{UAH} THE KILLINGS OF ACHOLI AND LANGO OFFICERS

 The Killings of Acholi and Lango Officers 1971

Following the 1971 coup, telexes were sent and phone calls made to Acholi and Langi pilots and technicians who had been sent for training abroad and were out of the country at the time of the coup. The messages urged to return home immediately. Soon after returning, they were massacred or disappeared one by one.

Allegations were made by the Ugandan exile community in Tanzania that between 4,000 and 5,000 Acholi and Langi officers and men had been massacred through much of 1971 following the Jan. coup.

 

Amin in responding to questions about the killing of Langi and Acholi officers always denied involvement and blamed atrocities on guerrillas backed by Obote who were based in Tanzania. On 12 Oct., 1971, the Uganda Argus newspaper published a front-page interview of Amin in which he refuted an interview given to the British Broadcasting Corporation by Naphtali Akena Adoko, the former director of intelligence, in which Adoko said three-quarters of the pre-coup army had been killed. Said Amin, “I will say that a few soldiers were killed during the military takeover in exchanges of fire while they were defending themselves from each other.” On 18 Feb., 1972, the Uganda government issued a statement further denying the allegations. The statement said that there were only 6,000 soldiers in the Uganda Armed Forces at the time of the military coup. “This is common knowledge and needs no elaboration or proof,” the statement read. It added:

 

“It would not have been possible for 4,000 to 5,000 Langi and Acholi to have been overpowered and annihilated as claimed by a mere 1,000 troops comprising the balance of the armed forces…

It has been claimed that the only survivors of the original 4,000 to 5,000 Langi and Acholi soldiers are the 23 men alleged to have escaped massacre at Mutukula and fled to Tanzania. This allegation is yet another example of how the facts have been falsified. Within the Mubende battalion alone with a total strength of 1,400 troops, there are today 973 Langi and Acholi soldiers. Some of these troops have been in the army for upwards of twenty years…Furthermore; many of them had recently been promoted to senior ranks and appointed to responsible posts throughout the Uganda Armed Forces. To mention but a few: Lt. Colonel Mwaka, Major Tarensio Okello, Major [Pangalasio] Onek who incidentally was the parade adjutant during the recent celebrations of the first anniversary of the Second Republic; Captain Odur, Alele, etc.”

 

The government is not aware of the thousands of persons that are alleged to have disappeared since the establishment of the Second Republic.

A number of persons that were presumed dead or missing at the time of the military take-over have turned out to be the very persons who have either been writing back to their colleagues or friends in Uganda or who have since joined the ranks of guerrillas and are actively campaigning against the government of Uganda. There is ample evidence that some of these persons paraded at Pangale as escapees from Mutukula prison.

Oyite-Ojok who claimed to be their rebel leader had in the past years written numerous letters to members of the Uganda Armed Forces with the sole intention of destroying their morale and pitting them against the government of Uganda…There is obvious similarity between the contents of Oyite-Ojok’s letters and the reports of the stage-managed interviews which have appeared in the Tanzania Standard.”

Yet even as hundreds of thousands of people continued to support the new military government and Amin remained popular, rumours were beginning to spread countrywide that this 6ft. 4in. giant of a leader was, in fact, a murderer of a cold-blooded and bone-chilling kind. In mid 1971, there were reports that Amin had carried out a purge of Acholi and Langi officers and men in the Uganda army, having thousands of them massacred and secretly buried in western Uganda.

 

As these reports of the gruesome massacre of Acholi and Langi officers in Mbarara’s Simba battalion barracks continued to circulate in Kampala, two Americans, a journalist and an heir to a United States brewery fortune Nicholas Stroh, 33, and a Sociology professor at Makerere University, Robert L. Siedle, 48, decided to investigate the reports and traveled to Mbarara town.

On 5 July, Stroh cabled the Washington Star newspaper and informed the paper that he intended to investigate allegations of massacres of Acholi and Langi army officers and men in the Simba Battalion barracks in Mbarara in late June. Stroh and Sidle drove to Mbarara and checked into the Ankole Government Rest House on 7 July, 1971.

 

Captain C.E. Mukasa, a former adjutant at the Simba Battalion barracks who was later transferred to the Office of the President, said Stroh had visited the barracks on 7 July, two days before Siedle and he disappeared. Captain Mukasa advised Stroh to make an appointment and meet the commanding officer of the battalion, Lieutenant-Colonel Waris Ali the next day at 10:00 a.m. Mukasa said Stroh told him that he had contacted senior government officials regarding his proposed investigation, including the acting chief of staff of the army, Lieutenant- Colonel Valentine Ochima.

