Tag Archives: Uganda

More guns, no butter in Africa: US strategy, dictatorships, and buying off the human rights groups

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I love a man in uniform: Museveni (R) ogles Maj. Gen. David Hogg of US Army Africa Command (AFRICOM), at Kampala military summit, May 2012

I hope African human rights activists, including LGBTI activists, will read this document. It’s the White House’s new “strategy paper” for sub-Saharan Africa, released in June. There is the usual airy talk about democratization and feeding people, unballasted by details or dollars. (There is substantial attention to trade, which reaffirms my sense of the shape of aid conditionalities to come: the main quid-pro-quo for US assistance to Africa will be not decreased rights abuses, but increased trading opportunities for US firms.) But the core of the paper mentions no ballots and promises no butter. It’s about guns. “Security” is its watchword. Reuters noted, in its neutral fashion, that the paper lacks “a single signature project which could cement Obama’s Africa legacy”:

Instead, attention has focused on AFRICOM, the unified U.S. Africa Command that the Pentagon established in 2007. It is playing an increasingly important role as the United States pumps resources into training African militaries. …

J. Peter Pham, director of the Africa program at the Atlantic Council, said Washington’s emphasis on security, coupled with the lack of new economic initiatives, had shifted the balance in U.S. ties with Africa.

“It is militarization by default,” Pham said. “Part of the reason is the U.S. interest in fighting al Qaeda, and part of it is because of the weakness of our African partners which are unable to contain these threats themselves.”

A slight image problem: AFRICOM

One consultancy group of “Africa experts” speculates that “the timing of the paper is in response to the recent controversy generated by news stories reporting of the US’ ‘shadow war’ in sub-Saharan Africa.” Yup. Shortly before the strategy paper’s launch, the Washington Post revealed that the US has set up networks of secret bases across the continent, to use surveillance technology and Special Forces incursions against alleged terrorists and other undesirables. Special training for African militaries is part of the package. So, too, are murders:

The lightly equipped commando units train foreign security forces and perform aid missions, but they also include teams dedicated to tracking and killing terrorism suspects.

O, left hand! O, right hand! Here, poor Third Worldies, have some food before I shoot you.

Why should LGBTI activists care? Well, Hillary Clinton is, with quite genuine élan, promoting the liberties of LGBTI folk on the continent. The right hand is on your side. But US military policy is propping up exactly the regimes — in Uganda, the DRC, Ethiopia, and elsewhere — that relish your oppression. The left hand doesn’t give a damn about you. For how can there possibly be any benign result to all this: secret US aid to train secret African military forces in secret strategies of murder and oppression? What can this conceivably achieve but to prop up dictatorships, and threaten even democratic governments with armed coups and dictatorial control?

Right hand, ignore that pesky left hand: US Gen. Carter Ham of AFRICOM describes actions against Joseph Kony

Just for one example:The BBC World Service just carried a fascinating report on the militarization of Ugandan politics, as the country becomes more and more a security adjunct to US ambitions in the region.  See, or rather hear, here. (You have to sign up to listen.)

A reader has also pointed out Phil Clark’s op-ed from this spring, fingering the dreadful Kony 2012 campaign as part of a broader project to build up Museveni’s repressive military by any excuses necessary. It capitalizes on wide support “for two of the international community’s preferred means of ending mass conflict — military intervention and international justice.” And the enthusiasm has come not just from trigger-happy Western governments but from naive human rights organizations. They deliberately overlook

the fact that, in pursuing rebel leaders in central Africa, the United States and the I.C.C. have cooperated with the Ugandan and Congolese governments, which themselves are responsible for murder, forced displacement, rape and torture of civilians over the last 15 years. …

When President Obama sent 100 American military advisers to support the Ugandan government’s campaign against the Lord’s Resistance Army last October, it was the latest move in a long-standing military relationship. Since the 1990s, Washington has viewed Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni’s government as a key regional ally against the Sudanese government during Khartoum’s wars in South Sudan and Darfur, the “terrorist” threat of the L.R.A., and most recently Al Shabab in Somalia. Washington’s political, military and economic aid to Uganda has propped up Museveni’s regime and strengthened the role of the armed forces in everyday politics. One reason that widespread protests in Uganda in early 2011 did not transform into another Tahrir Square was that the Ugandan armed forces — nourished for years on Museveni’s corrupt patronage, funded mainly by the United States — remained fiercely loyal to the president, including when asked to fire on innocent civilians.

