The longstanding citizenship disputes involving the Banyarwanda have their roots partly in colonial boundaries that divided communities and families without regard to their historical settlements, Gen Salim Saleh has argued.
His examination of Uganda’s nationality question, contained in a proposed national political settlement co-authored with his learned friend Prof Ogenga Otunnu, traces the controversy to territorial boundaries negotiated and repeatedly altered by colonial masters, including Britain, Germany, France and Belgium.
The authors, in the document, explain that these boundaries sometimes cut across related settlements and even individual family compounds, dividing communities that had previously coexisted, traded, intermarried and moved freely across territories.
Saleh identifies the Banyarwanda as one of the people whose nationality and citizenship questions were complicated by these changing colonial frontiers.
He argues that the resulting disputes over nationality, citizenship and statelessness cannot be properly understood without examining the historical circumstances in which the boundaries were created.
The paper further explains that colonial administrative arrangements hardened identities that had previously been fluid and overlapping, creating new grounds for exclusion and political conflict.
The Gulu and Kapeeka man traces how these divisions were subsequently reproduced by successive governments, sometimes through the politicization of ethnic identity and the treatment of particular communities as outsiders.
In his pap, Sale also examines the persecution and expulsion of people labelled as Banyarwanda during the Sir Appolo Milton Obote II period, arguing that the identity category was applied to a broad and fluid population with different historical backgrounds.
The document notes that some Ugandan Banyarwanda were caught up in the wider conflict, with individuals treated as foreigners because of contested ethnic and national identities.
The problem, Saleh says is a result of historical migration, settlement patterns, forced displacement and changing territorial frontiers,further placing the issue within a wider argument that Uganda’s political and social divisions should not automatically be treated as ancient or natural identities, since colonial policies helped manufacture and institutionalize many of them.
The document raises the question of how Uganda can address citizenship-related conflicts without reproducing the exclusion and discrimination that helped create them.
It presents the Banyarwanda experience as an illustration of how questions of national belonging can become sources of political mobilization, marginalization and conflict.
Gen Saleh’s proposed agreement seeks to address such historical grievances through inclusive national cooperation, recognition of marginalized communities and structural measures against exclusion.
