The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (89 page)

UGANDAN BUSH WAR

Death toll:
500,000
¹

Rank:
70

Type:
civil war

Broad dividing line:
Obote vs. Museveni

Time frame:
1979–86

Location and major state participant:
Uganda

Major non-state participant:
National Resistance Army

Who usually gets the most blame:
Milton Obote

Another damn:
African civil war

A
FTER DRIVING IDI AMIN OUT OF UGANDA (SEE “IDI AMIN”), TANZANIA
turned the country over to a commission of Ugandans, who tested and discarded a series of ineffective heads of state over the next few months. Finally, a rigged election in December 1980 picked Milton Obote, Uganda’s very first president (1962–69), to be the new president. Although Obote had been a relatively decent and only slightly corrupt president the first time around, he had grown bitter in exile.

This time, he ran Uganda almost entirely on behalf of a handful of favored tribes—the Tesos, the Acholis, and Obote’s own people, the Langis—who had suffered under Amin’s tyranny. Obote quickly created a dictatorship that was every bit as bad as Idi Amin’s, but less colorfully eccentric, so the world mostly ignored it.

Opposition to Obote coalesced around Yoweri Museveni and his National Resistance Army. Unlike Amin and Obote, Museveni was a southern Bantu, specifically a member of the Banyankole tribe. He was also more educated than those leaders, a graduate of a college in Tanzania.

Resistance to Obote was strongest in the Luwero Triangle, north of the capital Kampala. Obote’s soldiers terrorized the Triangle and drove two-thirds of the population out. Women were routinely gang-raped. North Korean advisers taught the army the newest torture techniques. In mid-1981, the army massacred sixty people at the Red Cross center. Museveni’s rebels recruited heavily among the orphans created by Obote’s army’s massacres, but he trained them in moderate politics rather than the usual radicalism of revolutionary fronts.

A massacre of several dozen townspeople, including an Anglican cleric, in May 1984 in Namugongo just outside Kampala proved to be the last straw. As the world condemned Obote for such a visible atrocity, his commander in the Triangle, an Acholi named Bazilio Olara Okello, overthrew him in July 1985. Obote fled to exile in Zambia. Okello, however, got off to a really bad start when his troops ran amok in the capital, killing and looting with impunity.

Although support quickly shifted to the rebels, Museveni bided his time until the hatred for the Okello regime was overwhelming. Museveni was a student of Mao—the good Mao—the rebel Mao who moved like a fish through the ocean of the common people. When Museveni took the capital in January 1986, there were no killings, and as his rebels mopped up resistance in the countryside, there were no reported atrocities. Museveni quickly established a remarkable level of peace and security to a nation that had epitomized Third World hellholes for a generation.
²

POST-COLONIAL AFRICA

T
HE CIVIL WARS IN ANGOLA, MOZAMBIQUE, AND UGANDA ARE TYPICAL OF
the conflicts that have raged across Africa for the past forty years. Here’s a quick list of the deadliest civil wars on the continent after independence:

1.
Congo (1998–2002): 3,800,000

2.
Sudan (1983–2005): 1,900,000
¹

3
. Nigeria (1966–70): 1,000,000

4.
Rwanda (1994): 937,000

5.
Mozambique (1975–92): 800,000

6.
Ethiopia (1962–92): 500,000

7.
Somalia (from 1991): 500,000

8.
Angola (1975–2002): 500,000

9.
Sudan (1955–72): 500,000

10.
Uganda (1979–86): 500,000

11.
Burundi (1993–2004): 260,000
²

12.
Liberia (1989–2003): 250,000
³

13.
Darfur (from 2003): 200,000

If you find it difficult to keep all of these African countries straight, don’t worry about it. Their names and outlines aren’t important. African countries rarely correspond to any authentic national entity. The continent was arbitrarily sliced up among the colonial powers at the big European conferences of the nineteenth century. A coastal fort or Christian mission would be enough to justify carving a small territory out of the surrounding countryside, and drawing a straight line between any two landmarks on the map was usually the easiest way to delineate territory. These little enclaves were then assembled into vast empires that shipped rubber, ivory, gold, copper, coffee, and diamonds out across the ocean.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, these territories were being swapped around in exchange for concessions elsewhere, or else they were tossed into the pot like poker chips during each European war. In each colony, the European powers usually picked one ethnic group over all of the others to educate and hire as civil servants and sergeants, thereby creating a local minority that supported the status quo. This created a cycle of privilege and resentment that carried over into independence. The African countries that were set free in the 1960s and 1970s had no particular identity other than as former colonies of someone else. In general, each new country contained an unhappy mix of traditional enemies that quarreled like a sack of tomcats.

