What went wrong with human rights?

It may be difficult to recreate a sense of just how central human rights issues were to Ugandan politics, and therefore how instrumental they were in building and feeding the legend of the National Resistance Movement (NRM).

Between 1962 and 1986, Uganda was caught in an entrenched and mounting human rights crisis that characterised all her national life. Everything was about disappearances, detentions, bans, exiles and executions. It was our defining feature, and something that due to its very heart-rending nature, was also easily turned into media material.

This fully matured during the reign of General Amin where the combination of wholesale political exclusion, Western racism, and a mounting economic crisis led to a virtual carnival of language and imagery that really entrenched the notion of rights violations as being Uganda’s fundamental problem.

The 1980-1985 anti-Obote war was merely the final point of that. Beyond the political differences, human rights violations were the struggles’ lowest common denominator: they were accessible, human, unifying.

This is where the NRM became important, because its unique selling point in Uganda politics was as being the entity that finally “found the medicine” that enabled the country to solve this problem and therefore enable us to move on to other things. This is of course completely untrue as everyone can now see. 

How to not think

However, the point is not that it has become untrue through some backsliding over the years: the point is that it was never true. All that has changed is people’s perception of the same things.

If we are to put it in modern terms, we would say that human rights was NRM’s “brand”; the thing that defined its public identity. So, what went wrong?

One perhaps, needed to have been there, alive and aware, at the time of the NRA victory, to fully understand this.

However popular Robert Kyagulanyi is now as an inspiring insurgent figure, his popularity is nothing compared to that which a youthful and inspiring Yoweri Museveni had between 1985, and maybe 1990.  This speaks to just how significant the arrival of the NRM was: Museveni, and the various smaller versions of him in his various war-hero commanders, were virtual gods. 

Nothing wrong could be said about them. One risked insults, ostracism, physical violence and open ridicule for making even the most basic negative remark. And this not from the regime itself, but ordinary members of the public. I know, because I was at the receiving end of all that throughout the 1980s, and beyond.  

It’s what developed my interest in education issues, because it was when I first fully realised that the Uganda education system is designed to train people in how to not think, and therefore not reason, and that in particular, there is nothing as manipulable as an excited woman, and expecially one who considers herself “educated”.

As said, the image is completely undeserved of course, despite what even some Opposition and wider human rights activists say: that the regime has “started”  human rights violations with the abductions and other things we now see. 

This is very uninformed in many cases. In other cases, it is just very intellectually dishonest.

NRM human rights violations as a government, began immediately after they took power, and have never stopped. A good early example of the actual view of their leadership on the matter was the warning to “lock up [the media] under the 1967 Detention laws, if they continue to malign the good name of the NRA…” given by non other than new president Yoweri Museveni himself on the  of February 18, 1987. 

The venerable journalist Tony Owana was one of the victims of the attitude back then. Other victims of the true nature of the NRM were Jacob Oulanyah who was among the students shot by the police during a peaceful demonstration against Makerere University cost-cutting; and Charles Rwomushana, whose 1995 parliamentary ambitions were summarily crushed during the election campaigns by the violence from the supporters of his NRM big-shot rival.

What has changed, in the main, is the wider public perception of the violations. So the real problem with these abductions, is that the logic, framework and arguments for human rights were themselves abducted a very long time ago. And their custodians did not file any complaints at the time. Now these new victims do.

For example, Charles Rwomushana, despite his unfair treatment by the NRM (and incidentally having been, he claims, also among the aforementioned demonstrating students), went on to a long career in our famously partisan state intelligence services, and now spends his days as a media contortionist speaking for the opposition on the behalf of the government (I think. Or something).

The late Mr Oulanyah of course went on the become an NRM voice in his home area, and through them, be elevated to the parliamentary Speakership.

Mr Owana is a dedicated cadre of the NRM of decades. He once told me that his detention (in a military barracks) had been as a result of a news source misleading him with information. He did not seem to have an opinion on the manner of the detention itself.

Again, the point was not that human rights were not being violated back then, rather; that the then generation of young activists saw the violations first hand and decided that they could live with it, while in pursuit of other things. 

The current rising generation of political actors facing the brunt of the abductions and torture can be said to be paying the bill for the silence their parents generation consumed in this manner, in two ways.

Release them, or charge them. 

First, the young are engaged in a handicapped discourse because those in charge do not know the issue, and second because those that do, cannot tell them about it because of their past collusion.

The most critical point missed therefore is human rights are not “politics” as such; they are what comes up as an issue once politics fails. But to avoid, or even fix a human rights crisis, one must have a clear political programme. It is very hard to develop one if one does not know the difference.

This was how the 1987-2002  wars in northern Uganda were treated like an issue taking place in a foreign country, among people we did not know. Those who know the politics that gave rise to it were not telling; and those experiencing the actual violations of the war had no political understanding of it.

The 1995 Constitution was supposed to be the NRM’s crowning moment, where all this bad history was finally neutralised and this fresh thinking was formally institutionalised. It came with the broadest of definitions: youth, women, people with disabilities were all given space and consideration, The donors loved it, calling it the best constitution in the world. Human rights were the very heart of the constitutional order.

That Constitution is now  the dead horse that Justice Sekaana was trying to make get up and walk with his admonishing of the State Attorney representing in a December 9th High Court mention of yet another case of abduction. “Release them, or charge them. They cannot be kept incommunicado”, he groused.

This, in a country that wrote such a principle (again) into its constitution against a background of a whole Chief Justice having once been abducted. Justice Sekaana’s having to state the basics, shows just how dead ruman rights now are.

And that is the thing: NRA in power was always going to be a Human Rights violator. It never really had a choice, given the expectations of the Western corporations that installed it in power. For them to get rich; the population must be either bought, or silenced. This makes abuses the policy, not an accident.

Nothing went wrong, apart from us being a country of slow learners further burdened by absentee teachers. 

Mr Kalundi Sserumaga is a social and political commentator