{UAH} THE MASSACRES OF LUWERO WERE DENIED BY OBOTE AND THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT

Uganda Struggling Awake From A Savage Nightmare

By David Zucchino,

Inquirer Staff Writer

BUSIRO, Uganda — The signpost for Busiro is a neat stack of bleached human skulls and skeletons. This is all that remains of peasants who failed to flee Busiro when the soldiers of Milton Obote came to pillage and murder.

Those who did manage to escape have returned now to find their neighbors' bones and not much else. In Busiro, and all across the fertile farmland known as the Luwero Triangle, survivors have returned to confront the realities of Uganda's long descent into savagery.

Former President Obote and his soldiers ravaged the area from 1980 through 1985. They are gone now, but so is everything else. Houses were burned and their contents looted. Cows and chickens were slaughtered and eaten. Coffee and banana plots were leveled. Two hundred thousand people were butchered.

The suffering of Luwero is the suffering of all Uganda. It is a nation that once boasted the finest hospitals and universities in East Africa. Its people were once among the most prosperous and best educated on the continent. The British explorer Sir Henry Morton Stanley called Uganda "the pearl of Africa."

Now, after 20 years of civil wars and massacres that have claimed an estimated half million lives, Uganda is attempting to recover. The same sense of security that has prompted villagers to return to Luwero is producing the first semblance of normalcy here in two decades.

Still, it is to an utterly wasted place that the peasants of Lowero must return. Maria Nakabugo came back this summer to find her house stripped, its metal roof and window frames hauled away. Her brother had been shot dead. Next door, an entire family had been murdered in their home. Nakabugo can only assume that their bones are now part of the Busiro signpost.

Every week, as she turns up the soil for planting, Nakabugo unearths more human bones. Almost every day, her children pick up skulls while playing in the forest.

"I look at them and wonder - which friend is that? Which neighbor? And of course I will never know," said Nakabugo, a small-boned woman of 32 who now lives with her six children in a mud hut next to the remains of her former house.

The Luwero atrocities ended in January of last year, when the bush army of Yoweri Museveni swept into the capital of Kampala, 30 miles to the south. Museveni is president now, and under his guarantees of safety, the survivors of the Lowero Triangle have come back home with a sense of caution and despair.

"We can never again have it the way it was," said Festo Manyangenda, a bony man of 70 who returned last year to find his three sons murdered and their wives raped. "I had a beautiful house, a good shamba (farm), cows and chickens. . . . And now it's all gone."

Those who survived five years of terror escaped with only their lives. Before 1980, about 1.5 million people lived within the 10,000 square miles that make up the lush Lowero Triangle. By 1985, the entire area had been depopulated.

As many as 200,000 villagers were massacred here by Obote's troops, according to human rights groups. The rest fled, leaving behind their homes and property to be plundered.

The area is home to the Baganda, Uganda's largest ethnic group. Luwero had been Museveni's base as he sought to overthrow Obote. Obote sought to rob him of local support and cover by eliminating every last animal, crop, building and human being.

Residents still talk of the four-story hotel in nearby Nakaseke, where Obote's men had set up a torture chamber. They speak of villagers being thrown

from the top of the hotel, of men and women being burned alive, of pieces of flesh chopped from them bit by bit to make them confess to aiding Museveni's soldiers.

The atrocities were first revealed in mid-1984 by Uganda newspapers and by American diplomats. But there was no international outrage because the massacres were denied by Obote and later discounted by the British government.

Now, in village after village, the bones of Obote's victims are stacked by the roadside as proof of what happened here. The macabre little monuments have been set up under the direction of so-called resistance committees made up of local officials loyal to Museveni's ruling National Resistance Movement.

"For years, no one believed us," said James Katende, 55, whose brother and sister were executed and his home and farm destroyed by Obote's soldiers. A stack of several dozen skulls rests outside his ruined home. The remains of his brother and sister are perhaps among them, Katende suggested.

"Here is the proof," Katende said, gazing down at the pale white bones. ''Now no one can say our people were not massacred."

Even after Obote was overthrown in a military coup led by Gen. Tito Okello in July 1985, the killings continued under Okello's troops as they tried to hold off Museveni's army, according to local residents. Only during the last year have villagers felt that it was safe enough to return.

