![Sample our Area Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5922/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Area-Studies.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
In Uganda, the 1981–1986 civil war mainly took place in the “Luweero Triangle” area where the National Resistance Army/Movement (NRA/M) guerrillas were based, fighting against the Obote regime’s regular army. The war resulted in an estimated 50,000–300,000 civilian deaths in this region. At the end of the war, thousands of unidentified human remains were found in the area in forms of skulls and bones. The Luweero skulls and bones would later be politically used through memorialization by the victorious NRA/M as a “scarecrow” propaganda instrument. Used from the early aftermath of the war, and especially during the 1996 elections, it aimed to mark the contrast between the terror of the previous Obote regime and the ruling NRM government, which prides itself on having brought peace and security in the country, consolidating the post-revolutionary state’s legitimacy. This article, based on archives and fieldwork interviews, explores the fate, memorial heritage making and political use of the Luweero skulls and bones in an historical perspective. It questions the political effectiveness of this instrumentalization of fear, as well as the success of the memorial heritage building to which the Luweero skulls were subjected, and finally discusses the conflicts that emerged from these policies between the central government and local Luweero residents and leaders.
Acknowledgements
This paper was first presented at the “Legacies of Struggle in Eastern and Southern Africa: Biography, Materiality and Human Remains” Conference at BIEA, Nairobi, on 18–20 March 2015. I thank Joost Fontein, Justin Willis and Emma for their efforts in editing this issue. Henri Medard also provided helpful comments on earlier drafts. Finally, I thank the anonymous reviewers and the editorial staff at JEAS.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. A rural and highly populated area northwest of the capital city area in the Buganda region, a focus of the civil war between 1981 and 1985.
2. According to the 1980 population census, the Luweero Triangle (Mpigi, Mubende and Luweero districts) had a total population of about 1.5 million on a total acreage of approximately 22,000 km2.
3. The authors of press articles and reports illustrated with Luweero skull pile pictures in the aftermath of the war do not mention by who, when and why they were exhibited in that way.
4. See Vidal “La commémoration” 575–92; Korman, “L'État rwandais,” 87–98 and; Eltringham, “Display, Concealment,” 161–80.
5. The Mass graves war monument visited were in Katikamu, Nakaseke, Kikyusa, Butuntumula, Makulubita (in Luweero District), Kikandwa, Semuto (Nakaseke District) and Nakasongola.
6. This area, lying between the three districts of Luweero, Mubende and Mpigi, was a highly populated by baganda mostly, but also banyarwanda, herdsmen who migrated from Ankole, and other migrant workers. It is a wet and fertile region with a banana and coffee economy.
7. The figure of 26 (or 27, if including Y. Museveni) firstly designated, in the NRM historiography, the number of men who accompanied Museveni for the attack of the Military Barack Kabamba (southern Mubende) on 6 February 1981. Then later, some formal participants of the attack corrected the figure, confirming that the number 27 did not correspond to the number of men, but to the number of guns (or armed men), and that other non-armed fighters were also involved in the attack.
8. Amnesty International reported several killings following rebel’s attacks in 1981 in the Luweero triangle area; in September, 16 people were lined up and shot by the Ugandan army in Wakiso (northwest of Mpigi), some hours after a guerrilla attack. Five days later, 30 people were executed in Makuta after another rebel action. In November, after an attack on a UNLA battalion near Ssemuto in Luweero, the regular army executed raids in several villages, killing “at least sixty people.” Amnesty International, Rapport annuel, 89.
9. Terms used by the Obote government and reproduced in the governmental press The people and The Ugandan Times.
10. In reality, the “refugee camps” for “internal displaced people” in Luweero were more similar to detention camps than to refugee camps. The majority of the displaced population having actually been forcibly displaced by the military to get them out of the “area of operations,” because they were suspected of collaborating with the rebels. The refugees in the camps were not free to leave. Complaints expressed by the British Minister of State for African Affairs and the Australian and Canadian High Commission in Nairobi denounced the absence of right for citizens of Luweero to voluntarily leave their camps.
11. Massacres reported in the opposition newspaper Munnansi, in Amnesty International report 1981–1982, and 1983–1984, in the letter by Paul Ssemogerere addressed to Obote on 4 August 1982, and in interviews with residents conducted by the author.
12. Kasanje UPC chairman of the constituency, Edward Kabira.
13. See Amnesty International report 1981–1982; and the letter by Paul Ssemogerere addressed to Obote on 4 August 1982.
14. Interview with J.S.S. (peasant farmer), Butuntumbula War Memorial, Butuntumbula Sub-county, Luweero district, 21 September 2011. Recorded interview, conducted in English and partially in Luganda, translation by R. Kisekka.
