Life in NRM/A rebel-controlled western Uganda

According to residents of western Uganda at the time, the NRA was rather disciplined in their day-to-day dealings with civilians and paid for everything they engaged in.

Speaking to the New African news magazine edition of January 1986, the late Tony Masaba, a former officer in the Obote II intelligence service, the National Security Agency, Tito and Bazillio Okello had themselves previously urged Obote to authorise them to deploy heavy artillery “to blast everything out of existence, including Museveni’s NRA, but the president refused to listen to them.”

Now it was the turn of Bazillio and Tito Okello not to read the warning signs. However, one of the top UNLA commanders, Lt. Col. Eric Odwar, seemed to feel the same way about the NRA as Obote. Odwar and Major John Kilama felt that Tito Okello did not seem to realise that Museveni was using the Nairobi peace discussions just to buy time for the NRA to strengthen its military position.

Odwar, it later emerged, started to plot a second military coup, to overthrow Tito Okello, and prevent the NRA from rising to power. Many other people at the time seemed to underestimate Museveni’s military position and intentions.

An intelligence officer at the British High Commission in Kampala remarked to a British citizen that “NRA is never going to make it past Katonga”.

The NRA did make it past Katonga and after fighting resumed on January 17, 1986, fought its way to Kampala and to state power that it would hold for the next 26 years.

The Masaka military blockade

The NRA laid siege of Masaka Barracks and sought to starve it into submission, which they eventually did.
The situation in Masaka was dire during this period, as the DP-owned newspaper, The Citizen, described it in its December 12, 1985 edition: “Masaka District, in Southern Uganda, which is controlled by Mr Museveni’s National Resistance Army (NRA), is reported to be in economic, social and political turmoil. There are calamities in and around Masaka that have never met the eye,’ said a student who escaped from the area by lake [Lake Nabugabo]. He said that many students have ventured into the NRA for lack of anything else to do.

Many schools have been forced to close and most young girls and boys are redundant. The young man feared for his fellow students who he said on joining the NRA, are given a crash session that lasts a week or two,” the newspaper reported.

“The next time, they find themselves at the war front, he lamented and added that many have died in the crossfires. The boy who said he had for a few weeks joined the NRA said many others wished to leave what he called the ‘gun-trolling business’ but are no longer able to do so.

He said, however, that except those who have died in this process and those selected for assassination because they are called enemies of the people, killing by the NRA is very minimal. Reports from other personalities who have escaped to Nairobi have indicated that the NRA is also composed of mercenaries, Rwandans and Tanzanians and a training team from Mozambique where Mr Museveni served as a guerrilla for quite some time,” it added.

As has already been stated, the impression most Ugandans have of the brief rule by the Military Council government in the latter half of 1985 is of a total breakdown of Uganda into rival armed gangs, looting by drunken UNLA soldiers and of the main guerrilla group, the NRA, as a disciplined force on which Uganda’s hope’s now lay.
What, though, is the truth about these tumultuous months following the July 27 coup?

A few days before the coup, the Commanding Officer of the army barracks in Fort Portal, Maj Pacific Okwera, who was part of the Acholi-led rebellion, handed the barracks over to the NRA. Okwera together with NRA’s commander Salim Saleh addressed a large rally at Fort Portal Boma grounds.
After the rally, Okwera, some aides and NRA officers went to the Bank of Uganda Fort Portal currency centre, emptied its vault and Okwera drove towards Kitgum.

An attack on the UNLA’s detach at Rubona on the Fort Portal-Kasese road was coordinated by some rebel Acholi officers. As a Lieutenant in the UNLA in Moroto in 1981, Saleh (a brother to NRA leader Yoweri Museveni) had been arrested for poaching animals at the Kidepo National Park but was released after the intervention of the Army Chief of Staff, Major-General David Oyite-Ojok.

In August 1985, the NRA rebels went to the sub-currency centre of Bank of Uganda in Kabale town.
Working with the help of an insider at the bank called Joy Kasirimbi, the NRA made off with the money (or as their critics put it, looted the money). It was Shs400 million.

A rebel commander called Jim Muhwezi got hold of a blue and white van belonging to the district farm institute of Kabale and the rebels drove off to the mining town of Kilembe at the foot of the Rwenzori mountains. The van arrived at the Kilembe branch of Uganda Commercial Bank (UCB) at about 4pm, headed by a Muhwezi and an NRA collaborator, a Dr Begumisa, the commissioner of Finance in the “liberated” areas.