{UAH} IDDI AMIN NEVER TARGETED LANGIs/ACHOLIs, THEY TARGETED HIM {---Series thirty nine}

Friends

 

In as much as Acholi and Langi stand to state that all is well, but what we need is Museveni's departure, Uganda Is suffering from violence. We have many that die and are simply neglected. The numbers of such that are dying are way out numbering the George Okellos and Gwokto that sing Museveni is the problem.  We are the problem. When  a Ugandan stands up publicly to state that Baganda women get raped for their men are sexually weak, stop and wonder what that dead man or woman thought last as he was abandoned by all of us. Ugandans I raised the HIV issue in Kyotera and Rakai, an issue many of you neglected as you  neglected the Acholi violence.  Well non Ugandans out there cared to travel through the region when Acholi were running our country. Among those that travelled the Kyotera Rakai Masaka axis, to see what really HIV did in the region was Robert Caputo. This is what he saw that you as Ugandans never saw, but never even cared to see. We are dedicating this series to Robert Caputo and what he saw that he wrote under a heading Uganda : A land beyond sorrow.

 

As you keep quite at the Acholi violence my question is very standard, who protects these people that die if not you?

 

UGANDA : Land Beyond Sorrow

written by Robert Caputo

 

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Once Known as "the pearl of Africa," Uganda has been ravaged by genocidal warfare costing perhaps 800,000 lives and is stalked now by an AIDS crisis that alarms world health officials. Jane Nakarima, right, is a victim of the disease, as is her year-and-a-half-old son. Yet fertile soil and good climate keep starvation at bay, while the nation searches for the first steps on the long and difficult road back.

JANE NAMIRIMU was 22 years old. When I went to visit her, she was lying on the floor of her parents' house near the town of Kyotera, her thin frail body cushioned from the cold concrete by only a torn piece of old foam rubber. A rash covered her body, she had chronic diarrhea, and she vomited when she tried to eat. Her breathing was shallow and short. There was no ointment to soothe her skin, or even aspirin to cool the fevers that gripped her. She was too weak to walk, and spent her days staring out the open door at children playing in the yard.

Jane was pregnant with her first child. She was the tenth victim of AlDS I had visited that day in Kyotera, a town of about 2,000 near Lake Victoria (map, pages 474-5).

"Jane has been sick for about six months," her father told me. " We took her to the hospital, and to a traditional healer. She did get better for a time. But then it started again. And what can we do? I do not have more money, and everyone just dies with this slim."

"Slim" is the word Ugandans use for AIDS because of the skeletal appearance of victims in the last stages of the disease. AIDS has reached epidemic proportions in this strifetorn country in which perhaps 800,000 people have been slaughtered in 20 years of intermittent civil war.

The government officially reports 2,369 cases of AIDS, but the real number is undoubtedly far higher. Nobody knows. The breakdown of communications and health-care systems makes it impossible to compile reliable numbers, but informed sources estimate that one in every five sexually active adults in Kampala, the capital, may be infected. When a Ugandan dies on a remote homestead, the cause of death goes undiagnosed. Like Uganda's ongoing civil wars, AIDS claims primarily those between 18 and 40 years old.

In the countryside near Kyotera I stopped at almost every house I came to, and in every one the scene was the same: Someone had recently died, or was dying, of AIDS. Hospitals are few in Uganda and cannot cope with the numbers of patients; most are cared for by their families. In house after house I saw mothers and grandmothers keeping vigil over loved ones who were slowly wasting away. I went to funerals almost every day-sometimes several in the same day. I often saw scores of mourners winding their way through the fields, on their way from one funeral to the next.

The underlying numbers are staggering: About half of the adult medical patients examined at a Masaka hospital tested positive for the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS, as did 40 percent in Kampala's Mulago Hospital, which admits five new AIDS patients a day. A survey of truck stops showed about 70 percent of the prostitutes and 33 percent of the truck drivers to be infected. In a 1986 survey at another Kampala hospital, seven out of every 50 pregnant women tested positive for HIV antibodies, and the same was true for adult male blood donors. A more complete picture of the extent of the disease awaits results of a national blood survey just begun.

" It is already a disaster," one foreign doctor working in Uganda told me, "and it's going to get worse. We don't know enough about the disease to make firm predictions-there are many possible scenarios. It could be that hundreds of thousands of people are going to die. They may already be infected."

"I don't know what to do," said Jane Namirimu softly while I sat with her. "I want to have a family, and a farm , and a home like this one. But I feel I am haunted by ghosts that will not leave me. I can just pray that things will be the way they should be."

