Disarming Uganda: International gun-control nonsense…
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>
>Disarming Uganda: International gun-control nonsense
>
>By Dave Kopel, Paul Gallant, and Joanne Eisen
>
>More gun control, more genocide. That’s the lesson of the 20th century
>in
>many nations, including Uganda. Yet the United Nations is again trying
>to make it impossible for Ugandans to protect themselves. Once again,
>the
>U.N. is supporting repression rather than human rights.
>
>”The Ugandan government has established a national body to combat the
>proliferation of illicit small arms into the country,” announced the
>U.N.Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs on September 24.
>
>The NFP (the Ugandan National Focal Point, an agency that coordinates
>Uganda’s relations with multinational bodies) will be responsible for
>fulfilling the country’s obligation, pursuant to the Nairobi
>Declaration, to reduce “the demand and supply of illegal firearms” in
>Uganda. According
>to the March 2000 Declaration, illicit small arms have had “devastating
>consequences . . . in sustaining armed conflict and abetting terrorism,
>cattle rustling and other serious problems in the region.” To the
>contrary, it has been disarmament which has been the prime facilitator
>of
>state-sponsored terrorism in Uganda.
>
>Occupying the northeast corner of Uganda are the Karamojong
>pastoralists, a marginalized minority of about 100,000 people who wander
>
>with their
>cattle from one pasture to another. Comprising three percent or less of
>the
>total population of Uganda, the Karamojong belong to a larger group of
>African
>peoples called Nilo-Hamites, some of whom live across the borders in
>Kenya and Sudan. The remainder of the Ugandan population are Bantus.
>About 90
>percent of the country’s inhabitants live in rural areas.
>
>At the heart of the Karamojong pastoral lifestyle is the cow. Through
>its milk and blood (animals are bled, especially during dry seasons when
>
>they don’t produce milk), and occasionally its meat, the cow provides
>the
>major source of dietary protein. Wealth is demonstrated, and local
>political power
>commanded, by the size of one’s cattle herd. In terms of raw purchasing
>power, two to three cows will buy one AK-47.
>
>In light of the absence of a strong central government, and the easily
>transportable nature of bovine assets, it should come as no surprise
>that cattle rustling (with its concomitant social violence) has been a
>traditional Karamojong activity.
>
>Low-quality firearms were first introduced to Karamojong society in the
>late 19th century by ivory hunters and traders, but were not generally
>available until the fall of Idi Amin. The British (who ruled Uganda from
>
>1894 to
>1962) were mostly successful in keeping firearms out of the hands of the
>
>indigenous population.
>
>Uganda’s first prime minister, A. Milton Obote, perpetuated British
>policies, including the gun-control laws. But pastoralists across the
>borders to the north and east had access to modern firearms, which
>facilitated raids on Ugandan herds. While Obote’s armed police were
>ineffectual in protecting the Ugandan pastoralists, they were
>nevertheless quite diligent about thwarting the Ugandans’ acquisition of
>
>firearms.
>
>Like most African leaders of his generation, Obote led an independence
>movement premised on democratic self-rule, but installed himself as
>dictator for life. In 1966, he suspended the constitution. On December
>19, 1969,
>Obote used a failed assassination attempt to justify imposing a
>nationwide ban on the lawful possession of firearms and ammunition. Of
>course,
>government officials and other favored individuals were exempt.
>Accompanying the ban on non-government guns was a ban on all political
>parties,
>except Obote’s government party, the Uganda Peoples Congress.
>
>In 1970, a new Firearms Act replaced the 1955 British Firearms
>Ordinance.
>The law imposed national firearm registration and gun-owner licensing
>under exceedingly stringent requirements. In practice, the law was used
>to
>make it illegal for anyone to have a firearm, except persons deemed
>politically
>correct by the Obote dictatorship.
>
>A year later, army chief of staff Idi Amin wrested control of the
>country in a military coup. The ensuing genocide of the Amin regime was
>perpetrated
>against a populace whose primitive armaments did not approach the
>effectiveness of the murderous government. By the time the genocide
>ended in 1979, the estimated toll was 300,000 slaughtered Ugandans, the
>Karamojong suffering a disproportionately higher percentage, at about
>30,000
>tribesmen.
>
>In response to Amin’s murderous rule, the Karamojong began producing
>their own guns, fashioning gun barrels from the steel tubing of metal
>furniture. These homemade guns were then used tactically to acquire
>better and more
>powerful ones by attacking isolated police outposts where acquisition
>would
>not be terribly costly in terms of tribal lives. When the Amin
>government
>was toppled and his army fled, military firearms were traded, sold, or
>lost along the way to local tribesmen, who also found easy access to
>now-deserted weapons depots.
