Bush Trip to Africa, July 2003
Stop Number Four: Uganda (plus Great Lakes and Sudan)The stop at Entebbe will likely provide the chance to announce any new policies toward the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). President Bush may also speak about the conflict in Sudan and should address abuses by the government of Uganda. Key question for the Bush team: will they publicly condemn the role played by Uganda and Rwanda, two key U.S. allies in Africa, in the war in neighboring Congo? Despite three peace agreements aimed at ending the five-year-old Congolese war, fighting in eastern DRC intensified in late 2002 and early 2003. The current violence in Bunia is only the latest episode in this war that has left an estimated 3.3 million civilians dead throughout the Congo, a toll that makes it more deadly to civilians than any other since World War II. The conflict in the DRC presents the Bush administration with a critical test of what resources it is willing to invest to protect civilians. War crimes, crimes against humanity and other violations of international humanitarian and human rights law have been carried out on a massive scale in Ituri. Armed groups have massacred civilians, often solely on the basis of their ethnicity. They have also committed summary executions, rapes, arbitrary arrests, and torture. All groups have recruited children for military service, some as young as seven years old. Armed groups have deliberately prevented humanitarian agencies from delivering assistance to people whom they have defined as their enemies, resulting in further deaths.
Ugandan forces, the occupying power in Ituri from 1998 until its withdrawal in May 2003, largely aggravated rather than calmed ethnic and political hostilities. The Ugandan army became involved in a land dispute between the Hema and Lendu ethnic groups in 1999. It conducted joint operations with Lendu and Ngiti militias to dislodge the Hema from Bunia in March 2003. Meanwhile, in the past year, the political group known as RCD-Goma (backed by Rwanda) and the RCD-ML (backed by the DRC) became increasingly active in the area, contributing to further conflict and backing new armed groups. The U.N. peacekeeping force, MONUC, with some 700 troops in Bunia, has had no capability to protect civilians and has been completely overwhelmed. The force lacks a robust mandate like that of the Interim Emergency Multinational Force for Ituri and has proved ineffective in quelling the violence and protecting civilians. The Bush administration has so far had two main objectives in the DRC: the withdrawal of foreign troops, and the establishment of a transitional government. At the U.N. Security Council, the U.S. backed the multinational force for Ituri, but so far has provided no financial or logistical assistance for it. The U.S. has also been reluctant to support the enhanced mandate necessary to allow MONUC troops to protect civilians, apparently because of concerns about the effectiveness and cost of the peacekeeping operation. Washington should support a strengthening of the overall MONUC mandate to ensure it is robust enough to protect civilians both in Ituri and elsewhere -- particularly after the Interim Emergency Multinational Force leaves in September. The U.S. has long provided substantial support to Uganda, not just because of its apparent success in economic development and combating HIV/AIDS, but also because it offered assistance in curbing the power of the Sudan. When President Bush met with Ugandan President Museveni on June 10, he reportedly warned him about continuing Ugandan involvement in the DRC, including its support of proxy militias, and urged him to open up the Ugandan political system. U.S. officials did not deliver such messages publicly, however, fostering the perception that the U.S. is biased in favor of Uganda. In December 2002, the Bush administration certified that Uganda was again eligible for preferential trading status under the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) even though human rights performance is one of the criteria for qualification. The U.S. State Department has been more open in criticizing Rwanda for its "poor" human rights record, citing both violations committed by its soldiers in the DRC and other abuses at home. However, the White House, satisfied by Rwandan withdrawal of its regular units from the DRC, has adopted a more lenient approach. In March 2003 the Bush administration declared Rwanda eligible for the AGOA program despite its poor human rights record. When President Bush is in Africa, he should publicly call on the Ugandan, Rwandan and DRC governments not to provide any military or financial assistance to the armed groups in Ituri. President Bush should urge the government of the DRC to make reform of the national justice system a priority so as to better prosecute and punish those responsible for violations of international humanitarian law and serious human rights abuses. The U.S. government should also support the establishment of some kind of international tribunal to hold accountable those most responsible for such crimes, whether citizens of the DRC or of other nations. Such a court must function with full independence and impartiality and according to international standards of due