All the President’s men: See http://musevenikaguta2.blogspot.com/

It’s not just Obama. As Clark emphasizes, the International Criminal Court, beloved of those who think human rights aren’t real unless they have police and prosecutors attached like sinister Siamese siblings, has been equally complicit in whitewashing Museveni. The Court, he writes,

has relied on Museveni and the Congolese president, Joseph Kabila, for the referral of their conflicts to the court, the security of its investigators, and assistance in identifying and transporting witnesses and gathering evidence. In January 2004, the I.C.C. prosecutor appeared side-by-side with Museveni in London to announce the opening of international court investigations in Uganda. Two weeks ago, Ocampo announced that he would soon visit Kinshasa to meet President Kabila and “thank him for his support” during the Lubanga investigations. From the outset, the close working relationship between the I.C.C. and the Ugandan and Congolese governments has allowed the latter to focus the court’s attention on atrocities committed by rebel leaders while insulating themselves from prosecution.

Museveni and Kabila have proven masterful at making themselves indispensable to international actors. Unquestioning international cooperation with the Ugandan and Congolese governments has allowed them to appear as agents of peace, security and justice while continuing to commit abuses against their citizens. That the United States and the I.C.C. voiced no concern while Museveni and Kabila cracked down on the political opposition during last year’s elections has emboldened them. The claim by the I.C.C. and its supporters that the court deters criminal behavior and therefore contributes to lasting peace rings hollow when state crimes are committed under its watchful eye.

Promoting his armed approached to governance and freedoms as a model for other regional leaders, Museveni this year hosted a conference of military brass from across the continent. Talk about resisting aid conditionality!  When it comes to pernicious plots against sovereignty, it seems, the homosexuals are a minor annoyance next to perverted foreign pacifists. He blasted belt-tightening demands from donors that might shrink military spending:

“Africa armies must be ideologically independent from foreign exploitation and manipulation. Some external forces told us not to spend 1.9 per cent of our budget and we had to reduce the size the army,” Mr Museveni said.

Spheres of affluence: US military commands

A final point. I mentioned AFRICOM, the US military’s Africa command, above. At present, this relatively novel US unit is based in Germany, from where it played a leading role in the Libya intervention. That success (from the American standpoint) gave it a great deal of street cred, or rather sky cred, with DC policymakers. The Bush administration set up AFRICOM in large part as a military counterweight to growing Chinese involvement, and investment, in Africa. From this perspective, the secretive “counterterrorism” campaigns it dallies with conceal, like the proverbial Chinese boxes, yet another secret: they mask a larger geopolitical ambition. They’re more about Beijing’s honchos than Bin Laden’s heirs: AFRICOM aims to keep China away from that vast wealth of African raw materials that we’ve already succeeding in keeping Africans away from. (One fascinating thing about Africa is that all its riches, without exceptions, make the bulk of Africans poorer. This is a cultural phenomenon worth Mitt Romney’s study, though it has more to do with Western culture than its African counterpart.)

For more on AFRICOM and what it’s up to in Africa, see here, here, here, and here. 

Several of Museveni’s supporters in the US Congress — including the head of the House’s subcommittee on terrorism, Republican Ed Royce — are exploiting the Kony 2012 mania to push for laws expanding AFRICOM’s role in Africa. Some want to move the command’s headquarters from Europe to the continent itself. All this would vastly increase the support it can provide to Museveni and fellow dictators.