>
>Firearms thus became plentiful and readily available throughout
>Karamoja. Inter- and intra-tribal raiding (which included cross-border
>raiding
>from Kenya and Sudan), previously fought between warrior herdsmen armed
>with
>spears, was now fought by pastoralists many of whom were armed with
>AK-47s. This disturbed a centuries-old balance between Ugandan tribes
>that had
>been evenly matched. The imbalance fostered the perception of an
>increase in
>violence, permitting Ugandan leaders to use the promise of reducing
>violence as the carrot for disarming the now-powerful, albeit poor,
>minority.
>
>Obote, who was fortuitously out of the country when Amin took control
>and thus escaped being killed, was restored to power in 1979, after Amin
>
>attacked Tanzania and was toppled by the Tanzanian army. Obote again
>began to attempt to disarm the Karamojong. His efforts were forcefully
>repelled. Obote was too late, for the Karamojong had learned that cows
>and guns
>are equally indispensable: One needs a gun immediately at hand to
>protect
>one’s herd. The most heavily armed tribes fared the best.
>
>Obote stole the 1980 election, driving his political rivals into
>rebellion. One of Obote’s rivals, Yoweri Museveni, “went to the bush
>with only 26
>guns and organised the National Resistance Army (NRA) to oppose the
>tyranny
>that Obote’s regime had unleashed upon the population” – as Museveni’s
>website puts it. Defeating Obote and seizing power in 1986, President
>Museveni
>reconstituted his rebel forces as the new national army. Like his
>predecessors, Museveni attempted to subdue the Karamojong. The army’s
>tactics did not win them any friends. In Africa Studies Quarterly,
>Michael Quam explains that “the soldiers misbehaved, bullying people and
>
>looting
>stores, and generally convincing the Karimojong that their only
>protection
>from men with guns lay in keeping guns themselves.” The Ugandan
>government’s coercive disarmament efforts met with so much resistance
>that Museveni
>let the matter drop in 1989.
>
>Then the United Nations began its program to disarm everyone,
>everywhere, except for governments. On December 2, 2001, Museveni
>announced a
>voluntary gun surrender program in Karamoja. Promises were made for
>building
>materials, farm implements, schools, new wells, and capital investments,
>
>all contingent on a successful outcome of the gun surrender program. But
>
>funds in Karamoja have a habit of being diverted before the ink has
>dried on
>the check, and government assurances were met with skepticism. As John
>Robert Otto, an elder Kotido tribesman, said, at least “with the gun one
>
>would
>be sure of the next day’s meal.”
>
>Museveni also promised trained, armed militias (Local Defense Units, or
>LDUs) and army troops for Karamoja. As Uganda’s government-owned New
>Vision newspaper reported:
>
>The Army has assured the Karimojong that the UDPF Uganda People’s
>Defence Forces, Uganda’s army] would protect them against inter-tribal
>raids and
>external aggression from the Turkana of Kenya during and after the
>disarmament exercise. ‘Don’t worry about the cross-border raids by the
>Turkana because we have found the medicine to that problem. Just bring
>the guns. We know what to do if they disturb you,’ the commanding
>officer of
>the 405th Brigade in Kotido, Lt. Col. Patrick Kiyingi, said. . . .
>
>When the voluntary gun surrender expired on February 15, 2002, and only
>a disappointing 7,676 guns (out of a conservatively estimated 40,000)
>were
>collected, Museveni turned up the heat. He gave the army free rein to
>switch roles from guardian to terrorist, and the army launched a
>”forcible
>disarmament operation” in Karamoja to get the rest of the guns. Yet
>despite the risk of imprisonment, the remaining gun-owners refused to
>disarm.
>
>The UPDF went on a rampage, beating and torturing Ugandans, and raping
>and looting at will, all the while using firearm confiscation to justify
>
>the
>violence. On March 21, 2002, Father Declan O’Toole, a member of the Mill
>
>Hill Missionaries in Uganda, and his companions were executed by UDPF
>soldiers because O’Toole asked the army to be “less aggressive” in the
>disarmament campaign. The murderers were apprehended and their death
>sentence was carried out within days, before they could appeal it – and
>also before they could reveal who had given them the order. Just one
>week
>after O’Toole’s murder, New Vision reported on the death of an expectant
>
>mother who “died of injuries sustained when a soldier kicked her in the
>stomach
>during forceful disarmament.”
>
>Museveni’s answer was to blame the Karamojong, whose torture by the army
>
>was the basis for O’Toole’s complaint. According to an article in New
>Vision, Museveni “said the best way to stop such incidents in [the]
>future is
>for the Karimojong to hand in their guns to eliminate any justification
>for
>the UPDF operations in the villages.”
>
>But the Karamojong know that security lies in their own hands. In remote
>
>Karamoja, when you discover your cattle being raided and your wife being
>
>raped, there is no 911 system to call. Indeed, what exists there is a
>barely functioning phone system, described as “poor and unreliable”.
