Uganda - The Country

The pearl of Africa, the mountains of the moon promises a sense of Africa renewed, pristine, undiscovered and perhaps pure. What Uganda offers, though, is a mist-covered glimpse into hell.

It is where Western tourists were ruthlessly hacked to death with machetes, a place where jails are stained with the brains of former inmates, where children are snatched and sold into slavery. A big, wide-shouldered place where even DP almost met their maker in a bomb attack. Uganda is a fertile and deadly place, always has been.

Back in January 1971, correspondents came out of State Department backgrounders in more than one capital, reporting, "This new guy Amin might be okay." ("Establishment military," authoritative sources had said; "we've dealt with him.") They were wrong.

Alas, when Yoweri Museveni's outlaw army began showing up on a distant bush horizon 15 years later, it wasn't so easy to get the scoop. He just wasn't the State Department's type. All we could tell was that authoritative sources were uneasy. So we were uneasy, too.

We speculated about Museveni, the radical, about reports he'd been with FRELIMO in Mozambique, among Maoist Chinese on the Tanzanian island of Pemba. We heard reports that this renegade off in the shadows of the bush was even sending children into battle . . . and, hey, the reports checked out. He was. Now he runs the place.

We pictured a gang of bush-hardened cultural revolutionaries, armed with AKs and simple-minded slogans, about to drag Uganda right back into chaos, just as new and moderate leaders were at last in place to nurse that sorry realm back to life.

During his long march on Kampala through a shell-shattered free-fire zone in Buganda known as the Lowery Triangle (shattered largely by the government's North Korean shells), Museveni had slipped out to London. In fact, he was there during a period when any practical leader (and he is a practical man) could see his cause was lost. He had virtually no financial resources, no trained military resources. The triangle was hamburger, it was over, and guile with reporters was pointless.

We paid slight attention to him then, just as we failed fully to appreciate until too late that Uganda's "moderates" were crooks who killed more Ugandans than Amin. A little more attention to quiet voices and we might not have evoked such foolish dismay as we relayed third-hand reports about a bullet-riddled beast (so rudely subhuman in its ability to live after such punishment), slouching toward Kampala.

This beast, as we now know, was an army of some 20,000 adolescents and kids in their 20s-those the despairing Museveni had left behind. On their own, they had hung on, and at last, slowly, pushed on. Less dependent on authoritative sources, we might even have provided some modest inspiration in dispatches about a true children's crusade, about orphans left with no choice but combat, their families and their lands having been trashed first by Amin, then by the undisciplined, unpaid and rapaciously angry soldiers of Tanzania, and then again by Amin's old military, now led by corrupt "moderates."

We didn't deliver that story until Museveni's kids were on the cusp of victory in mid-1985. To this day, many are surprised to learn that Julius Nyerere's protÄgÄ, the school teacher Apollo Milton Obote, killed more Ugandans than Amin.

All this matters now because all of Central Africa is dangerous. Museveni had almost succeeded in removing most of Uganda from the world's most dangerous places. The State Department reports that snatch-and-grabs from cars stalled in Kampala traffic are common, but security in Kampala and Entebbe is by no stretch frightful. Uganda's frontier with Rwanda is notably less dangerous than the refugee-ridden frontiers that Tanzania, Burundi and Congo share with Rwanda. But throughout East and Central Africa, you hear that we ignore Uganda at the risk of getting taken by surprise yet again . . . and not just in Uganda.