I attended a lecture given by Ugandan President Museveni today (Oct. 25) at Oxford, where I'm currently on sabbatical as a Visiting Fellow. The topic was "Developing Nations and Human Rights: A Perspective on Present Day Uganda." Given that Uganda has figured on this blog, I thought it might be of interest to summarize some of the ideas that President Museveni raised. He filled the South School of the Examination Schools, so it as a very well-attended talk; for those familiar with Museveni you know that he is a charming and witty speaker.
One conclusion he frequently raised was that violence of the scale of genocide and crimes against humanity was unknown to Africa prior to the colonial encounter. He characterized genocide as an "import" from Europe. Rwanda "learned" genocide from Europe. Although there was violence and conflict in precolonial Africa, there was nothing of this scope of massiveness. This was, according to Museveni, because of the monitoring effects of traditional and indigenous African values, which focused on the individual’s fear of losing respect before compatriots, ancestors, and God. Certain "no go" areas in traditional times, such as the murder of infants, have been eroded in contemporary political violence. Museveni's conception of human rights today is one that draws heavily from these traditional values, albeit tweaked to eliminate the disparate treatment of women.
Another point of emphasis was that those military forces most notorious for human rights abuses had leaders trained by the West. For Museveni, whereas the West used Africans as footsoldiers in Europe's own tribal conflicts, the West never trained proper leaders to supervise armed forces post decolonialization. He cited Amin, Mobotu and others as examples.
He dismissed a concern regarding the use of the death penalty in Uganda today as coming from a "young idealist".
From Museveni's perspective impunity is unacceptable, but there can be no culture of human rights without economic empowerment for Africans.
He mentioned the Lords Resistance Army on a number of occasions, but never Uganda's referral of the matter to the ICC, nor the Prosecutor’s recent decision to issue indictments.
His talk was followed by some questions. Unfortunately, I had to leave half way through. As of the time I had left, no questioner had raised the LRA issue; nor the perspective that the ICC's involvement is one in which the government of Uganda has externalized an internal problem onto an ill-equipped outside source (didn't recent statistical surveys show that only 10 to 20% of the population of northern Uganda had even heard of the ICC?) and onto a process that does not consider allegations of human rights abuses by the Ugandan government. Moreover, it is unclear to me how turning to the ICC to redress the LRA violence in any way corresponds to a revisiting of indigenous values. That said, several questioners asked very probing questions, including about human rights situations in Uganda, which Museveni answered with a relative degree of candor.
Mark, how intriguing that you got to attend that lecture: thanks for writing a bit about it here!
The argument that genocide, CAH, etc were "imports" from the west is one I've heard from people in many non-western societies. I feel unqualified to comment on it from an ethnographic/anthropological point of view. However, I do note from a broad historical perspective that the survival in a place like the African heartland, the Amazon basin, etc of so many different cultural groups for so many millennia, indicates that throughout that time there had been no (or few) successful campaigns of genocide or elimination of people of different culture before the introduction of western means of mass killing (and westerners prepared to use them.)
Museveni himself, I belief, had a father who served with the British-organized "7th King's African Rifle Brigade", from which the family took its name...
You raise an interesting point about the contradiction between him advocating a return to "traditional" African values, and his referring the northern situation to the ICC. Of course, there is nothing to prevent the ICC prosecutor from bringing an indictment against government officials as well as LRA people there... But if he did, I imagine the ability of his staff to travel in and out of Uganda to interview witnesses and collect evidence might somewhat rapidly be curtailed! (Q.v. the troubles Carla Del Ponte and the ICTR got into with the Rwandan government when she tried to pursue some of the ICTR's "special"-- i.e. counter-regime-- investigations... )
Posted by: Helena at October 27, 2005 12:10 PM
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