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From: Berhane Habtemariam (Berhane.Habtemariam@gmx.de)
Date: Mon Dec 13 2010 - 08:46:33 EST
How M7 plays off neighbours in a bid to open America's wallet
By Julius Barigaba ( <javascript:void(0);> email the author)
Posted Monday, December 13 2010 at 17:46
The brutal revelations about Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni that continue
to emerge from global whistleblower WikiLeaks' release of US diplomatic
cables have helped to confirm what the public has always suspected, but kept
only in the rumour mills - that while Museveni is Washington's chief agent
in the region, he also goes to great lengths to scheme up ways to wring
money out of the United States.
Even the president's handlers concede that the latest cable on the Ugandan
leader coming into the public domain as it did, is going to cause problems
between Kampala and its neighbours. A diplomatic embarrassment, to put it
mildly: The cable reveals Museveni's fears.
"I am in two minds about it. Some of the things this man has published, like
the US army killing unarmed people and two Reuters journalists are sinister
things that the world should know about. But about Uganda?
It's a bad idea for those things to be published; they were sent in private,
but what's going to happen now is that they will affect relations between
nations," said John Nagenda, senior media and public relations advisor to
the president.
Australian born journalist Julian Assange's Wikileaks website had earlier
published live footage of an Apache combat video in the Iraq war. On July
12, 2007, a US gunship killed innocent civilians and journalists in what the
WikiLeaks described as "collateral murder."
But as the juicy leaks stream in, geopolitical analysts are reading another
twist into the saga: Museveni the strategist has always played these games
with Washington in order to get money to fund his military adventures in the
region.
Undiplomatic games
In a June 13, 2008 meeting with Jendayi Frazer, former US Assistant
Secretary of State for African Affairs, Museveni confessed his fears that
Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi would assassinate him in the aftermath of his
falling out with his Libyan counterpart over the latter's fancy project to
create a United States of Africa.
The leaked cable also reveals Museveni's frustrations with leaders in the
entire Great Lakes Region; Democratic Republic of Congo President Joseph
Kabila and Sudan's Omar al-Bashir feature prominently.
Museveni also described troubled Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe as an
embarrassment to African liberation leaders, while Eritrea's Isaias Afewerki
is cast as the chief supplier of arms to Somalia's militias.
In the wider scope of the region's diplomacy and geopolitics, this
development is surely going to isolate the Ugandan president as an agent of
the Americans as his peers now know what Museveni's game is - to cast his
peers in Washington's eyes as assassins, weak and funders of regional
instability, Imam Kasozi, a geopolitical analyst says.
"When Museveni wants money from the West he plays the assassination card,
even if it's not true that Gaddafi wants to assassinate him. Museveni has
dug his own grave because now Gaddafi may have a motive to fund his
opponents," said Mr Kasozi.
Mr Nagenda said there is almost nothing that can be done, apart from
desperately poring over the penal code to see whether Kampala can nail the
world's whistleblower. "What can you do? It's already out there," Mr Nagenda
told The EastAfrican last week.
"We will see if we have laws in the penal code to charge that man if he came
here. It is after the deed is done that we start wondering what can be done.
But laws should be in place to safeguard national secrets."
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