Imperialism, however, was only the beginning. Most African countries have now been independent almost as long as they were under colonial domination, and they have been equally abused by the native leaders that followed independence. In general, these leaders used the rhetoric of anti-colonialism, anti-Communism, or anti-capitalism—whatever worked—to drum up support at home and abroad, and to gain a free hand in looting their countries for personal gain.

The best of these might actually have been hailed as enlightened despots in eighteenth-century Europe. Sure, they’ve skimmed a little off the top, put relatives on the payroll, and tossed outspoken newspaper editors into jail, but on the plus side, they redirected some of the taxes back into schools, clinics, roads, and the power grid, and forced multinational corporations to pay a fair price for extracting national resources. The middling tyrants of Africa have skimmed more, oppressed more, squandered huge sums on flashy vanity projects, and happily given away national resources in exchange for bribes. The worst of them built up paranoid cults of personality and then set out to rid their domains of anyone who failed to appreciate their magnificence. Only in the 1990s did we start to see some African countries become viable democracies.
*

African diplomats insist that redrawing borders is a far lower priority than fixing Africa’s many social and economic problems. Even so, the future will probably see plenty more wars as Africa either adjusts its borders to fit the ethnic distribution or adjusts its ethnic distribution to fit the borders. Either way will involve armies.

SOVIET-AFGHAN WAR

Death toll:
1.5 million
¹

Rank:
40

Type:
ideological civil war

Broad dividing line:
Communists vs. mujahideen

Time frame:
1979–92

Location:
Afghanistan

Major state participants:
Afghanistan, Soviet Union

Major non-state participants:
lots of warlords

Who usually gets the most blame:
Leonid Brezhnev

Another damn:
superpower ground war in Asia

The unanswerable question everyone asks:
Did this cause the fall of the Soviet Union?

Coups and Countercoups

Early in the Cold War, Afghanistan had been a lukewarm Soviet client state. It wasn’t Communist, but the Soviets were eager to keep their next-door neighbor stable, so they happily supplied the monarchy in Kabul with all of the guns and money it needed to maintain order.

In July 1973, while the king of Afghanistan was vacationing in France, a coup by his prime minister and cousin, General Mohammad Daoud Khan, made a return trip unnecessary. Afghanistan shifted from a lazy monarchy to a lazy dictatorship with hardly a blink at the United Nations; however, this interruption of the status quo caused both sides of the Cold War to reconsider. Daoud had no specific political agenda or orientation, but when Iran (an American client state at the time, under the shah) began to pour money into the country to buy Daoud’s friendship, Afghan Communists planned their own power play.

In April 1978, Communists in the Afghan army seized power and killed Daoud. The new leader, Nur Mohammad Taraki, began the usual Communist reforms aimed at dragging the country out of the Middle Ages, which ignited a small civil war between Communists and traditionalists throughout the country. Taraki began hauling rebels and dissidents into the new Soviet-built Policharki prison near Kabul, where tens of thousands would be killed and shoveled into mass graves over the next decade.

With the fundamentalist Muslim revolution taking over Iran (January to April 1979), the Russians became skittish about the Muslim minorities inside the Soviet Union, and they were anxious to keep Afghanistan from getting out of control. They cranked up foreign aid and assigned more advisers to the government.

In March 1979, Afghan workers who had recently returned from Iran with Islamist notions rioted against Communist secular programs in the west Afghan city of Herat. The local army garrison mutinied as well, taking control of the city. They hunted down and killed dozens, maybe hundreds, of Soviet advisers and their families, parading their mutilated bodies through the streets. In retaliation, Afghan tanks and Soviet aircraft flattened the city, killing as many as 20,000 Heratis.
²

In September 1979 the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev met with Taraki but continued to turn down the Afghan leader’s request for Soviet ground troops. Brezhnev knew that open intervention would only turn the Afghan people against their Communist government. Almost immediately following the Afghan leader’s return to Kabul, Taraki was killed in a countercoup led by his deputy, Hafizullah Amin, an American-educated independent Communist. Brezhnev was shocked at the murder of his recent guest and reconsidered intervention.
*S

In December 1979, Soviet commandos swooped in out of the blue, attacking the palace and killing Amin. Then Brezhnev’s preferred president for Afghanistan, Babrak Kamal, returned from Soviet exile and was put in charge. Brezhnev quickly approved Kamal’s request for large numbers of Soviet ground troops.
³

War

At this point—mere days after it had started—everyone knew that the Soviets had already lost the war. Or at least, that’s what they claimed later. In their memoirs, all of the Soviet generals swore they had tried to talk Brezhnev out of invading the country. Advisers to American President Jimmy Carter claimed to have giggled and skipped happily down the halls of the White House
*
now that Russia was about to have its own Vietnam.

In practice, it took almost a decade for the Soviet Union to realize it couldn’t win the war.

