29. In 1992 the LSA changed its name to the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). For this period, see Behrend, Alice Lakwena, chapter 10; Robert Gersony, The Anguish of Northern Uganda (Kampala: USAID, 1997), 20–35; Sverker Finnström, Living with Bad Surroundings: War and Existential Uncertainty in Acholiland, Northern Uganda (Uppsala, Sweden: Uppsala University Press, 2003).
30. The Kakwa sit astride the triple border between Uganda, Zaire, and the Sudan. They are equally at home throughout the region, regardless of formal citizenship.
31. See Kirsten Alnaes, “Songs of the Rwenzururu Rebellion,” in P. H. Gulliver, ed., Tradition and Transition in East Africa (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), 243–272. For a detailed history of the movement up to 1986, see Arthur Syahuku-Muhindo, “The Rwenzururu Movement and the Democratic Struggle,” in M. Mamdani and J. Oloka-Onyango, eds., Uganda: Studies in Living Conditions, Popular Movements and Constitutionalism (Vienna: JEP Books, 1994), 273–317.
32. Jean-Claude Willame, Banyarwanda et Banyamulenge (Brussels: CEDAF, 1997), 71. Marandura had been one of the 1964–1965 Simba leaders in South Kivu.
33. See chapter 2, p. 67.
34. New Vision, June 18, 1994. This was a local effect of the general decomposition of the FAZ rather than a planned operation.
35. Radio Uganda, in BBC Summary of World Broadcasts (henceforth BBC/SWB), September 2, 1994.
36. Agence France Presse dispatch, Kampala, August 30, 1994. There were still seventeen thousand Ugandans in northeastern Zaire who had fled there at the fall of Idi Amin in 1979.
37. On August 25 a grenade was tossed into the White Rhino Hotel in Arua, killing one and wounding four; on August 30 a pickup truck got blown up by a mine near Gulu, killing eight and wounding ten. Accusations kept flying back and forth between Kampala and Khartoum.
38. The personal accusation is probably false but relies on real facts: in 1979, as Amin’s troops were retreating, a number of Muslims were killed in the Mbarara area as revenge for Muslim domination during the dictatorship.
39. This relates to an obscure episode of the 1981–1986 civil war. It seems more likely that the Nyamitaga massacre was committed by Obote troops fighting the UFM, a guerrilla group that was a rival of the NRA and operated in the Mpigi area.
40. The Uganda Muslim community was in a state of permanent upheaval due to factional infighting; see G. W. Kanyeihamba, Reflections on the Muslim Leadership Question in Uganda (Kampala: fountain Press, 1998). By 1994 there were at least four main factions vying for the potentially lucrative Arab-funded leadership of the Muslim community.
41. Prince Badru Kakungulu was then the uncontested leader of the Uganda Muslim communities, Baganda or not. Interviews with Princess Elizabeth Bagaya, Kampala, November 1997, and with Professor Abdu Kasozi, Kampala, March 1998.
42. See Gérard Prunier, “The Uganda Monarchic Restorations,” in Gérard Prunier, ed., Uganda Monarchies in Transition (unpublished ms).
43. See, for example, the Memorandum of Detailed Grievances against the National Resistance Government, December 30, 1996. Museveni is accused of having deprived Ugandans of democracy, of being Rwandese, of having murdered Burundi president Melchior Ndadaye, and of having killed three hundred thousand innocent civilians during the bush war of 1981–1986.
44. Interview with ADM members, London, April 1999 Kabaka Yekka was the ultramonarchist party of the 1960s that precipitated the confrontation with Obote without having the means to win it. For a short and lucid analysis of this period, see I. K. K. Lukwago, The Politics of National Integration in Uganda (Nairobi: Coign Publishers, 1982).
45. For an overview of twentieth-century Islam in Uganda, see A. B. K. Kasozi, The Spread of Islam in Uganda (Khartoum: Oxford University Press, 1986); The Life of Prince Badru Kakungulu Wasajja (1907–1991) (Kampala: Progressive Publishing House, [1997]).