NOTHING is the way it should be in Uganda. As independence from Britain approached in 1967. it seemed that Uganda, " the pearl of Africa, " was well on its way to a long and happy life as a modern state. The fertile south, populated by the Baganda and other Bantu-speaking peoples, was highly developed. Kampala swelled on a tide of economic activity based on agricultural riches: Cotton, coffee, and tea exports earned foreign exchange that repaid the farmers with roads, schools, hospitals, and manufactured goods. Southerners made good livings as businessmen, bureaucrats, and professionals.

In the north, where the land is poorer, development was slower. To make up for this, and to take advantage of the Nilotic tradition of warriorhood, the British recruited northerners into the army and police. Thus both groups had avenues for advancement.

But the dream of independence became a nightmare of insecurity, brutality, and economic collapse. Milton Obote, of the northern Langi people, was elected prime minister. He soon ousted President Sir Edward Mutesa, the hereditary Baganda king, and made himself president. Obote's corrupt regime was overthrown in 1971 by another northerner, Idi Amin, who embarked on an orgy of bloodshed in which an estimated 300,000 Ugandans were shot, tortured, and battered to death.

In 1979 Amin was driven out by the army of neighboring Tanzania and the Uganda National Liberation Army (UNLA), and Obote returned. But the UNLA did not liberate Ugandans from savagery. Things got worse.

In 1981 the UNLA sought revenge on Amin's Kakwa people and other groups living in Nile Province. Obote's soldiers laid waste the land, slaughtered untold thousands of people, and drove almost 450,000 more into Sudan and Zaire as refugees.

In 1982 the UNLA was drawn into the Baganda heartland in force by southerners fighting to overthrow Obote's regime. In what must rank with the worst atrocities in human history, men of the UNLA ravaged the countryside and slaughtered between 200,000 and 500,000 people before they were defeated by the National Resistance Army (NRA), whose leader, Yoweri Museveni, is now president.

The scene of this carnage was the Luwero triangle, a wedge of rich farmland that points at Kampala, a few miles to the south. It is hard to imagine that the massacres went on there, a 30minute drive from the foreign diplomatic missions, for more than two years before the outside world knew about them or would believe they were occurring. But the evidence is there for all to see, as I discovered when I visited the town of Nakaseke.

JOSEPH KARIANGO, an old Baganda farmer, crouched to stare at something in his field that was not visible from where I stood. I went nearer. Lying in the dirt was a small pile of bones. Joseph looked up at me.

"It is my wife," he said.

Joseph pointed to a pair of rusty shock absorbers lying next to the skeleton. "The soldiers killed her. The men of Obote beat her with those things."

Joseph motioned me to follow him to the edge of the field. He pushed aside some of the tall elephant grass with his hoe. There was another skeleton.

"This is my daughter. They shot her when she tried to run. And my son was killed when the soldiers caught him in my shop. I myself ran fast into the bush, and I was very lucky to get away from them. Everybody that the soldiers did catch they would kill. Everybody in all this Luwero area there was nobody- everybody was killed, or they ran away. I want to bury my family, but you see, we fear to bury just bones like that. Unless the body is whole, we cannot bury it."

The Nakaseke Hotel, a brown, three-story structure, served as UNLA headquarters in Nakaseke. Bullet holes pockmarked its wall and those of nearby houses, mostly abandoned. Only 50 people had returned to a town where more than 300 formerly lived. Above the doorway to an abandoned shop next to the hotel, some UNLA soldier had written th theme of their occupation: "A good Mugand is a dead one."

I went into the hotel. The walls were covered with graffiti: boasts of prowess in battle or love, drawings depicting torture methods dripping molten plastic from a jerry can onto victim's face, or the "three-point," in which the victim's elbows were tied together behind his back so that he could not breathe.

From the roof I could see Joseph's fields and the reach of ruined shops along the road. They, the idle power lines, and derelict gas station indicated what used to be.

A companion, Fred Wamala, pointed to the grassy field below: "Those soldiers, they used to bring people here. Especially they would catch young girls, girls of 12, 14. They tied their arms with wire. Then they raped them, and when they were finished, they threw them off this roof."

The evidence was clearly visible: skulls, small piles of human bones, bits of rotting clothes, the twisted wire that had bound the victims' wrists.

In Luwero, the story is everywhere the same. This is beautiful country: swamps of papyrus and reeds nestle between gently rolling hills of dark brown earth and luxuriant green foliage. Anywhere else in Africa such fertile land would be crowded with people. Luwero's eerie emptiness is evidence of the multitude of the dead.

Small stands, originally built to display tomatoes, bananas, and other produce, exhibited human skulls gathered from the killing fields. At Kigoogwa, only 18 miles from Kampala, I stopped to photograph one of the racks of skulls and bones.