15. Among interviews with residents from the districts of Luweero, Nakaseke, Nakasongola, Mpigi and Mubende districts conducted during field researches in between 2010 and 2015.
16. Political control consisted of the establishment of resistance councils, initiated at the beginning of the war in 1981, but sat on their control in 1985. On the Resistance Councils, see Tidemand, The Resistance Councils.
17. Despite the official cease fire, fighting would continue in the west of Uganda, where the majority of the NRA had moved in 1984, and had reconstituted its troops. But the Luweero area itself was no longer a combat zone.
18. Although the killings began as early as 1981, the massacres in Luweero were widely reported by the press only in 1985, because of government censorship and the difficult access to the war zone for journalists before the 1985 coup. Nevertheless, the Ugandan opposition newspaper The Citizen and Munnansi (Munnansi replaced The Citizen when it was banned in 1982) differed by regularly and scrupulously reporting the routine murders, robberies, rapes, corruption and brutality of the Obote army and secret services security since the beginning of the war. And in 1984, Amnesty International was informed of the discovery of a number of mass graves in the “Luweero Triangle,” and the US Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights estimated in that from 1981 to 1984, between 100,000 and 200,000 people were killed by the army or “deliberately starved to death.” Africa Contemporary Record, 1984–1985, 107.
19. Richard Dowden (Matuga, Uganda), “Skulls Testify to Genocide Policy – Uganda’s Killing Fields,” 14 August 1985, The Times (London).
20. Richard Dowden (Matuga, Uganda), 30 August 1985, The Times (London).
21. Interview with Capitaine El Hadj Suleiman, Semuto Resident District Commissioner, who joined the NRA in 1981 and was a local chairman in charge of “food committee and uniforms” in the NRA political branch, at the headquarters of the Mondlane Unit, 62 years old at the time of the interview (21 September 2011), Semuto.
22. Didrikke Schanche “Uganda Cleans Up Macabre Reminder of Atrocities,” 17 July 1988, Associated Press, Nakaseke, Uganda.
23. On the post-genocide Cambodian government initiative, in order to legitimize the new state power, of turning the bodies from the genocide into “bones as evidence,” asking the villagers and local authorities to gather up the bones scattered across the countryside, see Anne Yvonne Guillou, “From bones-as-evidence to tutelary spirits: the status of bodies in the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge genocide,” in Dreyfus, Human Remains, 146–60.
24. Vidal “La commémoration,” 575–92. The RPF was formed in Uganda from Banyarwanda NRA veterans of the Luweero war. In 1986, about a quarter of NRA combatants were Banyarwanda. Rwigyema was appointed deputy minister of defense and deputy army commander-in-chief, and Kagame was appointed acting chief of military intelligence. See Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, 172–3; and Prunier, Rwanda, 92.
25. Interviews conducted during field research in the districts of Luweero, Nakaseke, Nakasongola, Mpigi and Mubende districts and at mass grave memorial sites between 2010 and 2015.
26. For example, a peasant digging his fields finding a skull would spontaneously pick it up and bring it outside his land at a common place determined by the local council. It should be pointed out that in Buganda, there were no public cemeteries; each family buried their dead on their land, as the graves established for generations giving the family a legitimacy on the right to the land.
27. “Uganda Removing Roadside Skulls after Complaint,” Reuters, Kampala, 3 May 1988.
28. Edward Kitaka, “Museveni Leads Tour of Site of Alleged Atrocities,” Associated Press, 11 February 1986; “Museveni Tries to End Cycle of Shame,” Drum, April 1986. “In his determination to unearth the atrocities committed by the Obote regime, President Museveni showed diplomats and journalists 237 neatly arranged skulls at Kiboga in Uganda which were exhumed from a mass grave north of Kampala. He told the pressmen that the grave was one of the many from atrocities committed under former two-time president, Milton Obote.” Henry Mukasa, “M7 Takes Envoys to Luweero,” New Vision, 18 May 2006.
29. “Uganda’s Luweero Residents Demand Burial of Human Skulls,” Reuters, Luweero, Uganda, 13 April 1988.
30. Quoted by Didrikke Schanche, “Uganda Cleans Up Macabre Reminder of Atrocities,” Associated Press, 17 July 1988.
31. In the Luweero Triangle area, the social order had been already destroyed by the civil war itself with its extraordinary level of violence. When interviewing Luweero residents nowadays about the wartime past, in testimonies of civilians who did not take part to any side of the conflict, vocabulary like “chaos,” “no rules,” “no logical,” “madness” and “nonsense” were to describe the situation in 1982–1984, testifying that all the usual rules and landmarks of the social order had broken down.
