Disarming Uganda: International gun-control nonsense

Independence Institute ^ | 12-11-02 | Dave Kopel, Paul Gallant, and Joanne Eisen

[backhoe]

Note- you have to scroll down to find the headline article; it is well worth reading and passing on:

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----- Original Message -----

From: "Independence Institute" <IndependenceInstitute@i2i.org

To: "Independence Weekly E-mail" <ii-list@free-market.net

Sent: Wednesday, December 11, 2002 5:42 PM

Subject: Guns in Uganda; II Newsletter 12-11-2002

Last Thursday night was our most successful Founders' Night Dinner ever!
We're still spinning from it.

The evening started with receptions where folks mingled with VIP's like
Governor Bill Owens, Congressman Bob Schaffer and Congressman Elect Bob
Beauprez.  In fact over a third of the state legislature were in attendance.
The nearly 400 of us then squeezed into the Brown Palace Ballroom for a
night of great company and great presentations.

State Treasurer Mike Coffman presented Douglas Bruce with the Vern Bickel
award for Grassroots Activism in recognition of the tenth anniversary of
Colorado's Taxpayer's Bill of Rights.  Senate President John Andrews
delivered the David D'Evelyn Award for Inspired Leadership to former US
Senator Hank Brown for his years of service in politics, education and
philanthropy.

We were blessed with not one, but two nationally renowned speakers.
Columnist, author and activist, Linda Chavez, shared her story of being an
unlikely conservative.  Author Dinesh D'Souza detailed what's so great about
America.  Of course the highlight for me was introducing my new daughter,
Piper.  It was a magical evening.

Linda Chavez will be my guest this week on "Independent Thinking."  You
don't want to miss this one.  That's Friday night at 8:30, repeated Sunday
morning at 11:30, on KBDI Channel 12.

The march continues for educational choice.  The next stop could well be
Colorado.  Read about it in my latest for the Boulder Daily Camera:
http://www.i2i.org/Caldara/camera/12-8-02.htm

Dave Kopel shares Jewish war lessons in his latest for the National Review:
http://www.nationalreview.com/kopel/kopel120502.asp

With budget shortfalls in Colorado the cries for tax increases will be
coming.  Yesterday, at a Press Club forum, Gov. Bill Owens repeated that he
would not support any tax increase.  He said, "The precise wrong time to
raise taxes is during an economic downturn." Thanks guv!
http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36%257E53%257E1045376%257E,00.html

Nothing says loving on Christmas morning like a gift of Independence boxer
shorts.  Check out the Independence Institute gift shop:
http://www.cafeshops.com/iinstitute

This week's op-ed by Dave Kopel, Paul Gallant, and Joanne Eisen was
originally published on NationalReview.com on the problems of gun control.

Jon Caldara
President
Independence Institute

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Disarming Uganda: International gun-control nonsense

By Dave Kopel, Paul Gallant, and Joanne Eisen

More gun control, more genocide. That's the lesson of the 20th century in
many nations, including Uganda. Yet the United Nations is again trying to
make it impossible for Ugandans to protect themselves. Once again, the U.N.
is supporting repression rather than human rights.

"The Ugandan government has established a national body to combat the
proliferation of illicit small arms into the country," announced the U.N.
Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs on September 24.

The NFP (the Ugandan National Focal Point, an agency that coordinates
Uganda's relations with multinational bodies) will be responsible for
fulfilling the country's obligation, pursuant to the Nairobi Declaration, to
reduce "the demand and supply of illegal firearms" in Uganda. According to
the March 2000 Declaration, illicit small arms have had "devastating
consequences . . . in sustaining armed conflict and abetting terrorism,
cattle rustling and other serious problems in the region." To the contrary,
it has been disarmament which has been the prime facilitator of
state-sponsored terrorism in Uganda.

Occupying the northeast corner of Uganda are the Karamojong pastoralists, a
marginalized minority of about 100,000 people who wander with their cattle
from one pasture to another. Comprising three percent or less of the total
population of Uganda, the Karamojong belong to a larger group of African
peoples called Nilo-Hamites, some of whom live across the borders in Kenya
and Sudan. The remainder of the Ugandan population are Bantus. About 90
percent of the country's inhabitants live in rural areas.

