Philip Matogo
Whenever you see soldiers on Uganda’s streets, you know politics is at play. Holding sway in the way we play politics is the army. They are central to the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) keeping its knee on the neck of an Opposition breathlessly seeking change.
Beyond the army, we see several security organs involved in our politics too. These include police and intelligence organisations. If you add the army, the three crowd out our rights.
In George Orwell’s Animal Farm, the three were called Bluebell, Jessie, and Pincher. They were three dogs. The nine puppies born between Jessie and Bluebell are taken by Napoleon and raised to be his guard dogs.
So, one could say, three agencies, like three Orwellian dogs, have led to a gang of human rights violations reflective of the triad’s inter and intra-agency activity. We know that the personnel recruited by these agencies to scotch the tide of change are only taking orders. These orders come from “above”, like His Almighty handed down edicts of animosity.These orders cannot be countermanded, or can they?
In the US army, there is what is known as the Nuremberg defence. This defence is “a legal argument used by members of the military who have been charged with failing to obey an order. The defence claims that the order was illegal and would result in a violation of international law. This defence can also be used by citizens accused of committing domestic crimes who claim that their actions were justified or mandated by international law”.
There should be a Nuremberg defence in Uganda. It could be known as the Luweero Defence. That way, it invokes the code that the National Resistance Army (NRA) supposedly lived by.
This code moved the needle on human rights by placing them on the same footing as all other rights in a context where some rights were considered more right than others. The people were supposed to be the very foundation of the NRA.
Since the NRA’s war was deemed a people’s protracted struggle. So if there was a Luweero Defence, soldiers could disobey orders from “above” if such orders controverted the code by which the NRA’s soldiers lived, and died.
In consequence, soldiers would not be allowed to attack civilians in the name of regime preservation.
Sure, the soldiers would be duty-bound to obey their commanders (the Nuremberg defence is also known as Superior Orders). But this confirmation of their superior’s orders would be circumscribed by the NRA’s code placing civilian rule above autocratic prerogatives.
The November 2020 shootings are still fresh in our minds. More than 50 people were shot dead and scores were wounded in protests that erupted after police arrested presidential candidate Bobi Wine in the east of the country.
Police and soldiers in Kampala fired tear gas and bullets to disperse Bobi Wine’s supporters, who blocked roads and burned tyres after news broke that he had been arrested in the town of Luuka and taken to a police station in the city of Jinja. There would have been no shootings if this government’s armed forces lived by the Luweero Defence.
This would then convince us that what the NRA fighters went to the bush for was more about the people’s hearts and minds than some hungry rebel’s stomach. Indeed, we need to rein in our security forces.
If we do not, the NRM/A Bush War would have been for nothing and the countless civilians who died during that war would have died for nothing.
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