{UAH} THE MURDER OF FOREIGN MINISTER MICHAEL ONDOGA

The Murder of Foreign Minister Michael Ondoga

Another prominent death in point was that of the former foreign minister and former Ugandan ambassador to the Soviet Union, Lt. Colonel Michael Ondoga. He was a brother-in-law of President Amin by virtue of Amin’s marriage to Ondoga’s sister, Kay Adroa Amin. On 12 Feb., 1974, Amin summoned a cabinet meeting at which he invited a French film crew to record the proceedings. Apparently, there had been growing slackness among cabinet ministers and Amin who postured as a strict disciplinarian would not have this. He criticised the cabinet and singled out for the harshest words Ondoga, who sat uncomfortably during the meeting. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs was in upheaval and Amin told Ondoga that this situation could not go on. On 19 Feb., 1974, Amin announced the appointment of Princess Elizabeth of Toro as the new minister of foreign affairs. The government-owned Voice of Uganda newspaper reported the new appointment the next day, 20 Feb: “Ambassador Elizabeth Bagaya has been named Uganda‘s new minister of Foreign Affairs. She becomes the country’s first woman ever to be appointed a minister. She takes over from Lt. Col. Michael Ondoga who is to be assigned other duties…The President; General Idi Amin announced the appointment while addressing Makerere University students yesterday. He said he had acted on recommendation of the Defence Council.

 

He also announced that the Ministry of Commerce and Industry is to have a planning section which will assist in the planning of the whole business industry throughout the country. Also to be formed are the National Chamber of Commerce and Industry and a Corporation responsible for Import and Export activities. “The tone of the news report on Ondoga’s replacement as a minister was measured, positive, and came as part of a general upgrading of the government’s policy-making apparatus. There was none of the angry yelling at the former minister that the Ugandan exile groups portrayed it to be. Ondoga was not humiliated or accused of sabotaging to Amin’s govt. as the FRONASA members had always claimed. It is very important that an ordinary Ugandan who votes gets this information.

 

As part of their subversive activities against the Amin administration, FRONASA also used to compose letters purportedly written from Tanzania by the Obote aide, Lt. Colonel Oyite Ojok, and listing Oyite Ojok’s postal address. These letters were addressed to select prominent Ugandans and “leaked” to the state security agency, the State Research Bureau, in order to lead to the arrest and, if possible, murder of the person in question.

Museveni had several calculations by this deadly covert action. Obote’s Kikoosi Maluum armed faction was, as noted already, the main rival of FRONASA. The importance of secrecy, the use of aliases and other false identities, disguise in her dress, and the content of some of the letters and parcels must have all been emphasised to her. For Museveni to eventually trust her enough to make her his wife, she must have come to learn some of the most secret details of what FRONASA was doing. This fact would become significant after Museveni came to power, when his wife and family assumed more power than any First Family in Uganda’s history. As has been said, Amin well knew what Museveni was doing and what he was capable of. During the 1970s, the national counterintelligence agency, the State Research Bureau, dedicated a desk to the monitoring of Museveni’s guerrilla activities.

 

When the pieces are tied together — the role of Janet Kataha Museveni as a courier, the letter allegedly written by Kazzora to Ugandan religious leaders, Amin’s charge that letters were being written to spread confusion in Uganda, and Kazzora’s letter to the Daily Nation denying he had written the letter — there is every reason to suppose that the letter supposedly written to Obote by Kiwanuka just before his arrest, could have come from FRONASA. A revealing piece of evidence that points to FRONASA’s hand in Kiwanuka’s murder came in an interview with the African current affairs magazine Drum in 1980 by Kiwanuka’s widow, Maxensia Zalwango Kiwanuka. Asked about the circumstances of her husband’s death, which at that time she blamed on Amin personally, she told the reporter V.P. Kirega-Gava: “To prevent any information from reaching us, some Banyankole who were present as my husband was being butchered by Amin were killed under mysterious circumstances.” Several questions arise out of Mrs. Kiwanuka’s interview. To begin with, few heads of state in the modern world would personally carry out executions when they had squads of agents who could easily carry out the deed while leaving the president looking innocent.

 

There have been many claims that Amin personally executed many of his victims. This would not be possible if Amin had vehemently denied any role by his government in their killing. Secondly, even if this one head of state Amin was the kind to personally murder his opponents, almost all accounts of Amin’s alleged brutality mention that he surrounded himself with and relied on trusted and vicious Nubian, Sudanese, Lugbara, and Kakwa killers from his West Nile home district and southern Sudan. A few others have mentioned that Amin’s State Research Bureau intelligence service also employed Rwandese Tutsi refugees who had lived in Uganda since 1959.

