International
After Rwanda has done the heavy lifting in Mozambique, Museveni says he now wants in
It was going to be a matter of time before
Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni's rage, over the decision by Mozambican
President Filipe Nyusi to seek military assistance from Rwanda to fight Islamic
State (IS) terrorists, boiled over to the surface.
The jihadists have been killing people and destroying property in
the country's northern province of Cabo Delgado for four years. For a while,
after Kigali sent Rwanda Defence Force (RDF) troops and a contingent of Rwanda
National Police (RNP) officers to Mozambique, Museveni had stayed put waiting
to see the Rwandan mission "fail".
On his return from Kigali, President Nyusi had told reporters that
he asked President Paul Kagame for military assistance because Rwanda is the
only country in Africa with a proven record and experience in fighting violent
extremists.
As some in the Southern African region sought to criticize the
Mozambican leader's decision to seek Rwanda's support, Ryan Cummings, a
security analyst based in Cape Town, said that "President Kagame is
admired for contributing peacekeeping missions worldwide and that's why his
Mozambican counterpart, Filipe Nyusi, reached out to him".
Rwandan soldiers and police officers hit the ground running and
the global news media started reporting that, together with Mozambican troops
the joint forces were quickly retaking towns and territory from the IS
fighters.
They had
killed several terrorists and captured some of their leaders. Then Mocimboa da
Praia, a strategic port city which the jihadists had turned into their
headquarters, was recaptured.
Museveni wasn't amused and his Chieftaincy of Military
Intelligence (CMI) went to work. The agency's mouthpiece, Chimpreports, put out
a lead story which alleged that South Africa's minister of defence, Thandi
Modise had "warned" Rwanda not to celebrate any victories in the war
against IS in Mozambique, calling reports of the fall of Mocimboa da Praia,
'Rwandan propaganda".
Meanwhile,
a local news media outlet, Club of Mozambique, was reporting that ''
Mocimboa da Praia was retaken ...after a campaign led by Rwandan troops who
were deployed to the region last month, as part of a bilateral agreement".
Within hours, however, Chimpreports took down the story, along
with a fake audio it had attributed to the minister. Clearly, some South
African official was breathing down its editors' necks. Within the same period,
reports that president Museveni had sent an envoy, Gen Ivan Koreta, to
Mozambique with a special message to President Nyusi started to circulate on
social media and according to Uganda government-owned newspaper, the New
Vision, " During the meeting, Koreta expressed Uganda's availability to
help Mozambique overcome the challenges it is facing such as
terrorism".
Mozambique,
its northern province of Cabo Delgado in particular, has been under attack from
the IS terrorists for the last four years, with many innocent people killed and
many more forced to flee their homes. Even after it became public that
president Nyusi had asked Rwanda for help, Museveni didn't offer his military
support.
Then global television networks began broadcasting images of
Rwandan and Mozambican troops, inspecting the positions and towns they had recaptured
from the Islamists, including Mocimboa da Praia, which IS terrorists used as
their headquarters. Commanders from the joint force on the battlefront
were announcing that 90% of the work was complete. That's when the Ugandan
president decided it was time for his army to join the fight.
Analysts who, for decades, have closely observed
Museveni's political scheming in the Great Lakes region, though, saw it coming
from a mile away. In 1997 when Rwandan troops were approaching the outskirts of
Kinshasa, the Capital of Zaire later renamed the Democratic Republic of the
Congo, with the war to remove its long-time kleptocratic ruler, Mobutu Sese
Seko coming to an end, Museveni sought to pull a wool over Kigali's face. He
suggested to then Vice president and minister of defence, Paul Kagame that the
Rwandan troops pull back and have his own soldiers who he said were fresh, take
over the capital. It didn't work.
Cabo
Delgado is symbolically deeply personal to Museveni, who has idolized
Mozambique for over fifty years now. In 1970, as a student at the University of
Dar-es -Salaam, he wrote a paper on the "verification" of Franz
Fanon's theory of violence. It was, he said, inspired by a visit he and a
number of other students made in 1968 to the liberated territory of Mozambique,
arranged for them by FRELIMO freedom fighters.
Through the years he has never missed an opportunity to tell
whoever cared to listen that Montepuez in the northern province of Cabo Delgado
is his Mecca. It is, Museveni says, where his military career began and
the place where the original nucleus of his fighters trained and by "the
time Amin collapsed on 11th of April 1979, this group of 28 had helped me raise
a force of 9000 soldiers".
In May
2018, president Museveni made what the news media in Uganda described as a
"nostalgic pilgrimage" to Mozambique accompanied by three other
individuals who he said were the only surviving members of the original group
trained by Mozambican freedom fighters, in Montepuez, Cabo Delgado.
He told Mozambicans that he had made the trip to express gratitude
for their invaluable contribution to the liberation of his country and pledged
that "the people of Uganda will never forget this solidarity".
Indeed, during his inauguration in May he introduced the official who
represented Mozambique as the delegate from the country which "liberated
you" (Ugandans).
With all this outpouring of unity and affinity, one would have expected Museveni to send his army the moment Mozambique was first under attack. Once he had to wait for Rwandan and Mozambican troops to recapture all the territory that the terrorists had occupied, after decisively routing them, you begin to question what his motives are.
And, during his "pilgrimage", Museveni
had made a spirited pitch for his army, telling an attentively listening
President Nyusi and members of his cabinet, in a state banquet in Maputo that
the Uganda army is the most capable force anywhere, that can defeat IS.
"Somalia had become a no-go-area ....The US army had been forced to
withdraw under heavy losses. Many people thought we were mad to agree to
involve ourselves in the situation......I was confident that we would defeat
the demented terrorists......When you hear that Uganda has got an army that
defeated Al-Shabab ....remember that the beginnings of this army were Montpuez
(in Cabo Delgado)". Museveni told his hosts.
However, as Gen. Koreta was conveying the message
to President Nyusi that Uganda wants in, the African Union Mission in Somalia
(AMISOM) was announcing an investigation into the killing of innocent Somali
citizens by the Ugandan army in the Lower Shabelle region. The soldiers are in
that country under the African Union mandate.
President
Museveni has, for long, pursued an active policy aimed at destabilizing Rwanda.
He has funded and supported anti-Rwanda terrorists, including the Rwanda
National Congress (RNC) and Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda
(FRLR). Museveni was, therefore, most certainly rubbed the wrong way when,
after bragging to the Mozambican authorities about his army's unequaled
capacity to defeat Islamic insurgents, President Nyusi overflew his airspace to
seek military support from Rwanda, a country the Ugandan ruler has worked to
undermine at every turn.
Oftentimes it is not what politicians advertise about themselves that matters, it is what others truly believe about them that counts.
Source: www.newtimes.co.rw