Federal Democratic Movement (FEDEMU)
The Federal Democratic Movement (FEDEMU) was an anti-Obote insurgency which had joined General Tito Okello’s government following his July 1985 coup against Obote. FEDEMU did not enjoy the reputation for discipline which had characterized the NRA. It was comprised mainly of Baganda combatants, among whose families were the victims of Luwero Triangle atrocities.
When the NRA overthrew the Okello Government, FEDEMU joined the Museveni forces and was integrated as a unit into the NRA, which from that moment assumed responsibility for its conduct. At some point – apparently after regular NRA forces consolidated their control in the north – the NRA/FEDEMU unit (known in the NRA as the 35 th Battalion) was dispatched to Acholi. Among the areas to which it was assigned was Namuokora, the home town in eastern Kitgum of General Tito Okello and, reportedly, the origin of many Acholi officers.
From the outset, NRA/FEDEMU’s conduct was reported by civilians in the area as different from the regular NRA units which had previously occupied the area. Frequent looting, threats and beatings took place.
According to Namu-okora interviewees, during the May/July 1986 period in Namu-okora:
- one boy (aged 18) accused falsely of being ex-UNLA was shot while running from NRA/FEDEMU forces;
- one former UNLA soldier (aged 30) was arrested by NRA/FEDEMU soldiers in Namu-okora and beaten to death; and
- one local teacher was shot to death by an NRA/FEDEMU soldier.
While mortality was limited, these incidents created fear and tension in the minds of Namu-okora residents. Most people understood that FEDEMU was at that point an integral part of the NRA, but also appeared to recognize that it had a previous separate identity. In August 1986 the UPDA launched a series of well-planned, coordinated attacks on NRA positions throughout Gulu and Kitgum.
Among the first was an attack on the village of Ukuti, northeast of Namu-okora, a few kilometers from the Sudan border. The position, defended by an NRA/FEDEMU unit, was overrun and the defeated forces withdrew to Namu-okora. Immediately following this defeat, the NRA/FEDEMU forces threatened brutal reprisals against the Namu-okora civilian population, invoking the Luwero atrocities as well as the Ukuti defeat.
They arrested 44 men and one woman and placed them in the back of a truck. Soldiers armed with automatic weapons in the bed of a pick-up seized from the Catholic parish followed the truck as it departed west on the road to Kitgum. Fearing the worst, some of the detained civilians attempted to escape from the truck. The NRA/FEDEMU forces fired on and killed all of the prisoners.
UPDA forces, galvanized by this incident, attacked and overran the NRA forces in Namu-okora and for more than one month controlled the town, the only occasion of the sustained occupation of a town anywhere in Gulu and Kitgum during the decade-long war, according to several sources.
President Museveni reportedly reacted angrily to news of the Namu-okora massacre. He is reliably reported to have ordered the arrest of its perpetrators. Some of them, temporarily held in an enclosed truck, died of suffocation. Others were jailed, where according to reliable sources they remained at least through the mid-1990s.
Nonetheless, the Namu-okora incident persuaded many former UNLA soldiers and some youth who had been awaiting developments to join the UPDA rebels. Until mid-August the Acholi had no intention of opposing the NRA. The war began in a spontaneous and disorganized form in August – as a result of the Namu-okora massacre, an assertion which the facts do not appear to support.
While all interviewees in Kitgum and several published sources identify the 35th Battalion as the former FEDEMU forces, one source indicates that it may have been an amalgam of former FEDEMU and combatants of the former Uganda Freedom Army/Movement (UFA/M), another anti- Obote insurgency incorporated into the NRA.
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