Via Movement for Justice by Any Means Necessary
Published: 8 January 2014 at Facebook Movement for Justice by Any Means Necessary
24. Februar 2014 um 14:51
Published: 8 January 2014
- Stop the Politicians Scapegoating Lesbians & Gay Men for Poverty& Inequality in Uganda!
- Bring Down the Museveni regime! Throw Out the Politicians!
- Freedom & Equality for LGBTPeople, Women & Youth – the Only Road to Democracy in Uganda – No Democracywithout Equality for All
- Build a Mass, Integrated, Youth-Led Movement to Unite ALL Uganda’s Poor and Oppressed
- No to the Anti-Homosexuality Bill! No to the ‘Pornography’ Bill!
- Massive National Education,Health and Jobs Programs
- End Britain’s Collaboration with Anti-Gay Persecution –Asylum for LGBT People & their Defenders – End Detention! StopDeportations!
- No more deaths from deportation like Ugandan lesbian Jackie Nanyonjo!
- Bring back Prossie Now!
Every Ugandan knows that the country is in a social, economic and political crisis; the situation is fundamentally unstable and explosive. The nation’s school, college and university studentswho are repeatedly striking and rebelling against the failings of an under-resourced education system, additional fees, and repressive management are keenly aware of that. Uganda’s ruling elite can only inspire cynicism, especially among the youth, and no number of moral lectures or ‘patriotism classes’ will change that. Last month Uganda’s Parliament passed anAnti-Homosexuality Bill that increases the range of offences and the harshness of penalties for lesbian & gay people and their defenders; it passed the Museveni Government’s so-called Pornography Bill with vague and sweeping powers to criminalise anything the authorities consider ‘erotic’ like wearing miniskirts. The plain truth is that this Parliament is a den of thieves and hypocrites. Their witch-hunting of lesbians and gay men and their frightened attempts to enforce a rigid and oppressive sexual morality on women and youth are a symptom of their weakness, not their strength.
Uganda is ruled by a neo-colonial Kleptocracy – a system of government by thieves, in the service of the dominant imperialist powers and global banks & corporations. There is an economic boom for the elite and growing inequality and poverty for the masses. Ministers, generals and top officials enrich themselves without fear of prosecution, while Uganda’s brave anti-corruption campaigners are harassed and arrested. Tens of millions of dollars in aid money have been stolen or ‘diverted’ from development programmes and health projects while poverty and HIV/AIDS levels are soaring. The rich and powerful, helped by judges, seize vast areas of land and evict tens of thousands of small farmers, and cut deals with Western timber and agri-business firms. Even school land and cemeteries are not safe from their greed.
The promoters of theAnti-Homosexuality Bill, David Bahati MP, Ethics Minister Lokodo and Pastor Martin Ssempa, claim they defend religious values. They know their Bible, so they presumably understand the role of the SCAPEGOAT: “And Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat, and confess over him all the iniquities of the children of Israel, and their transgressions in all their sins, putting them on the head of the goat, and shall send him away by the hand of a fit man into the wilderness: And the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land not inhabited: and he shall let go the goat in the wilderness.”(Leviticus, 16, v. 21-22). They have learned the lesson well: they lay theiniquities of Museveni’s thief/ministers, thief/officials, thief/generals, business allies and peasant-evictors on the heads of Uganda’s Lesbians, Gay Men, Bisexuals and Transsexuals (LGBT). The Ugandan regime is the favourite lackey of the western powers in east Africa, so it blames the LGBT community for ‘westernisation’; the land thieves and robbers of aid money are creating poverty and displacing communities, so they put the responsibility for ‘social breakdown’ onto lesbians and gay men.
This anti-gayScapegoating campaign is a social necessity for Uganda’s Kleptocracy. It is tied to this campaign because the only thing that keeps the squabbling thieves united is their fear that, without the Scapegoat, they will face the wrath of the people they have cheated,impoverished and dispossessed.
Defeatingthe anti-gay campaign is the key to victory for the poor & oppressed in Uganda
The LGBT community ist the scapegoat for reasons that are true across most of Africa. Africa is now more exploited by the great capitalist powers and more integrated into the world market than it ever was under colonial rule. Ugandan society, and most of all Uganda’s students and youth are increasingly connected socially and culturally with the rest of the world. The Government and the privileged ruling elite are like middlemen in a process that is enriching them but which they can’t control. The rapid pace of change that is creating their fortunes is undermining their authority, because it is destroying an older economy faster than it provides opportunities in a new one. In a country where the majority of the population is too young to vote, young men and women are reaching working age much faster than new jobs are being created. These youth are the most dynamic, ambitious, globally aware and rebellious force in Ugandan society.