46. Author’s field notes, Uganda, 1996–1998.
47. For a broad (but quite pro-NRM) view of Ugandan society since 1986, see the four volumes edited by Holger Bernt Hansen and Michael Twaddle, Uganda Now (1988), Changing Uganda (1991), From Chaos to Order (1994), and Developing Uganda (1998). All are published by James Currey Publishers in Oxford.
48. Interviews with ADM-ADF cadres, London, April 1999.
49. The majority of the fighters came from eastern Uganda and were recruited among the Basoga, Bakedi, and Bagisu tribes. But there were also Banyoro and Baganda. The northerners were very few since northern enemies of Museveni would tend to join either the WNBLF or the LRA.
50. For its origins and development, see Muhammad Khalid Masud, ed., Travellers in Faith: Studies of the Tablighi Jama’at as atransnational Islamic Movement for Faith Renewal (Leidan: Brill, 2000).
51. See S. Simba-Kayunga, “Islamic Fundamentalism in Uganda: The Tabligh Youth Movement,” in Mamdani and Oloka-Onyango, Uganda, 319–363.
52. Given the interstate tension between Sudan and Uganda, Sudanese help for the Muslim radicals tended to be channeled through Pakistani or Bangladeshi intermediaries. Thus in November 1997 Mohamed Izz-ed-din, a Bangladeshi national who was director of the Uganda branch of the Islamic African Relief Agency, was deported after being accused of using his NGO as a cover for recruiting ex-FAR soldiers into the ADF.
53. Although much diminished, the ADF still exists at the time of this writing (December 2007).
54. Interestingly enough, although several analysts questioned my etiology of the ADF movement, it has been confirmed by a series of later military captures in which some of the prisoners were Tabliq Muslims (including strangely enough, women) and others hailed from the former NALU. See New Vision, May 1, 2001, and May 5, 2001. All had been recruited in 1996.
55. Radio Uganda, in BBC/SWB, January 8, 1996.
56. Radio Uganda, in BBC/SWB, April 22, 1996.
57. Indian Ocean Newsletter, July 6, 1996.
58. This from a high point of 120,000 men in 1992.
59. By September 1996 the Sudanese had achieved the necessary military synergy to bring together UMLA, ADM, Tabliq, NALU remnants, and Rwandese Interahamwe to form the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), which started operating from the Zairian side of the Ruwenzori into Bundibugyo and all the way to Kasese.
60. The best work to follow this belated process is René Pélissier, Les guerres grises: Résistances et révoltes en Angola (1845–1941) (Orgeval, France: Self-published, 1977).
61. Gervase Clarence-Smith, “Capital Accumulation and Class Formation in Angola,” in David Birmingham and Phyllis Martin, eds., History of Central Africa (London: Longman, 1983), 2: 163–199.
62. They were estimated to be twenty-six thousand in 1950, quite likely an underestimation.
63. Among the best introductions to the Portuguese colonial system are Gerald Bender, Angola under the Portuguese (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2004) and Christine Messiant, L’Angola colonial: Histoire et société (Basel: P Schlettwein Publishing, 2006).
64. Clarence-Smith, “Capital Accumulation,” 192.
65. J Marcum, The Angolan Revolution, vol. 1: The Anatomy of an Explosion (1950–1962) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969).
66. The only African ethnic group that adhered to the MPLA in large numbers was the Mbundu, probably because of the long-standing commercial and social links derived from their geographical proximity to Luanda.
67. Holden Roberto had even married a sister of Joseph-Désiré Mobutu.
68. It is ironic to think that Savimbi’s initial plan was to join the MPLA. But he was blocked, both by Neto’s insistence on Soviet-style “democratic centralism” and by the cold-shouldering of the mestiços. On Savimbi and UNITA, see Fred Bridgland, Jonas Savimbi: A Key to Africa (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1988); Jonas Savimbi: Combats Pour l’Afrique et la Démocratie (Paris: Favre, 1997).
69. For proofs of Savimbi’s collaboration with the Portuguese, see W. Minter, Operation Timber: Pages from the Savimbi Dossier (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1988).
