Besigye: A tale of tenacity through thorns and rocks

Since writing a scathing dossier against the Movement government in 1999, FDC leader Kizza Besigye has walked a journey lined with thorns and rocks. As the Police confined his movement to his house yesterday, Charles Mwanguhya Mpagi explores Besigye’s trying political life.

When the police announced Thursday that it had placed main opposition politician Kizza Besigye under preventive arrest, it marked a major chapter in a long journey on his political footpath.

His political trek started as a volunteer rebel combatant who joined rebel ranks in 1982 as a frontline physician and later personal doctor to then rebel leader Yoweri Museveni into the early years of the Museveni Presidency.

While that should have taken him out of the political mainstream back to his profession, his appointment in the early years of the regime as State Minister for Internal Affairs ensured that he was shoved right back.

As National Political Commissar, Dr Besigye was responsible for popularising the Local Council network across the country. He debated and promoted the then individual merit Movement system of governance in higher institutions of learning, especially at Makerere University, where political debate was vibrant.

He briefly served as Chief of Logistics and Engineering and Commander of the Mechanised Brigade in Masaka before his nomination to the Constituent Assembly in 1994/5, where together with the Late Col. Sserwanga Lwanga and Winnie Byanyima, he argued that the Movement was only a transitional system and not another political form of government.

Seeds of disagreement with the man he once admired must have been planted then. Appointed briefly as military adviser to the Minister of Defence, Dr Besigye’s break came in 1999 when he authored and shared with the media a critical letter arguing that the Movement had derailed and needed to urgently be brought back onto the rails.

He survived court martial by a whisker for raising issues in the “wrong forum” after the intervention of elders from his native Rukungiri. But by then, the battle lines had been drawn and the rest of his life was going to be a roller coaster.

Marriage and Kungfu
In 2000, he married Winnie in a private ceremony. They had a child, Anselm, in the same year. He was allegedly facing imminent arrest but still he announced a bid for the presidency ahead of the 2001 polls. This bid saved him from an alleged plot to arrest him, but set the ground for possibly the most exciting presidential race in over one-and-half decades in the country.

It included a martial arts display in the VIP lounge of Entebbe Airport as he tried to fend off operatives from Chieftaincy of Military Intelligence who wanted to arrest the head of his youth league, Maj. Okwir Rabwoni, a brother of then CMI chief Nobel Mayombo.

The period also included him being pulled off a plane, being blocked from another flight and being blocked from travelling to Mbarara at Lukaya.

By the end of July 2001, Dr Besigye had had enough and decided to flee to exile, beating 24-hour surveillance while the security was busy watching the Smart Partnership Dialogue in Munyonyo.

While is South Africa where exile took him, Dr Besigye was accused of mobilising rebellion. Once he appeared on a talk show on the then Monitor FM’s Tonight with Andrew Mwenda Live and squared it off with Brig. Mayombo (RIP), who read details of his alleged rebel contacts. David Pulkol, then head of External Security Organisation, walked himself into the show to reinforce Brig. Mayombo.

Around July 2002, Reform Agenda was formalised into a political pressure group, picking from his major campaign theme that called for political reform.

In absentia, he was elected leader. Between 2003 and 2004, with regular delegations meeting him in South Africa, Reform Agenda merged with the National Democrats Forum, whose leader Chaapa Karuhanga had also been a candidate on the 2001 Presidential ballot as well a pressure group, the Parliamentary Advocacy Forum, leading to the formation of Forum for Democratic Change registered after a long standoff that once saw promoters carry Shs100,000 in coins after government claimed it had no money to verify their signatures.

On December 19, 2004, FDC was given a registration certificate as a fully registered political party. Besigye was nominated interim leader in absentia.

A delegation to South Africa and at least a couple of meetings in Krugersdorp, the Johannesburg neighbourhood that was his exile home, Besigye was convinced to return home and run as FDC flag bearer. This would be his second challenge against Museveni who was assured to emerge as NRM flagbearer.

Rumours of his imminent arrest filtered through the air in Kampala and in South Africa and put his return in balance. Sources that attended the Krugersdorp meeting maintained that both Besigye and the party were aware of the threat but he decided to return on October 26, 2005.

Like on Thursday May 12 when he returned from treatment in Nairobi, throngs of his supporters took over Entebbe Road from the airport to Kampala, giving him a hero’s welcome in a journey that lasted at least 10 hours.

At Najjanankumbi, the FDC headquarters, Besigye was registered by a team specially sent from the Electoral Commission to enable him beat a registration deadline to be eligible to participate in the 2006 election, which were to be held under a multiparty system.

Two days later on October 29, Besigye was formally elected Party President at a conference at Namboole Stadium and flagbearer. Again, the decision was seen as insulation from arrest.

After embarking on an immediate tour of the country, Besigye was arrested on November 14 as he returned from western Uganda.
The arrest sparked what has now become the common phenomenon of demonstrations and riots. Besigye appeared in court on November 15 to face charges of treason, concealment of treason and another that surprised and shocked all—rape.

