Where are they? Who finished them?

Uganda-Rwanda crisis is not a personal feud between Presidents Kagame and Museveni. The fact that a difference of principle is reduced to one of a personal clash tells the extent to which propaganda has taken over the discourse on this conflict, burying what was once an emerging media industry in the region, and trashing the credibility of people who were once considered voices of reason in East Africa.

Some people think the present crisis is a delayed consequence of the Kisangani wars of the late 1990s. While there may be some truth that some in the older generation of Ugandan generals, mostly around Salim Saleh, have failed to digest what they perceive as humiliation, the clashes were themselves only a consequence of the actual problem between Uganda and Rwanda.

Rwanda holds a principled stand against Uganda and Kagame happens to be the person who embodies that stand by virtue of his status as president of Rwanda. It is Rwanda’s principled position that, as a sovereign entity, it will not subordinate itself to any other authority, certainly not the authority of President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni. It’s not personal; it’s interstate relations – the business of states.

When the RPF came to power in 1994, Museveni and his inner circle thought that they had won another play-ground to add to the one that was already in their possession. Museveni wanted to dictate who should be in Rwanda’s cabinet and his relatives descended on Kigali to take up procurement tenders in the same way they had done and continue to do in Uganda. This was the false start that Rwanda had with Uganda.

A rebuffed Museveni turned to his usual trickery. He began to deploy a double-pronged strategy that he believed would assert pressure on the leadership in Kigali to cede to his desire to control Rwanda, primarily for his family’s benefit. In his frustration, he let it be known that he held the power/potential to sow discord and cause chaos to the then young and, truth be told, then inexperienced leadership in Kigali. This would be the cost for denying him control over key decisions and access for his family to loot the country at will. The self-proclaimed Machiavellian that he is, and secret admirer of colonialists despite his pan-African posturing, Museveni turned to divide-and-conquer.

He began by befriending Pasteur Bizimungu, the then president of Rwanda. In 1996, on their way to Butare Univesity (present University of Rwanda), Museveni engaged President Bizimungu in a “conspiratorial conversation against the then vice president Paul Kagame” who he believed to be the biggest stumbling-block against his ambitions, according to a source inside the presidential detail at the time. Shortly after, in 1998, Museveni was also in “regular contact” with the then Rwanda army chief of staff Kayumba Nyamwasa, in total disregard for interstate protocol; with the latter foolishly accepting to be used as a tool in Museveni’s ambitions. Under normal circumstances, Kayumba would have reported this violation of protocol to his superior, the minister of defense. He didn’t. The highly illegitimate relationship remained and Museveni kept inciting Kayumba and using him in a strategy to divide-and-rule strategy against the Rwanda army.