Amon Bazira

Amon Bazira (1944 - 1993) was a Pan-Africanist leader and organiser who created an extensive intelligence network that was the critical clandestine component of the struggle to end the regime of Idi Amin. After he helped to remove Idi Amin, Bazira served as Deputy Director of intelligence, and then as Director of Intelligence in Uganda in 1979. He produced a government report predicting that there would be a massive genocide in Rwanda that would lead to the collapse of order in Central and Eastern Africa, and proposed granting citizenship to Rwandan refugees and other displaced Africans in Uganda, as a means of preventing genocidal warfare. In August 1993, Amon Bazira was assassinated in Kenya at Nakuru, allegedly with the complicity of Tiny Rowland, Yoweri Museveni and Daniel arap Moi. However, Bazira's Pan African ideas and efforts were not all in vain, and resulted in the creation of the African Unification Front, which has been instrumental in advancing the cause of Pan Africanism.

Implementing Pan Africanism

After the fall of Amin, he served as Director of Ugandan Intelligence, and as Chair of the Parliamentary Committee for Security. In these capacities and as a member of the cabinet he tried to end the human rights violations by state security organs in the Great Lakes Region. In 1982 he led a futile attempt to prevent the expulsion of Tutsis from Uganda. Predicting that left unresolved, the Tutsi displacement would result in genocide and the massive collapse of political order in the region, Bazira advocated for Uganda to accord full citizenship to all refugees from other African states as a means of forestalling regional conflict.

He believed that Statecraft, Diplomacy and Intelligence could be used properly to maintain and advance Pan Africanism. He organized and ran intelligence networks that were instrumental in the conduct of the struggle to remove Idi Amin from power, mitigate Obote’s excesses, avert massive loss of life during the overthrow of Tito Okello, and nearly succeeded in overthrowing the regime of Yoweri Museveni. Bazira trained for intelligence in several countries, including Israel. He studied Law, History, Political Science and Philosophy at Makerere University.

Bazira represented Uganda in international negotiations and in Pan African efforts (including talks with Kwame Nkrumah while he was a leader of the Pan African student movement), and served as Chair of the African-Arab Friendship Society in Uganda. The society (involving diplomacy, activism and the African public) became the most actively engaged and effective vehicle for addressing regional stability and Sudan's conflict. Amon Bazira's major success was the 1982 negotiated end to the violent 20 year Rwenzururu war in Uganda.

The Early Years

Bazira's political career began in the 1960s while he was studying at Nyakasura School near Fort Portal in Uganda. He emerged as a Pan-Africanist student leader, and met his future wife, Mary Bazira, while on the lecture circuit and Pan Africanist recruiting campaign across East and Central Africa. He was also promoting the establishment of a more robust African film industry that would help advance the cause of African unification. He eventually secured an appointment with President Milton Obote to whom he presented his plans for a state sponsored Pan African film industry. Obote arranged for Bazira to fly to Ghana to visit with Kwame Nkrumah. This meeting with Nkrumah had a profound effect on Bazira.

On his return to Uganda from Ghana, Bazira became the most outspoken Pan Africanist at Makerere University, where he studied Philosophy, History and Law. He graduated at Dar es Salaam, in Tanzania together with John Garang and Yoweri Museveni and several others in a class of graduants who would come to have a disproportianately influential impact on African politics. Bazira joined the government and started work in the President's office, and was sent to do intelligence training in Israel. Shortly after his return from Israel, Idi Amin became president in a military coup. Bazira went underground. In 1976 he was captured, imprisoned at Luzira Maximum Security Prison, and scheduled to be killed. His life was saved by the intervention of King Kigeri V and Commander Ozo, as well as several other sympathetic people who convinced Idi Amin to spare his life. Upon his release he resumed his underground activities, which included coordinating the movements of the TPDF and the Kikosi Maalum troops that were fighting to overthrow Idi Amin.

During and shortly after the 1978 war to depose Idi Amin, Bazira had created guerilla units that were later integrated into the national army. In 1979, while serving as Director of Intelligence, he recruited hundreds of soldiers into the army, mostly from communities that were under-represented in the national instututions. He created a special program for officer training in intelligence and military command and procured funds to send them to study abroad. The training program allowed him to vet and select talented and promising students. A significant portion of the students was also selected because they were from communities that were under stress, and some of these individuals were facing persecution or had been marginalised in spite of their potential. Among the sixty students for whom Bazira obtained passports and scholarships for military and intelligence training was Paul Kagame. Many of the students were sent to western Europe, Cuba and the USSR. Another group was sent to African states for various other programs related to political training.

