Category Archives: Uganda

16 in 2016: Sixteen global elections to watch in 2016

(123rf.com)
(123rf.com)

Of the most important elections in 2015, it’s a safe bet to argue that three of them took place in Greece: the January parliamentary elections, one insane roller-coaster of a referendum in July and another snap parliamentary vote again in September.

So what is the world to do in 2016, when no one expects Greeks to return to the polls? (Though, Athens being Athens, it’s impossible to rule the possibility out.)

Fear not. The new year will bring with it a fresh schedule of exciting elections on all seven continents, including in the United States, which after a marathon pair of primary campaigns, will finally choose the country’s 45th president in November 2016.

But following American politics only begins to scratch the surface.

At least two world leaders in 2016 will put ballot questions to voters  that could make or break their careers (and legacies).

New governments could emerge from elections in Taiwan, the Philippines, Morocco, Georgia, Peru, Jamaica, Ghana, Zambia and Australia.

Former president Nicolas Sarkozy will either advance or flame out in his bid for a French political comeback in 2016.

Semi-autocratic leaders in Russia, Uganda, Congo and Vietnam will seek endorsements from their voters while hoping that the veneer of elections doesn’t unleash popular protest.

An opaque series of votes in Iran could determine the country’s future Supreme Leader.

A mayoral election in London (and regional elections outside England) could reshuffle British politics with an even more important vote on the horizon in 2017.

One very special election could change the international agenda of world peace and global security altogether.

Without further ado, here is Suffragio‘s guide to the top 16 elections to watch in 2016. After a short break in the new year, your attention should turn to the South China Sea… Continue reading 16 in 2016: Sixteen global elections to watch in 2016

Uganda and LGBT rights: an interview with Bishop Christopher Senyonjo

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Bishop Christopher Senyonjo is an Anglican priest in Kampala.  Ordained in 1964, Senyonjo served in the Church of Uganda, but was dissociated from the church in 2006, largely over his growing role as a voice of tolerance for LGBT Ugandans.  Christened the ‘Ugandan Desmond Tutu’ by the Kampala-based tabloid Red Pepper last week when it included him on a list of Uganda’s ‘top 200 homosexuals’ (notwithstanding his wife and six children), Senyonjo runs a center for reconciliation and equality north of the city center.  In the aftermath of Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni’s decision to sign into law a harsh anti-gay bill last Monday, which provides for a sentence of life imprisonment in the case of ‘aggravated homosexuality,’ Senyonjo discussed the plight of LGBT Ugandans with me last week.uganda

On education about sexuality in Uganda: 

CS: I’ve discovered the reality is you shouldn’t hurt people, you shouldn’t punish people for being what they are sexually.  Sexuality is a very important component in a human being’s existence.  So if you smother expressions of sexual being, it means you are killing that person.  Regulating sexuality, I think, is important, because if people lure young people into something they’re not, it’s wrong…. 

But where people are consenting adults, and you punish them, it seems to me to be very dehumanizing. You may quote the Bible, you may quote Scripture. But these things are quoted out of context. God created, and is still creating, so I think understanding people, how they live, why they live as they are, is important. That’s why I feel the most important thing we need to do is education.  By education, we learn.  We learn where we may be going wrong.  That’s different rather than saying, ‘The whole category is condemned.’

On reconciling the church with human sexuality:

CS: My church, unfortunately, generally, doesn’t understand human sexuality….  But the point is for people to listen to each other, not just quote the Bible [at one another].  I’m a Christian also, I’ve taken theology courses, I’ve been in the ministry now for 50 years, but I can see that God is not such a God who is so harsh because of a person’s sexuality.  God is loving, and if you love, you have to be compassionate.  Try to understand the other person’s view, not say, ‘Don’t talk to me, I know everything about you.’ You should also listen to the other person.  Unfortunately, the homosexuals, the general term we use, are usually not listened to. [Opponents] just condemn it. It’s difficult….

[Critics say,] ‘God doesn’t like for me to talk about my sexuality. Adam and Eve were just heterosexuals. Why can’t you talk about something else?’

They don’t think about in Adam, everything was there. Intrinsically in Adam, every possibility was there.  When someone talks about Adam and Eve, I say, ‘What color was Adam and Eve?  What height? What kind of eyes? So you think we are just copies of Adam and Eve?  We weren’t.’  Every single possibility was there, and being manifested in Adam and Eve.

