{UAH} Allan/Pojim/WBK: If the Entebbe raid had failed, would we have celebrated Amin’s soldiers? - Daily Monitor:
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If the Entebbe raid had failed, would we have celebrated Amin's soldiers?
One of the more interesting statements about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's visit to Entebbe this week, to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the raid on the airport, came from Gen Moses Ali, the First Deputy Prime Minister.
"As things stand, this day should be observed by Israelis because it was their victory over us," burly Ali, who was the Finance minister in Idi Amin's government at the time of the raid, told this newspaper. "If we are to observe it, it must be to remember our dead, not celebrate. We should be shedding tears…"
It is an interesting argument that says a lot about our national psyche, memory, and the writing of our history. In his speech, in which he laboured, with rather disastrous effect, to balance the argument between both sides of the Middle East conflict, President Museveni said the Israelis were right to raid Entebbe airport to rescue their citizens. I agree.
What Mr Museveni did not say is whether the Ugandan soldiers were right to defend the territorial sovereignty of the country against the invading force. In fact, while Lt Col Yonatan Netanyahu, the force commander and PM Netanyahu's brother who was killed in the raid is widely known and celebrated as a hero in Israel, the Ugandan soldiers killed during the raid have not even been afforded the memory of villains or the vitality of statistics. It is not that they were airbrushed out of history; they were never recorded at all.
This is important beyond the lives of these anonymous men. It is about how we see ourselves and how we preserve the memories of our existence.
Consider this: Soldiers follow orders. It was not up to Lt Col Netanyahu to decide whether to carry out the raid or not; that was up to then prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and his colleagues. Once the order was given, Lt Col Netanyahu's job was to carry it out.
Similarly, the Ugandan soldiers deployed to guard the hostages and the airport had no hand in deciding to allow the hijacked plane into Uganda. Their orders were to guard the hostages. The soldiers all died in battle; one is remembered, many are forgotten.
This is partly due to the reality of history being written by victors; if the Israeli commandos had been beaten back and dozens killed, the heroes of the story would be the Ugandan soldiers and whoever commanded them.
But there is something else. The unspoken word is that these were 'Amin's soldiers', not Ugandan soldiers. Buried alongside their names and memories are a few questions: for instance, what, if anything, did ordinary Ugandans think about the decision to get involved in the whole sordid affair? Did Amin act on behalf of Uganda or on his own behalf? Would the people who rightly condemned Amin for getting involved in the affair in the first place have praised him if the raid had been a disaster?
Similar questions can be asked today. How should Ugandans remember the Entebbe raid? Or, for that matter, how should we document the military adventures in DR Congo? Who should pay the $10 billion fine imposed on us by the International Court of Justice; all Ugandans or the army generals who profited personally from the plunder of the Congo? When future generations look back at the fighting in Kisangani, shall they speak of the UPDF or of 'Museveni's soldiers?'
Are our soldiers, who continue to pay a high price in Somalia, fighting for us, for themselves, for the region, for Western powers or for the politicians responsible for sending them into battle? That these and other questions have to be asked is, in a way, an answer in itself to the absence of a common sense of history or shared values.
It says something about us that we now have monuments to honour Lt Col Netanyahu at Entebbe and the Libyan soldiers killed in the 1979 war but none for the thousands of soldiers who have died fighting in our endless wars at home and abroad. We don't even have a national monument for Omukama Kabalega – as fine a general as any this country has produced. My fellow Ugandans, we need to talk.
Mr Kalinaki is a Ugandan journalist based in Nairobi. dkalinaki@ke.nationmedia.com
Twitter: @Kalinaki
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