Philip Gourevitch - We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families

Museveni received me in a pavilion on the immaculate grounds of State House, at the end of Kampala’s Victoria Avenue. He sat behind a desk on a plastic lawn chair, wearing an untucked brown plaid short-sleeved shirt, corduroys, and sandals. Tea was served. On a shelf beneath his desk were a book on the Israeli war in Sinai, the Washington journalist Bob Woodward’s book The Choice, about Bill Clinton’s election campaign, and a volume called Selected Readings on the Uses of Palm Oil. Museveni appeared tired; he did not try to hide his need to yawn. Even in the official portrait photographs that hung in most shops and offices around the capital, his round face and nearly shaved pate had an uncharismatic, everyman look that was part of his appeal. His speech, like his writing, was lucid, blunt, and low on bombast.

Toward the end of the war in the Congo, when Kabila’s victory appeared inevitable, The New York Times ran an editorial headed “Tyranny or Democracy in Zaire?”—as if those were the only two political possibilities, and whatever was not one must be the other. Museveni, like many of his contemporaries among the leaders of what might be called post-postcolonial Africa, sought a middle ground on which to build the foundations for a sustainable democratic order. Because he refused to allow multiparty politics in Uganda, many Western pundits were inclined to join with his Ugandan critics in withholding admiration for his successes. But he argued that until corruption was brought under control, until a middle class with strong political and economic interests developed, and until there was a coherent national public debate, political parties were bound to devolve into tribal factions or financial rackets, and to remain an affair of elites struggling for power, if not a cause of actual civil war.

Museveni called his regime a “no-party democracy,” based on “movement politics,” and he explained that parties are “uniideological,” whereas a movement like his National Resistance Movement or the Rwandese Patriotic Front is “multi-ideological,” open to a polyphony of sensibilities and interests. “Socialists are in our movement, capitalists are in our movement, feudalists—like the kings here in Uganda—are members of our movement,” he said. The movement was officially open to everyone, and “anybody who wants” could stand for election. Although Museveni, like most African leaders of his generation, was often described as a former Marxist guerrilla, he was a staunch promoter of free enterprise, and he had come to favor the formation of political groupings along class lines, in order to produce “horizontal polarization,” as opposed to the “vertical polarization” of tribalism or regionalism. “That’s why we say, in the short run, let political competition not be based on groups, let it be based on individuals,” he told me, adding, “We are not likely to have healthy groups. We are likely to have unhealthy groups. So why take this risk?”

Museveni’s complaint was with what might be called cosmetic democracy, in which elections held for elections’ sake at the behest of “donor governments” sustain feeble or corrupt powers in politically damaged societies. “If I have got a heart problem and I try to appear healthy, then I will just die,” Museveni told me. We were speaking of the way that the West, having won the Cold War and lost its simple template for distinguishing bad guys from good guys around the world, had found a new political religion in promoting multiparty elections (at least in economically dependent countries where Chinese is not widely spoken). Museveni described this policy as “not only meddling but meddling on the basis of ignorance and, of course, some arrogance also.” He said, “These people seem to say that the developed parts of the world and the undeveloped parts of the world can all be managed uniformly. Politically this is their line, and I think this is really rubbish—to be charitable. It’s not possible to manage radically different societies exactly in a uniform way. Yes, there are some essentials which should be common, like universal suffrage, one person one vote, by secret ballot, a free press, separation of powers. These should be common factors, but not the exact form. The form should be according to situations.”

IT ANNOYED MUSEVENI and Kagame equally that Rwanda’s RPF-led government was widely viewed as a puppet regime of Uganda’s, and that Kabila had in turn been tagged by opponents as a pawn of “Rwando-Ugandan” imperialism. “They were puppets of the French,” Museveni said of his Rwandan and Congolese critics, “so they think that everybody else is looking for puppets or masters.” He considered it obvious that other countries in the region should look to Uganda’s example. “When Martin Luther published his criticism of the papists, it spread because it struck a chord in different places,” he said. “And when the French Revolution happened there were already local republican elements in different European countries. So when there were changes in Uganda against the dictatorship of Idi Amin—yes, there was some attraction to those ideas.”

That Museveni should present himself in the light of early modern European history was a measure of his determined optimism. He was a student of how the great democracies emerged from political turmoil, and he recognized that it did not happen quickly, or elegantly, or without staggering setbacks and agonizing contradictions along the way. I often heard it said, even by Museveni’s admirers, that he was, alas, no Jeffersonian democrat. But the traditions and particular circumstances which produced Jefferson are unlikely to be found afresh in Africa, and it’s doubtful that those who yearn for such a man again would be prepared to tolerate the fact that Jefferson’s leisure to think and write as grandly as he did was financed in large measure by his unrepentant ownership of slaves.

Still, in addition to the stories of Luther and the French Revolution, Museveni had no doubt also read about the American Revolution, which required eight years of fighting, four more years to get the Constitution ratified, and another two years before elections were held—a total of thirteen years after the Declaration of Independence proclaimed, with “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind,” not only the causes of the anticolonial struggle but also the divine, and universal, legitimacy of waging such struggles by force of arms. The story would appeal to Museveni. The Yankee general who had led the Revolutionary army in from the bush won America’s first two presidential elections.

Museveni got himself elected for the first time in 1996, a decade after taking power, and could run for another five-year term in 2001. But until Uganda experienced a smooth transfer of power to an elected successor, “no-party democracy” could not be said to have met the ultimate test of its institutions. In the meantime, nearly everything depended on the goodwill and the capacities of the leader—but not, Museveni assured me, on the wishes of the international community. The Euro-American architects of the old postcolonial order were welcome to work with Africa, he said, but on Africa’s terms, as joint-venture investors both of capital and of technical expertise. “I really don’t think the Europeans have the capacity to impose their will again. I don’t think that America or anybody will dominate Africa anymore,” he told me. “They may cause destabilization, but they cannot reverse the situation if the indigenous forces are organized. By the sheer force of Africa we shall be independent of all foreign manipulation.”

A FEW WEEKS after Mobutu’s abdication, Bill Richardson, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, flew to the Congo to see President Kabila. His presence, he told me, reflected a “renewed U.S. interest in Africa,” sparked by the awareness that the countries that had formed the alliance behind Kabila’s Alliance constituted a “regional strategic and economic power bloc, through shared experience,” that “needs to be dealt with seriously.” He spoke of the attraction of market economies, and “a lot of improvement” in social and political conditions, and he expressed admiration for both Kagame and Museveni.