By Ahmed Kateregga Musaazi
MASAKA-UGANDA/NEWSDAY: One Saturday in 1988, when l was an A level student at Kololo High School, and had gone to Makerere University for coaching, l and my colleagues were walking around Makerere University main building when a fat and energetic man driving a saloon car with a diplomatic number plate stopped near us. .
He introduced himself as a representative of Novosti News Agency in Uganda. That was a state owned news agency for the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).
He also introduced a middle aged man with a bold head, as the Eastern Africa correspondent for Pravda, a leading newspaper published in Moscow. He was based in Addis Ababa.
“A report about Makerere University without Ugandans’ faces will not be good,” he said as he persuaded us to follow him to the main hall for the picture. The university seemed to have been in a holiday.
I never got a chance of reading the article. But my mind remembered of Pravda a Soviet Union newspaper reported by Musizi magazine of April and May 1979 published by Munno Publications which quoted Pravda as, “…at last condemned Idi Amin’s excesses.”
According to “Ebbaluwa ya Binsangawano, a summary of main news items of the month, Pravda, had at last criticised Amin for the atrocities committed by his regime yet all the years it was quiet as USSR was the main supplier of Uganda armed forces’ weapons.
Ever since, l became a regular visitor at the Russian Cultural Center at Buganda Road where l could get free publications. One of them was written by a couple that belonged to the banned Communist Party of USA who were arrested and tortured as terrorism suspects until they fled to Moscow.
In my early journalism career in the early nineties, l did not interact with the Novosti news agent as USSR collapsed in 1991. However, in the mid nineties as l was walking with fellow journalist Tamale Mirundi near Parliament, we bumped into the man putting on casually.
I asked him whether he was representing Russian Federation or the whole Commonwealth of Independent States as former Soviet republics had been grouped initially. After a very deep thought, he answered that, “Russia.” He was surprised that we recognised him, but ever since, l have never seen him again.
Abdul Rahman Babu, one of the architects of 1964 Zanzibar Revolution wrote that one of the reasons for the 1971 coup that brought Amin to power masterminded by CIA, M15 and Mossad, the US, British and Israeli intelligence agencies, was to check on the growing influence of USSR in Uganda as Tanzania had gone China.
That is why under the NRM 10 Point Program, NRM/NRA states that the West praised Amin whom it could not allow to be a corporal in its own police and that when he changed to Libyan-Soviet Block, some of African progressive leaders wanted FRONASA guerillas to work with Amin, but they refused.
According to New Vision series, ‘Uganda 30 years ago’, when Amin was OAU chairperson in 1975, there was reluctance for African recognition of MPLA Government under Augustino Neto in Angola. When USSR insisted for the recognition, Amin temporarily broke off diplomatic relations with Moscow.
After 1976 Israeli attack at Entebbe, USSR requested Amin for a power base on Lake Victoria but he refused. Yet the “Saba Saba,” missile that was used by Tanzanian forces and Ugandan exiles in 1979 war, was supplied by USSR.
In his book, From Cross to Gun, Brig. Bernard Rwehururu says that when the artillery pieces were taken to Amin and he invited Soviet experts, they said that they knew it well and could supply its counter. Amin turned down their offer after his intelligence reported that they were supporting the Wakombozi.
So, while in 1894, Britain declared Uganda its protectorate in order to protect Christian missionaries especially Anglicans, to control source of the Nile which was a lifeline of Egypt, which Britain had colonized, in order to control, Suez Canal, the shortest route to then British India, Uganda remains strategic where all powers scramble for controlling it.
Unofficial history talks about the deadly tsetse flies that spread sleeping sickness in Ssese islands was sexed up to depopulate the islands for whites’ settlements. There are also claims that Sir Edward Muteesa ll was exiled by Sir Andrew Cohen in 1954 partly because he had declined to sell Ssese and Buvuma islands to the British.
It is not surprising that since independence, Uganda has been active in Non Aligned Movement with diplomatic relations with East and West Germany and South and North Korea.
It was only during the war against Saddam Hussein over so called chemical weapons that Uganda supported US and its allies but after which President Museveni regretted and said that he supported blindly.
With this history in mind, Uganda should be saluted for abstaining in the recent General Assembly session on Russia-Ukraine war, as it will soon chair the Non Aligned countries in the UN which will enable it to play mediation role between Russia and its allies and Ukraine and its allies as it did, side by side with the late Nelson Mandela, to reconcile Libya and UK and USA over the Lockerbie disaster.
Haji Ahmed Kateregga Musaazi is a veteran journalist and a Deputy Resident City Commissioner for Masaka City.
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