More on Uganda: The LRA, Civil-Military Affairs, and Why Due Diligence isn’t a Bad Idea

Last week President Obama authorized the deployment of approximately 100 combat troops to Uganda to help regional forces capture or kill senior leaders of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a terrorist militant group accused of widespread sexual enslavement and responsible for thousands of deaths. The president’s argument was one of furthering American national security interests, and it was not wholly unexpected.

The U.S. has been helping Uganda and other African nations counter the LRA for several years; we’ve provided local militias with training and equipment and have established ongoing humanitarian and civil affairs operations using our military there. One of my colleagues even served one of these deployments to Uganda as a civil affairs specialist with the U.S. Army Reserves. Her posts on her deployment are fascinating and a must-read, and for this reason Uganda has been one country that D&S has followed closely. Indeed, there is much to be said about Uganda and the role of the U.S. military in long-term humanitarian relief. Yet that is another post (and one I am looking forward to!) for another time, because today something else truly takes the cake. It may seem frivolous, but to those of you who, like us, have been following the situation in Uganda, it is certainly news (and cringe) worthy.

On Friday, ”Obama Invades Uganda, Targets Christians,” was the title of a segment on Rush Limbaugh’s radio talk show. If you can’t glean it from the name, Mr. Limbaugh spent the segment lambasting Obama’s military operations against the LRA as persecution of Christians.

 Lord’s Resistance Army are Christians.  It means God. . . . They are fighting the Muslims in Sudan.  And Obama has sent troops, United States troops to remove them from the battlefield, which means kill them. . . . So that’s a new war, a hundred troops to wipe out Christians in Sudan, Uganda, and — (interruption) no, I’m not kidding.  Jacob Tapper just reported it.

He then, and I’m not kidding, starts quoting from the LRA’s stated objectives (“to remove dictatorship and stop the oppression of our people,” for one) in order to back up his argument. This isn’t a blog where we usually comment on bloviating domestic political personalities, so I’d suggest heading over to FP Passport for a great recap and reaction, including some more information about the LRA and their atrocities.

Undoing the Lord’s Work

Joseph Kony is a murderous thug who likes to hang around with little boy soldiers and little girl sex slaves. It’s worthwhile for US troops to help eradicate his brutal Lord’s Resistance Army.

New Report Challenges U.S. Military’s Use of Aid in Africa

Should the U.S. military use humanitarian and development aid to further its security interests?

As a U.S. Army Civil Affairs specialist, my whole job is based on the premise that the answer to this question is “yes.”  Civil Affairs soldiers use development projects and aid distributions – mostly on a small scale – to achieve a number of objectives, such as improving relations between the U.S. military and a local population, or enhancing the capacity and credibility of the host nation government. Continue reading »

Wear the Flag: Bear the Expectations

Last week my 5-person U.S. Army Reserve team arrived at the site of a devastating landslide in Bududa, Uganda. At the request of the Ugandan Government, we were diverted from our normal mission in the northern Karamoja region (where we have worked for 6 months) to respond to the disaster. While the U.S. Embassy had allocated $50,000 to the Ugandan Red Cross for relief efforts, we ourselves had no resources or funding as such to contribute upon arrival. Our mission would be a limited one: we were to support our counterparts, the Ugandan People’s Defense Force, in our capacity as civil-military relations specialists, and to determine opportunities for future military-to-military disaster support.

But if there is one thing that we have learned in Uganda, it is that it is difficult to limit expectations or manage perceptions – especially in uniform. This is not Iraq or Afghanistan: our ACU uniform does not help us blend in with the landscape or with thousands of other soldiers. We are often the sole representatives of the U.S. government (and certainly the powerful U.S military) in the areas where we work – and by this virtue and others, we are a spectacle everywhere we go. This does not put us in danger, but it means that we must limit the time we spend on the ground assessing a potential project, for example, so that our presence does not start to raise expectations as well as eyebrows. Continue reading »

Freedom, the Rule of Law, and a Walk in Kampala

A friend here in Kampala recently commented to me that in Uganda you find freedom without the rule of law, and in Rwanda you find the opposite.

Today I may have a chance to explore that. The police are deployed throughout the city in anticipation of political protests sparked by the decision to keep the CBS radio station closed. The government shut down the station last year – along with several other media outlets – as part of its response to the riots that shook the capital and left 27 dead. The coalition of opposition parties, which is organizing the attempted political actions today, will also be protesting the continuation of the leadership of the highly controversial Electoral Commission.

Since I have been in Uganda I have seen cartoons in the press that have characterized the police as out of control and inclined towards violence. One of them depicted a voter about to grab a helmet to participate in the 2011 elections. Certainly Uganda has many challenges with regard to the rule of law, police discipline being one to which Ugandans are frequently exposed. The police also have a reputation among them of being highly corrupt. Moreover, the police are often irrelevant: mob justice is common here, and foreigners are even advised not to stop if they cause an accident on the road…for their own safety. Up in the region where my team works, Karamoja, crimes as serious as murder are often still dealt with through local elders and traditions (usually involving reimbursement of a certain number of cows) rather than through the Ugandan criminal justice system.

The rule of law is flouted at higher levels too: official corruption, tales of exorbitant spending, and stories of “ghost” soldiers, workers, and even clinics (with “ghost” budgets) routinely make the headlines here in the non-government sponsored papers. The fact that these stories and cartoons are a regular facet of life here is certainly indicative of a level of press freedom and independence. But the decision to keep CBS closed and other tales of media harassment demonstrate that this freedom has limits.

For example: I cannot speak intelligently about Uganda’s experience with freedom, rule of law, etc. in comparison to Rwanda, but Ugandan journalist Andrew Mwenda can, and did in an article in his Independent magazine.  It is one of the most scathing and interesting articles I have read since I have been here. He writes in response to a letter from a Ugandan politician that criticizes him for taking a positive stance on the “authoritarian” regime in Rwanda. “Colin,” he answers, “democracies do not rob their own citizens the way we are witnessing in Uganda.”

After reading his opinion piece I instinctively googled, “Andrew Mwenda death threat.” This lead me to an article in which I learned that Mwenda has been held at gunpoint by government agents, charged with 20 criminal violations including sedition, and has purportedly already survived several plots against him. Still, Mwenda says in the article, “If Museveni were like Idi Amin (the infamous Ugandan dictator), I’d already be dead.”

Now there’s the power of positive thinking. I’m off to see what the papers and the police are up to on the streets of Kampala.