While Amon Bazira was Director of Intelligence, Yoweri Museveni was Minister of Defence and Vice-Chair of the Military Commission that ran Uganda after the overthrow of Godfrey Binaisa. Bazira and Museveni did not get along. They had fallen out in 1972 when Bazira had refused to compromise his intelligence operations by turning down a request by Museveni to provide him with a safe house. Museveni had been reckless, violent and erratic in his operations during the 1972 invasion, and Bazira didn't want to risk his network.

After the overthrow of Idi Amin, both Bazira and Museveni had become members of the National Consultative Council, an interim body consisting of anti-Amin dissidents and political leaders. It was the NCC that recommended Bazira for leadership of the intelligence service, and had recommended Museveni as Minister of Defence. Museveni had insisted the intelligence portfolio had to be under the Minister of Defence. The other NCC leaders thought otherwise, and had placed the highest organ of the intelligence service, known as Special Branch, under the President's Office, with authority to oversee intelligence in both the civil and military services. In 1979 Amon Bazira accused Yoweri Museveni of perpetrating an indiscriminate campaign of revenge and terror against people who had served under Idi Amin. Among the victims of this period of terror was Enoch Olinga the head of the Baha'i faith in Africa. Museveni was the main suspect in Olinga's assassination. In order to cover up the evidence, Museveni and soldiers from Republic House, the Ministry of Defence, ransacked the offices of the intelligence service.

In January 1981 Amon Bazira decided to run for parliament, and declined a request to join Museveni's party, named Uganda Patriotic Movement. When he became a Member of Parliament, he left the intelligence service. However, his relationship with the government was problematic from the start. Although he was elected to serve on the Executive Committee of the Uganda People's Congress, he was denied a senior cabinet posting. He served as a special diplomatic envoy and as the deputy minister for Lands, Water and Mineral Resources. Moreover, he maintained his intelligence networks and continued to produced reports for use by the members of parliament, and he also run The Sun a major national newspaper he founded.

Struggle for Peace

In 1981, Bazira prepared reports naming Laurent Kabila as a disruptive influence in the region, and recommending measures to address and manage conflict in the Great Lakes Region. In that same year Bazira served on diplomatic missions in the Middle East, including Iraq. He was in Beirut, Lebanon the day when Anwar Sadat was killed.

In 1982, while he was serving as a member of Parliament and of cabinet, Bazira prepared reports warning about the imminent attack on the Ministry of Defence Republic House in Kampala, Uganda. This warning was ignored by the government authorities, and the attack, carried out by [Andrew Kayira two weeks later, gutted Republic House, and devastated the government and became the most important media event by the dissident movement, and it marked the beginning of the rebellion against the regime of Milton Obote. The government's response was incoherent and brutal, instead of addressing the causes of the rebellion.

After the Republic House attack, a Ugandan parliamentary inquiry blamed the Obote government for not heeding Amon Bazira's warning, which had been circulated to members of Parliament and cabinet. The parliament, over the objections of some cabinet ministers, passed legislation setting up the Parliamentary Security Committee, with Bazira as chair, to oversee the reformation and reorganization of all security, police and military functions of the state of Uganda. However, the parliamentary committee was frustrated and sabotaged by the interference of Obote and several reactionary personalities, who accused Bazira of usurping the presidential powers. In spite of the obstructionism and myopia of the government, in the same year, 1982, Bazira negotiated an end to the 20-year long Rwenzururu War and oversaw the reintegration of the Bakonzo Community into Ugandan society.

In October 1982, Bazira protested in parliament the plans to expel Rwandans from Uganda. The plan to expel Rwandans was started as a land conflict between Hima cattle-farmers and Bairu crop-farmers at a place called Ishasa in Mbarara District in Uganda. Instead of negotiating a solution, a small group of government ministers led by one named Kagurusi made political capital by taking sides, and accusing the Hima of land grabbing. When they failed to prove their case, and could not expel Himas from Uganda, they changed tactics and simply accused the Hima community of being Rwandan Tutsis and therefore non-citizens and not entitled to own land in Uganda. The claim that Tutsis were not Ugandans was also unsupported by facts or the constitution. Both Hima and Tutsi landowners had land titles and had acquired land titles constitutionally. To expel them would be illegal, and fearing failure, the anti-Hima ministers organised militia gangs, nominally under the youth wing of the Uganda peoples Congress. These "youth wingers" carried out massacres, pillaging and a campaign of intimidation, looting and destruction of property, including the killing of cows and cutting down banana plantations. They targeted Himas and Tutsis indiscriminately.