According to Mukasa, Stroh said Ocima had told Stroh to “go ahead” with the investigations. On 8 July, the two Americans told the caretaker of the Rest House, Isaac Kamya, that they were going to Kikagati near the Tanzania border to see what was happening there.

They then returned from Kikagati and back to the Rest House and then, according to Kamya’s testimony given in 1972, they went to an undisclosed destination. A cook at the Rest House, Muhamud Kawooya, said that on 9 July, Siedle was picked up by four men wearing shirts that looked like army uniform. The account best known to the public and in the history books is that the two Americans were last seen alive on the night of 7 July, 1971 as they entered Mbarara’s Simba battalion barracks where they were murdered.

 

Amin and his soldiers were blamed for the murder of these Americans which they committed allegedly to cover up the massacres of the Acholi and Langi. From the eye witness accounts quoted above, we see that the two Americans were actually alive even on 8 July. David Martin, a correspondent for London ‘s Observer newspaper and author of the 1973 book General Amin, interviewed a former officer in Amin’s army who had since fled into exile in Tanzania . He was named as Lieutenant Silver Tibahika. He was from the Bakiga tribe in southwestern Uganda, although he lived in Mbarara.

The interview, published in London’s Observer newspaper on 9 April, 1972, had Tibahika claiming that Stroh and Siedle were murdered in the Mbarara barracks by two Muslim officers, one Colonel Ali and one Major Juma. The Africa Contemporary Record reported Tibahika’s testimony this way:

“He gave a detailed account of how they [Stroh and Siedle] had been murdered. [Tibahika] put the blame on [Lieutenant-Colonel] Waris Ali and [Major] Said Juma, and precisely located where the car [a Volkswagen Beetle owned and driven by Stroh] could be found.” (Africa Contemporary Record, ibid. page B280) this way:” Record reported Tibhika’. Tibahika, speaking from Tanzania, described this further detail to the Observer of what happened to the Americans:

 

“They had been slashed to death with pangas [machetes], and then burned, and the remains buried in a nearby bush to be later exhumed and thrown into a river. Their car was burnt and then later taken to Mountains of the Moon, 250 miles northwest of Kampala. There a party of school children found it and Judge Jones and his assistants identified it from the number plates and parts of the chassis. Nicholas Stroh was killed because he was so proud.”

On the surface of it, it would appear that Lt. Tibahika’s narration matches the facts as they happened. There is, but, a problem with the reliability of the facts. Firstly, Tibahika told the Observer that “Nicholas Stroh was killed because he was so proud.” This goes directly against the generally held view that the Americans were murdered by the Amin regime in order to suppress the findings of their investigations into the massacre of thousands of Acholi and Langi soldiers. Secondly, a separate report on what happened to Stroh and Siedle was given, contradicting Tibahika’s claims. A former Ugandan army officer, who spoke anonymously, gave the International Herald Tribune newspaper of 3 Sept. and 4, 1977 “detailed evidence” of how the two Americans had been “slaughtered” in Mbarara barracks. This officer said the two men who murdered Stroh and Siedle were Captain Stephen Taban, who was the chief technical officer in the Uganda Airforce, and Colonel Dusman Sabuni, who later became Amin’s minister of Industry and Power.

If we bear in mind that Lt. Tibahika gave a “detailed account” of how the two men died and who killed them, and yet here was another former Ugandan army officer giving directly contradictory but supposedly “detailed evidence” about the same incident, it creates the problem of how credible the two claims were.

 

A further element in this story must be borne in mind: Tibahika was, like Museveni, from western Uganda and most of the cores of FRONASA were from the western part of the country. Furthermore, it introduces the question of either misinformation about the facts or perhaps even brings into question the whole basis for pinning the blame on the two men’s deaths on the Amin regime. To complicate matters even further, President Amin commissioned an inquiry into the circumstances of the two Americans’ deaths. A British-born judge, David Jeffreys Jones, headed the inquiry.

He left the country for Kenya but posted his report to Uganda from the Indian Ocean port city of Mombasa.

