At Uganda Talks we welcome guest blogs from our readers. Today, political scientist and analyst Okello Lucima writes about the circumstances of General Kazini's death.
I have been wondering what in military parlance and war tradition, it would mean for a Private to single-handedly slay a General on the battlefield. Would one be promoted from Private, to say Captain, Major, Lieutenant Colonel, or a Brigadier?
Surely, those in the know of military customs and practices would know. I confess complete ignorance. Even more puzzling for me, and I am sure, for military historians and scholars alike, is the decoration that an untrained civilian, and a woman who looks as fit as a sack of potatoes, deserves, when she outmanoeuvres a Major General and former commander of a national army.
It is intriguing what people on the streets are saying. Some have already promoted Lydia Draru to the rank of a Field Marshal for her improbable feat of felling with a fly-swatter, an experienced, well trained, war-hardened and heftily built General in a “domestic” squabble.
The death of Gen. Kazini last week in a Kampala suburb was shocking, bizarre, and a tragic spectacle that came as easily and simply as the deaths of four suspected LRA insurgents that Gen. Kazini, then a colonel and army commander in Gulu, northern Uganda, released to a mob that he incited to lynch the four innocent young men in 1996. The public execution by stoning and clubbing of the young Acholi school boys by a reluctant mob that was egged on to draw blood by the army, lest they were treated as rebel sympathizers, was extra-judicial, summary, public, deliberate, and aimed to shock and awe and deter sympathies for the insurgency in Acholi. Therefore, Gen. Kazini, like many NRA generals, was suspected of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity.
I am a humanist. I have milk of compassion. And as John Donne did say, the death of every human being diminishes me and us all. Gen. Kazini’s death, allegedly at the hands of a mistress, cannot be a moral and just retribution, or karma for the lives of the innocents of northern Uganda that his power, order and command, dispatched savagely and heartlessly when he prosecuted counterinsurgency operations in Acholi and West Nile. It would have been just dessert, if some day, the court of justice and the law were to catch up with him and his colleagues, whose rise to prominence were navigated upon the river of blood of country, men, women, and children.
It is a personal, family and national tragedy that a man of his stature should die like a stray dog. If his violent death in the “hands of his lover” was shocking, the nonchalance and lack of obvious signs of grief in the demeanour of those who symbolised the state, and the unhurried nature of the law enforcement and security services that responded to the scene of the crime, was preposterous. Even more curious, is the behaviour of the alleged killer, and how she was treated by the police and the security services.
We know the closeness and solidarity of the brotherhood and fraternity of the military and police. But imagine this: an alleged “Taliban prostitute” –if you believe the Red Pepper- shamelessly declares she has murdered a soldier, a General at that, and a former commander of the national army, the mighty and someone’s sacred UPDF, and neither she nor her neighbourhood is cordoned off and besieged by the Military Police? And the civil police, when they finally came, what do they do? Oh gosh! They don’t even as much as touch her or shove her around. She is left a free woman, to dart from her place where the mortally wounded Gen. Kazini lay in rivulets of his own blood, and her neighbour’s veranda, all the while like a pet parrot, proclaiming to all who might want to hear, that she did kill the general!
Things got more bizarre as the day wore on. Try this for size: when she broadcast to strangers and the street urchins on motorbikes and the first responders that she killed the general, she was decked out in a turquoise blouse and a dark coloured skirt. But when we next see her strolling out of the magistrate’s court, on her way to the Central Police Station in Kampala, she is tastefully attired in a blood red dress suit, suggesting that, the detectives extended to her the unbelievable privilege of changing into more fanciful clothes. Moreover, they must have also passed by the hairdresser before she was arraigned before a magistrate because her hair was so neatly done.
Watching her walk arm in arm with a woman police detective, I wondered if there was a resident hairdresser at the courts, or whether the handsome police spokesperson, Ms. Namakooba, keeps one at her beck and call, and may have lent out to the “confessed murderer”. Experience and keen observation suggest that the behaviour of the security services personnel and the police, and how they treated the alleged killer in a high profile murder case of someone who once was at the pinnacle of state power, leads to more questions than answers.
First, soldiers and police are close-knit brotherhood-that live and die by the motto “one for all and all for one”. They have been known to rough up civilians for as little as holding placards demanding for their rights to be heard on issues of importance to them. We all have recollection of how Hon. Nabilla Nagayi was bundled and carried off screaming and kicking, allegedly for holding an illegal rally. And she is an honourable MP; a member of our national legislature!