However, in spite of his efforts to save lives and prevent carnage, over 100,000 Rwandans were forcibly repatriated Rwanda. Many of the Rwandan and Hima who did not end up stranded on the Rwandan frontier found refuge in Kasese, Bazira's home district. In the process of forced repartriation, thousands of Ugandans and Rwandans were killed and tortured, and most lost their property. Along with six other ministers and members of Parliament who tried to prevent the violence and the Rwandan exodus, Bazira was accused of harbouring Tutsi sympathies and of being a Tutsi himself, and some ministers called for his deportation to Rwanda. For a Pan Africanist the entire debacle was unbearable. Bazira offered his resignation from government but was denied, and from that point on he essentially became a hostage to a government that was bent on a course of national suicide.

The 1982 expulsion of Rwandans was investigated by a UN Commission consisting of several eminent persons, but Milton Obote, Kagurusi, Rwakasisi and other instigators refused to cooperate. That expulsion gave impetus to the Rwandan refugees to create the RPF and to invade Rwanda and overthrow the anti-Tusti junta led by Juvenal Habyarimana. At the end of 1982, a generalized multi-state conflict had been sparked in central Africa with dislocated Ugandan Tutsi refugees at its center, and its consequences would include the rise of Museveni, the pogroms in Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Kenya and Congo in the 1980s and 90s, the subsequent Genocide of 1994, and the fall of the Mobutu regime.

The Mid 1980s

In 1983, the internal rifts within the government of Milton Obote were leading to mutiny. The army was dominated by members of the Acholi community who made up 60% of the troops, and the Langi community. Southerners, consisting of the states two largest communities, the Ganda, Nkore, and Banyarwanda, were under-represented in the national army, but over-represented in the under-ground resistance. In an attempt to resolve the impasse, some of the Acholi general officers by-passed the government altogether, and began secret negotiations with the disidents, among whom was the former Minister of Defense, Yoweri Museveni. The dissidents and the army commanders reached a secret power-sharing agreement that included a plan for a coup d'etat to depose Milton Obote. The role of the Vice-President, Paulo Muwanga, has never been clear.

However, effective control of the armed forces was in the hands of Brigadier-General David Oyite-Ojok, who had not been included in the mutiny, and who remained popular among both the military and the public, having emerged as the most prominent and capable commander in the war against Idi Amin. On December 1, 1983 David Oyite-Ojok was killed in a helicopter crash. Killed along with Oyite-Ojok, were eleven other senior and general officers, all members of the Langi community, except for one. Oyite Ojok had been working with Amon Bazira, as chair of the Parliamentary Security Committee, to resolve the security problems. The death of Oyite-Ojok created a national crisis and caused major fractures in the army to come out in the open and become public. The general level of violence and human-rights abuses in Uganda escalated, perpetrated by vengeful and government security organs with uncertain loyalties, and dissidents bent on sabotage.

By 1984, the Obote government, like all other African governments was faced with severe constraints, including a disastrous exchange rate against the US dollar. However, it was losing on the public relations front, and the rifts within government and reached all the way into the cabinet. Obote refused to reshuffle the cabinet, a move that would have shaken things up and given progressive government leaders a chance at reforming the system. Moreover, Obote refused to negotiate with the rebels, and the stressed and poorly-organised security organs increasingly targeted ethnic communities that were considered to constitute the rebel support networks. They police instituted the Panda Gari, an operation in the downtown core of Kampala City, in which large groups of people were randomly arrested and interrogated, and the product of these interrogations were usually arrests and extrajudicial murders of innocent civilians. Among Bazira spent a lot of time rescuing arrested people, and retrieving people from illegal detention centers.

By June 1985 the government has lost political coherence. Security organs were operating without parliamentary supervision. The party leaders were preparing for the coming elections, and expecting no reprieve in the violence. On June 27 the military coup that had been prepared in 1983 came. It had been obvious for several weeks that it was coming. Bazira had intervened to negotiate an orderly process. However, Milton Obote abandoned his post at dawn on the 27th. He did not inform his cabinet or the parliament, and did not leave instructions for loyal troops about how to address the change of government. In the chaos that ensured there were needless gun battles in the city between disoriented troops.

In the afternoon Tito Okello was declared president by the radio and television. A week later a new cabinet was installed. Bazira declined appointments. The dissidents complained about the new cabinet and political appointments because they violated the secret agreements of 1983. Bazira attended meetings at Okello's invitation. In the meantime he negotiated an end to a stand-off between government troops and National Resistance Army (NRA) troops at Kasese. Okello agreed to pull the government forces out of Kasese. Because of the deal, Kasese became the first district occupied by the NRA. Bazira had been trying to avoid violence, and so Kasese changed hands without a single shot being fired. The NRA set up their first majro military base at Mobuku. The base was commanded by Alphonse Furuma. It was at this base that the NRA recruited most of its fighting force.