Africans and their allies have mobilized against AFRICOM’s present and predicted roles in repression. You can visit the Resist AFRICOM site here:

With the establishment of AFRICOM, the Pentagon attempts to increase access to Africa’s oil and to wage a new front in the Global War on Terror without regard for the needs or desires of African people. Enabled by oil companies and private military contractors, AFRICOM serves as the latest frontier in military expansionism, violating the human rights and civil liberties of Africans who have voiced a strong “no” to U.S. military presence. We reject this militarization of foreign engagement. Instead, our vision is a comprehensive U.S. foreign policy grounded in true partnership with the African Union, African governments, and civil society on peace, justice, security, and development.

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Thatcher, dead, endorses gay rights

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Baird and baroness in happier days: Meryl Streep will play her in the movie

John Baird, now Canada’s Foreign Minister,last made news a couple of years ago when his cat died.  The cat was named Thatcher, after an object of Baird’s admiration, and he sent friends a text message reading, “Thatcher is dead.”  As word raced through Canada’s Tory government, mourning spread, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper prepared a message of condolence to the British people. It took some time for Buckingham Palace to confirm that the Iron Lady was still alive, though rusting. Harper’s spokesman concluded, ”If the cat wasn’t dead, I’d have killed it by now.”

Baird made news today as well, in a more congenial way, by an act of homage to another tough woman, Hillary Clinton. Clinton’s  initiative of US support for LGBT people’s human rights, announced last month, has become a model for other politicians striving to make a mark.   In a speech in London, Baird therefore took his shot at the headlines, and outlined two priorities for Canadian foreign policy: LGBT rights and religious freedom.

What’s striking about Baird’s mimicry, though, is how generally appalling his speech is, once you get beyond the gay-specific sections.   He targets the developing world — Uganda is, as is ordinary these days, his preferred negative example.  But his language is that of an increasingly illiberal interventionism, driven by the need to reshape other societies, and economies, in a pliable and useful image.  LGBT rights advocates should not be happy to find their cause mixed in with this repressive agenda.

Let’s see. Seething just beneath the surface of the speech, there’s neoliberalism:

The support for free markets and open societies will be the defining struggle of the coming decades – the United Kingdom and Canada have been partners in this great endeavour before; we are partners now, and we will be partners in the future in our common cause.

There’s state feminism, Tory style, with a nod to his late cat:

We in Canada, and in Britain, know well the Queen’s leadership and both our countries benefit from the full participation of women in all aspects of society. I think of leaders like Baroness Thatcher.

Thatcher (femme, not feline) at least fought for her own rights, but in other countries, passive women force us to go out and bomb things on their behalf:

 I am particularly proud of the role Canada has played – in concert with our NATO allies and Afghan civil society – in advancing women’s rights in Afghanistan.

The women lucky enough to have survived NATO’s help, though, have an exciting time ahead of them: “The young Afghan girls that go to school today in Kandahar and Kabul will grow up and learn about the political tenacity of Margaret Thatcher.” The prospect of a whole generation of Afghan females, unveiled and pompadoured, proclaiming that “There is no such thing as society” must strike terror into Taliban hearts.

And, of course, there’s a blissful amnesia about the past:

Dozens of Commonwealth countries currently have regressive and punitive laws on the books that criminalize homosexuality. In some countries, these laws are unenforced hang-overs from an earlier era; in others, they are actively implemented. The criminalization of homosexuality is incompatible with the fundamental Commonwealth value of human rights.

How you “enforce” a “hangover” is less than clear; but never mind that — you’d think these countries picked up these laws during a drunken binge, instead of during the nightmare of colonialism.   That “c” word is unspeakable for Baird, himself the scion of a settler colony, as it implies a common responsibility for that old oppression’s effects. And such commonality in turn seems incompatible with the Commonwealth.  (Meanwhile, elevating human rights as “the fundamental Commonwealth value” may be rhetorically useful, but ignores where the Commonwealth came from.)

To the contrary.  Colonization, though we can’t actually call it by name, was the source of all the good stuff:

Voluntary associations like the 54-nation Commonwealth can and must be propelled forward as an agent for democracy, rule of law, human rights and development. That reflects the true value of the British democracy that has spanned the continents and shaped the world.

There’s a blithe confusion about all those funny little countries in Africa, which are hard to tell apart:

However, there are slivers of light.  Rwanda and South Africa have been leaders in protecting and promoting the fundamental rights of gays and lesbians. Slivers of light.

