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Trump’s ‘Rigged Election’ Remarks Are ‘A Gift To Dictators,’ Say Africans

Trump’s ‘Rigged Election’ Remarks Are ‘A Gift To Dictators,’ Say Africans

By Ed Cropley

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – If Donald Trump is interested in rigged elections, Zimbabwean opposition leader Tendai Biti says he could teach him a thing or two. Biti was arrested for treason and detained for a month after daring to suggest his party had defeated President Robert Mugabe in a vote in 2008.

“They denied me food. They beat me up. They put me in leg irons. They beat me in the private parts,” Biti, a lawyer who later served as finance minister in an eventual unity government, told Reuters. “That’s real election rigging.”

To opposition figures in Africa, and in other parts of the world that lack the 240-year U.S. history of peaceful transitions of power, Trump’s assertion that November’s U.S. presidential election will be “rigged”, and his declaration that he may not accept the outcome, are dangerous words.

“Donald Trump is a gift to all tin-pot dictators on the African continent. He is giving currency and legitimacy to rigging because if it can exist in America, it can exist anywhere,” Biti said.

“He has no idea what he’s talking about, absolutely no idea,” said Biti, who speaks from the experience of three election defeats to Mugabe, a 92-year-old ex-guerrilla who has run Zimbabwe since independence in 1980. “It makes us cross because in Africa there’s real election rigging.”

Long-serving rulers who have faced U.S. criticism in the past are already using Trump’s remarks to counter Washington’s pro-democracy message.

When Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, in power for 30 years, won re-election to his seventh term in February, U.S. officials accused his government of arresting opposition figures, harassing their supporters and intimidating the media.

Trump’s comments, said Museveni’s spokesman Don Wanyama, “should be an eye-opener to them. As they sit down to lecture other countries, they should realize that it’s not easy.”

“Democracy is a process and it really takes time.”

Trump refused during a debate on Wednesday to say whether he would respect the result of the Nov. 8 poll. That sent a chill down the spine of Musikari Kombo, a former local government minister in Kenya, where 1,500 people were killed in a wave of ethnic bloodletting unleashed by disputes over the result of a 2007 election.

“I was shocked. I was horrified,” Kombo said. “People in Africa who have always challenged elections will say: ‘You see, we are vindicated. Even in the Mother of all Democracies, the presidential candidate is not willing to accept because there is rigging.'”

U.S. officials, including state governors from Trump’s own Republican Party, say there is no serious vote fraud problem in the United States and the election will be clean.

Nevertheless, Trump and some allies have alleged anomalies in the voter roll in cities such as Philadelphia and Chicago that could allow the votes of dead people to be counted on behalf of his opponent, Hillary Clinton.

It is hard to think what they would have made of this year’s election in Gabon, where opposition leader Jean Ping cried foul after narrowly losing to President Ali Bongo, whose family have ruled the oil-producing former French colony for half a century.

The focus of Ping’s concern was the province of Haut-Ogooue, where results showed 95.46 percent of voters backed Bongo on a turnout of 99.9 percent, more than double anywhere else.

Gabon’s constitutional court – led by the long-time mistress of Bongo’s father, Omar – upheld the result.

“I would say to Mr. Trump ‘Come to Gabon to see what a fake democracy looks like, to see what a stolen election looks like,'” said Alexandre Barro Chambrier, a senior Ping adviser. “There is no democracy here. There is the rule of one family and one man imposing a dictatorial regime,” he added. “Mr Trump is not serious.”

(Additional reporting by Edward McAllister, Edmund Blair and Elias Biryabarem; Editing by Peter Graff)

Secret Lives: An Evening In A Ugandan Gay Bar

Secret Lives: An Evening In A Ugandan Gay Bar

Kampala (AFP) – Just as he attends church on Sunday morning, there’s another sacred place Nick, a 23-year-old Kampala stylist, flocks to every Sunday night.

“It gives me fuel for the whole week,” he says, standing beer in hand outside an inconspicuous bar, in a red check shirt and jeans.

“When I come here I don’t mind if I miss sleep and then go to work, because I go to work feeling happy, new. It’s a beautiful Sunday.”

During the week this pub, located in the capital’s business district but away from the nightclub strip, is full of unsuspecting, heterosexual Ugandans.

But for six hours on a Sunday night that fly by all too fast, the venue, with its grass thatched roof and flashing fluorescent disco floor lights, becomes a haven for Uganda’s gay community who meet here to drink, dance and more.

“It’s accepting, they do not discriminate,” says Nick, who has arrived at about 8pm, and is waiting for the bar, informally chosen by his community as their spot, to fill up. This normally happens from about midnight.

