Context of Political and Social Violence in Uganda

Context of Political and Social Violence in Uganda.

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and his National Resistance Movement have maintained control over the country for the past 37 years and will exceed 40 years at the end of his current term of office. As in Chad, Museveni’s son, a military general, is being positioned to take the reins upon his father’s retirement from the presidency. The United States and other governments and intergovernmental organisations have described the last several elections in Uganda as being inconsistent with international standards of democracy. The U.S. Department of State has, for the past 3 years, been banning travel to the United States by members of the Museveni regime for their roles in undermining democracy in Uganda. Among the allegations behind the increasing isolation of the Ugandan government, there are credible allegations of arbitrary killings and disappearances of opposition supporters, disenfranchisement and voter intimidation, harassment of the opposition, closure of social media websites, and lack of transparency and independence in the Electoral Commission. The national police maintain internal security, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs oversees police. The president detailed army officials to leadership roles within police and the executive, including government ministries. The law allows the military to support police operations to maintain internal security. The Ministry of Defense oversees the army.

There were reports that members of the security forces committed numerous abuses, with only a few low-ranking officers purportedly punished. These human rights violations were deemed significant by the UN and included credible reports of: unlawful or arbitrary killings, including extrajudicial killings; forced disappearance; torture and cases of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by government agencies; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; arbitrary arrest or detention; political prisoners or detainees; serious problems with the independence of the judiciary; arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy; punishment of family members for alleged offenses by a relative; serious abuses in a conflict, including unlawful civilian harm; serious restrictions on freedom of expression and media, including violence, threats of violence, and unjustified arrests or prosecution of journalists, and censorship; serious restrictions on internet freedom; substantial interference with the freedom of peaceful assembly and freedom of association, including overly restrictive laws on the organization, funding, or operation of nongovernmental organizations and civil society organizations;

serious flaws with citizens’ ability to determine their government through free and fair elections; serious and unreasonable restrictions on political participation; serious government corruption; serious government restrictions on or harassment of domestic and international human rights organizations; lack of investigation of and accountability for gender-based violence, including domestic and intimate partner violence, sexual violence, and child, early, and forced marriage; crimes involving violence or threats of violence targeting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or intersex persons; and existence of laws criminalizing consensual same-sex sexual conduct between adults. Both the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau for Democracy and Human Rights and Human Rights Watch found that the government was reluctant to investigate, prosecute, or punish officials who committed human rights abuses or engaged in corruption, whether in the security services or elsewhere in government, and impunity, including for serious abuses, was a problem. Beyond these surface conclusions of the international community above, the remainder of this section examines the context of political and social violence in Uganda that are driving many Ugandans into exile. The violence that has become a standard part of Ugandan social, political, and cultural life is neither new, nor does it arise from only one segment of society. Instead, it has become like an epidemic of sorts, with public officials championing and advocating for violent

responses to protests and other violent responses in an endemic cycle of violence. As the graphic in figure 2 illustrates, Uganda is majority Christian, with enclaves of Muslims in the northeast and southeast. The dominant ethnicity is Buganda, where the country draws its name. Neither ethnicity nor religion appears to be major drivers of conflict.

Instead, we have found there to be widespread depth of generational psychosocial-emotional trauma from 50-years of violent civil conflict that is nearly continuously overlaid by violent and abusive local and national governance. Part of this governing abuse is the creation of a ‘winner-takes-all’ mentality that permits or even encourages political ingroup-outgroup creation of social representation in the form of ‘haves versus have-nots’ expressed as a murderous reordering of society. At the centre of this murderous reordering is President Museveni’s National Resistance Movement, which has transferred psychological ideations of tribe-clan self-love to political party self-love. It is not enough to merely be neutral, as neutrality implies membership within the outgroup of NRM self-love, where competitions over social, political, or security agendas are the outward (rational) manifestations of an otherwise psychological motive for the violence. There are deeper aspects of this phenomenon in play, however this kernel of diagnosis establishes the context needed to describe the context of political and social violence more fully in Uganda. Those Ugandan urbanites who are or were part of any of the competing competitions over social, political, or security agendas are at particular risk of violent attention. And this violent attention extends to their families as part of a pattern of psychosocial vengeance by victims-turned-perpetrators, creating a social situation that may well become intractable.