Rwanda?  Who told him that?

There’s a vision of human rights that deprives victims of both agency and voice:

As citizens of a global community, we have a solemn duty to defend the vulnerable, to give voice to the voiceless, to challenge the aggressor, and to promote and protect human rights and human dignity, at home and abroad.

Finally, there is his fixed conviction that injustice and oppression happen somewhere other than at home.

[A] priority to me as Foreign Minister… is, promoting and protecting the fundamental rights and liberties of people around the world. It is something we often take for granted in our pluralistic societies, something we often overlook. But the vivid images of suffering and repression beam through our television sets, and are plastered in our newspapers.

I am not sure where that “plastered” comes from.   But you can compare this to Clinton’s comment in her Geneva speech last month:

I speak about this subject knowing that my own country’s record on human rights for gay people is far from perfect. … Many LGBT Americans have endured violence and harassment in their own lives, and for some, including many young people, bullying and exclusion are daily experiences. So we, like all nations, have more work to do to protect human rights at home.

It’s unusual to accuse a Canadian of lacking humility as against an American; but there you are.

Identity crisis

A scandal arose in Canada this week over an amendment to airline security regulations that the government had enacted quietly last July. The new rules read:

An air carrier shall not transport a passenger if
(a) the passenger presents a piece of photo identification and does not resemble the photograph;
(b) the passenger does not appear to be the age indicated by the date of birth on the identification he or she presents;
(c) the passenger does not appear to be of the gender indicated on the identification he or she presents; or
(d) the passenger presents more than one form of identification and there is a major discrepancy between those forms of identification. [Emphasis added]

Item c) would seem to ban transgender people who haven’t changed their identity papers from flying. Activist Mercedes Allen explains more:

Most Canadian provinces require evidence of genital reconstruction surgery before allowing the change of gender markers on foundational documents.  Standards of care call for a minimum of one year living as one’s identified gender before the required procedure can occur (two years in some provinces, including Ontario).  This is further complicated by the fact that some provinces have removed coverage for this surgery from their health coverage, so some individuals can be trapped indefinitely with incongruent gender markers on their identification.

In fact, there have been no reports of trans people denied air travel because of the ban. The transport Minister’s spokesman claims that “Any passenger whose physical appearance does not correspond to their identification can continue to board a plane by supplying a letter from a health-care professional explaining the discrepancy” — though the regulations are far from clear on this.

The deeper problem is that Canada treats the legal identity of certain people as a medical problem, and demands a medical solution.  Recognizing gender identity should not depend on genital surgery, anymore than it should (as in Sweden) depend on sterilization. Requiring that opens the door not only to discrimination, but to physical abuse.

For a loud defender of religious freedom, John Baird seems deaf to the old verse — it’s Luke 6:42 — that asks, “How can you say to your brother, Brother, let me pull out the mote that is in your eye, when you yourself behold not the beam that is in your own eye?”  And, equally, he appears oblivious to how human rights activists must be aware of history, including history’s curious susceptibility to irony.

P.S. A petition against the travel regulation is here. 

Al-sha’b yurid isquat al-nizam

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“The people demand the fall of the regime.”  Yesterday was the first anniversary of the Egyptian Revolution’s beginning. Mass protests, meant not only to commemorate but to voice anger at the continuing rule of the generals, happened across the country. Here is a shot of Tahrir square, yesterday at about 4 PM:

And here, just in case anybody thinks you need asphalt and Stalinist architecture to create a revolutionary mood, is the corniche in Alexandria:

Everyone, the army included, knows the revolution is unfinished.  For all that remains to be accomplished, though, it is still the most important blow struck for human freedom in this century so far. That’s not to slight the struggles and sacrifices of the Burmese, the Nepalis, the Syrians, and many more: it’s just that everyone’s battle needs an example, and the Egyptian, in these years, remains the biggest one around.