At the heart of the Karamojong pastoral lifestyle is the cow. Through its
milk and blood (animals are bled, especially during dry seasons when they
don't produce milk), and occasionally its meat, the cow provides the major
source of dietary protein. Wealth is demonstrated, and local political power
commanded, by the size of one's cattle herd. In terms of raw purchasing
power, two to three cows will buy one AK-47.

In light of the absence of a strong central government, and the easily
transportable nature of bovine assets, it should come as no surprise that
cattle rustling (with its concomitant social violence) has been a
traditional Karamojong activity.

Low-quality firearms were first introduced to Karamojong society in the late
19th century by ivory hunters and traders, but were not generally available
until the fall of Idi Amin. The British (who ruled Uganda from 1894 to 1962)
were mostly successful in keeping firearms out of the hands of the
indigenous population.

Uganda's first prime minister, A. Milton Obote, perpetuated British
policies, including the gun-control laws. But pastoralists across the
borders to the north and east had access to modern firearms, which
facilitated raids on Ugandan herds. While Obote's armed police were
ineffectual in protecting the Ugandan pastoralists, they were nevertheless
quite diligent about thwarting the Ugandans' acquisition of firearms.

Like most African leaders of his generation, Obote led an independence
movement premised on democratic self-rule, but installed himself as dictator
for life. In 1966, he suspended the constitution. On December 19, 1969,
Obote used a failed assassination attempt to justify imposing a nationwide b
an on the lawful possession of firearms and ammunition. Of course,
government officials and other favored individuals were exempt. Accompanying
the ban on non-government guns was a ban on all political parties, except
Obote's government party, the Uganda Peoples Congress.

In 1970, a new Firearms Act replaced the 1955 British Firearms Ordinance.
The law imposed national firearm registration and gun-owner licensing under
exceedingly stringent requirements. In practice, the law was used to make it
illegal for anyone to have a firearm, except persons deemed politically
correct by the Obote dictatorship.

A year later, army chief of staff Idi Amin wrested control of the country in
a military coup. The ensuing genocide of the Amin regime was perpetrated
against a populace whose primitive armaments did not approach the
effectiveness of the murderous government. By the time the genocide ended in
1979, the estimated toll was 300,000 slaughtered Ugandans, the Karamojong
suffering a disproportionately higher percentage, at about 30,000 tribesmen.

In response to Amin's murderous rule, the Karamojong began producing their
own guns, fashioning gun barrels from the steel tubing of metal furniture.
These homemade guns were then used tactically to acquire better and more
powerful ones by attacking isolated police outposts where acquisition would
not be terribly costly in terms of tribal lives. When the Amin government
was toppled and his army fled, military firearms were traded, sold, or lost
along the way to local tribesmen, who also found easy access to now-deserted
weapons depots.

Firearms thus became plentiful and readily available throughout Karamoja.
Inter- and intra-tribal raiding (which included cross-border raiding from
Kenya and Sudan), previously fought between warrior herdsmen armed with
spears, was now fought by pastoralists many of whom were armed with AK-47s.
This disturbed a centuries-old balance between Ugandan tribes that had been
evenly matched. The imbalance fostered the perception of an increase in
violence, permitting Ugandan leaders to use the promise of reducing violence
as the carrot for disarming the now-powerful, albeit poor, minority.

Obote, who was fortuitously out of the country when Amin took control and
thus escaped being killed, was restored to power in 1979, after Amin
attacked Tanzania and was toppled by the Tanzanian army. Obote again began
to attempt to disarm the Karamojong. His efforts were forcefully repelled.
Obote was too late, for the Karamojong had learned that cows and guns are
equally indispensable: One needs a gun immediately at hand to protect one's
herd. The most heavily armed tribes fared the best.

Obote stole the 1980 election, driving his political rivals into rebellion.
One of Obote's rivals, Yoweri Museveni, "went to the bush with only 26 guns
and organised the National Resistance Army (NRA) to oppose the tyranny that
Obote's regime had unleashed upon the population" - as Museveni's website
puts it. Defeating Obote and seizing power in 1986, President Museveni
reconstituted his rebel forces as the new national army. Like his
predecessors, Museveni attempted to subdue the Karamojong. The army's
tactics did not win them any friends. In Africa Studies Quarterly, Michael
Quam explains that "the soldiers misbehaved, bullying people and looting
stores, and generally convincing the Karimojong that their only protection
from men with guns lay in keeping guns themselves." The Ugandan government's
coercive disarmament efforts met with so much resistance that Museveni let
the matter drop in 1989.

