I’m Coming Home; But not Like Kyakabale, says Col Mande.

By Estella Jones

Former commander of the dissolved rebel group People’s Redemption Army Col Samson Mande has once again hinted on his impeding return to the country, once shown green light by the regime. 

Mande, who has been in exile in Sweden after his rebel group was defeated by the UPDF in the DRC, said today that he is ready to hold talks with government on his return. 

Mande said at the beginning of the year, that he would be in the country by the close of last month [July].

Last week there were rumors that he had discreetly returned to Uganda, which he refuted as false. 

Today, Col Mande revealed that he would by all means return to his home country and that he was prepared to discuss with government on the terms. 

This he said however, he would do on condition that he is not compelled to join the ruling government which he has critiqued for about 2 decades. 

He said he doesn’t want to follow in the footsteps of his former colleague in the PRA Lt. Col Anthony Kyakabale who was pardoned by the President in March this year. 

Kyakabale is currently drumming support for President Museveni in the south western region. 

“I am willing to discuss any matter with the government as long as they don’t force me to join NRMO as Kyakabale,” stated Mande. 

“I am not jobless here so am not under economic duress like Kyakabale was. I have my own projects and property in Uganda so I need no government job or help.” 

He added, “I want to come and offer solutions or be part of the ongoing struggle for the political social economic challenges my motherland is going through.” 

President hires SMS company for Campaigns

By Estella Jones

Kampala. After picking nomination forms to run for NRM party chairman and presidential flag bearer in the 2016 election, President Museveni has hired a bulk-sms company to push his campaign messages to Ugandans explaining his candidature.

According to a statement addressed to Uganda Communications Commission (UCC), the messages will be in both audio and text.
Mr Silva Musubika, the executive director SMS Empire, the company that has been hired, confirmed the deal and said his team had started the job.

We started work on Sunday and we hope to complete by Friday (August 7),” Mr Musubika said.

The UCC spokesperson, Mr Fred Otunnu, said the commission had received the letter and noted that the company (SMS Empire) is aware of terms under which certain messages are disseminated.

The messages should be at no cost to the receiver and should have opt out options to those who don’t want them, if that is breached, of course, we will take action” Mr Otunu said.
Mr Don Wanyama, the special media assistant in the office of the NRM national chairman, confirmed the development and said the messages would be sent to all Ugandans.

It is true the message is from the chairman (President Museveni). It is a summarised message from the statement he made after picking his nomination forms last Friday,” Mr Wanyama said.

The message

The message which Daily Monitor has seen reads: “Owing to NRM achievements especially bringing peace, the historical league and party structures seconded me to pick nomination forms for NRM chairman and presidential flag bearer 2016 with a mission of leading Uganda to a middle income country by 2019. My fellow Ugandans, join me on this great and rewarding journey. Thank you for the support and trust. Yoweri K Museveni”

Cabinet Gives Up on Electoral Reforms Clause

By Joan Pounds

Cabinet has given up on one of the main clauses in the Constitutional Amendment Bill 2015 commonly known as the Electoral Reform Bill, which is focused on changes in the electoral process. 

The long awaited Bill was only introduced in Parliament by government through the Attorney General on 30th April 2015, a few months before the Electoral Commission issued the road map for the coming general elections of 2016. 

Although the electoral process ahead of 2016 has already started, the Bill seeks to amend some of the articles in the 1995 Constitution including the name of the EC, the appointment procedure of EC commissioners, crossing from one political party to another, minimum requirement of judges of different courts and introducing salary review commission.

The committee of Legal and Parliamentary Affairs that was charged with the duty of scrutinizing the Bill finalized their work last month and it is currently being debated though opposition members in the same committee disagreed with the main report and authored their own. 

It has now emerged that Cabinet that passed the Bill before it was introduced in Parliament has agreed and withdrawn clause 4(1)(g) which sought to amend article 83 (g) of the constitution. 

Article 83 (g) says any Member of Parliament that crosses from his or her political party to another party should vacate and his or her seat be declared vacant. The Bill wanted to undo the restriction and give opportunity for those who want to cross freely do it before the end of their term. 