process. President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda is a favorite of international donors because of his social and economic outlook. But he has long tolerated serious abuses by Ugandan forces in northern Uganda. The seventeen-year war against the rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) is a stalemate in which the Acholi community-the ethnic group predominating in the three northwestern war-torn districts-has been punished mercilessly by both sides. The Ugandan army (Ugandan People's Defense Forces, UPDF) and security forces commit multiple abuses against the population, such as rape, torture, recruitment of child soldiers, and prolonged arbitrary detention. The government rarely punishes its forces for these crimes. The government's abuses were obscured until recently by the brutality of the LRA, which targets children to serve as soldiers, porters, slaves or servants, and concubines- abducting more than 8,500 children from June 2002-May 2003, more than in any other comparable period. The children are brutalized, then trained as soldiers; many are forced to kill other children and sometimes even family members. The LRA also targets Catholic clergy, suspected informers, civilians living in displaced persons camps, and vehicles carrying relief supplies. Abuses by the government UPDF soldiers and Local Defense Units have produced a resentful northern population. Some 70 percent of the population in the Acholi districts-a staggering 800,000 persons-has been displaced. In the north and throughout Uganda, opposition multipartists and ordinary people are increasingly subjected to prolonged arbitrary detention under treason and anti-terrorism laws. The proliferation of "safe houses," unacknowledged detention centers run by military intelligence and security services, has been accompanied by more reports of torture. The Bush administration should work actively to end abuses in northern Uganda, recognizing that a military solution has failed and that the suffering for northern Ugandans has gone on too long. The U.S. should use its leverage to see that the Ugandan government puts an end to abuses by the UPDF and security forces and demonstrates a convincing pattern of investigating and prosecuting those accused of abuses throughout Uganda. The U.S. should convince its partners in the Sudan peace talks to include the LRA as an agenda item, because the Sudanese government is again aiding the LRA in retaliation for the Ugandan government's support of the Sudanese rebels the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A). The Sudanese government must agree to discontinue all support for the LRA. The U.S. has been deeply committed to achieving a peaceful negotiated solution to the larger and longer conflict in Sudan, which has taken as many as two million lives in its twenty years. A peace agreement between the Sudanese government and the SPLM/A, targeted for signature this year, should eliminate the need or excuse for Ugandan support for the SPLM/A, which will become a partner in Sudanese government. The Sudanese peace negotiations, however, have not brought an end to that country's remarkably long record of human rights abuses, despite a ceasefire signed in October 2002. The Sudanese government and its southern ethnic militias have been attacking civilians in the southern oilfields despite the ceasefire. The Sudanese government is throwing most of its military resources into a war in Darfur in western Sudan, an area not even covered in the peace talks, where repression and impunity for government militias that burn villages and kill civilians is repeating the pattern of devastation visited on the south for the last twenty years. The Sudanese government has abused the rights of its citizens even outside the war theatre with continuing torture (especially of university students), prolonged arbitrary detention, recruitment of child soldiers, off and on suspension of many newspapers and arrests and fines for news people. This essentially one-party state has not made much progress toward opening up to civil and political rights for all its citizens. The SPLM/A, which has received enormous political and financial support from the United States, is an authoritarian organization with a weak political wing that will become a one-party government for the south after the peace agreement-unless the U.S. takes firm steps to see that the parties agree to extensive international monitoring of the human rights provisions of the peace agreement. The U.S. should also ensure that the parties agree to allow a neutral international team to conduct elections (scheduled for national, regional, and local posts three years after the peace agreement) and the referendum on self-determination scheduled for six and a half years after the peace agreement. More information from Human Rights Watch is available online: Letter to Security Council Members on their Mission to Central Africa (June 6, 2003)
Democratic Republic of Congo: U.N. Should Deploy a Rapid Reaction Force in Ituri: A Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International Letter to the U.N. Security Council (May 21, 2003)
Stolen Children: Abduction and Recruitment in Northern Uganda (March 2003) Report: http://hrw.org/reports/2003/uganda0303/
|
