By Albert
Rudatsimburwa, KIGALI Rwanda
President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda is back to his usual game: Saying
one thing to one group or individual, then turning around and saying another to
another group or individual.
After leaving the Gatuna quadripartite summit,
Museveni addressed the people of Kabale town who had been primed beforehand for
a celebration of the anticipated re-opening of the Gatuna border crossing he
had promised.
“The origin of the problem," he told them, "is that these
people we helped when they had problems, once they returned home started to
have divisions within themselves.”
Museveni had yet again over-promised and under-delivered. As a result,
he made up this story about Rwanda’s internal differences to deflect from his
inability to deliver and from his role in the impasse for which his country's
border communities are paying a heavy price. But does Museveni in fact really
believe what he told the Kabale residents?
If he does, then why didn’t he say this to his colleagues at the
quadripartite, choosing instead to bring it up only at his meeting with the
people of Kabale? Of even greater importance, what does his speaking from both
sides of the mouth say about his honesty in the Angola MoU process?
During the quadripartite meeting, Museveni presented no objection to
Rwanda’s grievances as they were presented. In fact, as duly recorded in the
summit's communiqué, he promised to verify those claims and for the findings of
the verification to be presented to the Luanda MoU Ad Hoc Committee for
assessment.
Rwanda's grievances which Museveni agreed to verify include his
government's support to the RNC and its active terror cells which operate
openly in Uganda. There is also demand to release Rwandans illegally detained
in his country.
But even before the ink on the communiqué he had just signed onto had
dried, Museveni was already pushing a totally different story. Given this
attempt to push a narrative before his domestic audience that is completely
opposite of that which he had accepted at the Gatuna-Katuna summit, how much
can he be trusted?
Uganda's accent to the Gatuna-Katuna summit communiqué clearly means
that Museveni doesn’t believe his own rhetoric about Rwanda’s internal
conflicts; he was only using it to divert Ugandans from a summit outcome that
was clearly much worse than expected for Ugandan businesses and border communities
that are heavily dependent on trade with Rwanda.
Speaking during the same meeting, Museveni referred to Kayumba Nyamwasa
- the head of the RNC terrorist organization he is supporting, as if he
were a legitimate politician who had merely disagreed with Kigali. But Museveni
is aware that Kayumba is anything but just an innocent man with a difference of
opinion with the Rwanda government. He knows as well as anybody else that
Kayumba, his would-be Rwandan quisling, is a convicted terrorist.
Being the RNC's chief sponsor, Museveni knows that on 13 September
2013, terrorists infiltrated Rwanda to launch grenades in markets and
taxi parks intending to cause maximum fear in the country in the run-up to that
month's parliamentary elections. The terror attack took place on the 14th at
the busy Kicukukiro market where RNC terrorists tossed two grenades, killing
two people and leaving 46 injured.
Following thorough investigations including the interrogation of
captured terrorists in earlier grenade throwing, on 14 January 2011, the
military court sentenced Kayumba Nyamwasa to 24 years, in absentia, for forming
a terrorist group, threatening state security, and undermining public order,
among a long list of charges.
The terrorists captured shortly after the September 2013 attacks
revealed they had been working under Kayumba Nyamwasa’s orders. During their
2013 trial, Lt Joel Mutabazi and Cpl Joseph Nshimiyimana, alias Camarade, said
they had been deployed by Kayumba Nyamwasa, volunteering WhatsApp, Skype, and SMS
communication exchanges with Kayumba, planning the attack that was jointly
carried out by the RNC and FDLR.
On 5 November that year, Nshimiyimana told court he was present when the
attack was planned in July 2013 at Mamba Bar Point in Kampala and that Kayumba
had also linked them with Col Jean Marie, an FDLR commander, to finalize the
details of the attack.