On Museveni’s request for Ugandan scientists to determine whether homosexuality has a genetic basis: 

CS:  I was impressed when our president said he’d consult scientists about this subject.  And they gave him his views, which were generally really balanced.  Unfortunately, [the president] just picked a point here and there, not looking at the whole report.  I may not agree with everything the scientists said, but I appreciate what they did. When I read it, they were balanced.

But I don’t know how you can really measure love genetically.  A human being is complicated.  Let a human being tell you his or her story. Listen to the real story. What causes it?  Is it real?

….But if you look at the whole report, even the science has a lot of things to discover.  There was a time they talked about light traveling in a straight line [long before science discovered] quantum theory.  Science is very flexible to discover things.  When you’re a scientist, you’re open to new learning.

On counseling young gay Ugandans: 

CS: [There’s] a young man — I won’t use his name, but he’s a typical one, I’ve watched him grow, I know him even today.  He has lived, and now he’s happy, because he came to understand and accept himself.  But he was a miserable young man because his parents, as he was growing up, thought he should get married.  The young man did not.  His younger brothers were getting married, and they looked around and said, ‘Look, there! Wonderful, beautiful girls, why don’t you get married?’

The young man didn’t care, he said, ‘I don’t feel like those girls!” They couldn’t understand. The mother was very worried, because she was getting old, the father had died, so they wanted to have [grand]children, which is understandable.  The young man was worried, and they told him, ‘Go to church, talk to the pastor, he will help you repent, do this…’  So he did for a long time, tried to pray, fast and all that. But he was not changing.  One pastor talked to him and [sent] him to me, you can go and talk to him about your ‘condition.’  He came.  And we shared a number of conversations talking about how he felt and all that.  I realized he was not pretending, he was a gay person. And I told him, ‘Accept yourself as you are.’  This was relieving, because he told me he was contemplating committing suicide.  Because people were telling him, ‘Even God doesn’t love you unless you change’….

When I told him, ‘Accept yourself, God loves you as you are,’ that young man is still alive and very happy.  It’s one example, but it’s a typical one.  The mother continued to say, ‘My son, why don’t you get married?’  The mother was getting sick, and the young man was worried too.  So this young man said, ‘Let me gather courage and talk to my mother. ‘Because the mother really cared and loved him. So he said, ‘Mother, I want to tell you something. I don’t love those girls you are talking about, you’ve been bringing around and all that. I’m gay.’

Oh! The mother broke down into tears, cried and cried, and the young man also cried.  After crying, the mother said to the young man, ‘You are my son. You are different, but you are my son. I love you as you are.’ This was wonderful for this young man.  After a few months, the mother became really sick and died.  She is dead now, but the young man said, ‘My mother died happy, and I am happy she died knowing who I was, who I am.’

So when you hear and know people like that, and [Ugandans want] to send them to prison, maybe for life, because [they] have said, ‘genetics or whatever,’… for me, I don’t think you can determine the love of a person by what you call scientific methods.  Love is a mystery.  There are many mysteries, but they are real.  So I feel sorry, because people are going to suffer — innocent people are going to suffer — if you implement this bill. Continue reading Uganda and LGBT rights: an interview with Bishop Christopher Senyonjo

A treasury of comments about Uganda’s anti-homosexuality bill

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How much do Ugandans hate gays and lesbians?uganda

A lot, as it turns out.  My post from last week, which recounted the final enactment of Nigeria’s anti-gay law and the decision by Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni to veto the anti-gay bill passed in December 2013 by the Ugandan parliament, attracted more attention than nearly any post I’ve written since I started Suffragio in early 2012.

So I thought it was worth sharing some of the reactions — and they’ve been jarring.

In the past month alone, I’ve argued that the United States is engendering sympathy for al-Qaeda forces in Yemen, that the US Senate would commit policy malpractice by enacting a new Iran sanctions bill and that the late Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon’s most enduring legacy is empowering Hezbollah.  Just yesterday, I entertained the notion that the United States and Canada should merge into a superstate.  These aren’t easy issues, and others won’t always share my  interpretations and conclusions.

But nothing has caused quite as much blowback as a relatively straightforward piece examining Museveni’s veto in the context of a rapidly worsening climate for LGBT rights throughout sub-Saharan Africa.

