by RAY MWAREYA
Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni will provide room and board to about 2,000 Afghan refugees, at the request of the United States, until they can be transferred to Western countries in months or years to come. Airplanes carrying Afghan evacuees have already landed in Uganda.
This is a diplomatic triumph for a “useful” tyrant, who has repeatedly acted as a CIA enforcer in the sensitive regions of Central Africa and the Horn of Africa.
First, the open arms of the people of Uganda must be praised, especially now at a time of global racist pushback against asylum seekers and refugees. Uganda, a country with just $827 per capita income, is home to 2.2 million refugees fleeing grisly violence in Congo, Somalia and the rest of the African continent.
How ever generous, the good hearts of Uganda’s people have been used by Museveni as a bargaining chip to curry favor with the United States and thus solidify his calamitous rule.
Museveni has governed Uganda for 35 years. In the process, he has whipped skulls of challengers, forcibly pulled dissidents from airplane seats, and won a bloody election in January in circumstances that can be described as a stain on democracy.
Despite Museveni’s track record, the CIA counts him as a crucial bulwark against the radical Islamist menace in the Horn of Africa and East Africa region. The so-called “War on Terror” keeps Uganda wealthy with U.S. cash and makes Museveni so untouchable that his soldiers serving in Somalia drive around in bomb-resistant vehicles that once couriered U.S. troops around Afghanistan. Museveni is the United States’ dependable ally in East Africa, not thinking twice before he deploys Ugandan troops on behalf of U.S. operations to control the outcomes of regional wars in Somalia, Burundi or Congo.
As Yasin Kakande, fierce Museveni critic and author of Why We Are Coming, tells me: “Museveni plays a role akin to the head of a brokerage firm for rebels, rebellions and peace missions on behalf of America.”
The Afghan refugee emergency saw a bungling Biden scrambling for venues to temporarily place evacuated refugees ahead of a so-called “red-line ultimatum” given by an increasingly confident Taliban regime in Kabul. Qatar, a transit country, says it is now saturated with refugees and can take no more. Iran and Turkey were reportedly restricting the entry of Afghan refugees into their territory. However, Museveni has spotted a gap to play a benevolent friend to a desperate United States.
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