>
>Those who had credulously surrendered their guns were not rewarded with
>tranquility, but instead found themselves especially vulnerable. As New
>Vision had earlier admitted, “Most of the people whose cows were taken”
>in a raid in the recently disarmed Bokora district, “had handed in their
>
>guns
>to the government in the on-going disarmament exercise.”
>
>By May 2002, reports of fierce resistance from the remaining armed
>Karamojong began to trickle out, despite government attempts to suppress
>
>knowledge of that resistance and of the army’s brutality. The Catholic
>Church charges that thousands of residents were displaced from Karamoja
>after their homes were torched by UPDF troops in the disarmament
>campaign.
>By mid-July, the total number of confiscated guns had reached 10,000 -
>only about 25 percent of the expected total.
>
>Now, however, in addition to suffering from cross-border raids from
>Kenya, from other local Ugandan tribes, and from an oppressive standing
>army,
>the partially disarmed Karamojong face an armed invasion by the Lord’s
>Resistance Army (LRA), an insurgency formed two decades ago north of
>Uganda. Based in Sudan, the LRA, under the leadership of Joseph Kony,
>have
>regularly ravaged the Ugandan countryside west of Karamoja, and
>terrorized the
>people of Uganda. Their activities have increased of late. The LRA, one
>of
>numerous movements that came into existence in opposition to Museveni,
>aims to
>overthrow him, and alleges that he ascended to power through the help of
>
>many
>of those same Rwandans who would ultimately perpetrate Rwanda’s
>genocide.
>
>To help check LRA incursions to the west, Museveni launched Operation
>Iron Fist in March 2002, an aggressive campaign that allowed him, with
>permission from Sudan (which has historically provided a safe haven for
>the LRA),
>to cross the border and take the fight to Kony’s base camps. But
>Museveni
>needed more soldiers there, and he began to redeploy the army as well as
>
>many Local Defence Units west and north – and out of the Karamoja
>region.
>
>Some of Kony’s LRA rebels found relative safety in the void left by
>departing Ugandan troops. They also found easier pickings from a
>partially disarmed countryside. Reports of LRA atrocities in Karamoja
>included
>burning, looting, and castration (after which the men were left to bleed
>
>to death). Even so, the LRA claims to be a Christian organization.
>
>The assertion of firearm-prohibitionists that fewer guns lead to less
>violence has not been the case in Karamoja. Even without recorded
>statistics, it has been admitted by many that “insecurity” has increased
>
>despite – or perhaps because of – disarmament efforts. The
>government-controlled press in Uganda acknowledges that the Karamojong
>are now “purchasing more guns to replenish those either voluntarily
>handed
>[over] or forcefully recovered by the Government.”
>
>Because of the need for Ugandan troops to battle the LRA, the government
>
>of Uganda has temporarily suspended the disarmament program in Karamoja,
>
>although first deputy prime minister Eriya Kategaya promises that “the
>disarmament exercise would, however, resume as soon as peace comes to
>northern Uganda.”
>
>The only uncertainty about that next initiative is when, not if, since
>the Nairobi Declaration calls for full involvement by the U.N., and
>specifically for the U.N. “to draw up appropriate programmes for the
>collection and
>destruction of illicit small arms and light weapons.” And whenever the
>U.N. gets down to the business of civilian disarmament, it pursues that
>goal
>relentlessly, no matter what the human or economic costs.
>
>In an address to the African Conference on the Implementation of the
>U.N. Programme of Action on Small Arms in March 2002, U.N.
>under-secretary
>for Disarmament Affairs, Jayantha Dhanapala, stated: “The threats posed
>by
>these[small] arms jeopardize . . . the protection of women, children,
>and
>innocent civilians everywhere. . . . We must ensure that the global
>edifice of controls over small arms rests on a foundation of solid
>’grass roots’
>support.”
>
>Events in Uganda demonstrate that Dhanapala’s claims run exactly
>contrary to reality. It was disarmament that facilitated genocide by Idi
>
>Amin, and
>it is the new disarmament campaigns which have brought such terrible
>suffering
>to the Karamojong.
>
>The U.N. disarmament vision is for two, three, many Ugandas, all over
>Africa and the world. In Uganda, “disarmament” is a U.N. euphemism for
>war on
>the people’s right to protect themselves from predators, including
>predatory
>governments, and if the people lose that war, then the next war may be a
>
>war of genocide.
>
>Like the Saudi’s funding to spread Wahabbi teachings of totalitarian
>assaults on people of diverse religious faiths all over the world, the
>U.N. disarmament campaign is a global attack on human rights. The result
>
>is
>widespread murder by governments and by terrorist groups, and the
>suppression of human rights.
>
>This op-ed was originally published on National Review.com on December
>11, 2002.