“We were chased all over before the gay bill was removed,” says Nick.

Last December the Ugandan parliament passed an anti-gay bill that stipulated repeat homosexuals should be jailed for life, outlawed the promotion of homosexuality and required people to denounce gays.

The bill was signed into law by veteran President Yoweri Museveni in February, but in August was struck down by the east African nation’s constitutional court on a technicality.

After the law was passed, the bar was shut by police for two months.

On Sunday night you would “stay home and cook”, says Nick, who is a born-again Christian and lives next to a church.

The nightspot reopened just a couple of days after the law was overturned. Although the group marking this victory was small in number, they were “celebrating like there’s no tomorrow”, one activist recalls.

The pub is now a place for “connections and reconnections”, says transsexual activist Pepe Julian Onziema.

“It’s like a typical bar,” he says. “Inside it’s drinks, chit-chatting, talking about work… meeting new people, love interests.”

Chris, 19, a corporate worker, says he has known he was gay since he was 16, but hasn’t told his family.

“They’d faint, they’d die,” he says, standing next to a friend, both of them laughing at the notion.

In the lead-up to the anti-gay bill being passed by Ugandan legislators last December, Chris stayed away from the bar.

“I was scared. You cannot be caught in a place like this,” he says, adding he was only out for the first time in 18 months.

But tonight it “feels good being with the kind of people who are the same as you, to hang out and feel free, do whatever you want. People get cozy, people kiss.”

For a year Steve, 19, a full-time DJ, has been supplying the Ugandan, Nigerian and Western music for the bar.

“I was very shocked hearing about that thing,” he said when asked his thoughts on homosexuality. “I feel bad when they’re doing their stuff. It hurts me.”

But, he admits, “I need money.”

He’s not the only one realising the potential business value in Uganda’s gay community.

The female owner of the bar was “caring enough” to think “we just found ourselves in these shoes,” says Nick.

But she is in a minority in Uganda, a socially conservative nation where most people support the anti-gay legislation. MPs are attempting to reintroduce the measures in parliament, and under a standing colonial-era Penal Code, gay Ugandans can still be jailed for “carnal knowledge against the order of nature”.

As the clock ticks along towards Monday and the revellers step out of their boozy, smoky haze, ready to face the week with a hangover, they are all too aware they won’t be able to tell their work colleagues about their Sunday night.

“Can you imagine, that in a very sociable country like Uganda, where bars are open Monday-to-Monday, we have only six hours in a week to be ourselves?” says Onziema.

“The moment you walk out it’s like you don’t know each other, you’ve not been having fun.”

AFP Photo/Isaac Kasamani

U.S. Slaps Sanctions On Uganda For ‘Vile’ Anti-Gay Laws

U.S. Slaps Sanctions On Uganda For ‘Vile’ Anti-Gay Laws

Washington (AFP) – The United States Thursday slapped sanctions on Uganda — cancelling a military air exercise, imposing visa bans and freezing some aid — amid deep U.S. anger at “vile” Ugandan anti-gay laws.

The legislation “runs counter to universal human rights and complicates our bilateral relationship,” the White House said, renewing calls for the law to be repealed.

Signed by President Yoweri Museveni in February, the law calls for “repeat homosexuals” to be jailed for life, outlaws the promotion of homosexuality and obliges Ugandans to denounce gays to the authorities.

Rights groups say it has triggered a sharp increase in arrests and assaults of the African nation’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community.

“From Uganda to Russia to Iran, LGBT communities face discriminatory laws and practices that attack dignity, undermine safety and violate human rights,” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said at a Gay Pride event for his staff.

“And we each have a responsibility to push back against the global trend of rising violence and discrimination against LGBT persons,” said Kerry, who has likened the Ugandan law to anti-Semitic legislation in Nazi Germany.

U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, called for similar anti-gay laws that exist in 76 countries around the world to be repealed.

In the steps unveiled Thursday, specific Ugandan officials involved in “human rights abuses” — including against the gay community — will be barred entry to the United States, National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said.

The U.S. gave some $487 million in aid to Uganda in 2013, of which $411 million went towards health programs. Some of those funds will now be frozen or redirected, with money going towards non-governmental organizations rather than the health ministry.

A $2.4 million program for a community-policing program will also be stopped as the U.S. is “very concerned about the extent to which the Ugandan police may be involved in abusive actions” in implementing the law, the White House said.

And a planned National Health Institute will now be built in another African country with some $3 million in U.S. aid.

