A Brilliant Genocide... (Museveni v. Kony)

Perhaps most importantly, this documentary shows how Museveni is the darling of the West (US/Europe) and lavish assisance is bestowed on him by us.

A Brilliant Genocide is an exposé of the brutal campaigns by the Yoweri Museveni regime to wipe out a significant part of Uganda’s Acholi people under the guise of crushing a rebellion by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). It lays bare the atrocities committed by Museveni’s army against the Acholi people of northern Uganda since 1986, when Museveni seized power, and includes interviews with survivors of the most pre-meditated torture. What has occurred is unfathomable: civilians raped in front of their families by Museveni’s soldiers, people tortured, buried alive and burnt alive – forms of abuse previously unheard of in Uganda. It is the humiliation and deprivation of a particular ethnic group that has suffered like no other in Ugandan history.

This documentary is the untold story of a people who were placed in what amounts to concentration camps, where the death rates from planned neglect exceeded 50,000 people per year over a period spanning more than a decade, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). A Brilliant Genocide is a counterpoint to Kony 2012, which brought worldwide attention to the crimes committed by the LRA. It shows how the Museveni regime has used Kony as a straw man, enabling the Ugandan government to garner international sympathy and resources in the supposed ‘war on terrorism’ while in fact diverting attention from its own crimes against humanity in northern Uganda.

It includes interviews with Museveni’s former close associates, involved in conducting some of the bloodiest campaigns in the north, and many other prominent Ugandan thinkers, opposition figures, activists, exiles and émigrés.

This is the untold story of how an African dictator has been able to commit mass murder and still get a regular audience at the White House and 10 Downing Street. It comes at a critical time in Uganda’s history, with Gen. Museveni re-elected after 30 years of rule, in what many critics around the world are calling a sham election.

Due to copyright restrictions, this video can only be viewed on RT’s live feed. Time of broadcast is available on RT’s schedule page. Not for the faint of heart: contains many shocking and disturbing immages of a violent and sexual nature.

Moar Reading: Expose the Ugandan Genocide blog.

And Ann Garrison in CounterPunch:

What did the U.S. gain by ignoring the Acholi Genocide as it built the Ugandan army into a proxy force?

In 1990, as the genocide continued in Northern Uganda, a battalion of the Ugandan army led by General Paul Kagame invaded Rwanda. After a four-year war and the assassination of the Rwandan and Burundian presidents, Kagame’s army overthrew the Rwandan government and established a de facto Tutsi dictatorship, which falsely claims to have ended competition between the Hutu and Tutsi populations. The last 100 days of that war included the massacres that came to be known as the Rwandan Genocide, which most of the world knows as the oversimplified, decontextualized story told in the movie “Hotel Rwanda.”

This radically mis-told story of the Rwandan Genocide has since become a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy. We’re forever told that we have to start another war to stop genocide and mass atrocities or – in shorthand – to stop “the next Rwanda,” as in Libya, Syria, and more recently, Burundi, and whatever unlucky nation may be next. Few have heard of the Acholi Genocide because it exposes the shameless U.S. foreign policy of supporting and enabling dictator Yoweri Museveni ever since he came to power in 1986. We’re never told that we have to stop “the next Acholi Genocide” or “the next Uganda.”

Beginning in 1996, Rwanda and Uganda invaded the hugely resource rich Democratic Republic of the Congo, enabled by U.S. weapons, logistics and intelligence. They expelled Congolese President Mobutu Sese Seko in 1997 and replaced him with Laurent Kabila. When Laurent Kabila raised an independent head and expelled Rwandan and Ugandan soldiers, Rwanda and Uganda invaded Congo again and replaced him with his more compliant adopted son Joseph Kabila. Today, after the death of millions in the First and Second Congo Wars, Rwanda and Uganda continue to commit atrocities and plunder eastern Congolese resources. Right now 60 people a month are being massacred in Beni Territory, but the world isn’t much more likely to hear about that than about the Acholi Genocide.

Most Westerners are far more likely to have noticed the Western press – and Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International – shrieking that there’s another Tutsi genocide pending in Burundi, even though the violence in Burundi is nowhere near as horrific as that in Beni, and many of those assassinated in Burundi have been top officials in the Hutu-led government. The U.S. and its allies want to take down the government of Burundi, so they keep sounding alarms that it’s plotting genocide, that we have to stop another genocide or “the next Rwanda.” They’re not sounding the same alarms about Beni because the elimination of its population would facilitate their longstanding agenda of breaking up the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as they broke up Yugoslavia and South Sudan.

The U.S. has used Ugandan troops to serve its agenda not only in nations bordering Uganda but also in Somalia and elsewhere on the African continent, as coordinated by AFRICOM, the U.S. Africa Command. It has even used Ugandan troops in its own assaults on Iraq and Afghanistan.