 

If these accounts are correct and typical, what then would Amin have been doing with Banyankole men at the time he was personally killing Kiwanuka? Yoweri Museveni had made the Banyankole his adoptive tribe and here a few clues begin to avail themselves. It would be unusual for Amin, especially when personally killing a prominent Ugandan, to trust the Banyankole or any other tribes from southern Uganda to be at the scene of his deeds. Amin knew that he was being opposed by the guerrilla leader Museveni. Since Museveni came from Ankole, army and security officers from Ankole were potential supporters of Museveni.

 

Amin would not have risked murdering Kiwanuka while in the company of these Banyankole who might pass details of these killings by Amin himself to the anti-government groups in exile in Tanzania or Europe. If indeed he committed the deed himself, Amin in all probability would have been accompanied by only the most trusted and loyal of his own tribesmen from the West Nile area. Could these Banyankole whom Maxensia Kiwanuka referred to in her Drum interview have been the FRONASA agents working for Museveni and whom he later ordered killed to cover up his role in Kiwanuka’s murder? After all, if Banyankole security agents in the company of President Amin could be killed to prevent any information from reaching Kiwanuka’s family, so too could security men from any other tribes. Amin who came to power through a military coup would know enough about conspiracy to be aware that anybody, even people from his own tribe, could pass information on to Kiwanuka’s family either for money or after becoming disgruntled with Amin in later years. In 1974, a Tanzanian intelligence officer, Deusdedit Kusekwa Masanja, captured in Uganda gave an account of Kiwanuka’s death to Drum which published it in the March 1974 issue of the magazine. Masanja said he witnessed Kiwanuka being killed in the Makindye military police barracks in Kampala on September 28, 1972.

 

The most striking part of Masanja’s account was his failure to reveal that Amin personally killed Kiwanuka or the failure by Drum to mention that, if indeed this is what happened. Any credible news agency or publication would know that an eye witness account of Amin’s personal hand in the murder of his former chief justice would be the news story or news feature of the year, if not the decade. Why was none of this mentioned, if Amin was responsible? Former FRONASA assassins more than 30 years later admitted that Kiwanuka had been abducted and murdered by FRONASA. Two weeks later, Ondoga was kidnapped and his badly mutilated body was found floating along the River Nile. The western news media and Ugandan exile groups condemned Ondoga’s murder, blaming it squarely on Amin and charging that this was further proof of the president’s maniacal dictatorship. Some evidence refutes this charge against Amin. As already mentioned, Ondoga was the president’s brother-in-law and only the most extraordinary treachery on the part of Ondoga would have led Amin to order the murder of Ondoga.

 

Ondoga’s offence, as Amin himself angrily said during the cabinet meeting, was his lateness to work. Secondly, Ondoga was kidnapped and later murdered. Had this order come from Amin, there would have been no need to kidnap the foreign minister. It has been widely claimed that Amin’s soldiers and security agents had the habit of dragging prominent Ugandans into cars in broad daylight and on to their deaths. Following this tendency, there would have been no need for Ondoga to be kidnapped two weeks after he was reprimanded by Amin. More than a few ministers and government officials had been summarily sacked by the president in a national radio broadcast. This would not have been unusual. Thirdly, Amin had criticised his foreign minister during a cabinet meeting filmed by a French television team. The president well knew that the recording would end up being broadcast in France and through much of a western world that was increasingly hostile to Amin’s government. For the goal of discrediting Amin, there could be nothing more valuable to the Ugandan exiles than this documentary film. Amin would have been the last person to order the kidnapping and murder of his foreign minister, since whoever had watched the recording of the cabinet meeting would naturally blame the president for the murder. Finally, upon Amin’s death in August 2003, Amin’s fifth and former wife, Sarah Kyolaba Amin, was interviewed by London’s Daily Mirror newspaper. In comments published by the Daily Mirror on August 18, 2003, Sarah Amin paid tribute to her late husband, describing him as a true African hero and a loving father.

Amin in his years as president liked to portray himself as a devout family man. He often participated in motor races with his wife Sarah Kyolaba as co-driver and even while receiving foreign dignitaries, his two favourite children Moses and Mwanga were often present. This image of Amin as an indulgent and affectionate family man is consistent even in the photographs, books, and magazines that have sought to portray him in the most unflattering light. In 1972 for instance, a body named the Public Safety Unit was formed to crack down on violent crime and the Public Safety Unit became greatly dreaded by the public. Amin and the head of the Public Safety Unit, Hussein Marella, insisted that these unexplained acts of public disorder and crime were being committed not by the army but by saboteurs. A commission of inquiry was created to look into allegations that the Public Safety Unit was behind the harassment and murder of prominent Ugandans.

