Christian Parenti Tropic of Chaos Climate Chang n

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.Under Amin, Uganda’s roads, ports, warehouses, farms, and factories fell into dilapidation.As The Economist wrote, “Expenditure to maintain the social and economic infrastructure, let alone to develop it, was reduced to a trickle.Scarcity and inflation were the harvest the regime reaped in a short period.”18 Labor strikes followed and were savagely repressed.The regime became increasingly isolated and vulnerable.Finally, a horrified US Congress moved to impose economic sanctions.The Carter administration, despite a stated commitment to human rights, opposed the idea.Congress prevailed, nonetheless, and in October 1978 the United States imposed a trade embargo on Uganda.In retaliation, Amin told American expatriates that they could not leave—essentially taking them all hostage.19 As the Ugandan economy shrank further, the officer corps, fat on economic carrion, took to squabbling among themselves.To appease his henchmen, Amin created ten militarily run provinces, but these fiefs only weakened the state further.As the provincial governors smuggled coffee and stole revenue, the vaults of the central government emptied.By summer 1978, even soldiers were going unpaid.There were coup attempts and small mutinies, in which even the defense minister was implicated.In October 1978, Amin resorted to the lowest trick of statecraft: he went to war.His invasion of Tanzania was, however, swiftly repelled, and Amin’s army—a modern, motorized, state-of-the-art shambles—collapsed.The Tanzanians and their anti-Amin Ugandan exile allies soon occupied Kampala.20 A New York Times correspondent described the victory: “It did not take long for Uganda’s liberators to discover that the dictator had left little behind.There was $200,000 in foreign exchange in the central bank, along with $250 million in foreign debts.There were mass graves throughout the land that held an estimated half million dead, most of them men who had been suspected of opposing Amin.It was a country of widows and orphans with no economy to speak of; a place of ruin.”21Armories PlunderedThe capital was under occupation, but in the rural northeast no one was in charge.As the army melted away, the well-stocked Moroto Garrison near the Kenyan border and a smaller one in Kotido were looted by Karamojong and Jie tribesmen, who acquired “for the first time a significant supply of automatic weapons and ammunition.” Many of these guns flowed into Kenya and on to other parts of the pastoralist corridor.22 One report described Karamojong warriors looting a military armory in 1979, stealing 20,000 assault rifles and 2 million rounds of ammunition; more guns were dumped by fleeing soldiers.23 A year into liberation, the Times described the crisis in Karamoja: “The natives stormed an army barracks in the town of Moroto during the revolution and took 15,000 automatic weapons.But Karamoja has its own special tragedy.For centuries the men among them have made their living with spears, stealing one another’s cows, but with the acquisition of weapons, the cattle-raiding changed from spearpoint to gunpoint.”24 Another press report called parts of Uganda “virtual war zones.” “Bands of raiders, sometimes numbering in the hundreds and usually armed with automatic rifles, sweep into Ugandan and Tanzanian villages, kill those who resist and make off with livestock—the villagers’ most valuable possessions.”25Thousands were displaced and hundreds killed before the new Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni could begin to restore some semblance of order.Today the Small Arms Survey estimates there are four hundred thousand illegal weapons in Uganda alone.And war continues there even today, now prosecuted by the sociopaths of the Lord’s Resistance Army.26Enter El NiñoJust as northeast Uganda was flooded with guns, a severe drought descended on the whole region.Famine swept the Karamoja, killing people and livestock.By the summer of 1980, The Economist described the crisis thus: “A disaster of huge proportions has hit northeast Africa.Hundreds of people, mainly children, are dying from starvation every day.In Somalia and Ethiopia, in northern Uganda and Kenya, in tiny Djibouti and in vast Sudan some 10 million people are at risk [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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