In Tripoli, street caricature have replaced Col Muammar Gaddafi’s portraits.
Elsewhere, the story unfolds differently.In Moscow, women protested against the war.
They displayed mattresses with Gaddafi’s portrait at the European Commission building with such slogans as “Make love not war!” “Send to sleep the spirit of war!” “Mattresses and bosoms, forget about war!”

On Masaka highway, about 100km south of Kampala, stands a huge billboard guarded by the army.

On the left, President Yoweri Museveni stands face to face with Gaddafi; perhaps enjoying a chat. On the right, the two stand side by side looking straight ahead. (Were they staring into the future?)

For a long time, the billboard was covered. It is not clear when it was uncovered.
Col Gaddafi was expected to unveil the billboard but that never happened. Even after Gaddafi is gone, the billboard remain heavily guarded. To any traveller, it does not make sense until you read the inscriptions in Arabic and English.
Though it is by the roadside, it is out of bounds even without any signs saying so — the army guards are enough to keep you away.

The billboard reads: “Erected in memory of Libyan government support to the then National Resistance Army rebellion.

Around this [Luweero Triangle] the Libyan air force dropped weapons to the rebels.”
The NRA rebellion was born after the 1980 elections that Museveni contested under the Uganda Patriotic Movement (UPM).

UPM won one seat but refused to take its seat in parliament saying the elections were rigged in favour of the Uganda People’s Congress (UPC), at the time headed by Dr Milton Obote
The Democratic Party (DP), which is said to have won the elections, chose to take its seats in parliament while Museveni took to the bush.
In his book Museveni’s Long March from Guerilla to Statesman, the late Maj. Ondonga Ori Amaza justifies the rebellion.
“The elections sparked off the rebellion but its mission was more than reversing the election results,” he wrote.
“When we went to the bush, we went to fight tribalism and other forms of sectarianism. We also fought to end murder in Uganda, corruption and backwardness in the economy,” Museveni explains in his book What is Africa’s problem.

Three months after the rebellion started, Libya made contacts with the rebels.
Museveni met Gaddafi in Libya and the latter gave the rebels some money and shortly after, smuggled in 800 rifles, 45 RPG launchers, mortars, machine guns and 100 anti-tank landmines
But the rebels received only 96 riffles, five GPMGs, 8 RPGS and landmines.
“This relatively small amount of weapons was useful but not decisive in any way.
The mines were particularly useful in blocking the Luwero roads by blowing up trucks,” Museveni writes in his book The Mustard Seed.
Incidentally, the rest of the firearms ended up in the hands of another rebel group, the Uganda Freedom Fighters headed by Prof Yusuf Lule that was fighting separately.

Later the two groups merged into the National Resistance Movement (NRM) with NRA being the armed wing.
In 1985, Libya sent another consignment of weapons — 800 rifles, 800,000 rounds of ammunition and some SAM-47 launchers.

By this time, Gen Tito Okello and Gen Bazillio Olara with assistance from Idi Amin’s exiled soldiers had toppled Obote, sending him into exile in Zambia.
“Having seen the trend, we decided to go on the offensive. We arranged for 800,000 rounds of ammunition and 800 rifles to be parachuted over our area in Ngoma using IIyushin 76 planes, the only significant support we received from Libya,” Museveni states in the book.

Unfortunately, the visibility of “Gaddafi” near Katonga Bridge is in contrast with the scene at the Libyan embassy.
With the exception of the emblem that can be seen at close range at its embassy gate, there is nothing else; even the Libyan flag has been lowered.


Gaddafi’s enduring fascination with Uganda

There is no foreign leader, not even the late President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, who has had such a long fascination and involvement with Uganda as Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.

Nobody has ever asked Gaddafi why he has been so fascinated by Uganda, for so long, and more than any other country. The nearest to his sustained interest has been Chad, his southern neighbour.

Uganda, until oil was discovered in 2006, did not have strategic minerals or sea access that should have been of crucial interest to Libya or Gaddafi personally. It does not have a majority or even a large Muslim population.
Perhaps a long-lost relative of Gaddafi’s once lived in Uganda from the Khedive Ismail protectorate days. Gaddafi, upon coming to power in 1969, soon turned most of his attention to international affairs.

