Who shall account for those who die while fighting for our right to live?

In the moments before his death Private M.Y. Masasa wore a tired, resigned look. His overgrown beard, strewn with streaks of grey, made him look older in his fatigues but most of the fatigue was stored in his eyes, which laboured to read the prepared text of pre-mortem capitulation held, unseen, somewhere ahead of him.
There is no telling what horrors he had seen in almost 18 months of captivity by al-Shabaab militants in Somalia. Whatever it was, he looked like a man for whom death held out the warm embrace of a welcome respite, the tipping over of his cup of suffering.
The end came swiftly, two close-range shots to the back of the head fired from a pistol-wielding outstretched hand of some faceless executioner too cowardly to show the rest of his body or even face his victim.
Not much is known about Private Masasa. Nothing about the family he spoke of wistfully in the dying minutes of his life. Not even his age, his service in the army, not even his full name or its correct spelling. In the end Private Masasa was a tired, dying man on a grainy video, a grim statistic and reminder of the depravity of religious extremist violence.
We might never know his story. When reports of an al-Shabaab attack on a UPDF position in Janaale, Somalia, first filtered through in September 2015 the military initially denied, low-balled the extent, and then went quiet. The first public confirmation that at least 19 of our soldiers had been killed and at least one captured in the battle came from the Commander in Chief – not in a sombre and respectful address to his countrymen and women, but in an off-cuff, on-the-stump, answer to a foreign journalist on a visit to Japan.
On the anniversary of the attack, last September, a UPDF spokesperson said the army was “doing all it takes to rescue him”. Those efforts, whatever they might have been, were in vain.
No one expects the military to conduct its affairs in the press. But we expect it to carry a moral responsibility to publicly account for those who die or are captured while fighting for our country. Yet, be it in the savannah in northern Uganda against the LRA, or in the blood-stained rainforests of DR Congo, South Sudan or the Central African Republic, the military has maintained a culture of secrecy in which there is only grudging public accountability, if ever, for our losses.
Death is an ever-present reality for the men and women who enlist in the army and march into battle. Those brave souls are willing to be shot in a breeze or whipped to a pulp so that the rest of us cowards can shoot the breeze in cafes and chortle over our caramel hot-chocolates with whipped cream.
All Ugandans must be ashamed. For 18 months, while al-Shabaab held Private Masasa and quite possibly tortured him, most of us sat around on our fat arses, debating everything under the sun except his fate. There was no parliamentary inquiry, not even a posthumous motion, to honour him. There were no running diaries in our newspapers on how many days he was missing, no priests condoling with the family, no scholarship fund for his orphaned children or those of his colleagues lost in battle.
We must treat our soldiers and veterans better. Investigations into the attack on Janaale, including one by your columnist, found that it was preventable if our soldiers had the right materiel, and were not riven by internal divisions. Yet there has been only silence from those who matter.
We must demand accountability for the wars we fight and the price we pay. We must also honour, individually and publicly, those who fall so that the rest of us can stand. We owe it to Private Masasa and the thousands of his colleagues not to forget the horrible price we pay for peace.
A public monument with all the names of our fallen soldiers is a good place to start, followed by more transparency by the military. We let the cowards in al-Shabaab win if we do not celebrate our soldiers for the heroes most of them are.
Never again should we leave one of our own dead or alive on the battlefield and if one is captured in battle, in a just war, long may our enemies know that we shall all fight to rescue them, or die trying.

Mr Kalinaki is a Ugandan journalist based in Nairobi. [email protected] &Twitter: @Kalinaki