The (unintentionally hilarious) Anel Tunes, who’s from Kampala, shared my post on Facebook — with the following preamble:

All homosexuals need to be shot dead on site. We don’t need to spend tax payers money by taking such beasts to court. We just need to slay their throats without a question.

He’s not alone — the comments on both my blog and on Facebook run very heavily anti-gay.  I’d expect that because Uganda’s culture is relatively conservative.  There are plenty of good people in the United States who oppose same-sex marriage and believe, for religious or other reasons, that same-sex relationships are wrong, and the battle for wider acceptance of sexual minorities (including, for the record, transsexual and transgender individuals) can’t be legislated or enacted by judicial fiat.  I can understand that.

What I can’t understand is the desire to kill fellow citizens.  The virulence of hatred is staggering.  I’m used to a hostile or critical comment (or dozen) from time to time, but these comments are extraordinarily hateful.

Rogers Mover M adds simply:

We HATE HOMOSEXUALITY

From Ssebbaale Henry Wise:

rubbish !!!! it doent matter whether he voted other wise, remember this is africa, we act as we please, we will contiue to kill the Gays until when they are totally finished

From Tonny Bulletslinger Tomeeo Lazyeye:

Homo??? you even have time to debate on that??? we have machetes

Jjemba Mathew disapproves of the Ugandan parliament’s decision to reduce the penalty from ‘death’ to merely life imprisonment:

Life imprisonment can not end gay habits.They need Gun fire in the stadium.

Black Panther argues that Ugandan gays should be fed to the crocodiles:

 This is abusing our President.Its such a shameful act that it shldnt hv even been discussed in our Parliament.They shld hv just rounded up all homosexuals at night and thrown them into River Nile for our more honourable and profitable crocodiles to feast on as they are more useful at least they attract tourists and earn the country the much needed foreign currency.

Continue reading A treasury of comments about Uganda’s anti-homosexuality bill

Museveni vetoes Ugandan anti-gay bill after Nigeria law takes effect

London, 11th July 2012. London Summit on Family Planning

You know it’s been a bad week for LGBT rights in sub-Saharan Africa when the best news came from a leader who referred to gays and lesbians as ‘abnormal persons,’ with an illness to be treated.nigeria_flag_iconuganda

But considering that Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan signed into law on Monday the Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act, which criminalizes not only ‘amorous’ same-sex relationships, but also registration, operation or participation in gay clubs, societies or organizations (including, potentially, US and other Western human rights organizations active in Nigeria), Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni’s decision to veto an anti-gay bill on Friday was somewhat of a triumph, even if the veto was shrouded in a bizarre — and still virulently anti-gay — message:

The President said a homosexual is somebody who is abnormal because the normal person was created to be attracted to the opposite sex in order to procreate and perpetuate the human race. He said, nature goes wrong in a minority of cases.  While in the Bill passed by Parliament there is no provision for killing homosexuals; the President said, “The question at the core of the debate of homosexuality is; what do we do with an abnormal person? Do we kill him/her? Do we imprison him/her? Or we do contain him/her?”

While the President said homosexuality is an abnormal condition that can be cured, he disagreed with the position of Western countries that homosexuality is an “alternative sexual orientation”. “You cannot call an abnormality an alternative orientation. It could be that the Western societies, on account of random breeding, have generated many abnormal people,” he said, adding that his acid test for rejecting Western position is that nature is purposeful.

Uganda and Nigeria are at the heart of an increasingly widening debate within sub-Saharan Africa over homosexuality, and Uganda’s proposed anti-gay laws have been widely covered in the international media.

The current bill, passed in December 2013 by Uganda’s parliament, which is dominated by the National Resistance Movement that’s controlled Uganda since Museveni (pictured above) came to power in 1986, would criminalize same-sex sexual intercourse, with penalties of life imprisonment for Ugandans convicted of ‘homosexuality.’  The bill also creates obligations for Ugandan citizens to report suspected gay and lesbian individuals to the police, and it criminalizes providing advisory services to gay and lesbian individuals.  The latter provision could endanger all sorts of public health initiatives in Uganda, especially with respect to HIV/AIDS.

Earlier versions of the bill mandated the death penalty for gays and lesbians, which number an estimated 500,000 people among Uganda’s population of over 36 million. Continue reading Museveni vetoes Ugandan anti-gay bill after Nigeria law takes effect