Treason and rape
On November 16, he returned to court where 16 other detainees arrested on similar charges were to appear before Justice Edward Ssempa Lugayizi for a bail hearing. They were granted bail but never got to sign the bail papers after a paramilitary group that came to be known as the “Black Mambas” besieged the court with intent to re-arrest them.

They chose not to sign the bail papers and therefore were returned to Luzira. Besigye was to be nominated in jail on December 19, 2005, and was granted bail in January for a presidential run that saw him commuting between the campaign trail and very regular court appearances. Every appearance attracted a demonstration and riot.

He lost the election but went to the Supreme Court to challenge the results. It was his second run and second petition, but unlike 2001, in 2006 all the seven judges of the supreme court ruled that the elections were flawed but not to a level substantial enough as to alter the overall outcome. Museveni kept his job, but had again been stung with a tint of illegitimacy that Besigye continued to ride on.

The rape charge had collapsed shortly before the election and the treason charge was to crumble later, especially over a technicality after the same group of suspects were charged in a parallel military court over the same set of facts.

When Besigye offered himself to run against Museveni for the third time in this year’s election, he announced he would not go to court but the court of public opinion. He lost the election, did not go to court and this explains the current standoff powered by the walk to work campaign over high food and fuel costs.

Since the start of the walk protests, at least 11 people have been killed, several injured and possibly thousands arrested. Besigye is the most prominent and has been arrested at least four time times so far, his “preventive house arrest,” being the fifth.

What next we all wait to see.

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House arrests around the world

Aung San Suu Kyi
The Burmese opposition politician and a former General Secretary of the National League for Democracy steered her party to victory in the 1990 general election with 59 per cent of the national vote and 81 per cent of the seats in Parliament.
Before the elections, she was placed under house arrest on the orders of the reclusive Generals who wield real power in the country. She remained under house arrest for almost 15 years from July 20, 1989, until her release on November 13, 2010.
Suu Kyi received the Rafto Prize and the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought in 1990 and the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991. In 1992 she was awarded the Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding by the government of India.

Godfrey Lukongwa Binaisa
The former President of Uganda was placed under house arrest shortly after his ouster from power in May 1980 by the Military Commission led by Paulo Muwanga and Yoweri Museveni.
He had been in power for 328 days, having been chosen President on June 20, 1979, by the National Consultative Council.

Jomo Kenyatta
In 1953, Kenyatta was jailed by the British colonial administration on suspicion that he was leader of the Mau Mau movement which was waging a armed campaign against the White settler community.
In 1959, Kenyatta was transferred from jail to house arrest, until 1961 when he was released and he became leader of KANU, which led that country to independence.

Chief Albert Luthuli
A South African teacher and politician who became President of the African National Congress, an umbrella organisation that led opposition to the white minority government in South Africa through the 1950s, until his house arrest in 1958.
Luthuli’s ban was renewed in 1954. Repeated banning orders caused difficulties for the leadership of the ANC.
Six days after the March 21 Sharpeville emergency in 1960, Luthuli sought to rally Africans to resist by publicly burning his identification document in Pretoria, in accordance with an ANC protest decision. On March 30, he was detained until August, when he was sentenced to a £100 fine and a six-month suspended sentence. On release, he was confined to his home in Stanger, Natal. Luthuli was later awarded the 1960 Nobel Peace Prize.

Ms Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza
The Rwandan opposition leader of Forces Démocratiques Unifiées (FDU) party was arrested and detained on October 15, 2010. She was charged with promoting genocide ideology.
In January 2010, a critic of the Rwandan government, Ingabire had returned to Rwanda from the Netherlands to run against President Kagame. She was first placed her under house arrest in April.

Benazir Bhutto
The former Pakistani opposition leader was placed under house arrest on November 9, 2007. Bhutto had promised a campaign to force then President Pervez Musharraf to stand down as army chief. A three-day detention order was served on the former prime minister after she tried to cross heavy police cordon set up outside her home.
Bhutto returned to Pakistan on October 18, 2007. She was assassinated on December 27, 2007, at a rally two weeks before the scheduled Pakistani general election of 2008 in which she was a leading candidate.

Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi
The Iranian opposition leaders are under house arrest. Both were detained shortly after making requests early this year to have public demonstrations. Mousavi was the top challenger to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose re-election in 2009 sparked violent protests in Iran.

Kim Daejung
The former South Korean president spent several years in and out of prison for challenging the life presidency of Gen. Park Chung Hee, who grabbed power in a 1964 coup and banned all political activities until he was himself assassinated in 1979. In August 1973, agents of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency abducted Kim from a Tokyo hotel. The plot was to “eliminate” him but swift and strong reactions from the US and Japan saw his release. He was immediately placed under house arrest. After December 1982, he was allowed to travel to the US. He returned home in early 1985, ran and was defeated in presidential elections in 1987 and 1992. In December 1997, he was elected to the presidency.

Mikhail Gorbachev
With the collapse of the Soviet empire, Gorbachev helped establish a new open system for the Russian government, ending the Communist Party’s monopoly. For this, between August 19-21, 1991, a group of hardliners of the Communist Party attempted a coup and put him under house arrest.