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Uganda Fears of Regional Domination
For the first time since the protectorate was founded,
the
NRA victory in 1986 gave a predominantly southern cast to
both
the new political and the new military rulers of Uganda.
For
reasons of climate, population, and colonial economic
policy,
parts of the south, particularly Buganda, had developed
economically more rapidly than the north
(see The Colonial Era
, ch. 1). Until the railroad was extended from the south,
cotton
could not become an established cash crop in the north.
Instead,
early in the colonial period, northerners established a
pattern
of earning a cash income through labor on southern farms
or
through military service. Although there had never been a
political coalition that consisted exclusively, or even
predominantly, of southerners or northerners, the head of
the
government had come from the north for all but one of the
preceding twenty-three years of independence, and each
succeeding
army's officers and recruits were predominantly
northerners.
Northerners feared southern economic domination, while
southerners chafed under what they considered northern
political
and military control. Thus, the military victory of the
NRA posed
a sobering political question to both northerners and
southerners: was the objective of its guerrilla struggle
to end
sectarianism, as the Ten-Point Program insisted, or to end
northern political domination?
In the first few days following the NRA takeover of
Kampala
in January 1986, there were reports of incidents of mob
action
against individual northerners in the south, but the new
government took decisive steps to prevent their
repetition. By
the end of March, NRA troops had taken military control of
the
north. A period of uneasy calm followed, during which
northerners
considered their options. Incidents of looting and rape of
northern civilians by recently recruited southern NRA
soldiers,
who had replaced better disciplined but battle-weary
troops,
intensified northerners' belief that southerners would
take
revenge for earlier atrocities and that the government
would not
stop them. In this atmosphere, the NRA order in early
August 1986
for all soldiers in the former army, the Uganda National
Liberation Army (UNLA), to report to local police stations
gave
rise to panic. These soldiers knew that during the Obote
and Amin
governments such an order was likely to have been a
prelude to
execution. Instead of reporting, many soldiers joined
rebel
movements, and a new round of civil wars began in earnest
(see The Rise of the National Resistance Army
, ch. 5).
Although the civil wars occurred in parts of the east
as
well, they sharpened the sense of political cleavage
between
north and south and substantiated the perception that the
NRM was
intent on consolidating southern domination. Rebels killed
some
local RC officials because they were the most vulnerable
representatives of the NRM government. Because war made
northern
economic recovery impossible, new development projects
were
started only in the south. And because cash crop
production in
the north was also impossible, the income gap between the
two
areas widened. Most government officials sent north were
southerners because the NRA officer corps and the public
service
were mostly southern. By mid-1990, the NRA had gained the
upper
hand in the wars in the north, but the political damage
had been
done. The NRM government had become embroiled in war
because it
had failed to persuade northerners that it had a political
program that would end regional domination. And its
military
success meant that for some time to come its response to
all
political issues would carry that extra burden of
suspicion.
Data as of December 1990
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