Ugandan journalist Andrew Mwenda knows who is responsible for the crisis between Rwanda and Uganda. On August 3, 2018 he wrote an article titled “Kayihura, Kagame, Museveni” which, he claimed, is based on inside information obtained when he was allegedly acting as a “quasi private envoy” between the presidents of Uganda and Rwanda. Mwenda listed at least 9 areas, with evidence, where Uganda had provoked Rwanda and only one against Rwanda, but even on this he writes, “Museveni never made this allegation of kidnappings although his military, political, and intelligence officials repeatedly made it… Kampala has NEVER made a formal or even informal protest to Kigali over this allegation. I am aware, however, that through Interpol, Rwanda and Uganda had an arrangement to exchange suspects.” It is Mwenda who put the word never in caps for emphasis of a one-sided provocations in the crisis between the two countries. Since that time, Mwenda has stayed away from writing about the crisis - one can imagine why - until now. On September 13, 2021, Mwenda resurfaced with an article titled “Losing sight of grand strategy.” When the two articles are read side by side, one wonders whether the title of the latter article refers to Mwenda himself. Out of the gates, Mwenda writes that Kigali “must be having many spies in our midst” and that it is “also possible that many of those arrested are guilty.” But Mwenda still asks: “Why does CMI hold them for months or years without trial or even a charge?” But shouldn’t the guilt of suspects be the reason to take them to courts for trial, and the absence of it the reason to hold and torture them without bringing them to court? CMI and Mwenda can’t have it both ways: if the victims of these abuses are guilty, the place to prove this is the courts of law! Mwenda is making himself the judge – thereby justifying the torture of innocent Rwandans – not because he doesn’t understand the laws of natural justice. However, it is that the big picture is disappearing from him. Mwenda is therefore projecting when he writes that Museveni’s capacity for grand strategy and big picture “disappears when it comes to dealing with Rwanda.” On the contrary, Rwanda may be the only issue on which Museveni is clear eyed, only in self-destructive ways. When it comes to Rwanda, Museveni has acted consistently in a manner that has not distracted him from his “grand strategy”: to install a stooge in Kigali to whom he can dictate what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. This “vision” goes way back to the 1990s when the RPF had just come to power in Kigali. Back then, RPF officials were surprised when Museveni wanted to dictate who should be president and who should be in what position in cabinet. Further, he wanted to be able to summon Rwandan officials to Kampala for instructions, even when this violated standard state-to-state protocol. For instance, he was in constant communication with Kayumba Nyamwasa when the latter was the army Chief of Staff, which under normal circumstances is a diplomatic scandal. Museveni also tried to drive a wedge between the then vice-president Paul Kagame and President Bizimungu by inciting the latter against the former. French Historian, Gerald Prunier, revealed in his book, Africas World War, that at the same time, in the mid 1990s, Museveni was in contact with the then security minister, Seth Sendashonga, to recruit young men inside Rwanda to form a rebellion against the new RPF government. Prunier writes that he, himself, acted as a middle man between Sendashonga and Gen Salim Saleh, Museveni’s young brother, who had promised to procure weapons. Page 366 of Prunier’s book reads: “While Tanzania had agreed to provide training camps, he [Sendashonga] hoped to get support from the only decisive and progressive force in the region, Museveni’s Uganda. He requested me to help him enter discussions with Kampala and I arranged the necessary contacts. On Sunday, 3 May 1998, there was a meeting in Nairobi between him and Salim Saleh, President Museveni’s brother. The climate between Kampala and Kigali was not at its best, and Salim was sufficiently open to the idea of supporting a new moderate force for it to have a chance of seeing the light of day.” Museveni’s hostility towards the young RPF government, whose many soldiers had helped him liberate Uganda, perplexed Mwalimu Julius Nyerere who asked him what problem he had against the Rwandans. Museveni’s response that “they do not listen to me” shocked Nyerere who had to remind Museveni that this was a sovereign country he was talking about. In 2001, Winnie Byanyima thought Museveni had crossed the line by supporting the FDLR, the army that had just committed genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and had escaped to the Congolese jungles, but she found herself in prison for speaking up against this abomination. In 2005, it was revealed that the head of the FDLR, Ignace Murwanashyaka, was traveling on a Ugandan passport while crisscrossing the globe mobilising for support to attack Rwanda. In 2007, Karegeya fled Rwanda through Uganda, and, three years