32. “Uganda Removing Roadside Skulls after Complaints,” Reuters, Kampala, 3 May 1988.
33. Complete list furnished by the Ugandan National Museum with the courtesy of Remigius Kigongo. Though the President Museveni in his statements refers to “33 mass graves in the Luweero Triangle” which were “containing 70,000 skulls” or “each containing about 2,000 skulls.” See Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, “On Election Rigging in Uganda 1961–2014,” The Monitor, 25 May 2014; Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, “In Response to an Article by Mzee Ssemwogerere,” The Monitor, 16 October 2014.
34. The authorization is not automatic and the demand itself could be subject of suspicion. In one of the memorial monuments, we have been firstly accused of trespassing on county headquarters and refused authorization to visit.
35. Expression from the Democratic Party National chairperson, Mzee Boniface Byanyima, in May 1999 about Museveni’s 1996 electoral campaign communication which used Obote as a scarecrow.
36. “Ssemogerere to Bring Back Obote,” by Pelegrine Otonga, The New Vision, 3 April 1996, 1–2.
37. “Ssemogerere Team Denies Obote Invite,” by Richard Mutumba, The New Vision, 5 May 1996, 1–2.
38. Informal interview with William Pike (non-recorded), Nairobi, 1 April 2016.
39. Field observations during 2016 campaign in local NRM rallies in Kampala and Luweero Districts, January–February 2016.
40. “Activists Petition EC over NRM Skulls Campaign Advert,” The Observer, 11 February 2016.
41. Schubert, “Guerrillas Don’t Die Easily,” 93–111.
42. Among the most significant NRM publications are the productions from the NRM Directorate of Information and Mass Mobilization (the party’s propaganda organ), including NRM, Selected Articles; NRM, Mission to Freedom; NRM, Ten-point Program and; NRM, National Resistance Movement.
43. The major work in this respect is the Ugandan president’s autobiography, Sowing the Mustard Seed, produced a decade after taking power, which covers the period from his childhood until 1996. A second biography appeared in 1998; it is the work of O. Amaza, who was Museveni’s fellow in the Bush and an influential member of the NRM. Despite the title, which refers to individual courses Museveni, the real object of the book is the history of guerrilla NRA from 1981 to 1986.
44. Pedros Kutesa’s autobiography, (Kutesa, Uganda’s Revolution) follow the same construction process, though some outspoken aspects are surprising: Museveni Bush comrade’s autobiography is an account of the guerrilla history while he still belongs to NRM, but the rebellious character of Pecos Kutesa (and his “untouchable” position in NRM) led him to often do not comply with the official myth, therefore certainly sometimes unintentionally.
45. S. Kagurire’s researches are not less valuable and very serious; see Karugire, A Political History of Uganda; and The Roots if Instability in Uganda. But P. Mutibwa’s chapter on the “bush war” history (“Guerrilla warfare: why they took the bush”), in Mutibwa, Uganda since Independence, 154–7, is more disappointing. Director of the History Department at Makerere during the Civil War until 1983, Mutibwa became a member of the NRM after the seizure of power by Museveni, and received in the party’s charge director of research and policy affairs. As can be expected, his general book Uganda since Independence is clearly favorable to the movement in the few pages he devotes to “guerrilla warfare” in his chapter on the second Obote regime, and the sources cited are exclusively from NRM. However, the excellent work of Kasozi (Kasozi, The Social Origins of Violence), one of the best historians of Uganda, is much less biased and relies on more varied sources, complementing sources from NRM with those from the press of the time.
46. Obote, Notes on Concealment of Genocide.
47. With regards to the issue of uniforms (the fact that the NRA did not have proper uniform apart from the Chief of High Command, Museveni): interview with S. Christopher, formal NRA tailor, Nakaseke Town, 6 February 2014; interview with Captain Sula, formal NRA/M member (political wing), local chairman in charge of “food committee and uniforms” in the NRM political branch during the bush war, Semuto, Luweero Triangle, 20 September 2011.
48. Translated to English from interviews conducted in Luganda with “X” and “Y,” formal NRA fighters and DP members, 30 January 2011, Lubiiri, Kampala.
49. Under the leadership of Olara Otunnu from 2010 to 2015, UPC made tentative alliances with the rest of opposition to challenge the NRM in elections.
50. These are distinct from the normal pension systems or benefits put in place for military personnel following the establishment of the post-liberation national army NRM.
51. NRM Secretariat, Selected Articles; NRM Secretariat, 1990, Mission to Freedom.