07/12/10 – Maria Burnett – The Scott Horton Show

I'm about to have a nervous breakdown, my head really hurts, if I don't find a way out of here.
Alright y'all, welcome to the show.
Welcome back to it.
It's Anti-War Radio.
Our next guest on the show is Maria Burnett.
She's the Senior Researcher of the Africa Division of Human Rights Watch.
Welcome to the show.
Thank you.
I really appreciate you joining us, especially on a short notice like this.
Can you, first of all, just give us quickly the headline and the lowdown on the bombing in Uganda, what you know so far about it.
Yeah, what we know is that there were two bombs that went off during the finals of the World Cup soccer yesterday evening in Kampala.
One went off at a rugby ground where they were broadcasting the game, you know, texting it onto a big screen, so there was a huge crowd there to watch the game.
And the other one went off at an Ethiopian restaurant on the south side of the city.
Neither of them is really in the central business district of the city, but obviously there's been a huge loss of civilian life.
It's hard to know how many people actually died, but the police are now talking about over 65 people.
Yeah, our headline at AntiWar.com has 74 killed, but I guess there's conflicting reports.
Yeah, obviously the numbers are coming in all the time as more of the injured die at the hospitals, so I think that number is probably going to keep going up.
All right, now, would it be a mistake to just go along with the conventional wisdom here, which is that this was al-Shabaab that did this, just like they warned they were going to last week?
I think it's way too early to really be sure about laying blame anywhere.
I think the concern now is how the Ugandan government is going to respond to this event, and obviously all of us should condemn and target civilians in any situation.
But it's very important that now more than ever the Ugandan government, you know, use the legitimate and legal tools at their disposal to figure out who is responsible.
In the past, you know, we have documented a lot of abuses by Uganda's police force and their counterterrorism forces, and we've also had concerns that in these situations sometimes the government has responded with, you know, excessive force and done a lot of, you know, sweeps of certain communities, particularly Muslim communities, and we certainly hope that they will do their best to ensure that they discover who did this without causing human rights abuses in the communities.
There's a significant Muslim population in Kampala, and obviously many of them may have lost relatives as well in this event, so there's no reason to believe that any of them are responsible.
There needs to be a good and thorough police investigation into what happened.
Yeah, well, that is very important, calling for civilian police work rather than some kind of military response.
But the Ugandan military is in Somalia, so if indeed they continue to put the blame on al-Shabaab, whether they actually did it or not, it seems like a military response there will be likely, huh?
Well, Uganda has a long history of the military being deployed both with the police and in the place of police.
Certainly, you know, in northern Uganda where there has been a war there for 25 years that only recently came to an end and sort of moved across the border into Congo and Sudan and Central African Republic, the military were the primary force there.
And when we have seen any kind of political unrest, even in the last year, last September, there were some political demonstrations and the military were deployed in that case as well.
So certainly there is a reason to believe that the military will be involved in a domestic situation.
We would call for a police investigation.
We're concerned that that investigation, you know, needs to be credible and independent, and certainly the international experts should be involved so that the right people are found.
Because Uganda has an extremely slow justice system.
There are very long times that people spend in prison awaiting trial.
And being arrested in Uganda can be very similar to the punishment itself.
Many people spend a couple of years, if not more, awaiting trial.
So it's really important that the right people are found and that they're brought to a speedy trial.
It's important that there is justice for the victims who have passed away in this event.
Okay.
Now, are you an expert in Somalia as well?
Because I'd like to ask you a little bit about the situation there.
I don't work specifically on Somalia, no.
I have worked on Burundi, Rwanda, and Uganda and Congo.
So I focus more in Central Africa than in the Horn of Africa.
Okay.
But, I mean, compared to me, you're an expert still, right?
I don't know if I'd call myself an expert.
But, yes, you mentioned that the Burundians and the Ugandans both have forces in the African Union Mission there.
And they have been there for quite a long time.