Then the United Nations began its program to disarm everyone, everywhere,
except for governments. On December 2, 2001, Museveni announced a voluntary
gun surrender program in Karamoja. Promises were made for building
materials, farm implements, schools, new wells, and capital investments, all
contingent on a successful outcome of the gun surrender program. But funds
in Karamoja have a habit of being diverted before the ink has dried on the
check, and government assurances were met with skepticism. As John Robert
Otto, an elder Kotido tribesman, said, at least "with the gun one would be
sure of the next day's meal."

Museveni also promised trained, armed militias (Local Defense Units, or
LDUs) and army troops for Karamoja. As Uganda's government-owned New Vision
newspaper reported:

The Army has assured the Karimojong that the UDPF Uganda People's Defence
Forces, Uganda's army] would protect them against inter-tribal raids and
external aggression from the Turkana of Kenya during and after the
disarmament exercise. 'Don't worry about the cross-border raids by the
Turkana because we have found the medicine to that problem. Just bring the
guns. We know what to do if they disturb you,' the commanding officer of the
405th Brigade in Kotido, Lt. Col. Patrick Kiyingi, said. . . .

When the voluntary gun surrender expired on February 15, 2002, and only a
disappointing 7,676 guns (out of a conservatively estimated 40,000) were
collected, Museveni turned up the heat. He gave the army free rein to switch
roles from guardian to terrorist, and the army launched a "forcible
disarmament operation" in Karamoja to get the rest of the guns. Yet despite
the risk of imprisonment, the remaining gun-owners refused to disarm.

The UPDF went on a rampage, beating and torturing Ugandans, and raping and
looting at will, all the while using firearm confiscation to justify the
violence. On March 21, 2002, Father Declan O'Toole, a member of the Mill
Hill Missionaries in Uganda, and his companions were executed by UDPF
soldiers because O'Toole asked the army to be "less aggressive" in the
disarmament campaign. The murderers were apprehended and their death
sentence was carried out within days, before they could appeal it - and also
before they could reveal who had given them the order. Just one week after
O'Toole's murder, New Vision reported on the death of an expectant mother
who "died of injuries sustained when a soldier kicked her in the stomach
during forceful disarmament."

Museveni's answer was to blame the Karamojong, whose torture by the army was
the basis for O'Toole's complaint. According to an article in New Vision,
Museveni "said the best way to stop such incidents in [the] future is for
the Karimojong to hand in their guns to eliminate any justification for the
UPDF operations in the villages."

But the Karamojong know that security lies in their own hands. In remote
Karamoja, when you discover your cattle being raided and your wife being
raped, there is no 911 system to call. Indeed, what exists there is a barely
functioning phone system, described as "poor and unreliable".

Those who had credulously surrendered their guns were not rewarded with
tranquility, but instead found themselves especially vulnerable. As New
Vision had earlier admitted, "Most of the people whose cows were taken" in a
raid in the recently disarmed Bokora district, "had handed in their guns to
the government in the on-going disarmament exercise."

By May 2002, reports of fierce resistance from the remaining armed
Karamojong began to trickle out, despite government attempts to suppress
knowledge of that resistance and of the army's brutality. The Catholic
Church charges that thousands of residents were displaced from Karamoja
after their homes were torched by UPDF troops in the disarmament campaign.
By mid-July, the total number of confiscated guns had reached 10,000 - only
about 25 percent of the expected total.

Now, however, in addition to suffering from cross-border raids from Kenya,
from other local Ugandan tribes, and from an oppressive standing army, the
partially disarmed Karamojong face an armed invasion by the Lord's
Resistance Army (LRA), an insurgency formed two decades ago north of Uganda.
Based in Sudan, the LRA, under the leadership of Joseph Kony, have regularly
ravaged the Ugandan countryside west of Karamoja, and terrorized the people
of Uganda. Their activities have increased of late. The LRA, one of numerous
movements that came into existence in opposition to Museveni, aims to overth
row him, and alleges that he ascended to power through the help of many of
those same Rwandans who would ultimately perpetrate Rwanda's genocide.