 

Solid proof of Tibahika’s background that enforces this point came on 25 May, 1972 during the hearings into the two murders. On that day, Lieutenant-Colonel Ali defended himself against Tibahika’s accusations that it was Ali who had ordered the murders: Ali said Tibahika had worked under him before he was sent to Makindye military police prison in Kampala. Ali also revealed that Tibahika was once a member of the now disbanded General Service Unit of the 1960s. (The People, 26 May, 1972) Titled “Commission of Inquiry into the Missing Americans Messrs Stroch and Siedle held at the Conference Room, Parliament House”, part of which read: “From paragraphs 9 and 10 of the [Tibahika] affidavit, it is obvious that the two Americans died an unnatural death. They were in fact murdered by personnel of the Simba Batalion of the Uganda Armed Forces. The culprits included the [Commanding Officer Mbarara] Waris Ali, his second in command Major Said Juma, Lt. Silver Tibahika, and Stephen Taban.”

By the way, Tibahika was mentioned in the report as one of the killers of the two Americans and yet in his interview with David Martin of the Observer, Tibahika had pointed the blame at Ali and Juma. Jones also named as one other culprit Ali Fadhul who as a brigadier Amin would later name his Minister of Provincial Administrations.

 

Three different sets of people were separately accused of murdering the Americans. In all three instances, the evidence given was “detailed” and seemed to have been from credible eye witnesses to the murders. Tibahika claimed that Major Juma owned a Volkswagen Beetle car while Ali said Juma actually owned a Datsun. How could all three versions of the story appear to be authoritative and yet they were completely in conflict with each other?

The only constants in the story are that two Americans were murdered and that the murders took place in Mbarara’s Simba battalion barracks. This conflict in the versions can only be explained when subversion and sabotage by an exile group or guerrilla force is factored in as spreading these accounts as part of their disinformation campaign.

 

On 25 May, 1972, Lieutenant-Colonel Ali gave perhaps the most damning fact of all about Tibahika: “Later, he [Ali] said, he [Ali] learned that Lt. Silver [Tibahika] had run away, but he did not know any reason why Lt. Silver decided to ran to Tanzania…He did not know why Lt. Silver is trying to involve him into this matter of the two missing men.” (The People, 26 May, 1972) We should ask the most important question: if Waris Ali, Said Juma, Stephen Taban, Silver Tibahika, and Ali Fadhul were all implicated in the murder of the two Americans by Judge Jones’ report, explain as to why it is only Tibahika who fled into exile shortly after the report was published and not any of the other men? Convince us as to why did Tibahika go into exile in Tanzania when his name was mentioned in Judge Jones’ report as one of the accomplices to murder, unless he knew that he was in friendly territory in Tanzania? Tibahika later returned to Uganda in 1979 as part of Museveni’s Tanzanian-backed FRONASA fighting force during the war to remove Idi Amin’s government.

 

This, more than anything else, suggests that FRONASA killed the two Americans on orders of FRONASA’s leader, From Colonel Ali’s statement about Tibahika’s past as a GSU agent — an intelligence agency Museveni once worked for and from the inference drawn so far — it is clear that Tibahika was probably a FRONASA saboteur assigned to the Amin army but working secretly with Museveni to undermine Amin from within the army.

A piece of evidence that proves that Museveni knew and was in touch with Tibahika is found in Museveni’s own book sowing The Mustard Seed, on page 51:

“During my stay in Bukoba [in northwest Tanzania] I made trips with Ojok to the Ugandan border trying to make contact with the people inside the country. We went to Murongo to wait for Lt. Silver, for whom I had earlier left a message in Mbarara, but he failed to turn up. After waiting fruitlessly for some time, Ojok said that he knew a policeman at Kikagati who might be of some help.”

 

This clear link between Museveni and Tibahika naturally suggests that FRONASA was the hand behind the murder of the majority of Acholi and Langi army officers in 1971, and not Amin as has been widely assumed. Tibahika might well have been the killer of the two Americans and was trying in his testimonies made in exile to put the blame on Amin’s army. Notes found in Stroh’s car had details of interviews conducted by the two Americans with eye witnesses to the killing of 160 Acholi army officers in late June. If Tibahika and therefore FRONASA were involved in the murder of the two Americans, it follows that they were killed to hide the evidence of the murder of the 160 Acholi officers, the testimony of eye witnesses to which was contained in the notes discovered in Stroh’s car. It would have been the natural tactical move by a ruthless guerrilla like Museveni. But having done a mediocre work of it, they ended up with conflicting versions of the story. Museveni knew perfectly well that the death or even disappearance of just two Americans would be enough to swing the U.S. state machinery into action and if an accusing finger could be successfully pointed at Amin, this would achieve FRONASA’s goal much better than a month of fighting on the battlefield.

 

The full facts and significance of this method of planting FRONASA agents in institutions for them to sabotage the government from within will be explored when we come to what happened in the 1980s in Uganda under the second Obote administration.