And there have been threats from the leadership of al-Shabaab in the past about attacks in Kampala and in Bujumbura.
You know, this is a sensitive part of the world.
And there are people who believe that Kampala was supposed to have been targeted when we saw those U.S. embassy bombings back in the late 1990s that happened in Tanzania and Kenya.
So Uganda has felt that it's a possible target for terrorism for a long time.
And, frankly, people do precautions.
All the major hotels do have a lot of security.
But these were pretty soft targets.
And, unfortunately, it led to a huge loss of life.
All right.
Now, I guess I'm going to try to ask you this question about Somalia because it's the most confusing part to me.
And if you don't know the answer, that's perfectly OK.
But I'm going to try anyway, OK?
OK.
OK.
So this is how my understanding goes.
And you tell me if you think I got any part of it wrong or et cetera like that.
America backed the Ethiopian invasion in Christmas of 2006 in order to support the local warlords, including the son of Adid from the Black Hawk Down episode back in 93, and to dislodge the Islamic Courts Union.
And then a war was waged for a couple of years.
And the Islamic Courts Union, along with their new allies, al-Shabaab, succeeded in driving out the Ethiopians and the warlords and basically defeated Dick Cheney's policy there.
So then Condoleezza Rice cut a deal with the Islamic Courts Union that said, OK, we'll recognize you as the government of Somalia, which they were in the first place, but only if you take on the shell of this transitional federal government structure that we've created for you.
And if you do that, we'll go ahead and wink and nudge and let you be the Somali government.
So the Islamic Courts Union leaders made that deal.
But then al-Shabaab, their new friends that helped them dislodge the Ethiopian army, is left over as the insurgency against them in the shell of the government that America created.
Is that right, or do you know?
I think that's probably a bit of an oversimplification.
But as I said, it's a very complicated situation.
And as I said, it's not a part of the world that I have focused on specifically.
We have done a lot of work on counterterrorism forces in Uganda.
But on the history of the conflict in Somalia, that seems roughly right.
I think the concern here is whether or not the targeting of the Ethiopian restaurant in Kampala was related to any of this antagonism between Somalia and Ethiopia.
Unfortunately, it looks like from the death toll that 10 Eritreans were killed, and Eritreans have actually been against the Ethiopians.
So this targeting has not actually worked out as they might have hoped.
Well, you can tell my fear is that this will be some sort of pretext for a further escalation of the conflict in Somalia, because lo and behold, there's this al-Shabaab group for no reason that we have to go and fight now.
I mean, already the media is saying that must be who did it and that kind of thing.
Well, certainly it's because the Ugandan government has said that this morning.
But there's no evidence clearly linking al-Shabaab to these events.
So there needs to be a thorough investigation so that the right perpetrators are actually held to account.
And as I said in the beginning, I think the most important thing is that the rule of law is respected and that the investigations that take place don't actually cause more human rights abuses, because that brings the government into the same line as the terrorists when they start hunting down and doing extrajudicial executions of certain groups and things like that.
So I think this needs to focus more on the response to finding the perpetrators than anything.
Well, yeah, of course, you don't want the cycle of violence to just get worse.
And as I think we should have learned, at least from September 11th, the purpose of terrorism is to get a reaction.
So the thing to do is to play it really cool rather than, you know, lash out in the way that the terrorists are trying to get you to do.
We certainly believe that in these circumstances it's very important that the investigations are credible and law-abiding and that the perpetrators are held to account for their actions.
The United States has done training of counterterrorism forces in Uganda, and those forces have been involved in domestic human rights problems in Uganda.
So it's a very important time for the United States and for other allies of Uganda to, you know, push and insist that these forces that could do these investigations, you know, abide by the laws.
Uganda has a very good constitution.
But more often than not, we see these security forces disrespect that constitution, and we certainly hope we don't see it in this setting.
All right, everybody, that's Maria Burnett from Human Rights Watch.
Thank you very much for your time.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you so much.
Bye.