Insurgency in the northern and eastern regions in 1986

Warning. Obote, while in exile, had warned senior UNLA officers in December 1985 that if the NRA seized power, it would commit massacres in northern Uganda.

There are many more bodies lying in the field. These are the ones we have counted so far. The number of the dead could be more than 600)… We were surprised to see the rebels coming at us without taking cover. We kept massacring them but they kept coming and we killed so many.” (The Standard newspaper, Nairobi, January 21, 1987)

Rwigyema had just commanded a massacre of unarmed civilians.
President Museveni flew into Corner Kilak by helicopter on January 18, 1987 and later said: “The rebels attacked us at a place called Corner Kilak 20 miles South of Kitgum. They came in while singing and shouting; our people [NRA soldiers] massacred those chaps. They approached us frontally. This gave us a very good chance because they exposed themselves; so on Sunday, we surrounded them and massacred them. We massacred them very badly.” (The Standard, January 21, 1987)

It was the first time Ugandans had ever heard a head of state openly, in public, use a graphic term like “massacre”.

It was, unquestionably, the campaign that former president Milton Obote had warned senior UNLA officers in December 1985 would be unleashed on northern Uganda should the NRA seize power.

On November 22, 1988, the chairman of the Uganda Peace Society and veteran DP politician, Tiberio Atwoma Okeny, wrote a letter to Museveni on the desperate situation in Acholi:
“Reports of incredible atrocities have been, by and large, corroborated by the government-owned [newspaper], The New Vision of 7th September, 1st and 16th November 1988… Mr President, the severity and magnitude of the scorched-earth policy has reached proportions, which [have] poisoned the minds of the people who are facing the onslaught, that it is the beginning of the implementation of the often publicly uttered statements by high-ranking NRM officials to exterminate a people.”

The NRA had launched an unprecedented reign of terror in northern and eastern Uganda, the likes of which had never been seen.

editorial@ug.nationmedia.com

Continues tomorrow