By Charles Onyango-Obbo
The last few days brought some very contradictory insights about the Uganda People’s Defence Forces (UPDF).
First, a Human Rights Watch (HRW) report alleged that African Union peacekeeping forces in Somalia (Amisom), mainly elements from UPDF and the Burundi army, have gang-raped women and girls as young as 12 and traded food aid for sex in the troubled Horn of Africa nation.
Secondly, was the revelation that Ugandan troops in Amisom provided the intelligence that helped US Special Forces kill al-Shabaab chief Ahmed Godane in a devastating air strike over a fortnight ago.
In the first series of comments about the airstrike on Godane’s convoy, the Americans spoke of it having been the result of years of hard work and sacrifice by its security services, without giving credit to anyone else.
By weekend, though, Uganda claimed its piece of the action, saying it provided the US with “key intelligence” on Godane’s whereabouts. The French also claimed credit.
In the end, the US said nothing about Paris’ role, but in an advisory to its citizens on the weekend counter-terrorism operation in Kampala that is reported to have “countered” an al-Shabaab attack, the US embassy said:
“We…caution US citizens of the possibility of retaliatory attacks in Uganda by al-Shabaab in response to the US and Ugandan military actions in Somalia last week which killed al-Shabaab leader Ahmed Godane.”
The UPDF and Uganda’s intelligence services are generally good at these kinds of things…but only if they are not distracted by in-fighting, or squandering their energies in local partisan politics chasing around President Museveni’s real and imagined enemies.
It is one reason the country’s security services are usually inefficient a year before election (as in the July 2010 World Cup finals night when two al-Shabaab attacks killed nearly 80 people in Kampala). The 2011 election was seven months away.
In the year after elections, there is usually a fall-out in the security services, as officers and soldiers who showed “disloyalty” to Museveni are neutralised, and resources are poured into ensuring that Kizza Besigye doesn’t start some big trouble to protest the fact that he was robbed at the ballot box.
After a year, things settle down. Thus in August 1998 when al-Qaeda-linked bombings laid waste to the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, the Ugandan attack was stopped cold in tracks. Rather ruthlessly too. Why? It was two-and-a-half years after the 1996 election.
What about the rapes? In its first years, especially when it was still the National Resistance Army (NRA), the UPDF punished rape severely – it was not uncommon for firing squads of the offending soldiers to take place near the scenes of the crime.
While, at the policy and rhetorical level, the UPDF leadership still takes a tough line against rape, in reality, the standards on the ground are lax.
One reason could be corruption that, even in otherwise well-run operations like the UPDF has in Somalia, has seen crooked officers stealing rations from troops and selling them and guns to warlords. The military leadership in that way loses moral authority over foot soldiers, who in turn resort to the medieval practices of treating the “enemy’s” womenfolk as part of the bounty of war.
This problem was at its worst in the disastrous DR Congo adventure, which degenerated into plunder and pillage. When the soldiers returned home, nearly half of the “returnees” were Congolese women with the soldiers’ children, chicken, and other domestic animals!
It is also why the kind of operation UPDF ran in DRC would not have been able to pin point the location of a Godane. By contrast, the UPDF contingent in Somalia is far more professionally managed than the DRC adventure was.
One senses that the model the Commander-in-Chief uses have changed. He tried to micro manage DRC and failed miserably.
To avoid the mistakes of DRC, three changes happened. One still has to be loyal to get a top leadership position in the UPDF or intelligence services. This time, however, two other elements were required. One, you need to be trusted by Museveni. Thirdly, you need to be at least averagely competent…and quite a few of the new crop of officers are smart and efficient.
There are no former army cooks running operations in Somalia, but there are still bad apples who create the moral hazard that, in turn, leads to aberrations like the UPDF rape of Somali women.
Though not the subject of this column today, something interesting has been happening. By adding trust, and competence to good old loyalty, Museveni might have created not just a better security machine, but also one that is more beholden to him giving him more control. He is like the man who was thrown down a hole, and found a winning lottery ticket at the bottom.
Mr Onyango-Obbo is editor of Mail & Guardian AFRICA (mgafrica.com). Twitter:@cobbo3
Source: Daily Monitor