The clause became very contentious since the interpretation of article 83 (g) is currently before the Supreme Court in a case between the four rebel MPs and the National Resistance Movement automatically making it prejudice for Parliament to debate the matter. 

The four MPs including Theodore Sekikubo, Barnabas Tinkasimire, Mohamed Nsereko and Winfred Niwagaba were expelled from the ruling party and asked to leave the house. 

Speaker of Parliament, Rebecca Kadaga however disagreed with the Attorney General which compelled him to challenge and win the win the decision in the Constitutional Court. 

The four MPs appealed at the Supreme Court that overturned the ruling returning them back to Parliament. 

The debate on the Constitutional Amendment Bill was halted at Parliament awaiting another interpretation from the Attorney General who had asked for time to consult with Cabinet. 

Debating resumed on Monday when it became clear that Cabinet has given up on the clause and withdrawn it. 

During the same debate on Monday, MPs like Tinkasimire and Nalubega Mariam (Butambala women) asked parliament to adopt some of the proposals that were made in the minority report by opposition members Ssegona Medard and Paul Mwiru to restore the term limits for the president to redeem the image of parliament because there were allegations of bribery to lift it. 

Meanwhile Budadiri west MP Nathan Nandala Mafabi who is also the Secretary General of FDC asked his colleagues to be careful in scrutinizing the bill so that what they decide do not catch up with them because 70 percent may not return. 

I hope Kagame ‘defies’ masses on term limits

By Estella Jones

The people of Rwanda are demanding that the Constitution be amended to allow President Paul Kagame stand again in 2017.

It is easy to find this demand on the streets of Rwanda’s capital, Kigali. But you will also find opposition, albeit in hushed tones. 

The debate is raging. The person whom it concerns the most, Kagame, insists the debate must go on. Part of the debate has turned on the very prohibitive wording of Article 101: “…Under no circumstances shall a person hold the Office of the President of the Republic for more than two terms.”

Recently, more than 3.5 million signatures were presented to parliament, which last week voted overwhelmingly to start the process of amending the Constitution. It’s quite evident that only one outcome is likely – article 101 will be deleted or changed to read differently. 

Other than a complete deletion of the two-term limit provision, one option being floated is to insert a clause providing for a referendum on a third term for a specific leader. One way or the other, it is a foregone conclusion. Here is why. 

On Wednesday, I interviewed the chairman of the Social Democratic Party (PSD), also minister for natural resources, Dr Vincent Biruta. This ministry, like most government offices in Kigali, is housed in a plush building with a corporate outlook and clear signs of an evidently-functional public body, unlike the filth and neglect that attends government offices in many African countries.

I told Minister Biruta that it was rather strange for his party, supposedly the main opposition political party, to endorse the process of removing term limits so Kagame stands again yet they can’t beat him in an election.

“It’s the people, not us the leaders,” he reasoned. He continued: “they believe that they cannot as yet trust another leader other than Kagame. He has been such a high-performing president and the people want him to continue.”

I reminded Dr Biruta that the mark of leadership is the courage to stand above the wishes and sentiments of the masses. If masses were the ones to always dictate what should be done, then the very notion of leadership would lose meaning. 

At any rate, I added, he, as the leader of the second largest party, should be pushing for alternative leadership and a culture of sustainability and continuity, instead of putting all hopes in one mortal being.

President Kagame finds himself in a very precarious situation. He is a man known to rigidly stick to his beliefs and principles. Will he hold out or will he succumb to the “demands of the people?” He has been on record for making two very important statements. 

First, that he would not seek another term after serving the two constitutional ones. Second, that it is not true that no one else is capable enough to take over from him; and if it were true then, that would mean he, as a leader, has failed and should for that very reason step down.

Sources close to him say he regrets not taking the issue of succession seriously and not preparing ahead of time. Now 2017 is in sight and Kagame finds that, even without the popular demand for him to stay, he is not quite ready to relinquish power. 

His controversial involvement in the Congo, coupled with some internal dynamics, make it risky for him to leave power without sufficient guarantees that he will not end up somewhere in detention as happened last month to his chief of intelligence, General Emmanuel Karenzi Karake, arrested and still held in London.

