Uganda Peoples Congress

THE MUKURA MASSACRE.

UGANDA PEOPLES CONGRESS
(Office of the President)
7 July 1999
  1. On the 10th Anniversary of the MUKURA MASSACRE which falls on 11 July, I send on behalf of the Members of the Uganda Peoples Congress (UPC) and on my own behalf deepest condolences to the families of the victims and much lamentations to people of Uganda as a whole.
  2. The Independent State of Uganda has been for now over thirteen years, since January 1986, a land where its citizens have been in bondage and under the rule of terror and massacres.
  3. The legacy of the Independence Struggle in which the UPC following upon the footsteps of its parent, the Uganda National Congress (UNC), was in the forefront that the Independence of the country must mean that always and at all times every citizen must also be free to enjoy and exercise his/her God given human rights and freedoms without restrictions, has been replaced by dictatorship and bondage.
  4. In June, 1989, the New Vision attributed two holocaustic reports to Museveni, the Commander of the National Resistance Army (NRA). The first was a disclosure to diplomats that there were, at that time in the North and North-East, two point seven (2.7) million people who had lost everything including homes and who were in makeshift camps without food, water, shelter and clothing. The cause of the holocaust which made such a colossal multitude to be destitutes was not a natural disaster.
  5. The cause of holocaust was given by Museveni in an interview to a New Vision reporter and published by the paper on June 27, 1989. In the interview, Museveni disclosed the heinous crime against humanity committed by his army. He disclosed that there was a policy of destroying foodstuff of millions of people in the North and North-East and that destruction had been done and completed with the result that much of the North and the North-East had been made desolate and therefore "pacified".
  6. Although two point seven million people were dying and suffering inhumane treatments in the makeshift camps, I did establish, through various means, that some three million people from the Districts of the two point seven million were MASSACRED during the NRA military operations to destroy the foodstuff and to render the Districts desolate.
  7. Never before have the people of Uganda been so much slaughtered and made to suffer so much degrading treatment and deprivation as under Museveni.
  8. Mukura is in Kumi District which is in Teso and Teso is in the North-East which Museveni told the diplomats as having been pacified. Why was it that some three hundred young men were imprisoned and locked by the NRA in Railway wagons at Mukura, a pacified area, and then MASSACRED by setting fire under the wagons! The answer can only be that the destruction of the foodstuff of millions of people, the destruction of their homes, the MASSACRES of some three million people and at Mukura were all a deliberate policy to depopulate Uganda so as to provide land for foreigners to farm.
  9. The policy to depopulate Uganda and thereby to provide land for foreigners to farm which Museveni launched in Luwero District in February 1981, is continuing in various ways. The most telling of the ways are two namely, the impoverishment of the people of Uganda and the deliberate policy to run down medical services so that many should die coupled with the policy to destroy quality education so that under debilitating ignorance, the land is stolen and given to foreigners.
  10. Dictatorship, bondage, MASSACRES, impoverishment of the people, dilapidation of hospitals and schools and the stealing of the land are being entrenched even by people who claim to be opposed to Museveni's Movement. One cannot, for instance, be opposed to the Movement or to the dictatorship when one is a member of the Movement's and not the People's Parliament, and such membership means giving credence and credibility to the dictatorship on the specious ground that the voice of the opposition is in Parliament. To be seen and recognised as being opposed to the dictatorship is not to be a member or sit in any organ of the dictatorship such as the Parliament. To do otherwise is to deceive the people.
  11. Uganda's nationalist politicians and leaders of opinions should know that the older democracies, led by London and Washington, have invested very heavily in the Museveni dictatorship so that time may come when the people of Uganda shall rise up and assert the enjoyment and exercise of their God given human rights and freedoms through carnage and much bloodshed. That time is now on the horizon.
  12. It is not in the nature of human beings to accept bondage and dictatorship. On this 10th anniversary of the MUKURA MASSACRE, coming as it does soon after the passage of a law to entrench bondage and dictatorship, through a dehumanising referendum, Notice is also given to the dictatorship and its mentors that IT IS NOT IN THE INTERESTS OF THE PEOPLE OF UGANDA FOR YOUR SYSTEM TO CONTINUE. FOR GOD AND MY COUNTRY.
A. Milton Obote
President
Uganda Peoples Congress