It was none other than Gaddafi who in March 1972 persuaded President Idi Amin to abandon his close ties with Israel and join the Arab and Palestinian cause. Libya then promised and delivered money to Uganda to compensate revenue lost from severing ties with Israel.

When Kampala’s turn came to host the 1975 OAU summit, Libya and Saudi Arabia helped meet some of the costs.
During the 1978-79 Tanzania-Uganda war, a Libyan C-130 transport plane was destroyed by a Tanzanian Rocket-Propelled Grenade at Entebbe Airport in April 1979. Several dozen Libyan troops sent to Uganda were killed in the fighting and in ambushes.

Gaddafi was hurt and humiliated by this military defeat and never forgave Tanzania for that.

When the former Minister of Finance under Idi Amin, Brig. Moses Ali, the former deputy Minister of Internal Affairs, Andrew Kayiira, and the former Defence Minister Yoweri Museveni under the post-Amin UNLF government started guerrilla wars against the second Obote government in 1981, Gaddafi eagerly leapt to their assistance.

He supplied them with weapons and money and several guerrillas of Kayiira’s UFM group were sent to Libya in 1982 for military training. Former Cabinet minister, Matthew Rukikaire, told The Monitor of July 4, 2004 that “At that time, Gaddafi was actually bent on supporting UFM because he thought that they were more active, stronger and were made up of older people.”

One of the first countries Museveni established strong ties with after taking power in 1986 was Libya. Museveni’s External Security Organisation (ESO) and the Internal Security Organisation (ISO) intelligence agencies took their names from their Libyan counterparts.

One of the little-known facts of Great Lakes history is that Gaddafi also funded the RPF rebels after they invaded Rwanda in 1990. He provided them arms that were flown into Uganda, then handed to the RPF by the Museveni regime.

If Gaddafi had an odd and long-running relationship with Uganda the country, after 2001, he developed an even more curious relationship with a kingdom within Uganda called Tooro in western Uganda.

As a result of his friendship with Tooro’s Queen Mother Best Kemigisa (itself a matter of great public speculation and amusement in Uganda), Gaddafi became anything from a regent to the youthful Tooro king Oyo to the main financier of kingdom projects.

Since it has always been believed that Tooro is one of the few places in Uganda where President Museveni has enjoyed unwavering support since 1986, Gaddafi’s involvement with Tooro affairs, bankrolling the renovation of the king’s palace, among other things – the very display of public generosity that is Museveni’s ruling style – it was not long before a somewhat upstaged Museveni started to develop friction with Gaddafi.

Tensions between Museveni and Gaddafi reached the point where, as the WikiLeaks US diplomatic cables later published, in September 2009, Museveni started to get concerned that Gaddafi could even order the shooting down of his presidential jet.
However, relations between the two leaders appear to have been repaired this year. On July 3, Libyan state TV reported that “Ugandan president sends condolences message to Libyan leader for death of his son, all “martyrs” of Nato bombings.”
From the Tropical African Bank in the 1970s (formerly called the Libyan Arab Bank) and since 2001 Uganda Telecom, National Housing and Construction Corporation, the Windsor Lake Victoria Hotel and other companies, Libya has invested substantially in Uganda.

To Uganda’s Muslim community, the lasting legacy of Gaddafi in Uganda will be the beautiful peach and cream-coloured grand mosque atop Old Kampala Hill, a construction project that started in 1972 but seemed like one of those that would never get completed.

Ugandans too have had their long-running fascination with Gaddafi. His flamboyant fashion sense, the hilarious fights his bodyguards always got into with Museveni’s presidential escort, that relationship/friendship/alliance with Best Kemigisa, all made headlines.

Ironically, considering the erratic person that Gaddafi is supposed to be, he has maintained a relationship in one form or the other with Uganda spanning four decades. If we were to go by that and to be fair to Gaddafi, 40 years certainly speaks of commitment.

http://www.monitor.co.ug/