The Afghan war doesn’t flow in any traditional narrative structure. It was mostly a matter of patrols, raids, and local offensives against a patchwork of warlords and rebel alliances. By 1984, the Soviets had 115,000 troops in Afghanistan, but only 15 percent of them were available for offensive combat. The other 85 percent of the Soviet soldiers were tied down in garrison duties, and they never really controlled more than the big cities and the roads that connected them. The rest of the country belonged to guerrillas and warlords. The mujahideen (Muslim rebels) relied on Pakistan and Iran as safe havens to train and recuperate out of Soviet reach.

The United States, in partnership with conservative Muslim states such as Saudi Arabia, funded and supplied the rebels by funneling aid through Pakistan. The new fundamentalist Islamic Republic of Iran also supported the rebels, although definitely
not
in partnership with the United States.

Rebels of the Tajik ethnic group under Ahmad Shah Masoud held the Panjsher Valley throughout both the Soviet and the Taliban era. Because it branched off the main road between Kabul and the Soviet border, control of the Panjsher Valley was vital to the outcome of the war. The Soviets launched as many as nine massive armored offensives against rebel strongholds here without ever securing it.

When the rebels proved too slippery to catch, the Communist forces often responded by just killing whomever they could find—hostages, family members, or suspicious-looking bystanders. Despite press censorship, scattered reports of atrocities filtered out of the war zone. Any rebel bombing or rocket attack could provoke a brutal Soviet retalliation. In 1979, Soviet and Afghan government forces killed 1,300 villagers in Konarha Province.
⁴
In early 1985, the Soviets massacred hundreds of civilians in the northern province of Kunduz.
⁵
As a reprisal for an attack on a convoy near Kandahar in October 1983, three nearby villages were wiped out.
⁶

Winding Down

By 1985 the mujahideen were almost broken, but the Soviets didn’t know it. Instead, Mikhail Gorbachev’s new reformist regime in Moscow began to reconsider the whole Afghan adventure. During 1985 and 1986, the Soviets pulled back from big combat operations, leaving the major fighting to the Afghan army. At this point, the Soviets would only initiate action with small commando raids by special forces. By 1987, the Soviet policy was to fight only defensive battles and only when necessary.

President Kamal was retired to Moscow in May 1986, and the leadership of Afghanistan was handed over to Muhammad Najibullah, the head of the secret police. During 1987, he tried to be less dictatorial and bring the moderate opposition into the government in an attempt to split the rebellion.

At a private meeting in September 1987, Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze tried to interest American Secretary of State George Shultz in a cooperative approach to Afghanistan. He tried to convince his American counterpart that Islamist fundamentalism would soon be more dangerous to the West than Communism would be, and that the superpowers should jointly rebuild the war-torn nation. Nothing came of this, but it’s one of those missed opportunities that always looms larger in hindsight, especially on September 11, 2001, when mujahideen operating out of Afghanistan attacked the United States.

By October 1987, as the war wound down, there were 2.9 million Afghan refugees in camps in Pakistan, and 2.3 million in Iran.
⁷
The Geneva Accords, which normalized relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan, were signed in April 1988 and are usually regarded as the beginning of the end of the war, even though they only included sovereign nations and were not signed by the mujahideen. The Soviets started to withdraw their troops in May, with the last of them leaving in February 1989.

This was the last conflict of the Cold War, and by now it had become clear that the Soviet Union couldn’t afford to keep up with its American rivals. The war in Afghanistan had cost the Soviets about the same that the 1991 Gulf War would cost the Americans ($70 billion
⁸
versus $61 billion,
⁹
respectively), but the results were radically different. For the Soviets, those billions of dollars had been scrounged and doled out over ten years, costing 13,310 Soviet lives, leaving them at the other end beaten, bankrupted, and exhausted. For roughly the same price—pocket change by Western standards—the Americans could fight a more concentrated war, winning in less than one year with a loss of only 383 lives.
*

War without End

Violating every prediction made at the time, the Communist government in Kabul held on for several years after the Russians left. It successfully kept the rebels at bay, and it was only internal divisions in the government that finally brought it down. As the rebels closed in, President Muhammad Najibullah resigned and handed the government over to a subordinate who couldn’t hold onto it either. In 1992, the Muslim fundamentalist Taliban militia took Kabul and imprisoned Najibullah. He languished under arrest for a few years until September 1996, when he was tossed to the crowd, castrated, shot, and strung up from a traffic light.

The lynching of Najibullah is as good a place as any to close the chapter on the war in Afghanistan. Much of Afghanistan remained under the thumb of local warlords, and the world as a whole did not recognize the Taliban as legitimate rulers, but Communism was no longer an option, so the world ignored the Afghans for several years. Since then, the war has shifted in a new direction, which—so far—hasn’t killed enough people to make my list.