Moreover, Kayumba had provided 150 grenades for similar attacks across
the country along with $50,000 to be used to recruit more people to toss grenades
at other busy intersections. Other witnesses also confirmed Kayumba had
recruited them for training in the detonation of explosives at key
installations. Kayumba had bought and personally sent a bomb-making manual and
had sent them pictures of the products they needed to manufacture improvised
explosive devices (IEDs).
As a result of this terror campaign, the RNC and FDLR killed 14 and
injured 460 innocent people across Rwanda, between 2010 and 2014. These are the
groups Museveni has rallied behind to destabilize Rwanda.
He is so brazen about it he even finds nothing wrong meeting with their
representatives, as he did with Charlotte Mukankusi and Eugene Gasana, even
though he famously admitted to have met them only “accidentally” in a letter he
wrote to President Kagame in March last year which he leaked to the Ugandan
media even before it had been delivered.
The confession of his purportedly "accidental" meeting with
these representatives of a terror organisation was after details of a passport
his government had issued to Mukankusi had been leaked, proving that Uganda was
in fact facilitating the movement of this terror group’s official “head of
diplomacy.”
In the same "accidental meeting" letter, Museveni admitted to
hosting Tribert Rujugiro, the group's top financier who is, in fact, a regular
sleep-over guest at the Ugandan president's official residence, and who, during
his visits is given presidential-like security and protocol.
Proof of Museveni’s close support for Rwandan genocidal and terrorist
groups is further demonstrated by Philemon Mateke, his minister for regional
affairs, organising an RNC-FDLR coordination meeting at the Kampala Serena on
14-15 December 2018.
The two very senior FDLR officials who represented the genocidal group
at that meeting, chief spokesman Ignace Nkaka, aka LaForge Fils Bazeye, and its
chief of intelligence Lt Col Jean-Pierre Abega, aka Theophile Abega, were
captured at the Bunagana border with DRC as they returned from the meeting and
were repatriated to Kigali where they are facing justice, in a Rwandan court.
Frank Ntwali represented the RNC in a meeting whose aim was to finalise
alliance between the two terror organizations. Mateke had told the two
groups that he had a “special message” from President Museveni to deliver
to them, according to witnesses who were present in that meeting.
In Kabale, Museveni tried to sanitize Kayumba as a politician who had
political differences with the leadership in Rwanda. How those differences
justified the cold-blooded murder of innocent people at bus parks and in
marketplaces, only Museveni can know.
To further demonstrate that the summit communiqué he had just assented
to was meaningless, Museveni just last week on February 24, invited members of
the group that the Angola MoU has listed as operatives of the RNC who Uganda
must expel. However, rather than that expulsion required by the MoU, Museveni
saw fit to host them to State House, and according to sources, advised them to
“leave politics and restrict themselves to humanitarian work”, despite the
evidence Rwanda has tabled proving they have already been hiding behind
purported humanitarian and church work as fronts for RNC mobilization.
Nowhere in the MoU does it require Museveni to dine with and give advice
to these groups; rather, it requires him to disband them, which clearly he
won’t do if he is inviting them for State luncheon and discussions in clear
mockery of the Angola MoU process.
All this shows Museveni thinks he can continue to play his double game
of leveraging Rwandan genocidal and terrorist groups in his dream of
destabilizing Rwanda while also pushing for the renormalization of
Rwanda-Uganda border operations.
He is clearly too invested in his anti-Rwanda proxy groups to be able to
withdraw his support as the Angola MoU requires. He is seriously deluded and is
in for a reality-check to think he can succeed at this contradictory
game.
Continuing down this road will just ensure the problem between Uganda
and Rwanda won't be resolved, no matter how his Chimpreports propaganda
mouthpiece spins his meeting with Rwanda's enemies he is supposed to interdict
under the Luanda MoU process.
There are no two ways about it: He can be sure of painful costs should
he persist in his determination for Uganda to provide a base to destabilize
Rwanda. No amount of whitewashing of the criminals he is using as his proxies
in his Rwanda-destabilisation project will change that. – The New Times
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