SPARE A THOUGHT FOR MUKURA VICTIMS ; TESO SUB-REGION WILL NEVER FORGIVE PRESIDENT M7 it’s abundantly clear that July 11 1989 is the kind of date the NRM government would rather everyone forgot, cast out into the wilderness of political oblivion. To recap: between 1986 and 1990, the National Resistance Army (armed wing of the ruling NRM) was deployed in the Teso sub-region with the aim of destroying the infrastructure of the rebel Uganda People’s Army (UPA), led by Peter Otai, former Minister of State for Defence under President Apollo Milton Obote’s second government (1980-1985). On July 11, 1989, peasant farmers, who were tending their crops across Mukura, Kumi District, were herded by NRA troops into makeshift IDP camps, ostensibly to protect them against the marauding UPA rebels. That same day, soldiers handpicked 70 youths and frog-marched them to Okunguro Railway Station, five minutes from Mukura trading centre. They then crammed them into a disused railway wagon, securely locked the carriage and lit a fire underneath, incinerating all their captives in an almighty inferno. The haunting question that remains unanswered is why the 70 suspected rebels were summarily exterminated, rather than charged in a court of law, allegedly for trying to overthrow the NRM government. By all accounts, the Museveni government instituted an inquiry into the massacre. So, why have the findings never been made public? Don’t we have a right and obligation to demand a straightforward and concrete accounting of what happened in Mukura 21 years ago this Sunday? The crucial question is by whose authority were those unarmed youths cremated by the NRA? It takes no intelligence to recognise that the people of Mukura deserve justice, too. However uncomfortable reading the inquiry findings might be, only publishing them can produce a semblance of catharsis. I’m no huge fan of the British Conservative Party, not least because the former Conservative Prime Minister, Edward Heath, with unbridled sadism, unleashed Idi Amin on hapless Ugandans in 1971. However, what wins my overwhelming praise is the swiftness with which their current leader, Prime Minister David Cameron, moved to issue a grovelling apology for the “unjustified and unjustifiable” execution of 14 civil rights marchers by British paratroopers in Northern Ireland on what came to be known as Bloody Sunday, January 30, 1972. It’s bad enough that Gen. Yoweri Museveni hasn’t seen fit to borrow a leaf from Cameron’s book and prosecute the perpetrators of the Mukura Massacre. What’s more absurd is that it’s hard to imagine that our overlords in Kampala even know a single name of those who were roasted like vermin in that wagon, unlike in Northern Ireland, where names of the victims were read out to the huddled world media hacks on June 15. Sad but true, the Museveni government has been naïve in thinking that memories will gradually fade and Mukura will be forgotten, then airbrushed out of official data. It may yet take 40 years, like Northern Ireland’s Bloody Sunday, but our collective memory of the victims of Mukura’s bloody Tuesday will never disappear in a puff of that wagon’s smoke. Oh! And incidentally, David Cameron issued his fulsome apology on a Tuesday! THE COMING OF A NEW LEADER WILL BRING JUSTICE ; VOTE FOR CHANGE COME 2016
Posted on: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 10:19:01 +0000