It even gets more intriguing for the army. We know that woe betides the woman or man who does as much as cut off or refuse to yield to afande’s motorcade in traffic. People are known to have been shot at for incidents which posed no or very little potential harm to a military officer, even when such an officer is a lowly 2nd Lieutenant or Captain. In this case, we have a general dead. More precisely: a former commander of the national army is murdered by an alleged woman of “easy virtue”. I rely on my past experience of fleeing a neighbourhood where incidents involving the army and civilians or insurgents happened (lest I am caught up in the fire and brimstone that lay ahead in the aftermath). Thus, I was dumbfounded that no red-bereted UPDF Military Police showed up to turn Namuwongo upside down and inside out. Besides, I thought I would witness the police manhandle, kick, slap and bundle the alleged killer under their benches on the patrol pickup truck as they often do with opposition demonstrators and lowly suspects!
I was sorely disappointed. I was tempted to chalk all this up to Gen. Kale Kayihura, the IGP, who I thought, through training and pep talks, may have finally reined in his force to act professionally, assume suspects innocent until proven guilty and not to use excessive force even on the littlest of the Republic’s denizen. To that end, the suspect was never as much as grasped firmly by the wrist or shoved around. The police detectives looked less like arresting officers than VIP protection units shielding a dignitary from a gawking crowd. Many, who witnessed the stroll from the magistrate’s courts to CPS, will agree that it was a leisurely affair than escorting to a jail cell, the assassin of an important state functionary who still lay warm in a mortal posture in the bare floor of his alleged lover and killer. It has been impressed upon us that, in these parts, you can play with anything: like steal millions meant for drugs for aids, malaria, tuberculosis; or mint millions from CHOGM kickbacks and corruption—but you dare not touch someone’s UPDF, his army!
Once I remembered the sacred nature of the army to the mighty ones who own the institution and personnel, I sat up straight to try to come to terms with the significance of what was unfolding right under my gaze. Because, when they finally showed up, those Generals, Majors and Captains looked as awkward as someone who came to satisfy themselves that Gen. Kazini was stone-dead-cold—but not in a coma from which he might still come out. They neither bore any obvious signs of grief, nor did they seem troubled by the gruesome scene before their eyes. They were not investigators; they were colleagues and friends, people who should care. But no one of them could be said to have been spied betraying either friendship or the grievous loss of a comrade-at-arms.
From their behaviour, one would be forgiven if one were to hang one’s hat on the plausibility that the police, the army and the alleged confessed killer, Ms. Lydia Draru, were privy to something that we mortal folks can only conjecture. First, a confession puts a stop to any necessary and meticulous investigation. What do you, and why, investigate, when a killer has confessed? Second, an instant confession scuttles any need for a lengthy, adversarial trial. What do you need a trial for, and risk the disaster of the Besigye rape trial, when the killer is known and what is needed is swift justice? Sentence and jail her, making her inaccessible to prying eyes and nosy journalists.
Therefore, the behaviour of the law enforcement officers, the military honchos who turned up as if on cue but without a single military police personnel or angry soldiers who loved their commanders, let alone an ambulance, suggests that the President and Mrs. Phoebe Kazini are right: It is plausible that it is more than the hapless Draru, who wanted Gen. Kazini dead! Is she a fall girl, the convenient lover, the other woman, the second fiddler who will never take centre stage or inherit the lion’s share from her lover’s estate, but willing to block the emotional and physical intimacy to bait him into his death in the hands of conspirators she knew, for a sum grander than what she could only dream of.
Unfortunately, those who wrote the script for the stage play for Gen. Kazini’s tragic end, lacked character studies of the police and army in our great republic. Even the main character uses a weapon that it would be impossible for her to kill a rat with. And as a lover to the late Gen. Kazini, it is impossible to imagine her striking the second and third and subsequent such blood sputtering blows until the General was dead, no matter the depth of the provocation. We have all loved and lost; but very few of us would find such hate and ferocity to kill someone we love and sleep with, no matter what their transgressions. The ferocity, the multiple blows, suggest a revenge killing or execution that whoever did it, was not a woman, and did it not for heart ache and jealousy for love, but for a very well planned and executed project whose bottom line was for Gen. Kazini to die!
If Namuwongo was Medellin, Colombia or Parlemo, Italy, drug deals gone awry or a minion from a rival mafia family sleeping with a rival Godfather’s mistress, would genuinely elicit this kind of brutality as signals to would be malfeasants not to dare contemplate it farther than daydreams. Namuwongo is no Medellin or Parlemo; and Gen. Kazini was neither of any danger to society, nor to himself. Convicted by the Court Martial, redundant, but a happy-go-lucky guy, he was at peace with himself and the life he had been reduced to lead. Who did Gen. Kazini’s simple life but vast military experience and connections threaten? A heartless like Sophocles Medea, she may be, but Lydia Draru is not a killer—although she knows who wanted Gen. Kazini dead.