At the same time, these images of undifferentiated masses also suggest to me some of the revolution’s own problems. Everyone who was there and to whom I’ve talked has described the intoxicating exhilaration of unity, of differences dissolved as groups and interests melted together, of the weight of numbers producing the single will voiced in the famous slogan — the ecstasy of the volonté générale.  Yet this has made it harder to negotiate between, or even recognize, diverse interests including class and gender as they assert themselves in the politics of the post-revolution society.   The nostalgic fetish for unity makes it easier for the military to divide and conquer. The volonté générale may mark the inception of real politics, but held on to for too long, it asphyxiates it.

In that light, I remember the news I got on the second day of the Revolution: while scanning the web frantically for newer news from Egypt, I got an email from a friend telling me of the murder of David Kato. The Ugandan gay activist was bludgeoned to death in his Kampala home on January 26. Uganda’s government, which had presided over the politically manipulated circus of homophobia that led to his killing, continued to vilify him in death.

I’m not going to recapitulate the many memorials to David that you can read around the web today; enough has been said, and eloquently, by others. My own memories of him are of a slight figure trembling, visibly, like a reed, with anger at the injustice he saw around him. His rage, though, didn’t keep him from copiously giving his time, his help, and even his home to people poorer than he was, or suffering worse from injustice than he. It was probably that generosity that got his killer through the door.

“The people” is an abstraction. It is made of up of countless individuals, their anger, their loving-kindness, their acts and their pain. Its will — that the regime should fall — is composed of a million separate wills, each with its own care, its own caution, its own indignation, its own compassion.

To forget the separateness, and the particular faces, is to mimic the regime’s strategy of forgetting. What drove David, in Uganda, was mirrored in some way by what propelled every demonstrator in Egypt to Tahrir or to their local streets. At the same time, they were all different in some way, and their difference was also a particle of their power.  Remembering David, like remembering the martyrs from Cairo to Aswan, is to remember the concrete and sensuous possibility that revolution will continue, till all the regimes in their high places fall.

Egyptians raise an obelisk with the names of revolutionary martyrs, January 25, 2012


Growing pains: More on British aid

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Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg with the Queen

Kirk Cameron, the former child star and British Prime Minister, has threatened developing countries with dire consequences if they do not eliminate the sodomy laws that his distant ancestor Alan Thicke brought in his hand baggage on Qantas. Trapped in a loveless civil union with coalition partner and former rapper Marky Mark, Cameron made the move to bolster falling poll ratings among key fans. Possible sanctions include plagues of boils, locusts, and frogs, conversion of first-born children to child stars, and massive increases in agricultural development aid that would reduce the entire population to starvation. “These countries don’t want to be left behind,” Cameron said, referring to the popular series in which twelve contestants from all walks of life, stranded on a remote island in an exotic location after the Rapture, compete in tests of skill to keep God from throwing them into eternal damnation. “British aid should have more strings attached, in terms of do you persecute people for their faith or their Christianity, or do you persecute people for their sexuality.”

No. No. This is all wrong. It’s late; my mind isn’t working. Former child star David Cameron is the current British Prime Minister. Kirk Cameron, current child star and former Prime Minister, lives in Moldova, where he eats children in his converted castle on the Transylvanian border.

The silliness and posturing over Cameron I’s proclamation that he will tie overseas aid to LGBT rights issues has started. It is risible indeed, but it’s no laughing matter to the people whose rights will be affected.  An advisor to Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni told the BBC that Cameron had a “bullying mentality”:

“Uganda is, if you remember, a sovereign state and we are tired of being given these lectures by people … If they must take their money, so be it.  … But this kind of ex-colonial mentality of saying: ‘You do this or I withdraw my aid’ will definitely make people extremely uncomfortable with being treated like children.”

The main political consequence? Repressive leaders and regressive initiatives now have a new excuse to couch themselves as anti-colonial assertions of independence. In Nigeria, where a new bill to restrict LGBT people’s rights is moving forward, a news source reports:

One of the backers of the same sex prohibition ban … told USAfricaonline.com that “Britain’s Prime Minister Cameron still think [sic] we are under his colonial rule. Let him keep his financial aid  and same sex agenda. Nonsense. He wants to run our country for us?”

