Uganda

By Michael S. Serrill

The 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.

But the biggest change is psychological. For the first time since the murderous clown-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 of grass-roots democracy, and even managed to hold a successful national election. Politically, things are as good as they can be."

Museveni has been building his own kind of democracy. Local affairs are run by "resistance councils." Last February voters were permitted to cast ballots for added seats to the National Resistance Council, Uganda's renamed parliament. But Museveni's National Resistance Movement is the only legal political organization, and the unelected President last week had the N.R.C. extend his term of office five years, to 1995.

The 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."

Museveni's highest priority is reviving the economy. When Uganda gained its independence from Britain in 1962, it was one of Africa's most prosperous countries. Idi Amin not only raped the economy for his own personal enrichment, but in 1972 he also ejected tens of thousands of ethnic Asians who had formed the backbone of commerce. Uganda's per capita income dropped nearly half during the 1970s, and exports fell 60%.

Slowly Museveni has turned things around. One step was to devalue the Uganda shilling and introduce free-market structures to earn $550 million in World Bank and International Monetary Fund loans. They are crucial to the economy since the plummet of the price of coffee, which accounts for 90% of the nation's income. Inflation hovers around the three-digit range, and corruption remains rampant. Local businessmen call Museveni the government's "only honest man," and even officials charged with rooting out misappropriation say that "the problem is so immense, there's no way we can tackle the whole of it."

Recent progress aside, life is still hard in Uganda. The banks cannot always cash a check, power failures are common, and pipes do not always have water. The health system has been overwhelmed by AIDS, which has infected as much as 30% of the adult population in the southwest.

As for Museveni, he has thwarted two coup attempts, and is constantly ; criticized for favoring his native south, home of the predominant Baganda group, over the north, where the Acholi and Langi prevail. But the President is confident that his nation can again become the breadbasket of East Africa and bury forever the bones of its war with itself.

With reporting by Marguerite Michaels/Kampala