Kagame’s Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF) was birthed and groomed in Uganda. Its affable and highly-regarded founding leader, the late Major General Fred Rwigyema, was Uganda’s deputy army commander. Rwigyema’s RPF successor, then Major Paul Kagame, was a senior Ugandan intelligence officer in what was then called Directorate of Military Intelligence, headed by the then Colonel Mugisha Muntu. 

It is possible that at the time Rwigyema and his compatriots launched their struggle to return home, on October 1, 1990, they were seeing glimpses of the rot that the NRM government eventually fully became.

When Museveni’s misrule shot through the roof in the late 1990s, with glaring scandals of malfeasance in the privatization of state corporations, shoddy deals in military procurements and ghost soldiers, Kagame must have watched keenly.

As president of Rwanda, he had a perfect living example of a government next door, and one grossly mismanaged by his politico-military mentor, with clear lessons on how not to run a government. He had to strive to be different. Today, Rwanda has achieved what Uganda can’t realize under the decadent regime of General Museveni, notwithstanding Kagame’s much-talked-about poor record on civil liberties and individual freedoms.

Now enter the term limits debate. Perhaps again committed to being different from Uganda, at the time Museveni was manipulating the constitutional amendment process in 2003-5, including bribing MPs to remove term limits, Rwanda was promulgating a new Constitution with an article stating unequivocally: “under no circumstance shall a person…” 

General Museveni must be keeping his fingers crossed that General Kagame yields to the “demands of the people!”

Without electoral reforms, 2016 polls is meaningless

By Estella Jones

The news that the NRM-dominated Parliament has rejected all the 17 proposals, containing the core areas recommended for electoral reforms by its opponents, Ugandans and civil society groups, leaves this country in an unstable state. It also offers no credibility to the current Electoral Commission, and does not guarantee that the 2016 general elections will be free or fair elections. 

Without dialogue and reforms to the electoral laws, the 2016 elections are meaningless.

Going into 2016 for the Opposition looks like a free man willingly ceding his freedom to a tyrant. Let us not mince words; without elaborate and widely agreed upon electoral reforms, there is no pretence about the quality or manner of conduct of any elections in Uganda.

I envisage tough times coming ahead of Ugandans after 2016 if the elections were to be mishandled. These are critical moments for Ugandans to defend the ongoing peace and tranquil. One needs to understand that the concept of national security is not about the presence of armed men loitering around our villages and manning major highways with weaponry. 

It is about the conviction amongst citizens, that their living conditions are just and tenable. When citizens feel that they have control over their destinies, and can freely negotiate for common goods and to share liabilities, then we, as a nation, will enjoy stability.

The Uganda that has evolved under the NRM regime is that of nurturing intolerance and greed around safeguarding power. The people of Uganda are feeling the emptiness associated with disempowerment. And yet, we have a regime that is constipated with power. These disparities are the ingredients that feed the seeds of violence and instability in society, however sophisticated it is.

I prophesy that if we continue on this path Uganda will slide into a graveyard in the near future. Unless the leadership wants to transform Uganda into a prototype of North Korea, there is no way he will continue with this belligerence. 

Civil society and the Opposition have endured the pain of providing alternative policy proposals to government. At least they have played their roles. A healthy democracy is adjudged by the vibrancy of its Opposition and civil society.

A government which fears competition will also thwart any possibility for highlighting its failings. Without these options, a balancing act in governance cannot obtain for public good. No one has monopoly over righteousness and no one person, least of all a corrupted regime, to be right at all. The essence of democracy is that dissenters are treated with decency, humility, and respect for the beauty of diversity.

Rejecting the reform proposals also indicates that the Parliament is in contempt of the will of the people. It is becoming apparently clear that the regime would pander to reforms proposed by America or Britain, but will reject those from its own people. It just starts to feel that we are in the era of slave trade where the chiefs conspired to sell their own people. By disempowering its people, modern day slavery or savagery has become the novelty of the NRM regime.