And in Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe’s supporters are wielding Cameron’s comments to undercut opposition leader (and Prime Minister) Morgan Tsvangirai, who recently voiced support for including sexual orientation protections in a new Constitution.

“It is possible that Morgan Tsvangirai could have been told by whites in the UK that part of their support to him would include him publicly supporting issues to do with gay rights in Zimbabwe. That could be the threat he was issued by the British and we all know that Tsvangirai has never been his own man,” said Mr Alexander Kanengoni [an author and former Mugabe propagandist who was allotted a farm in the violent land reforms ten years ago]. …

Zanu-PF spokesperson Cde Rugare Gumbo said it was clear that the British were pushing Mr Tsvangirai to support gay rights in Zimbabwe.  “There is a clear link between what Cameron said and what Tsvangirai is now advocating, and it is not surprising. They (MDC-T) [Tsvangirai's party] are sponsored by the British and the West and they have to toe the line. Failure to do so would cost them British support,” he said.

It’s still not clear what Cameron’s initiative means in practice. When the UK cut back on aid to Malawi in July, after months of bluster about human rights, the reductions were limited to general budget support – a form of assistance that allows governments maximum flexibility in allocating the funds, “to deliver their own national strategies for poverty reduction against an agreed set of targets.”  Money shifted to other channels, and the overall donation figure didn’t change. But the scope of what will happen matters less than the publicity, which makes LGBT people’s human rights look like neocolonial meddling.  As a coalition of African activists wrote last week, their movements have

been working through a number of strategies to entrench LGBTI issues into broader  civil society issues, to shift the same-sex sexuality discourse from the morality debate to a human rights debate, and to build relationships with governments for greater protection of LGBTI people. These objectives cannot be met when donor countries threaten to withhold aid.

Meanwhile, Peter Tatchell has stormed into the fray, with a press release warning that

“The British government is wrong to threaten to cut aid to developing countries that abuse human rights. … Cuts in aid would penalise the poorest, most vulnerable people. Many are dependent on aid for basic needs like food, clean water, health care and education … Instead of cutting aid, Britain and other donor countries should divert their aid money from human rights abusing governments and redirect it to grassroots, community-based humanitarian projects that respect human rights and do not discriminate in their service provision.”

“I stand in solidarity” with the African activists’ statement, he proclaims. This is a welcome move. Tatchell, of course, has a long record of supporting aid conditionality. In a US speech in 2008, he said:

“We must urge the US State Department to make foreign aid and trade conditional on the recipient countries agreeing to respect human rights, including the human rights of LGBT people. Tyrannies should not be rewarded: No US aid for anti-gay regimes.”

And during the controversy in 2010 around a Malawi couple’s brutal imprisonment under a sodomy law (during which Tatchell’s self-publicizing made his white, British visage the possibly uncongenial face of homosexuality over a large swath of Africa), he urged cutting UK assistance: “If [diplomatic negotiation] fails the UK should reconsider its aid and trade agreements with Malawi. There can be no blank cheque for countries that violate human rights.”  But even mountains move: usually after an earthquake that brings down houses on their inhabitants.

However, redirecting aid “to grassroots, community-based humanitarian projects,” as Tatchell demands,  has its own problems. Such redirection is one of the strategies African activists urge on governments in their letter, but is hardly plausible for the full aid package. Some rights and needs — “food, clean water, health care and education” — are arguably the state’s proper business. To saddle NGOs with responsibility for the water supply is not much different from privatizing it: turning something that should be a general good over to particular, and perhaps partial, hands. And while civil society in some places has played important roles in providing health care and schooling the young, treaties and international law still make these core tasks of governing. There is no reason to think that NGOs, without the resources and experience of a state, can do an adequate job on their own. Redirection by itself echoes the neoliberal solutions of the 80s and 90s, practiced at home by Thatcher and Reagan and enforced abroad by the IMF and World Bank. Governments sloughed off responsibilities for their peoples’ welfare; civil society was told to pick up the slack. Advocates who had pushed for improved state action necessarily transformed themselves into exhausted, overburdened service providers. The poor, sick, uneducated and disenfranchised got more so.