To help check LRA incursions to the west, Museveni launched Operation Iron
Fist in March 2002, an aggressive campaign that allowed him, with permission
from Sudan (which has historically provided a safe haven for the LRA), to
cross the border and take the fight to Kony's base camps. But Museveni
needed more soldiers there, and he began to redeploy the army as well as
many Local Defence Units west and north - and out of the Karamoja region.

Some of Kony's LRA rebels found relative safety in the void left by
departing Ugandan troops. They also found easier pickings from a partially
disarmed countryside. Reports of LRA atrocities in Karamoja included
burning, looting, and castration (after which the men were left to bleed to
death). Even so, the LRA claims to be a Christian organization.

The assertion of firearm-prohibitionists that fewer guns lead to less
violence has not been the case in Karamoja. Even without recorded
statistics, it has been admitted by many that "insecurity" has increased
despite - or perhaps because of - disarmament efforts. The
government-controlled press in Uganda acknowledges that the Karamojong are
now "purchasing more guns to replenish those either voluntarily handed
[over] or forcefully recovered by the Government."

Because of the need for Ugandan troops to battle the LRA, the government of
Uganda has temporarily suspended the disarmament program in Karamoja,
although first deputy prime minister Eriya Kategaya promises that "the
disarmament exercise would, however, resume as soon as peace comes to
northern Uganda."

The only uncertainty about that next initiative is when, not if, since the
Nairobi Declaration calls for full involvement by the U.N., and specifically
for the U.N. "to draw up appropriate programmes for the collection and
destruction of illicit small arms and light weapons." And whenever the U.N.
gets down to the business of civilian disarmament, it pursues that goal
relentlessly, no matter what the human or economic costs.

In an address to the African Conference on the Implementation of the U.N.
Programme of Action on Small Arms in March 2002, U.N. under-secretary for
Disarmament Affairs, Jayantha Dhanapala, stated: "The threats posed by these
[small] arms jeopardize . . . the protection of women, children, and
innocent civilians everywhere. . . . We must ensure that the global edifice
of controls over small arms rests on a foundation of solid 'grass roots'
support."

Events in Uganda demonstrate that Dhanapala's claims run exactly contrary to
reality. It was disarmament that facilitated genocide by Idi Amin, and it is
the new disarmament campaigns which have brought such terrible suffering to
the Karamojong.

The U.N. disarmament vision is for two, three, many Ugandas, all over Africa
and the world. In Uganda, "disarmament" is a U.N. euphemism for war on the
people's right to protect themselves from predators, including predatory
governments, and if the people lose that war, then the next war may be a war
of genocide.

Like the Saudi's funding to spread Wahabbi teachings of totalitarian
assaults on people of diverse religious faiths all over the world, the U.N.
disarmament campaign is a global attack on human rights. The result is
widespread murder by governments and by terrorist groups, and the
suppression of human rights.

This op-ed was originally published on NationalReview.com on December 11,
2002.

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[45Auto]

"In 1970, a new Firearms Act replaced the 1955 British Firearms Ordinance. The law imposed national firearm registration and gun-owner licensing under exceedingly stringent requirements. In practice, the law was used to make it illegal for anyone to have a firearm, except persons deemed politically correct"

Which is precisely why the Brady Bunch wants so desparately to institute a national gun ("needs based")licensing/registry. The enemies of freedom are the same the world over, and even over time they never waver from their assinine agenda. There is only ONE way to deal with these traitors; sooner or later it always comes down to active resistance.

[backhoe]

I agree; thanks for looking- and FYI, the Independence Institute produces some very good research, opinions, and position papers on "rights-oriented issues"- like the RKBA. They are a good source.

[45Auto]

"The assertion of firearm-prohibitionists that fewer guns lead to less violence has not been the case in Karamoja."

Nor anywhere else in the world over the last several centuries.

[backhoe]

Just checking in, neighbor- my "better" PC croaked last night & I'm still trying to get it back up & running.