N.B. The opinions expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of Independent Publications Ltd.
Subscribe to this comment's feed
written by David Basobokwe, November 17, 2009
-
- -3
-
-
written by Okelo P'Okott, November 17, 2009
-
- +5
-
-
written by jaraiira Muwanga, November 17, 2009
Well, first off, I claimed that I used the hallow pipe that you saw on at the scene. Are you people so stupid, to believe me? A Hallow piple is not soild, so there is not enough mass to cause that injury.
2. The hallow pipe is not sharp like a knife, so it can't cut deep? I wondered why you people believed me so fast!!!
3. The head does not have big arteries to have that amount of blood presssure sputtering, you all saw the blood that splashed on the bottom of the door. You must have been crazy to believe me. If you hit the head, you could crack the skull, but blood is not going to splutter like that.
4. Lastly, has any of you ever killed a chicken or a goat? When you cut the neck, you cut a major artery right? Its when you get high pressure of blood spluttering!! Ask any doctors that have seen a patients that has been hit/ involved in a car accident and cracked the head. Blood doesn't bleeed profusely like that!
-
- +10
-
-
written by jaraiira Muwanga, November 17, 2009
-
- +3
-
-
written by Moses Luyinda, November 17, 2009
-
- +2
-
-
written by Okelo P'Okott, November 17, 2009
-
- +2
-
-
written by Lameka Nyakiiru, November 17, 2009
-
- +3
-
-
written by Ocheto, November 17, 2009
-
- -3
-
-
written by Kitalo, November 17, 2009
-
- +2
-
-
written by P.M, November 18, 2009
-
- -1
-
-
written by Charles Dalton Opwonya, November 18, 2009
She was and is still a prisoner of conscience through threats and blackmail.
She mourned Kazini in beforehand by weeping most of the time the day prior to his demise.
She was already missing in advance her lover. Someone or group of people with exceeding power and ability to threaten and blackmail must have forcefully enlister her in his/their employment.
All through the aftermath, she has been distraught, remorseful, fearful, bereaved.
Without prejudice to the above sincere belief, in case she was the killer, then, in Lwo Parlance, Draru's New name would be inclusive of the suffix ,,,,,,,MOI
WHAT Would it be?
KaziniMOI?
CigaMOI
Lugwarmoi?
MarMoi?
-
- +7
-
-
written by kukunda, November 18, 2009
Answer me please.
Okello Lucima, you have kicked my ass on this man.
-
- +1
-
-
written by Tukamwesiga Eliabu, November 18, 2009
-
- +3
-
-
written by DK, November 18, 2009
-
- +1
-
-
written by walter, November 18, 2009
You’ve analyst what is known as criminal profiling. Those of you who would like to know the truth; the finger is point at the state.
Respect
Bongo
-
- +1
-
-
written by Nze Ggwe, November 18, 2009
These are intereting times we live in.
-
- +4
-
-
written by Simon , November 18, 2009
-
- +1
-
-
written by dora nabukenya, November 18, 2009
-
- +5
-
-
written by kabera, November 18, 2009
-
- +1
-
-
written by WHY FEEL SORRY FOR KAZINI, November 18, 2009
BUT THE FACT IS, THAT DEMON (KAZINI AND HIS ACCOMPLICE THEN M7) DESTROYED AN ENTIRE GENERATION OF THE ACHOLI AND LANGI BY SENDING THEM TO CAMPS TO BE MASSARCED. BARLONYO MASSARCE IS A LIVING EXAMPLE.
WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND!
-
- +7
-
-
written by Twakoowa, November 18, 2009
Picture this, the most recent, in the North; Children walk 12 miles every evening, to go get a safe place to sleep, and twelve miles in the morning to go back to their parents. 10 year old boys made to beat a group of grown ups to death, and them drink their blood and eat their brains. Six year olds forced to kill their dear parents and siblings. Children raped daily till they have children. Amputation. Who is nursing those souls? Some of them are adults already, who knows what they are thinking? That 9 year old in Uganda Rising trailer whose head had been opened for the brains to ouze out onto the carpet, whose son was he? Why in the name of the Lord Almighty?
