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Uganda: Breaking the media blackout
Andre Vltchek
Uganda, Rwanda and Kenya are becoming truly and increasingly unpleasant countries, dangerous to work in, or even to visit.
Of course not if you are a foreign trader in diamonds or uranium, or if you are a military attaché from a friendly Western country, or from Israel… But if you are an independent investigative journalist, or even a UN official that criticizes, your life is patently at risk.
I am walking down the street, in the middle of Kampala, with my Ugandan friends. Suddenly, one of them stops, then points at a tall man walking in the opposite direction, on the other side of the street:
“Look at him… That is a Kenyan intelligence agent…” He gives his name. “He used to be so thin, you know… He has AIDS. But they gave him all sorts of drugs so now he is as huge as a mountain again. He does a lot of killing here, also torturing. He tortured some of our people, from the opposition. They bring Kenyans here to do this kind of job, as they have no emotional attachment to this country; no personal links…”
In front of the entrance to the State House, I try to photograph heavy concrete blocks, guardhouses and soldiers. I use a small Leica, but in just a few seconds I am surrounded by soldiers, one of them is clearly from neighboring Rwanda.
This is my, perhaps, 25th visit to Uganda, and I feel suddenly exhausted. I don’t want to argue, to play tricks with the camera, or present some official documents in order to get myself out of this situation. I simply show them the image, and then calmly delete it. My friends are from the opposition. I don’t want any trouble. I worry about them more than about some photo.
People say that intelligence agencies from the West and Israel are operating all over Kenya, especially towards the border with Somalia, near the historic city of Lamu. Recently on the high seas, several terrified fishermen told me (I hired a boat to investigate), that Kenyan patrol boats are operating, have been for quite some time, carrying Western soldiers on board, and that the local Muslim people get regularly kidnapped, interrogated, tortured… and that some even disappear.
There are British military bases in Kenya. There are countless and bizarre NGO’s operating in both Uganda and Rwanda. There are military folks, and those countless US military flights to and from Entebbe airport. And there are heavy trucks, transporting booty from the destroyed DRC to Ugandan airports and to the main Kenyan port of Mombasa.
Kenya is now occupying the southern part of Somalia. Uganda and Rwanda are plundering the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is full of highly priced raw materials like coltan and uranium. They are all untouchable, as they act on behalf of Western companies and governments. In the meantime, the number of corpses in the region is mounting, nearing some 10 million since 1995.
Both Uganda and Kenya are closely linked with that bizarre geopolitical entity called South Sudan, a country created by the joint neo-colonialist policies of North America and Europe – a country that became a failed state even before it was truly declared independent, and which is there only to serve the political and especially economic interests of the West.
‘Media blackout’
To legitimize it, there is an almost bulletproof media blackout – almost no reporting on the severity of the situation. Those few reports that make it to the mainly non-corporate media, immediately get attacked and smeared by the always vigilant and paid ‘bloggers’, who use smear tactics quite similar to those used against any objective reports on Venezuela, Russia, China or Ukraine, even Thailand.
While those abovementioned countries, plus many others such as Cuba, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Eritrea, and North Korea, are constantly bombarded by projectiles coming from Western mass media, the true rogues such as Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, but also the many desperados (torturing and robbing their own people) like Indonesia and Philippines, are either glorified or at are least spared the most damaging criticism. It is because they are ready to sacrifice their own people (and people in neighboring countries) and to deliver them, together with all the riches, to the altar of the Western economic and political interests.
While the West manufactures ‘opposition’ wherever there is a system that puts local people first, the most outrageous, even grotesque dictatorships, like those in Uganda, enjoy unapologetic support of the Empire.
It is easy to understand why.
Source: http://rinf.com/alt-news/breaking-news/uganda-breaking-media-blackout/