 

After the commission cleared the Public Safety Unit of any charges, Amin in a Radio Uganda broadcast said that the verdict “proved that people who used to say that the Public Safety Unit was bad are the very people who are carrying out those subversive activities.” Amin defended the Public Safety Unit. He was capable of loyalty. It would be unlikely, therefore, that Amin would have ordered the assassination of Ondoga his foreign minister and brother-in-law over a minor offence and yet the president had shown loyalty to some among his senior government officials who were widely feared or grumbled about by the public like the Public Safety Unit head, Hussein Marella. Incidentally, Amin’s statement that those who blamed the Public Safety Unit were the very people who were carrying out these subversive activities throws further light on the fact of what was going on in Uganda at the time and that Amin was aware that his government was being maligned by the guerrillas based in Britain, Tanzania, and Kenya. Speaking to the Daily Monitor on May 29, 2005, the former Ugandan foreign minister, assistant OAU secretary general, and Ugandan ambassador to Britain, Paul Etiang in a series titled “Serving Amin” said this of the former president: “Amin was somebody who, if you told him something, he would look straight at you very deeply and get convinced about it but keep quiet because he wanted to put some mystery to it…The way Amin was behaving, no one — not even his wives I dare say — could say that he or she had seen the totality of him. Amin in one place would behave very differently in another place. It would take a number of people with whom he worked to come together and piece the complete picture together. All the judgments about Amin tend to depict him as a terrorist not because that was his nature but because I think those are the only things remembered about him.

 

I must say that the worst that happened to Amin is what would happen to many presidents.” (Italics added for emphasis) On the morning of August 18, 2003, two days after Amin’s death, his former vice president General Mustapha Adrisi was asked by Radio France Internationale to give his verdict of the former leader. Adrisi said he had one problem with Amin — his propensity for lies and exaggeration, something that Etiang mentioned in his recollection of the Amin years. In the same interview, Adrisi said, however, that Amin was not the legendary killer he has been portrayed to be. Adrisi said Amin was loved by ordinary people and very popular all over the country. Another former official in the Amin government was Lt. Colonel Nassur Abdallah who was arrested in 1979 after the overthrow of Amin and spent 21 years in jail in Kampala before being released on September 11, 2000. Lt. Colonel Abdallah was widely regarded as one of Amin’s most notorious henchmen. As governor of the Central Province from January 8, 1975 to April 11, 1979, Abdallah was reported to have ordered criminals and idlers in Kampala City to forcibly eat rubber slippers as a punishment for wearing slippers in the city at a time he was trying to ban the habit. He told this to the Daily Monitor on July 3, 2005: “The allegations that I made people eat slippers whenever I found them wearing [them] are baseless and I have always asked anybody to come out and challenge me but no one has done so. I never made people eat slippers and this is just politics of hatred.” Abdallah was also accused by some of being the killer of Francis Walugembe, the mayor of the southern town of Masaka, in 1972. Refuting that claim, he said: “That other story of Francis Walugembe is also fake. I never killed Walugembe and those people in Masaka can tell the truth about me.” This accusation of Abdallah is more revealing when it is borne in mind that another of Amin’s close aides, Colonel Isaac (“Maliyamungu”) Lugonzo was said by the exile groups to have personally murdered Walugembe and marched the body through the streets of the town.

 

Either it was Abdallah who murdered Walugembe or it was Malyiamungu or neither of them. If it is true that Maliyamungu not only committed the deed but dragged the late mayor’s body through Masaka’s streets, then there were enough bystanders that day in Masaka who clearly saw Maliyamungu unashamedly drag the body about. And yet in years following, rumours began to spread in Kampala that Walugembe was murdered by Nassur Abdallah. The fact that Abdallah’s name came up at all even when Maliyamungu is supposed to have been publicly seen parading the dead mayor’s body through the streets of Masaka leads to one conclusion: the crime might have been committed by neither of the two men. As in the case of the Americans Stroh and Siedle, there is such a conflict of accuracy in the versions given of Walugembe’s murder that it once again raises the question of who it was that was distributing this misinformation and whether that party might have been the perpetrator of the crime. Walugembe, like Jolly Joe Kiwanuka, Basil and Edith Bataringaya, John Kakonge, Fr. Clement Kiggundu, Frank Kalimuzo and dozens of others, was murdered by FRONASA. Little thought has been given to the reports about the mutilated bodies of prominent Ugandan and foreign victims of the Amin “terror” found floating along the River Nile, sometimes as far north of Kampala at the Karuma Falls, more than three hours’ drive away. It made no sense for these victims’ remains to be driven all the way to Karuma to be dumped into the Nile when they could easily — and more economically with fewer risks of being discovered later — have been buried in secret mass graves or military cemeteries, cremated, or in any other way got rid of.