Intolerance though, is a recipe for disaster because it alienates agents from the mainstream to the periphery, eventually excluding them. When the locus of dissent realigns itself, and finds a new shape outside the shades of the State, then other forms of liberation modalities may be chosen over a stale democracy.

The problem of a military dictatorship is that it is inundated by its investments in the industry of coercion. But hstory has shown to us that no amount of weaponry and coercion can restrain a critical mass with full consciousness of their repression.

President Museveni is a legend of a revolution with contempt for democracy and elections. He scorns the ballot for the bullet. Demanding for free and fair elections is a waste of time. The fear of internal democracy within NRM demonstrates that the Presidency is up for grabbing, forcefully.

"No Reparation before guilty verdict" -ICC.

By Estella Jones

GULU-UGANDA: A senior officer of The Hague based, International Criminal Court (ICC), has clarified that the court does not offer reparations to victims of war crimes and crimes against humanity until after the court have passed a guilty verdict against the perpetrator.

Ms. Maria Mabinty Kamara, the Outreach Coordinator for Uganda and Kenya in the Public Information and Documentation Section of ICC, told a meeting of stakeholders on ICC including the media, that ICC does not pay reparations to individual victims but to the community as a whole and that money is spent on projects which benefit all.

“Reparations are paid only at the end of trials and after guilty verdict.” She said, at Churchill Courts Hotel in Gulu Municipality on Tuesday 14th July 2015, during preparations to celebrate the 17th anniversary of the Court, which is celebrated annually on 17th July.

She was responding to the concern of a victim of the Northern Uganda insurgencies, including that of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebellion, which spanned from 1986 to 2006, that it seems the ICC is only interested in giving justice to the victims of Lukodi-a village in Bungatira sub-county in Gulu district, a few minutes’ drive from Gulu town.

The LRA massacred over 46 innocent civilians between 19th and 20th May 2004 in Lukodi’s eleven villages. It is believed that, the indicted and captured LRA commander Dominic Ongwen, masterminded the massacre in Lukodi in 2004. This is the single incident for which Ongwen is in custody at The Hague waiting for trials to begin.

Mr. Akena Jimmy, who is a land mine survivor from Land Mine Survivors’ Association in Gulu, wondered why the ICC was working at Lukodi only, yet atrocities were committed throughout the region.

“If the LRA leader, Joseph Kony, dies in the bush, will those others not get Justice? Akena questioned.

Ms. Kamara said the ICC’s main work is to make sure that, ”impunity is no longer the game”.

She said that other victims of the war benefited from 18 projects sponsored by the Court’s Trust Fund for Victims whereby over 40,000 individual victims benefitted through Non-governmental Organizations (NGOs) like AVSI and CARE International.

“One of the mandates of ICC is to provide support to other victims through NGO’s like AVSI and CARE International. Have you not seen victims getting artificial limbs, psychosocial support, Facial Reconstruction and Counseling services? These NGOs get funding from the Trust Fund for Victims of the ICC”.

She said ICC was concentrating on Lukodi because that is where Ongwen committed those crimes for which he is before court. She said Ongwen cannot be held responsible for all the crimes committed by other LRA commanders in other parts of Northern Uganda.

“It is not possible to hold Ongwen responsible for all the crimes committed in the whole Northern Uganda. His crime relates to Lukodi”. She said, adding that ICC may expand the scope on Ongwen to include other places like Pajule and Odek where he is reported to have committed crimes there as well.

17th July is declared The Day of International Criminal Justice to mark the anniversary of the adoption of the Rome Statute which established the ICC on 17th July 1998. So far, 123 States have ratified the Rome Statute.

ICC seeks to protect people from genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and crimes of aggression. The day unites all those who wish to support justice, promote victims’ rights and help prevent crimes (that are committed by individuals, but not States) that threaten the peace, security and well-being of the world.

Lukodi will host this year’s celebrations to mark the Day of International Criminal Justice on Friday, 17 July 2015 to thank the community for their overwhelming support to the work of ICC after waiting for ten years before a suspected from the five indicted LRA commanders is in Court.