-
- +2
-
-
written by Twakoowa, November 18, 2009
-
- +1
-
-
written by francine, November 18, 2009
-
- -2
-
-
written by francine, November 18, 2009
-
- -4
-
-
written by WHY FEEL SORRY FOR KAZINI, November 18, 2009
WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND!
-
- +4
-
-
written by MAYOMBO, November 18, 2009
This is the Jalibu of 2011, there is yet more to come.
--Demonise strong holds of oppostion, devide them on pety inside causes then ask the planted spys to re-join NRM
--Eliminate individuals who are people freindly
--Create a sense of insecurity and ask victims to come to you for help
--Craete small kingdoms who would make up the council of cultural leaders who would then sanction a need to elect one Mighty leader, gues who, The Rwakitura dynasty of Akazu..
--Have you heard of the misgivings between M7 & Gadfi??--both playing the code of cultural leadership!!!
This is the new paradigm of self imposed Emporors In Africa to justify presidency for life.
Lesson--For individuals like Kazini, if you are trying to stand in his way, you would not servive..
God come back to Uganda!!!
-
- +2
-
-
written by Lakwena, November 19, 2009
-
- +2
-
-
written by Twakoowa, November 19, 2009
Once upon a day, I was accused of demonising people by those who don’t know that none of us has the power to demonise others, definitely not by the use of writing a post on a forum. People are demonised by their actions. And I will repeat this, whoever did that they did to those children in the North, like those who did what they did to the children in Buganda, Congo, plus those who sacrifice children and other people are DEMONS. I don’t care whether they are dead or alive.
cont....
-
- +1
-
-
written by Twakoowa, November 19, 2009
I and mine are beyond frustration, we are sick and tired. About Uganda being not dead, how can an animal be hunted down and be devoured by the hunter and his gang and be live at the same time? Uganda is dead! And Buganda is getting out of this carcass. So you need not worry yourself about my nationality. Remember, one thing true about times is that they do change. always. So, keep that piece of advise, you might need it yourself.
-
- +1
-
-
written by Twakoowa, November 19, 2009
Would do you a lot of good not to take thngs for granted.
16 There are six things the LORD hates,
seven that are detestable to him:
17 haughty eyes,
a lying tongue,
hands that shed innocent blood,
18 a heart that devises wicked schemes,
feet that are quick to rush into evil,
19 a false witness who pours out lies
and a man who stirs up dissension among brothers.
Cont...
-
- +1
-
-
written by francine, November 19, 2009
-
- +4
-
-
written by francine, November 19, 2009
John Dryden
“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to Change
the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Change is inevitable - except from a vending machine.” “We must become the change we want to see.”mhatma Ghandi. yes times change and only cowards fear that change!!!!!!!!
-
- +0
-
-
written by magino rafael, November 20, 2009
-
- -1
-
-
written by Ben Nakawa, November 20, 2009
Ben / London
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
-
- -2
-
-
written by WHY FEEL SORRY FOR KAZINI, November 20, 2009
From the current trend in Uganda it seems the quickest route to gain public sympathy when you die is by committing serious crimes against humanity, plundering other countries resources and embezzling public funds(part of the taxes I pay) while you are alive.
When will Ugandans wake up and stop giving Hero status to people that commit attrocities, embezzle public funds...............Why dont we ever think critically? Fellow country men and women lets wake up.
-
- +5
-
-
written by Waswa sam, November 21, 2009
-
- +0
-
-
written by charles semambo, November 22, 2009
-
- +0
-
-
written by Tembo Mambo, November 22, 2009
-
- +0
-
-
written by WHY FEEL SORRY FOR KAZINI, November 22, 2009
-
- +1
-
-
written by Twalwaana, November 23, 2009
But anyway Kazini and his ilk caused alot of suffering to our Brothers and Sisters during the insurgency in the North. They had the power to end the suffering there but for political and economic gain, they left people's blood to flow.
-
- +1
-
-
written by dida sean, November 23, 2009
his time will come soon too.."BOSS"..remember Boss...what goes around always comes around....yours might be even worst...BOSS
thanks Lucima for the brilliant article...
odida sean....Neko moi
-
- +1
-
-
written by atukwasize chrisogon, November 24, 2009
-
- +0
-
-
written by Benson (Dr), November 24, 2009
-
- +0
-
-
written by Joseph Buwembo kawooya, November 24, 2009
-
- +2
-
-
written by Tumusiime Boaz, November 25, 2009
-
- +1
-
-
written by Watcher, November 25, 2009
-
- +1
-
-
written by Major Robert AK45, January 14, 2010
-
- +0
-
-
Okello, we still need you alive!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!