The Guest House Siege of 2007

The Guest House Siege of 2007

18^th February 2007
Due to various reasons (malaria not being the least of them), I never quite got the chance to write about everything that I wanted to in Uganda. The siege of the guest house in Mukono is one such piece that I'm going to write about here.

Back when I was still in high school, one guy described me as being so laid back I may as well have been asleep. I think it was quite an apt description.

One of the best examples I have of this was when I was driving the VW Beetle that my mother had won. I was on my way to a holiday job and was entering a long swooping left hand turn motorway on-ramp. I must of been taking the turn too fast or too sharply as the car started to spin. It managed to do a complete 360 degree turn and then snapped back into the direction it was originally heading. I shrugged and carried on my way to work. I didn't really think much about it at the time. I didn't even mention it to my workmates or family.

Now I have another good story about been laid back. Though this one was perhaps a bit too much laid back.

I was up on the second story of the Best Meals Hotel (whose meals really weren't) at their Internet cafe. I was due to leave Uganda in a few days, and since I was donating my laptop to GrassRootsUganda.com, I desperately needed to back up all the files on my laptop to some DVDs. I looked up at one point at noticed, rather strangely, that I was the only one in the normally packed Internet cafe. Everybody was out on the balcony and looking down upon the street. I went and had a peek myself and noticed that there were bricks all over the road and about twenty or so policeman walking down the street bedecked in full riot gear. Shield, helmets, teargas guns, batons, shotguns. The full works. The bricks were there to prevent any traffic moving on the normally very busy Jinja Road.

I realised what was going on pretty quickly. One of the opposition political parties were holding a rally in Mukono that day. The rally was technically illegal as the government never gives permission to opposition parties. Which then allows the government to break up the rallies with any means they see fit. i.e. bowl on in with riot police and tear gas the fuckers! Gigi and Lesdog got caught up in one in Kampala, and I saw the end of one in the taxi park. This one though, was right in our back yard.

I watched the riot police walk on past, shrugged, and return to what I was doing. After a while I got a text from Lee saying something like: "The police are coming towards you. Gigi is quite concerned and want you to get out ASAP." I glanced out the window again, saw nothing and headed back to what I was doing.

I eventually finished what I was doing and everything seemed to have calmed down. So I jumped onto a boda-boda and headed back to the guest house.

When I got back to the guest house, the people inside said that the police had started from one end of Mukono and had fire tear gas wherever they saw fit as they headed on up the street. One of the tear gas canisters landed on the house right next to the guest house! The people inside obviously panicked and quickly shut all the windows before the gas got in. Apart from a few sore throats later on, they all were okay. Lesdog (who tends to know stuff like this) reckoned that thestrength of the tear gas was fairly mild. If it has been full strength, they would of been in real trouble.

The roaming battles continued for the rest of the day. We saw some more tear gas further down the street, far too far away to cause us any problems. I managed to get a few sneaky pictures of the riot police without them noticing, which was a nice change considering my previous run in.

As the whole thing settled down I headed back onto the street. I found a souvenir shot gun shell (the police fired several warning shots). I also wanted the tear gas canister from the roof but someone had beaten me to it. I asked several people on the street if they knew who had it and that I was prepared to pay ush5,000 ($NZ 3.96) for it, but had no luck.

I think there are three interesting things that I have gleaned from this whole episode:

The government of Uganda are a bunch of pricks
One way to stop your opponents from organising rallies, is to make it next to impossible for them to get a permit, and then tear gas them when they gather illegally.

Cunning, but evil.
I am perhaps too laid back at times
The danger of Uganda is somehow appealing
I love the Philippines to death and can't wait to return there. I also love Uganda. One strange advantage that Uganda has over the Philippines is its danger. This incident, the whole Kitgum thing, the wars in neighboring countries and so on, all seem to add some sort of strange appeal to Uganda.

That's not to say the Philippines is not without its dangers and problems. My good friend Eden saw a nasty incident of road rage that ended up with a gun pointed at her jeepney's driver's head. One such as myself does go to the southern island of Mindanao for fear of being kidnapped. My other good mate Raymund also related this story.

Africa and Uganda just seems to have more of it, and that is somehow appealing. Maybe I just like telling stories like this and freaking out my mother...

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(c) 2005, 2006 and 2007 Malcolm Trevena.
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