strong enough reason to sever their long-standing ties with Museveni; definitely not at this time when he, as their sub-contractor in Somalia, is more valuable to America than America is valuable to him.

Museveni can visit China and obtain loans and weapons, but the United States cannot, for all sorts of complicated reasons, find any other country to expose its troops to the attacks of the Al-Shabab militia in Mogadishu and hold the Red Sea for America as it engages in the Middle East and South-Central Asia.

The bottom line, then, is that for all his abuse of power and the corruption of his regime, Museveni remains a vital asset to Washington. So are such client states in East Africa as Kenya, Rwanda, and Burundi and, to a lesser degree, Tanzania.

The joint U.S.-East African military exercises in Kitgum are mostly logistical and humanitarian rather than tactical, but they serve to remind Washington that these five client states are important assets as America goes about its unending "war on terror."

The more we see any joint military exercises or training between the Ugandan army and the U.S. army, the more we must keep in mind that America is not going to let go of this useful relationship with Museveni without an overwhelming reason.

The only reason they can let go of it is what Ugandans themselves decide to do. If they rise up and sustain demonstrations for more than a week and even up to a month, with the country coming to a total standstill, the U.S. will adjust to this new reality and, choosing stability over loyalty to Museveni, will side with the insurgent population.

The Ugandan opposition, Buganda kingdom, the Ugandan news media, and the Ugandan electorate had better keep this in mind and start planning now the ways they will react in 2011 when --- no longer if --- the election is rigged and Museveni is declared president yet again.

Museveni is already preparing for the possibility of other riots and a major national uprising, probably sponsored by Libya.

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