 

There has never been a claim made that the Nile was believed by these Nubian and West Nile killers to have special magical or ritually cleansing powers so that a trip to the river was worth the bother and risk of being found out. The Nile is the world’s longest river and on average about a kilometre wide, with several turns and rapids, boulders and rocks along its course. It is difficult to believe that there was always, by some coincidence, an idle person who just happened to be standing along the river’s banks and by chance somehow managed to sight what looked like a corpse. This idle person who was otherwise minding his own business then and on closer inspection (by swimming or getting a chance ride in a boat closer to the corpse) realised that this just happened to be a prominent citizen he had always seen on television and read about in the newspapers.

 

No single photograph has ever been reported or published in which a single rotting or mutilated body was shown either being pulled out of the Nile or surrounded by shocked villagers and fishermen or police detectives. If it was not in the interest of Amin’s government to display these photographs, it would at least have been in the interest and for the benefit of the exile community and guerrilla forces to publish these photographs to reinforce to the world the scale of Amin’s brutality. These are some of the stories that have come to the surface since the end of Amin’s rule which contradict the general assumption that Amin’s rule was a reign of terror that he masterminded. Predictably, these brutalities allegedly committed by Amin’s regime came to the attention of a shocked world. Amin’s reputation slipped rapidly.

 

On June 10, 1976, President Amin was invited to the Nsambya police barracks as guest of honour at the passing out parade of newly commissioned officers. Suddenly, three grenades were hurled at the President’s jeep, killing his driver. While in exile in Saudi Arabia in the late 1990s, Amin would explain to his family what happened that day. The grenade that hit Amin on the back and landed onto the side of the renegade jeep was a shrapnel grenade which was intended to cause maximum injury to the President and increase the likelihood that he would be killed.

The explosion was absorbed by the rear tyre of the jeep and by the ground. Apparently, whoever had thrown the grenade had been either in a panic, impatient, or an amateur with shrapnel grenades which are timed to explode about 10 to 15 seconds after the lever has been released. Amin grabbed the body of his driver and dumped it back into the jeep. He then fixed a Motorola larynx communicator to his throat and roared off toward the Mulago hospital, all the time issuing orders for army reinforcements at the barracks and the cordoning off of the entire area around the barracks. Amin had escaped another assassination, the 13th of his presidency. Amin and most people at that police barracks did not know who the assailant with the three grenades was. The would-be assassin at Nsambya that day was Yoweri Museveni. In the commotion of the scene, Museveni escaped to the nearby Kibuli hill for refuge. Waiting for him there was Prince Badru Kakungulu, the descendant of the man regarded as the father of Islam in Uganda, Semei Kakungulu.

This assassination plan was hatched and required that should it abort, Museveni was to quickly retreat to the prince’s house atop Kibuli hill. The man coordinating Museveni’s progress to Nsambya and back to Kibuli was named Anthony Butele, who would later be appointed minister of labour in the second Obote government in 1980. Many years later in the 1990s, some people close to Museveni would remark at a deeply felt sense of frustration by Museveni that he had been unable to get rid of Amin. And yet it was his tendency while speaking in public to remind Ugandans that “we defeated Amin”. This frustration, undoubtedly, sprang from this incident at Nsambya when he came so close to personally assassinating Amin but failed. There is every possibility that Mr. Museveni might have been involved in person in a few more of the 14 attempts on Amin’s life between 1971 and 1979. In 1976, apart from entering Uganda to try and assassinate President Amin, Museveni came on a second mission: to survey the countryside and see what location was suitable for him to launch a future guerrilla war, as he had done in inspecting the Mozambican district of Nangade.

 

The hilly areas of western Uganda Museveni found to be unsuitable for his preferred kind of guerrilla warfare. The northern and eastern parts of the country were too flat and bare as well. After perusing through maps of the physical terrain and finding out details about climate and soil conditions, Museveni settled on a district in central Uganda called Luwero. It had fertile soil, a good ethnic mixture of people, heavy tropical trees growing high enough to provide cover, and at the heart of the country, it was strikingly similar to the Nangade district of Mozambique. Otherwise one would wonder why of all places did Museveni chose Luwero.

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"