Seven years ago, the residents of the Luwero Triangle enjoyed one of the highest standards of living in Africa. They lived in solid concrete houses with glass windows and electricity. They raised their own food and earned a solid living selling coffee and bananas.

Now there is virtually no home left undamaged. Most are still pocked with bullet holes and blackened by fires set by Obote's men. Farm plots have been overtaken by elephant grass; the last coffee crop was harvested in 1980.

Finally, there is some hope that the horror has ended. When Museveni's National Resistance Army took Kampala last year, there was little of the looting and revenge killings routinely carried out by previous "armies of liberation."

Last month, when reports surfaced of atrocities by Museveni's soldiers in northern Uganda, Museveni called in his commanders and publicly warned them that violaters would be severely punished.

Western diplomats in Kampala say only isolated instances of army atrocities have occurred. They point out that soldiers caught stealing have been punished, and that Museveni has set up a human rights commission to investigate abuses against civilians.

Museveni is the first southerner to lead Uganda since it gained independence from Britain in 1962. Unlike northerners such as Idi Amin and Obote, he has included politicians of rival tribes in his government. Still, Museveni has chosen to wage a war of attrition against rebels from tribes in the north, where half of Museveni's army of 35,000 regularly battles several thousand loosely allied rebels.

Some 30,000 to 50,000 civilians have been displaced by the fighting, according to relief workers in Kampala. Several hundred more have been killed, wounded or robbed by gangs of cattle rustlers armed with AK-47 assault rifles. There have been unconfirmed reports of murders and lootings by both rebel and government soldiers.

As civil war drags on in the north, the rest of the country struggles to recover. The nation's infrastructure has been destroyed, and it will be years before it can be rebuilt.

Kampala itself is a ghetto littered with decaying buildings and bullet- riddled storefronts. Electricity comes and goes, safe drinking water is elusive, and the roads are hopelessly potholed.

An economic reform package announced by Museveni in May - which included a 700 percent devaluation of the Ugandan shilling - has attracted promises of aid from international lenders. Meanwhile, foreign relief agencies are stepping up their operations here. The U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) has provided $5 million in aid this year and hopes to provide $20 million next year.

Museveni has welcomed back exiles from the Amin and Obote years. ''Museveni's tolerance and accommodation distinguishes him from all the others," Prince Ronald Mutebi, hereditary ruler of the Baganda tribe, whose family was banished by Obote in the 1960s, said in Kampala. "There's a real renaissance under way here."

That renaissance has not yet touched the Luwero Triangle. Even with kits of seeds, hoes, bicycles and foodstuffs provided by AID, few villagers have been able to grow food or cash crops yet. Virtually no one has been able to move back into his or her house.

In the village of Kirolo, Aida Nalubwama once lived in a solid concrete house with flower and vegetable gardens. Now she lives in a mud hut and makes a bare living by selling tomatoes grown by her neighbors.

Nalubwama, 60, fled Kirolo with her family in 1982. Traveling through the bush, they were ambushed by Obote troops who killed her husband and three of her children.

She escaped, only to remain on the run for nearly five years. She returned this summer to find the village wrecked and her home destroyed.

"This is not the way we normally live," Nalubwama explained to a visitor. ''Our people do not live in mud huts. We live in proper houses - not now, but normally. Please don't think we are savages."

It was the northerners, the tribesmen brought in by Obote and Okello, who were the savages, she said. She would never forgive them. Nor would she ever accept them as fellow Ugandans in the new nation Museveni was attempting to forge.

"They are there and we are here," she said. "That is as it should be."

On the gutted storefront where Nalubwama sold her tomatoes, Okello's departing soldiers had left their own sentiments in scrawled graffiti. One message read: "Museveni, we are very sorry to say that a good Baganda is a dead one."

                 Thé Mulindwas Communication Group
"With Yoweri Museveni, Ssabassajja and Dr. Kiiza Besigye, Uganda is in anarchy"
                    Kuungana Mulindwa Mawasiliano Kikundi
"Pamoja na Yoweri Museveni, Ssabassajja na Dk. Kiiza Besigye, Uganda ni katika machafuko"