On 11 July, 1971, in another denial of involvement in the murder of Acholi and Langi soldiers, there was a departure from simple denials by the president. During a state visit by Amin and the First Lady Sarah Mariam Kibedi Amin to London at the invitation of the then British Prime Minister Edward Health, two days of riots broke out in the Simba battalion barracks in Mbarara protesting at the harassment of Acholi and Langi soldiers.

The riots spread to the Moroto barracks in northeast Uganda and to Magamaga barracks in Uganda’s second largest town Jinja where the unrest was at its most intense. Two days later on 13 July, 1971, the acting army commander, Lt. Colonel Charles Arube, said in a statement that guerrillas had attacked several army units and killed 17 soldiers.

On 14 July, 1971, President Amin issued a statement in London in which he said Mozambican-trained guerrillas and Tanzanian troops had attacked Jinja and Moroto on 11 July and 12. Amin added that three Chinese advisors had participated in the attacks.

 

Some analysis is required here.

If it is true that there was an uprising across the country in protest at the killing of Acholi and Langi officers and men, at the very least it shows two things: either the Ugandan army was still made up of troops from many different tribes. As such, these tribesmen were angry and shocked at the killing of their comrades and this led them to rise up in protest. That in itself suggests then that Amin’s army was truly a national army, representing the broad section of the country’s ethnic makeup. This would make it a professional army and not a band of “thugs” as Museveni and other opponents of Amin tried to make it appear. Alternatively, if Amin’s opponents were correct in arguing that from the beginning Amin was eliminating the Christian Acholi and Langi tribesmen from the army in gruesome massacres and replacing them with Muslim Nubian, Sudanese, and West Nile tribesmen who were loyal to him, then by mid 1971 the army had taken on this new ethnic composition. If the army was now dominated by Amin’s illiterate Muslim West Nile and Nubian tribesmen, it leaves open questions of who then it was that was rioting and protesting the purging of the Acholi and Langi from the army.

 

If it was these Sudanese, Nubians and Amin’s own tribesmen from the Lugbara and Kakwa who were rioting, it reveals something very important. It shows that these soldiers from Amin’s tribe and the others from Sudan, far from being vicious killers and undisciplined thugs as we were made to believe, were in fact patriotic, well-behaved, sensitive, humane people who were hurt that Amin was killing their fellow soldiers just because they happened to be from Obote’s tribe.

 

To see it either which way presents a problem for Museveni’s version of history. In the preamble to their manifesto, FRONASA laid all the blame for what was taking place in Uganda on Idi Amin and his army: “While the people go short of items from salt to medicine the army has all it requires.

General Amin has let the army loose among the people where they have gone on a spree of rape, murder and looting. The most barbarous soldiers have been the ones most highly rewarded with promotions. The death toll currently stands at 83,000, a figure representing a cross-section of the population of Uganda.” The FRONASA manifesto states in its preamble that “While the people go short of items from salt to medicine the army has all it requires.” In the very next sentence, FRONASA charges that “General Amin has let the army loose among the people where they have gone on a spree of rape, murder and looting.” Obviously the authors of the FRONASA manifesto were not alert to the contradiction and dishonesty in their claim Sincerely if FRONASA stated, the Uganda army had “all it requires”, convince us as to why would Amin let the same well-paid well-facilitated army loose on a population which up to that time still supported Amin? Sincerely, why should someone risk losing all that support when the army had all that it required and was happy with the way things were? Therefore, there was no need for the president to divert its attention by unleashing it loose on the population.

Sincerely things do not add up!

 

And now in July 1971 we see this army rioting, not against the civilian population, not rioting over a lack of food or over delayed wages, but rioting in support of the very Acholi and Langi soldiers that such a brutal army would have been eager to eliminate. The events started with the murder of Americans Siedle and Stroh, then turned into riots protesting the massacre of the Acholi and Langi, and finally with Amin and the army commander saying that the army had been attacked this time not by guerrillas loyal to Obote, but by Mozambican-trained guerrillas. Who would these guerrillas be who were trained in Mozambique, possibly backed by Tanzania and backed up by Chinese advisors? Who else but the FRONASA guerrillas led by Yoweri Museveni! Furthermore, if Amin’s army was protesting the killing of soldiers from Northern Uganda related to Obote and as the FRONASA manifesto stated, Amin’s army was loyal to him, then the killing of the Acholi and Langi soldiers would not have been Amin’s directive either or else these rioting soldiers who were loyal to Amin would be supporting rather than opposing him. It could not have been the same army to kill the Americans as a way of hiding the evidence of their murder.

