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.

Muhwezi and Begumisa summoned the UCB Kilembe branch manager, John Katungi, and gave him instructions to keep their money for use as and when they might need it. They ordered Katungi to open the bank’s safe for inspection and deposited their money separately from the rest of the bank’s cash reserves. They opened a book of accounts for the money and thereafter started transacting business with it, buying fuel, food, vehicles, and so on.

The NRA had also helped themselves to coffee from the Nyakatonzi Growers Cooperative Society in Kasese and gave them to John Sanyu Katuramu to buy cars from Rwanda and Zaire on their behalf. According to residents of western Uganda at the time, the NRA was rather disciplined in their day-to-day dealings with civilians. They paid cash for everything they engaged in. Even if one gave them a lift in one’s private car, they paid for the trip.

That same month, August 1985, the NRA hijacked a Uganda Airlines F-27 Fokker Friendship propeller plane on a domestic flight, with 44 people on board and diverted it to Kasese. Lt. Fred Mugisha, an intelligence officer at the UNLA battalion at Entebbe, was the man who made the move on the plane. Among the other hijackers and collaborators in this hijacking were NRA guerrillas Captain Innocent Bisangwa, Dan Byakutaga and Uganda Airlines officers Abraham Kiroso and Winnie Byanyima coordinating the operation. The plane was piloted by Capt. Justus Tinka.

Coordinating the hijacking of the plane from Fort Portal was an NRA intelligence officer, Lt. Paul Kagame.
The NRA demanded the release of one of their political commissars Landislausi Serwanga Lwanga, who had been arrested by the UNLA, as a condition for returning the plane. About September 1985, the UNLA sent a convoy of trailer lorries to reinforce Kasese. There was an NRA roadblock at Katunguru along the Kasese-Mbarara road, near Lake George and Lake Edward.

The troops were surrounded. A senior NRA official ordered the trailers to be locked up with soldiers in.
Several days later, a major stench came out of the trailers and when it was opened, the decomposing bodies of the soldiers lay on the floors. They had suffocated to death.

The NRA propaganda machinery at this time went into overdrive, portraying the UNLA as an army of mass killers.
Capt. George Nkwanga of FEDEMU was tricked into believing that Bazillio Okello wanted to meet him at the Nile Mansions hotel in Kampala. As he headed for the meeting, he was waylaid near the Silver Springs Hotel at Bugolobi and killed.
Several sources say the ambush was by the NRA whom Nkwanga, now a member of the Military Council, had grown critical of in recent months.
In response to this assault on its image by the NRA, the Okello regime announced a press censorship.
Journalists were required to present their political news stories to a government verification committee before they could be published.

The peace talks
During the peace negotiations in Nairobi, Obote, now in exile in Lusaka, Zambia, made frantic phone calls to the army officers who had recently deposed him. Obote urged one of the UNLA’s senior officers, Brig Lazarus Orwotho and others to overlook their disagreement with his ousted UPC government and instead focus their efforts to making sure Museveni’s NRA did not gain the upper hand and take power in Uganda

Obote warned Orwotho, in December 1985, that Uganda faced a grave threat. He said a genocide would occur in northern and eastern Uganda should Museveni ever seize power. Whether or not Brig. Orwotho heeded Obote’s urging is not clear.

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.