Dictator Museveni and dictator Bashir. One down; another to go.
The African Freedom Express pulled into Algiers and toppled long-time dictator Abdel Aziz Bouteflika and then steamed south to Khartoum in the Sudan where it lingered for several weeks then swept from power dictator Gen. Omar Hassan al-Bashir who’d run the country since 1989.
The Freedom Express should now steam to Uganda where the corrupt militarist Gen. Yoweri Museveni has been brutalizing his citizens and those of neighboring countries for 33 years.
Bouteflika a few months ago seemed untouchable even as he was wheeled around in a wheelchair. He’d been incapacitated since suffering a stroke years ago. Yet his handlers propped him up and operated a sham presidency, displaying utter contempt for Algerians who must have been infuriated and humiliated by this farce.
In the Sudan, Gen. Bashir mocked the entire world, traveling freely to foreign capitals, even though he’d been indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in connection with atrocities in the country’s Darfur region. His fellow militarist Gen. Museveni invited him to attend his own swearing-in when he stole the presidential election from Dr. Kizza Besigye in 2016.
Museveni, like Bashir, similarly commits human rights abuses then thumbs his nose at the rest of the world. He conducted slow-motion genocide in the northern part of Uganda by confining 2 million citizens in concentration camps under the guise of fighting the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebels of Joseph Kony; a conflict Museveni deliberately prolonged to milk financial and military resources from the West as his own commanders revealed in the documentary “A Brilliant Genocide.” Going by the World Health Organization’s mortality rates, more than an estimated one million people may have perished in those camps over a 20-year period.
Museveni also invaded Rwanda, Congo –multiple times– and South Sudan, leaving destruction, misery and a trail of deaths behind him. In 2015 the World court ordered Uganda to compensate Congo $10 billion for war crimes committed by Museveni’s army. The Wall Street Journal reported that he urged then U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to block a separate investigation by the ICC.
In 2016, Museveni’s army committed atrocities in Uganda’s Kasese region. He later boasted on an Al Jazeera interview that he ordered the assault. He promoted the commanding officer Peter Elwelu.
While these generals believe that they’re untouchable, People Power, the ordinary Africans on the streets, are proving them all wrong.
From Khartoum, the Freedom Express should now steam farther South.