 

The reason is that in the first place, the army wouldn’t have murdered the Acholi and Langi and as such would have nothing to hide from the American investigators. All logic and the military intelligence which for once did not blame the attacks on the army units on Obote-based guerrillas, leads rather to Mozambican-trained guerrillas backed by Chinese advisors who were obviously a Marxist-driven group. This attack on the barracks and the murder of the two Americans, it follows, was the work of FRONASA.

The manifesto also cited the murder of a number of prominent Ugandans. The acting director of Uganda Television, James Bwogi, disappeared on 24 Aug., 1971.

 

They included one Mulekezi, a former district commissioner of Bukedi district in eastern Uganda; and one Nshekanabo, the manager of the government-owned Rock Hotel in Tororo in Bukedi district. Mulekezi and Nshekanabo both disappeared on 23 Feb., 1972.

According to FRONASA, Nshekanabo had been trying to persuade a group of unruly soldiers to pay for the drinks they had drunk at Rock Hotel’s bar. Among the others purportedly murdered by Amin’s regime and providing justification for the launch of their struggle were John Kakonge, the former secretary general of the Uganda People’s Congress party; Ali Kisekka, former cabinet minister in the Obote government James Ochola; one Sebalu, the UPC administrative secretary in Ankole, Nekemia Bananuka, and the lawyer Patrick Ruhinda. The president of the Uganda Industrial Court, Michael Kabali Kaggwa was murdered in Sept. 1971. His body was discovered burnt out on 10 Sept.

 

A prominent politician and early pre-independence era agitator Joseph (“Jolly Joe”) Kiwanuka, and many other public figures were cynically murdered by FRONASA assassins on orders of their leader. FRONASA reported that a Roman Catholic priest, Father Clement Kiggundu, the former editor of Uganda‘s oldest newspaper, the Catholic Munno, had disappeared and his burnt body was found in his car on 15 Jan., 1973. The postmortem on his body revealed that Kiggundu had died before being burnt. The doctors who performed the postmortem disappeared a few days later. It is worth bearing in mind that Michael Kaggwa and Fr. Clement Kiggundu were murdered in exactly the same way — they were shot dead first then their bodies placed in their cars and burnt. FRONASA said the two men were dragged off by the soldiers commanded by one Colonel Toloko and never seen again.

How did FRONASA come to know of all these incidents and in such detail?

 

After the aborted attempt to overthrow Amin on 17 Sept., 1972, there followed a wave of murders of prominent people in Ankole in western Uganda. Businessmen, chiefs, lawyers, army officers, and other government officials from Mbarara, Bushenyi, and other towns in Ankole were murdered, many of them mutilated. These shocking killings were blamed on Amin and his army. What was not explained was something odd — practically all the people killed in Ankole that Sept and till the end of the year were from the majority Bairu sub-ethnic group. The royal sub-ethnic groups, the Bahima, whom Museveni had grown up among and whom he identified with, were untouched.

Amin would not have known or cared about the differences between Bairu and Bahima. After all, if support for the guerrillas had come from Ankole, it mattered not who was a Mwiru or a Muhima. On 13 April, 2005, former President Milton Obote narrated this episode to The Monitor newspaper of Kampala:

 

“Masaka was a failure, Mbarara was a failure. Our troops fought gallantly but against heavy odds and were beaten. Many including Alex Ojera, Picho Ali and Capt. Oyile were captured and later executed by Amin. Amin’s army then went from House to house and picked up our leaders and killed them. Among those killed was [the UPC’s administrative secretary in Ankole Nekemia] Bananuka together with his three sons.

Later, I was told that the man whom our troops picked before Mbarara town who was supposed to be part of Museveni’s imaginary army was the one who went house to house and made Idi Amin’s people pick up people like Bananuka.” Here is a suggestion from an independent source that points to some one big in FRONASA as the hand that directed the soldiers on whose house to visit and whom to kill.

 

President Museveni read this article in which Obote stated this allegation, but to date has not responded to it, even after first threatening to sue Obote and The Monitor over this series of autobiographical recollections by Obote. These selective killings that targeted Bairu and left unscathed the Bahima, were the first indications of what extreme measures Museveni’s FRONASA was willing to take in order to undermine Amin’s regime. Other victims of this FRONASA terror were Obote’s former Internal Affairs minister Basil Kiiza Bataringaya. Bataringaya had been part of a delegation of officials from Ankole who met President Amin and affirmed their support for him following the coup. Bataringaya’s wife Edith was murdered in 1975, her body burnt.

EM         -> {   Gap   at   46  } – {Allan Barigye is a Rwandan predator}

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"