“Ten years of waiting for justice is a bit long. We want to celebrate Justice in a special way”. Ms. Kamara said.

To celebrate the day, ICC designed a special Facebook account: 17th July. JusticeMatters to collect views of people on what Justice means to them. The campaign, which began on 6th July 2015, will end on Friday.

“People are saying every kind of things in the campaign. Victims are saying this is an opportunity for their voices to be heard”. Kamara said.

Rwanda genocide court to close its doors after 21 years

By Joan Pounds

Arusha, Tanzania (dpa) - Posters hang in the lifts at the International Criminal Tribunal (ICTR) for Rwanda reading, "Memorabilia wanted."

It appears that the court in the north Tanzanian city of Arusha has already become history.

At the entrance to the large building, the UN's blue logo has faded to a light grey and the corridors are deserted. 

More than 60 high-ranking criminals have been convicted here, those who initiated and incited the genocide. They include military and political leaders, a prime minister and journalists.

But the ICTR doesn't officially become history until December 31, when after 21 years it will close its doors forever, its mission complete.

It will also leave behind some significant achievements in the realm of international justice.

Systematically murdered

To go back to Rwanda in April 1994: The civil war has been over for a year, but the peace is a fragile one.

Hutu president Juvenal Habyarimana's plane is shot down - to this day it isn't known who carried out the attack. For radical Hutus it's an excuse to carry out a genocide, slaughtering the Tutsi minority and moderate Hutus.

The country descends into chaos, people are mercilessly massacred, the rivers are filled with their corpses and extremists in the media call for more slaughter.

Within just 100 days, between 800 000 and one million people are systematically murdered, according to United Nations estimates.

The UN withdraws its peacekeepers and the rest of the world looks on passively.

At the beginning of 1995, the ICTR is set up in Arusha at the behest of the UN Security Council. Today only one case is still being appealed.

It concerns the former family affairs minister Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, the first woman to be convicted in relation to the genocide.

International justice

The court has gone into "residual mechanism" to deal with the case, a kind of transitionary set-up responsible for upholding convictions, witness protection programmes and archives. From the original 1,200 employees only 190 remain.

One of them is Bongani Majola, the court's director. At 63 he's already of pensionable age, "but before I retire, I will finish this task first", he says, looking at the blue UN flag beside him.

He sees the ICTR as an "experiment" in international justice. It has shown the world that international justice is not an unrealistic utopia but an actual possibility.

And he's proud of that: The ICTR is the first international court to convict those responsible for committing genocide.

"Now no court has a problem to interpret what genocide actually means," says Majola.

Rwanda's former prime minister Jean Kambanda also became the first head of government to be convicted of genocide - a milestone.

International investigators

"We have shown: The time in which African leaders can do with their citizens whatever they want is over," adds Majola.

The court was also the first to recognize rape as a means of perpetrating genocide. "But that is not enough," says Majola, who thinks that more perpetrators should have been punished.

Between 100 000 and 250 000 women were sexually abused during the genocide, according to the UN estimates.

The court's work was not easy. How do you prove crimes that took place years earlier? How do you find witnesses? The international investigators were dealing with ordinary Rwandans, and had to deal with their mistrust, as well as language barriers.

Many Rwandans were not familiar with the international justice system and had never been abroad. It was difficult to get them to come to Arusha.

Fourteen people were acquitted. Of those found guilty, some spent just a few months in prison, others were sentenced to life. They are serving their sentences in the UN member states which volunteered to take them - Italy, Sweden and Mali.

Civilians

In June, ICTR President Judge Vagn Joensen asked the UN Security Council to find a solution to "the very troubling issue of relocating the acquitted and convicted released persons still residing in Arusha". For years they have been living in a secret UN safe house.

When the tribunal shuts its gates, it does not mean that justice for the atrocities committed will not continue.

In Rwanda there are still trials going on, mostly involving civilians.

Just last month, intelligence chief Karenzi Karake was arrested in London on a European Arrest Warrant, accused by Spain of ordering massacres.

In the ICTR hangs a wanted poster for the last nine fugitives. Can they still be found?

The investigators still work but it is very hard and difficult," says Majola.