Al-Shabaab bombs Kampala; it must now expect a tireless enemy

The Somali radical Islamic group, Al-Shabaab, has claimed responsibility for the deadly Sunday night bomb attacks in Kampala that killed at least 80 people.

Explosions blasted through crowds at two sites, a popular Ethiopian restaurant in the happy suburbs of Kabalagala, and the Kyadondo Rugby Club in Lugogo, as crowds watched the World Cup final.

Al-Shaabab wants Uganda to withdraw its African Union peacekeeping forces from Somalia, and has threatened to likewise attack the Burundi capital, Bujumbura. Burundi, too, has a contingent in the forces.

Will it succeed? Probably not. If anything, you can expect President Museveni’s government to dig in. To begin with, the Uganda mission — except when a soldier died or there was a scandal about salaries being stolen — was not top on the mind of most Ugandans.

Many who paid attention took the prejudiced view that it was a waste of time, because Somalis are “just like that”. They are warlike and don’t love peace.

To others, the Somali mission was a cynical ploy by a discredited President to curry favour with the West and elongate his rule, by “doing the dirty” work for the Americans in Somalia.

If the Uganda army’s presence in Somalia was little understood, or viewed with suspicion, the Al-Shabaab bombs have changed that. The attacks give Uganda’s role in ANISOM the popular legitimacy it lacked.

If, previously, the reason for the UPDF’s presence in Mogadishu was questionable, now it is less so because Al-Shabaab has brought the argument about its mission very close to people who previously didn’t care much.

Now an easier case can be by Kampala being in Somalia — to avenge the killing of nearly 80 Ugandans, and make sure it doesn’t happen again. Al-Shabaab could also have made a strategic blunder.

Sources in the know confirm that there are hawks in the militaries — and governments — of Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda who have been arguing that the AU peace-keeping effort in Somalia is ineffective, and that there should be a joint attack on Islamic hardliners in Somalia before they get entrenched and become harder to dislodge.

The hawks reason the Ethiopian invasion largely failed because it was unilateral, tainted with imperial ambition, and didn’t have sufficient international support. July 11 could tip the argument in their favour.

If there is a united attack on Al-Shabaab — which was very close to taking power in Somalia — then it will have to wait longer to take power. In any event, the only war that Museveni — a former rebel leader and still the ranking army officer in Uganda — walked away from was in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

First, the discipline of the Uganda forces (the Uganda People’s Defence Forces) nearly collapsed, and the rank and file were in danger as officers degenerated into plunderers of the DRC’s gold, diamond, timber, and even wild game!

The Uganda army was then routed — twice — by its smaller former ally, Rwanda, when they fell out, partly, over the spoils. But what did it was that international opinion turned sharply against the two countries’ presence in the DRC.

Because it was heavily dependant on foreign aid and didn’t want to put that at risk by a continued stay in Congo, and the fact that hostility towards the Congo campaign was palpable, Museveni cut his losses and ran.

Where there was no such pressure, he has stayed on until he salvages some kind of victory. The Uganda army first entered southern Sudan in 1990 in pursuit of the rebels of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) that was backed by Khartoum.

It has never left, and with the Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement taking over power over what is now a semi-autonomous region under the 2005 Nairobi peace agreement, it has been able to push the LRA further into the DRC.

Having learnt its lesson from the earlier debacle in the DRC and first got international opinion on its side to hunt down LRA’s Joseph Kony, who is hobbled by an ICC indictment for war crimes, the UPDF entered the northeast DRC and has been chasing the LRA around in the jungles there.