SUMMARY
NRA (National Resistance Army) – initially PRA (People’s Resistance Army) – was a rebel group that fought the Ugandan government in a conflict over government power in the early and mid-1980s. The group emerged in the aftermath of the ousting of former president Idi Amin; having reached their common goal of overthrowing Amin, the disparate winning coalition UNLF failed to formulate a continued joint strategy and power struggles ensued. One of the individuals that became increasingly sidelined in post-Amin Uganda was Yoweri Museveni, who had led the rebel group Fronasa in the armed conflict against the former dictator. Fronasa had joined the broad-based UNLF just before the fall of Amin, and its soldiers became increasingly marginalized in the new national army, which was dominated by the former rebel group Kikosi Maalum. Also politically, Museveni fared poorly. In June 1980, he formed a new party, UPM (Uganda Patriotic Movement), to contest the national elections that were to be held on 10 December the same year. In the atmosphere of distrust and factionalism that characterized the run-up to the elections, Museveni pledged to launch an armed struggle against any government that assumed power through a rigged election. When Milton Obote’s party UPC (Uganda People’s Congress) won a majority of the votes, Museveni consequently claimed that the elections had been “rigged in advance” and vanished from sight, only to reappear in February 1981 with his newly formed rebel group, the PRA (Popular Resistance Army). In mid-1981, PRA was joined by former UNLF leader Yusufu Lule’s UFF (Uganda Freedom Fighters), and received the name NRA. Ideologically, the group was left wing, and it propagated for a protracted people’s war, which would give it time to educate the population and prepare them for a revolutionary transformation of the country’s political system.
Yoweri Museveni was the founder and leader of NRA, and the deputy chair of NRM (National Resistance Movement), the organization’s separate political wing. Former UNLF leader Yusufu Lule, who had also been president for a brief period following the ouster of Idi Amin in 1979, was chairman of NRM. NRA was not controlled by NRM during the time of the armed conflict, wherefore the political wing is not listed in UCDP. Initially, NRA’s fighters were grouped into six zonal forces that were named after African leaders that Museveni admired: Kabalega, Abdel Nasser, Nkurumah, Mondlane, Mwanga and Luttamaguzi. In 1982, these six were joined by a mobile force, which grew rapidly, first into a brigade and then a division by the time Kampala fell in 1986. The zonal forces were to guard and defend NRA zones, whereas the mobile force was to launch offensives. NRA put a lot of emphasis on organizing the local population as a means to be able to fight a protracted people’s war in line with its Marxist convictions. Thus, so-called Resistance Councils (RCs) were launched among the population as sources of food and intelligence, but also as a way to spread NRA’s ideas. During some periods in the conflict, NRA was able to establish parallel governing structures in areas where the Ugandan government no longer had a presence. In these areas, NRA resolved that villagers were to replace their secret RCs with elected village and parish RCs that would manage a range of issues autonomously.
At the time of the emergence of NRA, ethnicity was highly politicized in Uganda; the country had seen a longstanding pattern of political elites manipulating ethnic and regional differences in order to legitimate their claim to power. In this context, NRA stood out in that it claimed to transcend ethnicity. In fact, the group held that Uganda could not become truly democratic without the removal of politicians and military officers who maintained power by manipulating sectarian cleavages of religion, region and ethnicity. However, despite this official stance, NRA needed to relate to and interact with a society that was in fact very much defined by ethnic politics and it was also clear that the group could benefit from this. While Museveni himself was from the south-western Banyakole ethnic group, he did not opt to base the rebellion on his home turf, in Mbarara District, but rather on Baganda territory, roughly 65-100 km north of the capital Kampala, in an area that later came to be referred to as the Luwero Triangle. The Baganda is the largest ethnic group in Uganda, and by utilizing the very structures that it criticized, NRA was able to recruit among the group and to build up substantial popular support. A main factor that worked in Museveni’s favor was the fact that Yusufu Lule was a Baganda, and with him as designated Chairman, NRA’s political acceptance increased greatly among the ethnically conscious Baganda. Second, the Baganda as a group had a long history of hostility to Milton Obote; during his first stint in power, Obote had abolished the group’s subnational kingdom, Buganda, exiling the king, something he was never forgiven for. NRA was able to utilize this hostility.
While the Luwero Triangle was the center of NRA for the first years of its struggle, the group expanded its reach as time passed. In April 1985, an NRA column walked some 200 km and set up a base in the Rwenzori Mountains in western Uganda. Soon thereafter, it took control of Kabarole and Bundibugyo districts and then the rest of the western region.
The size of NRA changed significantly over the course of the conflict. At the time of its first attack in 1981, the group consisted of 35 people, all of whom were former Fronasa fighters. The attack led to the desertion from the national army of additional former Fronasa soldiers, who opted to join the nascent rebellion. Furthermore, large numbers of students in Makerere University and other institutions were recruited. However, the bulk of new recruits came from villages in the Luwero Triangle, swelling the ranks of the group to around 900 by the end of the year. Over the following years, the group continued to recruit heavily, reaching some 20 000 prior to it succeeding to oust the government in January 1986. One important sub-group within NRA was some 500 Rwandan refugees; they were descendants of Tutsis who had left Rwanda to escape Hutu purges. They were led by Fred Rwigyema, who went on to become Deputy Minister of Defense when NRA seized power. Some years later, in 1990, this group of battle-hardened Rwandans would make up the back-bone of the Tutsi rebel group FPR, as it invaded Rwanda.
At the time of the birth of NRA, Uganda as a whole was going through a very turbulent period, and the group co-existed with numerous other armed challengers to the government. Despite this, and probably due to the disparate nature of the organizations, there was very little coordination between them. However, NRA was involved in one attempt at coordinating the armed struggle. In 1981, the leadership of the group met with fellow rebel groups UFM and UNRF under the sponsorship and Chairmanship of the Libyan leader Col. Gaddafi. The talks led to the signing of the Tripoli Agreement, under which the Ugandan Popular Front was formed as an umbrella organization intended to unite the three movements. However, Ugandan Popular Front failed to materialize on the ground, and NRA, UFM and UNRF subsequently simply opted to maintain good relations. Aside from helping to unite the rebel forces, Libya also assisted NRA by providing much needed arms.
On 26 January 1986, NRA succeeded in capturing Kampala from the government troops. The former army fled north, and NRA became the Ugandan government, thus ceasing to exist as an independent entity in UCDP data.
