WORLD, Page 54UGANDAStarting Over in KampalaPeace slowly revives a country shattered by war and atrocityBy Michael S. Serrill/Reported by Marguerite Michaels/Kampala
The relics of Uganda's bloody past are everywhere. Tanks rust
along the roads, and shellholes pockmark buildings. In the villages
north of Kampala, the capital, big plastic bags bulge with bright
white human skulls, femurs and tibias, the grisly remains of some
of the estimated 1 million victims of two decades of government
atrocity, tribal conflict and civil war. Now the nearly
four-year-old regime of President Yoweri Museveni is talking about
preserving these bones, perhaps in a museum, as a memorial to a
time that everyone in Uganda hopes is over.
Peace has come to most of the country, and with it a modicum
of prosperity. The outdoor markets of Kampala and other cities are
full of food. Soap, salt and cloth are available in stores. Cars
and trucks again ply the rutted roads, and offices that used to
close after lunch so workers could get home before the shooting
started are now open for business all day. Farmers are busy
cultivating cassava and coffee. Industrial production has begun to
revive, and the economy, brought to its knees by mismanagement and
war, grew 5% last year.
But the biggest change is psychological. For the first time
since the murderous clown-President Idi Amin took over the
government in a 1971 coup, Ugandans can walk the streets without
fear. "I still have no glass in my windows, and I can't afford
sugar for my tea," says Adam Mayanja, 48, who returned to his
32-acre coffee farm north of Kampala three years ago. "But I sleep
at night. There is peace and I am free."
Credit for all this goes to Museveni, 45, the self-described
freedom fighter whose National Resistance Army triumphantly entered
an exhausted Kampala after five years of guerrilla war against a
series of brief governments that succeeded Amin's. Once a firebrand
student of economics and politics at Tanzania's University of Dar
es Salaam, Museveni was regarded with some trepidation in Western
capitals when he emerged from the bush. Now the assessment is
almost unanimously positive. Museveni, says a U.S. diplomat in
Kampala, has been "a very effective leader. He has subdued tribal
rebels in the north, instituted a sort of grass-roots democracy,
and even managed to hold a successful national election.
Politically, things are as good as they can be."
Museveni has been building his own kind of democracy. Local
affairs are run by "resistance councils." Last February voters were
permitted to cast ballots for added seats to the National
Resistance Council, Uganda's renamed parliament. But Museveni's
National Resistance Movement is the only legal political
organization, and the unelected President last week had the N.R.C.
extend his term of office five years, to 1995.
The President's greatest achievement has been to increase
discipline in his 65,000-man army, which includes former rebel
troops. Says a Kampala business man: "Gone are the days when you
had to hide your car from greedy soldiers and carry cash in your
pockets to pay them off when they stopped you." Amnesty
International reported that although there are still problems of
torture and arbitrary detention, "the army is more subject to the
law now than at any time in the last 20 years."
Museveni's highest priority is reviving the economy. When
Uganda gained its independence from Britain in 1962, it was one of
Africa's most prosperous countries. Idi Amin not only raped the
economy for his own personal enrichment, but in 1972 he also
ejected tens of thousands of ethnic Asians who had formed the
backbone of commerce. Uganda's per capita income dropped nearly
half during the 1970s, and exports fell 60%.
Slowly Museveni has turned things around. One step was to
devalue the Uganda shilling and introduce free-market structures
to earn $550 million in World Bank and International Monetary Fund
loans. They are crucial to the economy since the plummet of the
price of coffee, which accounts for 90% of the nation's income.
Inflation hovers around the three-digit range, and corruption
remains rampant. Local businessmen call Museveni the government's
"only honest man," and even officials charged with rooting out
misappropriation say that "the problem is so immense, there's no
way we can tackle the whole of it."
Recent progress aside, life is still hard in Uganda. The banks
cannot always cash a check, power failures are common, and pipes
do not always have water. The health system has been overwhelmed
by AIDS, which has infected as much as 30% of the adult population
in the southwest.
As for Museveni, he has thwarted two coup attempts, and is
constantly criticized for favoring his native south, home of the
predominant Baganda group, over the north, where the Acholi and
Langi prevail. But the President is confident that his nation can
again become the breadbasket of East Africa and bury forever the
