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From: wolda002@umn.edu
Date: Tue Sep 28 2010 - 02:20:50 EDT
Tuesday, Sep. 07, 2010
Balancing Counterterrorism and Democracy in Uganda
By Ioannis Gatsiounis / Kampala
U.S. President Barack Obama took office promising to make good governance
the cornerstone of his African policy, and Uganda came to typify the shift
in priorities. Repeated attempts by President Yoweri Museveni to meet with
Obama were denied, apparently in response to Uganda's sluggish pace of
political reform ahead of presidential elections in February. President
Obama also directly challenged Museveni to lift his support for a draconian
bill persecuting gays.
But just as the 9/11 attacks drew the U.S. closer to autocratic Arab
regimes whose security services were needed to help fight al-Qaeda, so have
the July 11 bombings of two Kampala nightspots by the Somalia-based
al-Shabab militant group reminded the Obama Administration of Uganda's
importance in the battle against extremism in the Horn of Africa. And that
strategic interdependency challenges the U.S. democracy agenda. (See a
video of the Lord's Resistance Army hunting children in Sudan.)
"Washington is now forced to do a balancing act," says Livingstone
Sweanyana, executive director at the Foundation for Human Rights Initiative
in Kampala. "If the U.S. is going to work with Museveni on al-Shabab, the
U.S. can't afford to see or treat him as an unfriendly force."
U.S. officials insist that democratic reform still figures at the top of
Washington's agenda in Uganda. But as Museveni's National Resistance
Movement (NRM) has used the July 11 terror attacks as a pretext to shrink
the political space, Washington's critique hasn't kept pace. Three days
after the bombings, parliament passed a bill enabling phone-tapping. Weeks
later, nationwide demonstrations demanding an independent election
commission were violently suppressed on grounds that they could be
exploited by terrorists. And the media have since been banned from
commenting on the twin bombings. (Can Uganda forgive the Lord's Resistance
Army?)
Following the crackdown on protests calling for an election commission,
U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Johnnie Carson did
say that security concerns were no justification for squelching dissent.
Curiously, however, the previous day he told a reporter on the sidelines of
an African Union (A.U.) summit in Kampala that Museveni had been "elected
openly and transparently in free and fair elections," contradicting a 2006
State Department assessment that the polls had been "marred by serious
irregularities." (See pictures of Uganda.)
The about-face may be driven by growing desperation. At the same A.U.
summit, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said that "ending the threat of
al-Shabab to the world will take more than just law enforcement" and that
Washington was therefore going to work closely "to support the African
Union's [military] mission in Somalia [AMISOM]." Washington is looking to
boost current troop levels from 8,000 — most of them from Burundi and
Uganda — to 20,000. The problem is that few member states other than
Uganda have volunteered to step up. Museveni, a former rebel leader, is
reportedly prepared to mobilize that many troops on his own and has been
leading calls to switch AMISOM's mandate from peacekeeping to peace
enforcement.
"The U.S. is depending on Uganda to play a role in Somalia to rein in
extremist forces," says James Tumusiime, managing editor of the
opposition-leaning Observer weekly. "And in light of the attacks, the U.S.
is probably beginning to think they're better off with a stable,
functioning style of leadership in Uganda — someone who's not necessarily
a democrat but a guy in control — rather than support change for
democracy's sake."
U.S. diplomats in Kampala say much of their democracy-promotion work is
low-key. One example is their success in persuading Uganda to put
voter-registration lists online to allow the validation of voter
identities. USAID invested around $2 million on democracy and governance
programs last year, and that figure is expected to hit $10 million this
year. Officials argue that security and democracy are mutually reinforcing.
But support for the key opposition demand of an independent election
commission appears to be waning, says Wafula Oguttu, spokesperson for the
leading opposition party Forum for Democratic Change (FDC). Recalling
Washington's silence after the recent suppression of demonstrations — in
which 80 people were arrested and some claimed to have been tortured —
Oguttu says, "The U.S. likely would have spoken out against that prior to
al-Shabab." Now the opposition is anxiously awaiting U.S. Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton's quarterly report on Uganda, due late this month,
after Congress ordered the State Department to tightly monitor Uganda's
election process. "A lot of bad things have happened since May," says
Oguttu, and he expects the report to reflect that fact.
The last such report, issued in May, irritated NRM leaders, but prompted no
constructive action. Indeed the party's primary polls on Monday were marred
by confusion and allegations of ballot-stuffing. Opposition groups hope
that Washington will use its leverage as one of Uganda's leading aid donors
to press for change. But they fear the U.S. lacks the resolve to press the
issue, leaving Uganda's election process heavily skewed toward the ruling
party.
Challenges to the legitimacy of the electoral process raise the danger of
large-scale political violence, analysts warn. Last September, riots in
Kampala left 17 people dead after the king of Buganda kingdom was prevented
by Museveni from visiting a nearby district.
"We have shown restraint so far," says the FDC's Oguttu. But if the
mechanisms for free and fair elections fail to materialize, he says, "we're
going to have a little bit of trouble." He predicts the youth will grow
more vocal and could target the destruction of election-commission offices.
Meanwhile, the opposition is mulling the option of boycotting February's
elections. Whatever the case may be, he says, "expect fireworks." And a new
round of political turmoil, of course, is unlikely to help promote either
democracy or security.
See TIME's Pictures of the Week.