Mystery of mass murder and rape in the Kagera Salient

Since the Tanzanian commander, Major General Msuguri, had expressly forbidden his troops from destroying any infrastructure in Uganda and since the Tanzanian army was, in general, disciplined and was, after all, meeting light resistance in Masaka and Mbarara towns and therefore there was no need to bombard the towns, the task falls on future historians to investigate who it was that destroyed the buildings in Masaka and Mbarara, towns that 30 years later have never fully recovered from this destruction.
A particularly sensitive and painful chapter of this war has to do with the massacre of Muslims in Mbarara in February 1979 when the invading force arrived there.

Many Muslims were killed and thrown into River Rwizi, mosques were destroyed, women raped, and Muslim-owned businesses in Mbarara and Masaka looted or destroyed.

It is unlikely that the Tanzanian army, coming from a country that is 35 per cent Muslim and 30 per cent Christian, would have spared the mainly Christian population of Masaka and Mbarara that was welcoming them, but chosen to inflict atrocities on the small Muslim population of Ankole.

Who, then, massacred the Muslims? It is still in dispute. However, the attacks on the Muslims of Ankole were the first sign that the post-Amin era would not be the peaceful one that many Ugandans and international observers expected.

Something else also came in the footsteps of the 1979 war. As the war progressed, President Amin, speaking on Radio Uganda or at public rallies, often warned Ugandans against placing all their hope in the Tanzanians.

Amin spoke of a mysterious new disease that, he claimed, the liberation force was going to bring to Uganda. This disease, Amin said, had no cure. But because it was sometimes difficult to know what to believe in Amin’s claims, many Ugandans dismissed his warning.

One of the little-known duties of the State Research Bureau intelligence agency was to monitor and investigate any new diseases in Uganda. Amin, in 1972, had made a point of assigning the State Research Bureau this role.

Reports had been coming to Amin of a deadly new, wasting disease in the Kagera Salient of Tanzania and he thought he should pass this information on to Ugandans.

The medical news website www.iaen.org states that “Kagera is at the epicentre of the African Aids epidemic.
The first case of Aids in the region was diagnosed in 1983, although HIV was most likely present at least a decade earlier.”

This deadly disease appeared to have arrived in Uganda along the path taken by the Tanzanian troops and Ugandan exile groups as they advanced through Rakai, Kyotera, Mutukula, Masaka, and Lukaya.

There is something interesting about Aids in Uganda and the claims that Amin’s soldiers went about raping women in Kagera, abuses that sparked off the war.

Aids was clearly already in Kagera, “the epicentre of the African Aids epidemic”, in 1978 but most soldiers would not have known about it and therefore would not take precautionary measures.

It is intriguing that while the majority of the rank-and-file soldiers in the 1970s Uganda Army were from the Aringa tribe of West Nile and were the majority of the Ugandan troops who attacked Kagera, the scourge of Aids among Uganda’s military in the early years of the epidemic was most devastating, not in West Nile, but in Central and Western Uganda.

Given this whole distortion of Ugandan history, it should leave us wondering who exactly were these Ugandans who destroyed Kagera and raped the women folk in the area and why Aids early on took on a central and western Ugandan ethnic face, rather than a West Nile face.