Baroness Cox's Ugandan mercenary
by Linda de Hoyos
Executive Intelligence Review, June 9, 1995, pp. 53-55

Uganda remains today the on-the-ground headquarters for operations against Sudan. It is the major source of supply for John Garang's Sudanese People's Liberation Army. The SPLA is supplied from Kidepo Valley Park in northern Uganda, and Kidepo is the site for SPLA training and the SPLA headquarters. According to Ugandan sources, food, gasoline, and supplies are stored for Garang at the Mbuya military barracks, and the supplies are delivered by the National Resistance Army's 4th Division.

In the days when the SPLA was more militarily viable, Ugandan dictator Yoweri Museveni attempted to procure sophisticated weapons for Garang. In August 1992, Museveni's private secretary, Innocent Bisangwa-Mbuguje, and Ugandan Ambassador to the United States Stephen Kapimpina Katenda-Apuuli were arrested in Orlando, Florida, for illegally attempting to buy 400 TOW anti-tank missiles and 34 TOW launchers for $18 million. The weapons were bound for the SPLA, through the border towns of Nimule or Kaya in northern Uganda.

Museveni and Garang are old school buddies, both having matriculated at the Dar Es Salaam University--the Julius Nyerere ``kindergarten'' where the curriculum centered on Franz Fanon, Lenin, and Marx. Museveni came to power in Uganda in 1986, after five years of bush war. His most immediate sponsor was Tanzanian President Nyerere, who had ordered the coup against Ugandan President Godfrey Binaisa in 1981. During his years in the bush, Museveni received funding and arms from Libya, with which he retains close relations and a continuing arms supply. He also received cash injections from Nigerian businessman Mooshod Abiola, who in the early 1980s served as the bagman for ITT; and from Tiny Rowland, then director of Lonrho, who became an ``honorary'' member of the SPLA.

However, Museveni's most significant sponsor is Baroness Lynda Chalker, British Minister of Overseas Development. Chalker was the first foreigner to meet Museveni went he finally took Kampala in 1986. Her ministry has posted British civil servants as the ``seconds'' throughout Museveni's government. The relationship is personal. As one British source put it: ``Chalker spends a lot of time, a disproportionate amount of time, in the Horn of Africa and Uganda.'' Soon after the Rwandan Patriotic Front took Kigali in July 1994, Chalker flew to Kampala to visit Museveni for four days in a victory celebration. ``He is,'' said one British source, ``the blue-eyed darling of the British in Africa.''