later, Kayumba Nyamwasa also fled through Kampala. The same year, they formed the Rwanda National Congress (RNC), and, in August 2010, Karegeya announced in a Ugandan newspaper their objective - to overthrow the government of Rwanda by force of arms. In 2017, the RNC moved its base to Uganda, a period that coincided with the widespread detention and torture of Rwandans in Uganda who refused to join or to contribute money towards it. The manner of arrests in public view made it difficult to distinguish between security officers of the government and operatives of the RNC; the latter were embedded in the former so much so that operatives of the RNC were openly boasting on social media about the fact that anyone harassed in Uganda had no recourse. The fact that a group that has declared war on a neighboring country could be so embedded in the security apparatus of its host was enough proof that this was the official policy of the Ugandan government, and that Ugandan security officers were merely implementing directives. In March 2018, President Kagame traveled to Entebbe State House for discussions with his Ugandan counterpart. At a joint press conference, Museveni admitted (confession starts at 12:40’) that CMI had been facilitating RNC recruits and providing them safe passage to DRC jungles. Exactly a year later, in March, Museveni also admitted in a letter he wrote to President Kagame that he had “accidentally” met with RNC officials, Eugene Gasana and Charlotte Mukankusi who had also been traveling on a Ugandan passport in her role as head of diplomacy of the RNC. As a result of mediation by DRC and Angola, the authorities in Uganda withdrew Mukankusi’s passport, which they had first denied to having issued. I have intentionally used Ugandan sources of information that are also in the public domain. They show that Museveni has never been distracted from his grand vision; for him, the removal of a government in Kigali that does not listen to him is a “big picture” grand strategy. In Mwenda’s 2018 article, he reveals that President Kagame had called him naïve for the way he assessed Museveni’s motives for Rwanda. Kagame is vindicated when Mwenda thinks that Museveni’s grand strategy and big picture “disappears when it comes to dealing with Rwanda.” On the contrary, Museveni’s relentlessness in pursuit of any “grand strategy” comes alive when it comes to Rwanda. It trumps all other ambitions of his that he is even willing to sabotage major regional infrastructure projects involving Kenya and Tanzania and to forego the hundreds of millions of dollars in income that Ugandans were earning from the export of goods to Rwanda before the crisis. Clearly, anyone who is a “leading champion” of the cause for regional integration would find such sacrifices too much to bear especially because for more than 20 years they have yielded no results at all. It is neither patriotic to sacrifice the incomes of Ugandans nor Pan African to sabotage regional development in pursuit of a dead end “grand strategy.” When Mwenda asks, “How can all this be ruined by mere allegations of kidnap”? The answer is simple: it is not about kidnaps at all. It’s about a vision that Museveni has determined he won’t be distracted from. For the record, the exchange of suspects between Uganda and Rwanda took place in 2013. Why did Uganda wait five years before making it an issue that could derail relations between the two countries, especially when it received more suspects than Rwanda did during that swap? The fact is that the issue of kidnappings is “a response to, not the cause of” the crisis. Museveni’s decision to host the operations of the RNC in Uganda was a strategic mistake. The derivative policies from it include the harassing and torturing Rwandans in that country, the abusive trolls on both sides of the divide, and Rwanda’s response to close its border. They are in fact Museveni’s primary and secondary mistakes – “big and small.” Once Mwenda understands this, he will know that there is no such thing as “Uganda’s indifference to Kigali’s complaints,” which is his way of shifting “heavy responsibility” from Museveni and placing it where it doesn’t belong because it is not CMI that is devising Uganda’s “diplomatic relations with Kigali”. If Mwenda were to acknowledge this, he would also avoid his patronizing take that “a smart chief of an intelligence organization must know the core interest of the state he serves and use intelligence to promote that policy.” That’s exactly what the smart chaps at CMI are doing, “hence their promotions and increased budgets and power,” as Mwenda observes with acute naivety, choosing to see trees but missing the forest. It is he, not Museveni, who has lost sight of grand strategy. Museveni hasn’t told him about his grand strategy for Rwanda because, as he recently revealed to a France 24 journalist, his secrets are in his “head.” In other words, when Mwenda stops being naïve, or whatever he thinks he is doing when he decides to write, he will realize that Museveni’s “grand strategy” does not disappear when it comes to Rwanda. It comes alive, only in self-destructive ways.