Nor is it certain that rights-based and non-discriminatory service providers will be the ones to take advantage when aid to governments, and consequent state capacities, dwindle. It’s a truism that the growth of political Islamism in the post-70s Middle East came in the wake of lender-promoted government retrenchment. As welfare and services shrank, movements flush with Gulf oil money moved in to provide what the state once had, in older days. In the process, they built networks of gratitude, dependency, and political support.   In parts of sub-Saharan Africa, education is already as much the province of Christian churches as of the government. It would not much benefit LGBT people to promote policies to make it even more so.

All this means simply that the politics of aid are unsimple: complicated, full of unpredictable consequences, and fraught with both political and ethical concerns They are not susceptible to simplifying rhetoric. But rhetoric almost childlike in its simplicity is what the UK government is offering the domestic constituencies it strains to entice. Talk about growing pains! — but while British policy struggles to grow up, the pains will be felt in other, distant corners of the globe.

Uganda: it’s back

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I hate the gays, but I love this silly drag queen: Yoweri and Mu'ammar in better days

It appears Uganda’s parliament, on the opening day of its new session, decided to continue consideration of the “Anti-Homosexuality Bill.”  The bill died in the last parliament without a final vote. Bloomberg reports through its Kampala office that legislators

voted to reopen a debate on a bill that seeks to outlaw homosexuality that may be expanded to include the death penalty for gay people. The legislation will be sent to the relevant session committee for consideration, Speaker Rebecca Kadaga told lawmakers today in a televised debate from the capital, Kampala.

In October 2009, Ugandan lawmaker David Bahati proposed the Anti-Homosexuality Bill that sought the death penalty or life imprisonment for gay people in the East African nation. The proposal drew criticism from international and domestic civil- society groups for infringing on human rights and equating homosexuality with terrorism or treason.

Legislators on Uganda’s Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Committee in the previous parliament suggested adding a clause that would make it a criminal offense to perform same-sex marriages … The committee said in its report that the penalty of “aggravated homosexuality” should be the same as defilement, a crime that is punishable by death under the Penal Code Act.

It appears this was part of a general motion to carry over unfinished business from the previous parliament. The Monitor, Uganda’s main independent paper, reports snippets from the debate: MP Barnabas Tinkasimire

says the anti-gays Bill is overdue because the spirit of his ancestors tells him that they lived without this practices, says he hears government saying when we pass the anti-gays Bill, we shall lose the donor’s money. We can’t afford to stay with such ills in our society and when it comes before the floor, we shall all pass it and support it.

It’s not clear what happens next, or how quickly.

Other Uganda news suggests the state of the polity: an insecure authoritarian system seeking distractions.The government will keep opposition leader Kizza Besigye, who had the temerity to contest President Museveni’s re-election earlier in the year, “under house arrest until he promises to stop participating in anti-government protests that have marred the nation’s image, national police said on Tuesday.” And the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) paused today to mourn Mu’ammar al-Qaddafi.   Museveni, a longtime fan,

reportedly told the ruling party legislators attending a caucus retreat last week that although Gaddafi made mistakes such as killing people in Tripoli he showed a lot of bravery because he died in the battle field. Museveni … faulted the fallen leader for not investing adeqquately in military fighting equipment, which led to his defeat.

“Even though he had a lot of money, he had not invested in equipment like the surface-to-air missiles.

“He would have used this to bomb at least some NATO planes.

“This contributed to his downfall.”

Bahati, author of the “Anti-Homosexuality Bill” — now promoted to NRM caucus chair — told the press that Qaddafi 

“was a courageous man who died in battle. But he carried out many extrajudicial killings in his country. This is dangerous and should be avoided.”

Indeed.

Kasha Jacqueline, human rights defender

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Kasha Jacqueline Nabagesera, a lesbian activist from Uganda and one of the founders of FARUG (Freedom and Roam Uganda), is the receipient of the 2011 Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders. She accepted the award on Thursday in Geneva, and here (after the usual preliminaries at the beginning of the video) is her speech.