Word: kampala
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...relics of Uganda's bloody past are everywhere. Tanks rust along the roads, and shell holes pockmark buildings. In the villages north of Kampala, the capital, big plastic bags bulge with bright white human skulls, femurs and tibias, the grisly remains of some of the estimated 1 million victims of two decades of government atrocity, tribal conflict and civil war. Now the nearly four-year-old regime of President Yoweri Museveni is talking about preserving these bones, perhaps in a museum, as a memorial to a time that everyone in Uganda hopes is over...
Peace has come to most of the country, and with it a modicum of prosperity. The outdoor markets of Kampala and other cities are full of food. Soap, salt and cloth are available in stores. Cars and trucks again ply the rutted roads, and offices that used to close after lunch so workers could get home before the shooting started are now open for business all day. Farmers are busy cultivating cassava and coffee. Industrial production has begun to revive, and the economy, brought to its knees by mismanagement and war, grew 5% last year...
...President Idi Amin took over the government in a 1971 coup, Ugandans can walk the streets without fear. "I still have no glass in my windows, and I can't afford sugar for my tea," says Adam Mayanja, 48, who returned to his 32-acre coffee farm north of Kampala three years ago. "But I sleep at night. There is peace and I am free...
Credit for all this goes to Museveni, 45, the self-described freedom fighter whose National Resistance Army triumphantly entered an exhausted Kampala after five years of guerrilla war against a series of brief governments that succeeded Amin's. Once a firebrand student of economics and politics at Tanzania's University of Dar es Salaam, Museveni was regarded with some trepidation in Western capitals when he emerged from the bush. Now the assessment is almost unanimously positive. Museveni, says a U.S. diplomat in Kampala, has been "a very effective leader. He has subdued tribal rebels in the north, instituted a sort...
...President's greatest achievement has been to increase discipline in his 65,000-man army, which includes former rebel troops. Says a Kampala businessman: "Gone are the days when you had to hide your car from greedy soldiers and carry cash in your pockets to pay them off when they stopped you." Amnesty International reported that although there are still problems of torture and arbitrary detention, "the army is more subject to the law now than at any time in the last 20 years...