While the United States was committed to supporting the health needs of the Ugandan people, “we seek to invest in partners and programs that share our commitment to equal access and our evidence-based approach to medicine and science,” the White House said.

Plans for a U.S. military-sponsored aviation exercise in Uganda were also cancelled, but Hayden stressed none of the moves “diminishes our commitment to providing development and humanitarian support for the Ugandan people.”

Nor would the U.S. cut back on its bid to track down “the murderous Lord’s Resistance Army.”

Rights groups last month reported an increase in “arbitrary arrests, police abuse and extortion” among the gay and lesbian community, adding “scores have fled the country” and at least one person had been killed.

Some 17 people had been arrested on “allegations of consensual same-sex conduct with other adults or, in some cases, simply on the suspicion of appearing to be LGBT,” Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International said in a joint report.

Most have since been released without charge, some after paying bribes, the groups said. Others said they were sexually assaulted in custody.

With tabloid newspapers printing pictures of dozens of people alleged to be gay, at least 100 have fled the country.

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said Thursday’s announcement “sends a stern signal to the Ugandan government: the United States will not tolerate the vile persecution of LGBT Ugandans.”

The legislation “represents breathtaking ignorance, injustice, and cruelty,” Pelosi said in a statement.

AFP Photo/Stan Honda

Ugandan Named To Head UN Assembly Faces Criticism On Human Rights

Ugandan Named To Head UN Assembly Faces Criticism On Human Rights

By Carol J. Williams, Los Angeles Times

Ugandan Foreign Minister Sam Kutesa, who is set to take over the presidency of the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday, has a decades-long legacy of corruption, military aggression and human-rights abuses, according to opponents of his selection as ceremonial head of the world body.

The 65-year-old career politician and longtime ally of Uganda’s controversial president, Yoweri Museveni, was unanimously chosen by the African Union last month to fill the rotating U.N. presidency during the continent’s year-long term at the helm.

There will be no vote at the U.N. before the mantle passes to Kutesa. But his selection has stirred an eleventh-hour campaign to prevent him from taking office and presiding over General Assembly sessions, including the annual meeting of all 193 member states in September, when President Barack Obama and other world leaders address the gathering.

Milton Allimadi, a Ugandan journalist based in New York and editor of the Black Star News website, has been circulating an online petition appealing to the U.S. State Department to revoke Kutesa’s visa so he cannot attend Wednesday’s administrative session, where he is to assume his presidential duties.

In his petition, Allimadi accuses his country’s top diplomat of being a partner in Museveni’s alleged crimes of “domestic repression in Uganda and multiple invasions of neighboring countries” that have caused millions of deaths in Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan.

Kutesa also defended Museveni’s introduction of an anti-gay law last year that imposes life sentences to those convicted of “aggravated homosexuality,” a charge applied to same-sex couples openly living together. Those who promote gay rights or help homosexuals evade detection can also face up to seven years in prison under the law.

Elevating Kutesa to the prestigious role of U.N. General Assembly leader and host “would be a mockery of all the ideals that the U.N. is supposed to stand for,” Allimadi says in his petition, which has drawn more than 3,000 signatures.

U.S. Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand and Charles Schumer, who represent the state of New York, the seat of the United Nations, have also expressed concerns about Kutesa’s assuming the post.

“It would be disturbing to see the foreign minister of a country that passed an unjust, harsh and discriminatory law based on sexual orientation preside over the U.N. General Assembly,” Gillibrand said.

Schumer suggested that the U.N. “review Mr. Kutesa’s participation” in enacting the anti-gay law, noting that the U.N. Charter “clearly promotes respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all, without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion.”

Homosexuality has been outlawed in Uganda since it was a British colony. But the punitive law enacted in December has been associated with a 10-fold increase in attacks on gays in the conservative country, the group Sexual Minorities Uganda attested in a report last month carried by Britain’s Guardian newspaper.

Human rights groups that castigated the anti-gay law when it was enacted in February have also criticized the choice of Kutesa to head the General Assembly.

“There are real concerns about Sam Kutesa’s commitment to the values embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, including his defense of Uganda’s profoundly discriminatory anti-homosexuality law,” said Human Rights Watch Africa expert Maria Burnett.

A spokesman for the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Africa Affairs, Will Stevens, said he was not aware whether the petition had been presented to Secretary of State John F. Kerry.

Uganda’s U.N. mission envoys have declined to comment on the controversy, although Western news agencies in the Ugandan capital, Kampala, have reported that Kutesa has rejected the criticism of his nearly three decades in government as based on “a lie.”

Photo: United Nations Photo via Flickr