70. This was the famous Operation C
arlotta in which Fidel Castro brought ten thousand soldiers over from Cuba, with strong Soviet logistical support. See P. Gleijes, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington and Africa (1959–1976) (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
71. Savimbi did not hesitate to accept CIA and South African support and, with absolute pragmatism, immediately forgot his earlier Chinese connections. What he retained from the “Chinese phase” of his experience was the militarized, centralized, and almost sect-like forms of organization along which he ran UNITA.
72. See Ronald Dreyer, Namibia and Southern Africa: Regional Dynamics of Decolonization (1945–1990) (London: Kegan Paul International, 1994), 44–50. The reason for the link with Savimbi was that UNITA had good bases in southern and eastern Angola, close to Ovamboland, where the passage of SWAPO fighters could be facilitated either in and out of Zambia or for hit-and-run raids into South West Africa. An added reason was that the Angolan Ovambo were usually UNITA members.
73. J. Marcum, The Angolan Revolution, vol. 2: Exile Politics and Guerrilla Warfare (1962–1976) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978), 271.
74. United nations resolution no. 435, September 29, 1978.
75. Dreyer, Namibia and Southern Africa, 158.
76. Reproduced in Survival 23, no. 6 (December 1981). The speech was delivered on August 29, 1981.
77. The 27th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (February 1986) defined a new foreign policy in direct contradiction with the support for Third world “wars of national liberation” decided ten years before by Leonid Brejnev at the 25th Congress, then basking in the euphoria of the Soviet victory in Vietnam.
78. J. Marcum, “A Continent Adrift,” Foreign Affairs 68, no. 1 (1989): 173.
79. Mike Hough, director of South Africa’s Institute of Strategic Studies, quoted in Dreyer, Namibia and Southern Africa, 176.
80. It was the beginning of the end for the apartheid regime. Three months after the New York Agreement on Namibia Pieter Botha had to make way for Frederik De Klerk and a policy of progressive political opening.
81. See Global Witness, A Crude Awakening, London, 2000.
82. See Global Witness, A Rough Trade, London, 1999.
83. Empresa Nacional de Diamantes de Angola (Endiama) has a monopoly issuing licenses for diamond mining and is supposed to collect a 2.5 percent tax on all legal diamonds. Working around it is a national sport for the nomenklatura, up to and including the families of the highest members of the government.
84. Everyday life in Angola provides plenty of evidence of that attitude: in Luanda an African name is often a passport to petty humiliations and social slights, and when Savimbi came to the capital in 1992 the fact that he dared give his public speeches in Ovimbundu and not in Portuguese was denounced as “primitive” and “racist.” Skin color is less important than cultural markers: a totally black assimilado who speaks only Portuguese will look down on the equally black but Kikongo- or Ovimbundu-speaking matumbo.
85. After some fighting inside Namibia in early 1989 the SADF left the country in November and fairly democratic elections were held in November, giving a 57.3 percent majority to SWAPO. Sam Nujoma was elected president in February 1990 and Namibia became independent on March 21, 1990.
86. Agostinho Neto died in Moscow in September 1979, and Eduardo dos Santos, a typical assimilado MPLA apparatchik born in Sao Tome and married to a Russian wife, succeeded him.
87. FAPLA was then over 100,000 strong and FALA had at least 50,000 or 60,000 men. The problems of demobilization were not seriously considered.
88. In 1990 oil exports brought $2.748 billion and diamonds $214 million, while debt service stood at $1.011 billion.
89. Actually the massive arms purchases that had progressively switched from the Eastern Bloc to Western suppliers were not purely motivated by military concerns. They were also an opportunity for large kickbacks to the members of the nomenklatura who were allowed to negotiate the deals.
90. The best account of this period for the international point of view can be found in Margaret Anstee, Orphan of the Cold War: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Angolan Peace Process (1992–1993) (London: Macmillan, 1996).
91. With about 3 percent of the vote the FNLA had signed its own death certificate. It had not even been able to mobilize the Bakongo ethnic vote, and even less to attract another electorate.
92. Savimbi, Combat, 137.
93. Symptomatically UNITA’s few mestiço (Honoria Van Dunem) or white (De Castro, Fatima Roque) cadres were spared, while their black comrades were shot. M. A. Africano, L’UNITA et la deuxième guerre civile angolaise (Paris: l’Harmattan, 1995), 160–161.