"Yes, yes, yes," said a man who introduced himself as Katende Sserunjogi, a local official. "You make your photos. You take your photos back to America and show your people what that man Obote did. There are no soldiers there," he said, pointing to the rows of skulls. "No soldiers, just people."

REMNANTS OF THE UNLA fight on in the north, and the ongoing guerrilla war eats up as much as 40 percent of the country's budget and diverts energy and manpower from the pressing needs of reconstruction. President Yoweri Museveni's government, which took power in January 1986 after driving the UNLA out of the south, is determined to pursue a military solution. "We have to kill them all," one high-ranking official told me.

Ugandan and international groups allege that Museveni's government is torturing prisoners, that thousands of political opponents and suspected rebels are being held indefinitely without charge. The army is accused of destroying houses and crops, of raping and massacring civilians in the north and east.

It is difficult to know what the situation really is. Despite Museveni's personal promise to arrange a trip for me, I was unable to visit the north and east-only reporters from the government newspaper were allowed. Even the International Committee of the Red Cross had been barred, presumably because the regime does not want witnesses.

"These people in the north are defeated really, thoroughly," President Museveni assured me. But the war rages on. The NRA claims overwhelming victories; northerners recently arrived in Kampala speak of government defeats and NRA atrocities. Somewhere in between, perhaps, is the truth.

ORPHANS, WIDOWS, WIDOWERS: The exact death toll is impossible to determine. Now AIDS adds its numbers of dead and dying. As one Ugandan put it "It is as if we have been cursed for all the terrible things we have done to each other."

Though it is probably no harder hit than other countries in central and eastern Africa- Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, Zaire, and Zambia-Uganda's willingness to allow foreign journalists to cover the AIDS epidemic is unique. A National Committee for the Prevention of AIDS is in place, as is a program coordinated by the World Health Organization (WHO), to which donor nations have pledged 7.5 million dollars for education, medical equipment, and supplies. Public meetings are held to discuss AIDS, and a curriculum incorporating AIDS education is being prepared for the schools. Warning leaflets have been printed in ten languages. Slogans of the campaign are "Love Carefully" and "Zero Grazing," an agricultural metaphor.

"To not be open about AIDS is just ignorant," President Museveni told me. "This is an epidemic. You can only stop it by talking about it-loudly, so that everybody is aware and scared, and they stop the type of behavior that encourages the spread of this disease."

In Uganda, AIDS affects both sexes equally. The ratio of male to female AIDS patients is one to one. "There is every indication," a foreign doctor working in Uganda told me, "that AIDS is a heterosexual disease spread primarily through genital-to-genital contact."

The second largest category, about 10 percent of reported AIDS cases, is the transmission of the disease from mother to infant. There are some cases of AIDS infection through blood transfusions and unsterilized needles, but Ugandans' access to health care has been so disrupted that these play a marginal role.

AIDS was first noted in Uganda in the early 1980s by people in small fishing and smuggling villages along Lake Victoria. Smuggling was a major economic activity, and these ramshackle mud-hut villages, where the odor of drying fish hangs in the air, throbbed with commerce. Boats traveled between Uganda, Tanzania, and Renya, and lorries traveled along the roads between Uganda, Zaire, and Rwanda. Bars and hotels sprang up, local breweries went into production- and prostitutes by the hundreds descended on the lake, attracted by the free-spending, hard-drinking traders.

According to this theory, the traders returned to their homes carrying the organism with them, as did truck drivers from as far away as Mombasa, on the Indian Ocean. These men infected their wives. lovers. or other prostitutes, who passed the organism on to other partners. The lines of AIDS concentration in central and eastern Africa follow very closely those of commerce.

But AIDS is not limited to the high-risk group of prostitutes and truck drivers. It has been reported in every district in Uganda, and it strikes farmers and townspeople alike. One of the hardest hit areas lies west of Lake Victoria in the Rakai District, a poor, rather isolated area of gently rolling land vhere the first case in Uganda was diagnosed in 1984. Most people eke out meager livings on small farms scattered across the countryside. Barefoot, they carry their matoke (cooking bananas) and beans to market in the district's main town, Kyotera, which was bustling in the smuggling days but is now rather somber.

Really, it is not possible to know how many people have died from this slim around here."Badru Rashid, the local government official, told me. "In the last week ten people that I know of died. I myself have lost two brothers and a sister. And our town, it used to be so busy. But a lot of the traders died, and others left here because they were afraid. Can you see all the empty shops? So many orphans have come into town, but there is nothing for them, and they start to steal to get food."