The Okello government also started formal peace talks with the NRA and other dissident groups and non-statutory armies. These talks were held in Nairobi, overseen by Hosea Kiplat and other members of Daniel arap Moi's team. However, the talks were mediated by the inexperienced Kenyan team. The truce didn't last very long and by November 1985, the war resumed. The state of Uganda was divided in portions, each governed by a different faction, army or militia. In January 1986 the NRA entered Kampala after receiving a massive infusion of arms from Israel and Tanzania.

The Museveni Regime

The first six months of the NRA government were marked by a return to civility and normalcy. Crime dropped significantly and security returned to the capital. People could walk at night, and the fighting abated in the northern part of Uganda. However, Yoweri Museveni, the new president, was making ideologically incoherent speeches laced with Leninist-Stalinist rhetoric. He was extolling the virtues of revolutionary violence, and claiming that he was implementing a Marxist revolution. Rationing of food and services was introduced, and by July 1986 the radi ["sic"] was incessantly blaring archaic communist propaganda about anti-people activities, reactionaries and class enemies. This went on even though there was peace and most people were still euphoric about the new government.

On August 16, 1986 the government radio announced that Amon Bazira was under arrest on charges of treason. He was the first national political leader to be arrested. Eventually such arrests would become routine and announcements ceased to be made. For one year and eight months Bazira was held in detention, pending hearings that were unable to make coherent charges. At the same time the government had instituted a Commission of Inquiry into past crimes. The Chair of that Commission had demanded that Bazira be granted bail or released. The manuscripts of books that Bazira was preparing for publication were seized, including one for a book making the case for intervention in Rwanda in order to prevent genocide.

Shortly afterward Yoweri Museveni abolished constitutionally guaranteed rights and allegedly began to have potential opponents killed and destabilize regional institutions, though there is much debate about how much Museveni was really involved in these activities. The first to be killed was Andrew Kayiira. Several others followed. Bazira started a national campaign to oust Museveni and to form a new regionally responsible government in Uganda. He founded a coalition of political organizations called the National Movement for the Liberation of Uganda [NMLU] , whose military wing [NALU] first disbanded and expelled Laurent Kabila’s forces from the Rwenzori Range. Bazira also tried to harmonize the political agendas of the dissident forces in the Great Lakes Region.

In 1991, following negotiations between Museveni and Habyarimana, Bazira was arrested while travelling through Kigali and imprisoned in Rwanda. Habyarimana planned to capture Bazira and hand him to Museveni in exchange for Kagame and several other RPF commanders. However, Mobutu, who did not like Museveni, intervened and demanded the release of Amon Bazira. Bazira spent the next two years building a network of Pan-African activists, and trying to reform the nature of political dissent in Africa.

Death of Bazira

Bazira was killed because he resisted against the neocolonial interests and plans of the US State Department, of presidents Daniel arap Moi, Juvenal Habyarimana, Yoweri Museveni, and a British weapons & minerals magnate called Tiny Rowland. Amon Bazira was assassinated, allegedly on the orders of Ugandan president Museveni and complicity of Kenyan president Moi in August 1993, during a scheduled meeting with Daniel arap Moi at the Nakuru State House.

While some of the political organizations and networks that Amon Bazira created suffered as a result of his death, others have survived and continue to be a resource for the Pan African movement. Many of the people he trained and whose positive organizational talents he nurtured continue to have a powerful influence on the course of African politics. After Bazira's death, over the course of many years, different factions claiming his mantle have appeared, many trying to use his name for their own myopic ends, but most have been imposters trying to claim what they could not possibly comprehend.

Over the years several different groups have tried to redefine Bazira's identity and legacy. The basic facts are that he was highly disciplined and sought to steer a disciplined course in an era of terrorism and depressing violence. Yet in the world's most violent region he didn't get embroiled in the genocidal patricide, even while engaged directly and militarily, despite attempts by detractors and pretenders to drag his name into the mud. This is a testament to the fact that another Africa is possible.

Commentary

Perhaps for Africa, for whose freedom Amon Bazira was struggling, the most important thing he will be remembered for is that he defended and spoke up for communities whose image and status in was regretable. He showed that organising politically can raise a community from the status of pariah to decency and respect. In a land riven with attitudes and perversions that include ethnic shame, vulgar appetites, and repression, he showed that liberation was possible, even in the face of implacable odds.

References

New Vision Newspaper http://www.newvision.co.ug/D/8/26/417253

Allafrica. com http://allafrica.com/stories/200707020962.html

External links

* [http://www.africanfront.com/ The African Front website]