In the face of this threat to their rule the rich and powerful rely on traditional sources of authority – male authorities of family, church, clan etc – to maintain control. It thereby condemns millions of Ugandan women to the subordination, abuse and violence afforded to mere ‘property’. Without a major expansion of welfare provision, public health care, free education from nursery up to college etc., the ruling class needs women to provide these services within the family. As long as economic change in Uganda is based on an unequal relationship with dominant capitalist powers – a neo-colonial relationship – it can’t provide economic opportunities for more than a small minority of women to escape these roles.
State-sponsored homophobia (fear of LGBT people) reinforces the traditional stereotypes and gender roles of women in the family and is a means to control the sexuality, independence and creativity of youth. The Anti-Homosexuality Bill and the Pornography Bill are mechanisms for stoking up this anti-gay ‘crusade’. As a result, and as difficult as it may seem now, any struggle by women, school students, workers, dispossessed communities etc. will have to overcome the anti-gay prejudices whipped up by the oppressors if it is to have a real prospect of success. To defeat this Scapegoating crusade it is necessary to make a start on the hard work of building a united movement of LGBT people, youth, women and the poor and oppressed that will, in the not-to-distant future be strong enough to bring down the Government and overthrow the present political system.
Building a united mass movement of youth, women, the poor and oppressed.
Faced with the escalation of the anti-gay campaign it is understandable that many LGBT Ugandans, inside and outside the country, place their hopes on ‘pressure from the International Community’, meaning the western governments, aid donors, United Nations etc., many of whom have publicly criticised the regime’s anti-gay policies. Such hopes are tempting, but they are based on a misconception. When western governments point their fingers at the Ugandan regime it is purely for home consumption in their own countries. If they wanted to do anything practical they would do what the Movement for Justice demands and grant asylum to the refugees who come to Europe for protection, instead of sending them back to their persecutors – as the British Government sent Movement for Justice member Jackie Nanyonjo to her death through deportation in January 2013 and deported her fellow Ugandan lesbian and MFJ member, Prossie N, in a wheelchair last month. When they do that they are colluding with persecution. The western governments are imperialists – they are serving the interests of the people who profit from the giant banks and global corporations, the world’s richest and most powerful exploiters. They expect governments in countries like Uganda to use any means necessary to oppress, exploit and divide their own people. That is all the imperialists require of their neo-colonial ‘allies’.
The true allies of Uganda’s embattled LGBT community will be found among the disenfranchised youth, the women battling oppression and abuse, the workers, the jobless and the dispossessed farmers, because they all share a common enemy. There is so much anger among theyouth and students and the women and the poor and oppressed of Uganda who have every reason to hate their oppressors; that shared anger and yearning for change is thebasis on which a mass movement can be built. Many of the leaders of youth andstudent and women’s struggles in Uganda are LGBT people (even if they don’t feel able to be open) because they feel the weight of oppression and hypocrisymost strongly and want to fight for freedom. To counter the divisive anti-gay campaign and start to create a conscious recognition of a common interest, these lesbian and gay leaders can start the process by challenging the prejudices of their fellow leaders who are closest to them, and in doing so they will provide themselves with more protection and more places of sanctuary.
This strategy can create a movement because Ugandan society is not one solid homophobic mass. Most LGBT Ugandans, and most LGBT refugees from Uganda, have found non-LGBT friends, allies, family members, protectors at important points in their lives. All Ugandans know that their rulers are cynical, self-serving hypocrites; many, even if unspoken, have the same view about their pastors. If the LGBT community looks for ways to unite its own battle for freedom with the fight of women for equal rights and against forced marriages, the struggles of students and youth for universal, free, quality education and jobs, the struggles of workers, of rural communities against land seizures and of all the oppressed for justice, then it will find ways to break down the walls of prejudice and recruit new allies in a common cause. Every step along this road, however small, weakens the elite and makes the oppressed stronger – and bigger changes, when they come, can come quickly precisely because the situation in Uganda is so explosive. And this will have an international impact, because our struggles are fundamentally international and inter-connected. In the words of the Movement for Justice Pledge for young leaders of the new civil &immigrant rights movement:
I Pledge to the millions of oppressed people around the world, most of whom I will never know but all of whom I regard as my sisters and brothers that I will fight for freedom, equality and the right of all of us to democratically decide the future of each of each of our own nations. Winning freedom and justice for all in Britain is not possible so long as hundreds of millions of other people throughout the world live in desperate poverty, battle small and large man-made disasters on a continuous and regular basis, and are forced to accept the dictates of wealthier foreign powers. To win, our movement tmust be an international movement of the oppressed…. And so, to all those who are oppressed, I say… Your blood is my blood, your enemy is my enemy, your struggle for freedom is my struggle for freedom, your dreams and hopes echo in my heart and mind, the borders that separate us will not divide us, we will win as one. We have the power to make this world into the world we want to live in.