As I wandered through the streets, I was continually approached by young men. The see few foreigners in Kyotera and assumed that my visit must have something to do with AIDS. They seemed desperate for reassurance: "You must find some medicine for this. It is a real curse. We are all going to die-we are always burying people!"

Many people asked me about condoms, which are new to them, as is any information about AIDS. The question I was asked most frequently was, "Is it true that slim is gotten through sex?"

When the local people first noticed this new disease." Badru Rashid explained to me "they thought it was witchcraft. They believed that Tanzanians were cursing people who had cheated them. Even now, a lot of people still think it must be witchcraft because one person in a house gets sick and dies, and then others. Like a curse on the family."

The health of people in Rakai is generally poor-nutrition is inadequate, malaria is endemic, and so are a host of debilitating parasitic diseases. There is no hospital in the district, and the single clinic seldom has drugs. People's immune systems are constantly under assault, making them susceptible to new infections.

Sexually transmitted diseases are widespread, and mostly go untreated. Many of the doctors with whom I spoke speculate that the open lesions caused by untreated sexually transmitted diseases such as syphilis may increase the risk of transmitting AIDS. Even though people in Rakai have begun to learn that AIDS is spread through sexual contact they are reluctant to change their behavior. "You see," Badru explained to me, "a man has a wife, and a woman has a husband. But they also have many, many good friends."

Most of the people in Rakai spend all the daylight hours digging in their fields and doing the chores-fetching water and firewood cooking-that enable them to survive. It is hard existence with few rewards.

We cannot live without sex," one man put it "what else is there, where is thc enjoyment; we might as well be dead."

These words were spoken during a conversation one evening in the bar of the Milano South View Inn. where I had a room. I was drinking beer with some of the men from town. A dim bar bulb cast a ghostly light on the bar Girls leaned forlornly on the counter. Disco music blared from poor speakers, its tempo varying with the fluctuations of the power supply.

The manager of the bar had committed suicide because he thought he had AIDS. In Uganda the infection is often marked by weight loss, chronic diarrhea, fever, and skin rash. Some other diseases, which are treatable, may have similar symptoms. But because so many people have been dying of AIDS, a tendency has developed to assume that anyone who gets sick has that disease.

"You see," Badru explained, "people get sick with something like tuberculosis-something that has the same symptoms as slim. They think they have that disease, and so they do not try to get treatment because they know slim cannot be cured. They just stay home and they die. But they did not have to die."

The conversation-about condoms, sexual practices, whether people should be told the results of their tests-was punctuated by long and deep silences. When one of the men remarked that last year there were many more bar girls, one of those present looked up from idly drawing rings on the wet countertop. "It is doomsday," she said.

The entire time that I was in Uganda, where the cars are in poor condition, the roads are abysmal, and people drive like demons, I was frightened by the prospect of getting into an automobile accident and needing a blood transfusion. In some parts of the country I was worried about the general lawlessness and large number of guns.

In Kyotera, despite my understanding of the ways AIDS is spread, I was afraid of mosquitoes in my room, of the sheets and blanket on the bed, and, most of all, of the unspeakable toilet at the end of the hall. But these fears, I had been assured, were unfounded.

Much more difficult to overcome were the periods of depression and the part of me that wanted to withdraw from the people I spent all day with. I was in Kyotera for two weeks, and every day I went to funerals or to the homes of people who were dead or dying of AIDS. The population of Rakai was scared and confused.

Though death is no stranger to Ugandans, they did not understand this disease that struck down people in their prime. But I have never met people who were kinder or more generous to one who was intruding on their most intimate and sorrowful moments.

The patients gave me some of the precious little time they had left. The families allowed me to sit with them at wakes, while they cried and wailed over the loss of a son or daughter raised with years of care and love. They let me go with them when they carried the bodies, shrouded in bark cloth, to their graves.

I felt helpless. Famines or wars have solutions, however elusive. The situation in Rakai was hopeless. There was nothing to be done for the people who were dying of a disease for which there is no cure, and they knew it. I remember especially sitting on the floor with Jane, holding her hand, listening to her soft fading voice, her eyes lit with a strange inner light, like a candle flame swollen by the wind in the moment before it goes out.

I made a second trip to Kyotera, three months after I had first stayed there. All but one of the patients I had visited earlier were dead and by the time of this writing he too had died. Jane had given birth to a baby who lived for only a few days, and then she herself had died. Her mother took me out into the matoke field behind the house. There were two new graves: Jane's. and beside it the smaller one of her infant child.

"I have nothing to do," Jane s mother said,"This life is not good since my daughter died. Every time the memory of her comes to me, I had to cry."

 

Stay in the forum for Series fourty on the way   ------>

EM

On the 49^th Parallel          

                 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"