Big Challenges Face Heads in Kampala

The Commonwealth, as a CHRI report said some years ago, is about human rights and democracy or it is about nothing. In our 53 countries human rights problems abound, but it would be wrong to conclude that Commonwealth countries have a poor record by comparison with non-Commonwealth countries. On the contrary, if analysed region by region, Commonwealth countries come out rather better.

Nonetheless, the Kampala Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) is shaping up to be one of the most difficult for many years. Among the major issues that will confront the Heads of Government, the situations in Pakistan, Fiji Islands and Bangladesh are the more disturbing, but to these must be added the Maldives, The Gambia and Sri Lanka, as well as unsettling recent developments in parts of the Pacific such as Solomon Islands, Tonga and Papua New Guinea. Each poses human rights problems, and challenges the basic principles laid down and accepted by all member governments in the Singapore Declaration of Commonwealth Principles of 1971, the Harare Declaration of 1991 and the Millbrook Action Programme of 1995.

Of special concern must be the position of the host country, Uganda, whose President, Yoweri Museveni, will chair the meeting and then automatically become chairperson-in-office of the Commonwealth until the next CHOGM is held in Trinidad in 2009.

When Museveni was sworn in as President after years of turmoil in Uganda he said: "The problem of Africa in general and Uganda in particular is not the people but leaders who want to overstay in power."

That was 21 years ago and he is still President. The 1995 Uganda constitution laid down for the presidency limits of two terms, but in 2003 the ruling party scrapped that and last year Museveni won an election that was flawed, as Commonwealth observers pointed out, partly because of legal harassment during the campaign of opposition leader Kizza Besigye and his Forum for Democratic Change candidates. At the time of writing, Besigye and some of his colleagues are still on bail on treason charges.

In a speech during his visit to Uganda in June, Commonwealth Secretary-General Don McKinnon boldly warned that unless the situation changed, one question bound to be fired at him when CHOGM took place would be : “Where stands the case against Kizza Besigye, and the need to separate politics from justice?”

McKinnon also asked whether the truce with the Lord's Resistance Army, which waged a bitter insurgency for years in northern Uganda, was holding, and “what sort of justice, if any, is due to Joseph Kony,” its leader. McKinnon was obviously not satisfied with what Museveni had told him privately about these matters. Two years ago the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Kony and three of his commanders for the shocking atrocities committed by his fighters and the peace deal has been blocked for months by the Court's demand for him to be handed over.

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