Kintu Nyago
28 September 2008
opinion
Kampala — Anything goes when it comes to reporting on Africa.
This is the impression that was projected by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) weekly programme, African Perspectives, which recently marked the Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam al Qaeda terrorist bombings.
It was an amateurish, biased story which focused on Uganda's experience with global terror. It asserted that Kampala was opportunistically using the war on terror to suffocate its opposition while concurrently lining up its pockets with anti-terrorism financial packages from the Bush administration.
This programme mainly interviewed President Yoweri Museveni adminstration's harshest critics. An example is the US-based Ugandan academic Dr. Joshua Rubongoya. This BBC programme failed to appreciate that for nearly two decades, Uganda has been faced with the threat of both local and global terror.
One has only to refer to the methods of Peter Otai's Uganda People's Army, Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), or Jamil Mukullu's Allied Democratic Front (ADF), to appreciate my point.
The LRA and the ADF were much more than mere rural terror groups. They had links with the very core of global terror.
For in Sudan, the Tourabi-Bashir National Islamic Front regime which came to power through a coup in 1989 supported a policy of regime change in Kampala through supporting Kony's LRA, while concurrently creating Mukullu's ADF.
We should not lose sight of the fact that in the early 1990s, extremist Khartoum also hosted the notorious and enigmatic global terror mastermind, Osama bin Laden, who was recuperating from his initial Afghan Jihad. Ironically, this was conducted at the behest of Washington and Jeddah's, the ruling house of Fahad with which the bin Laden family has strong bonds.
While in Sudan, Osama's al-Qaeda developed links with the ADF, and the LRA, some of whom later trained in Afghanistan. Some of the effects of the Sudan al-Qaeda liaisons with the bizarre LRA and ADF stooge terror groups include the Kichwamba massacre that resulted in the burning to death of 80 youthful students.
Or earlier LRA's Vincent Otti masterminded Atiak massacre where up to 600 civillians were hacked to death. Then there were the Barlonyo and Obalang incidents. This became the pattern and modus operandi of these diabolical groups.
Few countries, with the exception of contemporary Iraq and Afghanistan, have faced the vicious wrath of global terror as Uganda. The ADF had in the late 1990s, with all sensitivity before 9/11, graduated from a rural to an urban terrorist group when it indiscriminately targeted the civilian population mainly in Kampala but also Jinja and Kasese.
Uganda survived being attacked by al-Qaeda when Dar-Es-Salaam and Nairobi were hit through a combination of being favoured by mother luck and the vigilance of our security forces who have superb civilmilitary relations.
The al-Qaeda cell leader who masterminded the East African attack fortunately drowned in Lake Nalubaale (Victoria) when coming to Uganda. His remains and documentation that was washed ashore were discovered by civilians in Wakiso district, who handed them over to the security forces.
Against this background, the African Perspectives programme falls in the league of gutter journalism. And they were most likely informed by the 'anything goes' mentality when it comes to reporting on Africa.
Sincerely, could such denialist and revisionist interpretations of reality be accepted in the West, by say suggesting that 9/11 was a conspiracy of the Bush administration to attain a legitimacy they lacked after the Florida debacle or that the holocaust never existed?
Africa deserves better.
The writer is a political critic
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2008 New Vision. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