94. One of the worst ones (two hundred killed) was committed in the southern city of Lubango, where the FAPLA shot up and invaded the UNAVEM compound. Anstee called it “a government riposte to curb the spread of UNITA’s tentacles across the country” (Orphan of the Cold War, 357).
95. J. M. Makebo Tali, “La chasse aux ‘Zaïrois’ à Luanda,” Politique Africaine, no. 57 (March 1995): 71–84.
96. This is what he eventually did on May 19, 1993.
97. Former interior minister Charles Pasqua flew to Luanda in February 1997 in the company of Bernard Guillet and Daniel Leandri, two of his close aides, whose names were later to come up during the notorious “Angolagate” scandal of 2001. Unbeknown to French public opinion, two French arms merchants had already started delivery on the enormous $633 million weapons contract I discuss below.
98. AFP dispatch, July 22, 1997, quoted in A. Rozès, “Un pays en déshérence et au bord de la guerre totale: L’Angola 1994–1998,” in L’Afrique Politique 1998 (Paris: Karthala, 1999), 193.
99. United Nations, Report of the Panel of Experts on Violations of Security Council Sanctions against UNITA, March 2000, 14. In February 2001 Romania was added to the list of probable Unita suppliers.
100. Although both men were French citizens they also held citizenship in a variety of countries: Venezuela for Falcone, who was also a U.S. resident; Israel and Canada for Gaydamak, who was a naturalized Russian with excellent former KGB connections dating back to the days he worked at the Soviet Embassy in Paris.
101. The supplier was a Czech-registered company that purchased the arms in the former USSR. But Falcone then went through his French-registered company, Brenco, apparently because one condition the Angolans had put in the contract was the supply of high-tech French-manufactured electronic listening devices the Russians could not provide. Although this component of the contract was worth only about $30 million, it was a key part and required authorizations from highly placed sources in Paris. The case was later prosecuted in France. See “Falcone et Cie, armes en tous genres,” Libération, December 13, 2000; “Charles Pasqua et ses réseaux sous surveillance,” Libération, January 11, 2001; “Les hommes de l’Angolagate,” Le Monde, January 13, 2001; “Gaydamak parle,” Libération, March 6, 2001. Things dragged on and have not yet been settled judicially at the time of writing. See “L’enigmatique monsieur Gaydamak,” Le Nouvel Observateur, September 28–October 4, 2006.
102. SOFREMI is the public company used by Paris to market French military hardware. The “discovery” of the SOFREMI-Brenco scandal by mainstream French media in late 2000 is amusing since the specialized Lettre du Continent had documented it as early as mid-1996.
103. United Nations, Department of Humanitarian Affairs. Revised Consolidated Appeal for Angola (February–December 1994), mimeograph, September 1994.
104. The white population culminated at 72,000 in 1958, compared to the black African population of 2.3 million.
105. The South African Anglo-American mining giant dominated. The other companies were British and paid their taxes directly in London.
106. For a clear history of the federation, see Patrick Keatley, The Politics of Partnership: The Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1963).
107. B. Turok, Zambia: Mixed Economy in Focus (London:
Institute for African Alternatives, 1989), 113.
108. For this compensatory aspect of Zambia’s diplomacy, see Daniel Bourmaud, “La Zambie dans les relations internationales: La quête désespérée de la puissance,” in J. P. Daloz and J. D. Chileshe, eds., La Zambie Contemporaine (Paris: Karthala, 1996), 69–87. It is interesting to note that this trait later survived the UNIP regime, with Chiluba’s pro-U.S. free enterprise rhetoric replacing Kaunda’s exhausted “socialist humanism” but with the same frantic quest for outside approbation to help shore up a crumbling internal situation.
109. “Basic decency” should be taken here to describe a certain overall quality of life and social relationships. As we will see, the government seemed to do its best to belie that tradition as time went on.
110. A favorite trick was to use tourist facilities such as the Mluwe airstrip in Luangwa National Park or Zambezi Lodge, near the Cazombo Angolan border salient.
Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe Page 58