I wanted to post publicly about the Tiananmen Square type
incident that occurred in Ethiopia a few days ago. Then I remembered—I am an
American living in Uganda. Ethiopia is very close by. Their government doesn’t
seem to have any qualms about killing journalists reporting the “wrong”
information. I remember my husband’s deportation. Our lives were uprooted in
every way possible and the proceedings did not make sense or line up with what “normally”
happens. Any small protest/person that sounds somewhat legitimate but comes
into the crosshairs of a regime that handles hundreds of trillions of dollars—there
is no need to sweat about using $100,000 to squash that person and all his relatives.
Considering all things, I think I will let others do the
speaking.
Recently an article about Alfred Olango’s killing by El
Cajon police officers brought back into the limelight particulars about my
husband’s case and the suspicions I’ve had about it since then. But of course
any evidence is classified in some dusty forgotten room in the archives of some
classified department of covert government agency that handles it.
New revelations, from the Olango case, also underscore the
suspicions I have had. My husband had spoken out against the existing Ugandan regime
while in states, during a time when his status was in limbo with immigration. Things
could have gone the other way but consistently despite our efforts and the unimaginable
money we put toward the case, every decision pushed us closer to his deportation.
We were spied on. Angela Minner at the office in Bloomington, had photos of me,
my car, my routine, my house.
Every conversation we ever had before and after that time
was recorded. After Stephen was deported to Uganda, we had an unimaginable amount
of phone calls between the two of us. The clicking on the phone was constant. Those
phone calls likely saved his life. We didn’t completely realize it at the time
but the fear and terror and blame that I verbalized on the phone about the
complete personal financial ruin (of both of us) that followed his deportation
was very real and to anyone spying, eventually it could not have been a
contrived drama. I am sure I mentioned the house I kept at 40 degrees
throughout the whole winter. I am sure I mentioned collecting rainwater from
the roof and cutting the power to most outlets in the house. The bankruptcy. Dumpster
diving for food. All of that terror and loss verbalized over the phone was
followed by easy to find evidence. If all the wife fixates on is financial
ruin, how can this guy be planning a coup?
And yes, that is what all African governments are afraid of—the
coup that topples them from power. How did Lybia fall? U.S. funded insurgents
who had enough bang power and strategic killing to
convince anyone. Remember the guys who tried to topple the regime in Gambia. One
was prosecuted in St. Paul in 2015.
The spies among us.
I remember having a meeting with my restaurant’s business
partners the day Stephen was taken by ICE. I wondered why him, who didn’t have
a criminal history. I suspected a political motive because of how he spoke
against the regime of government. That day, I began to voice that suspicion to my
business partners. The particular response I received from one partner who was
Ugandan was very peculiar and poignant in my memory, in that she emphatically denied such a possibility
even before I was even half-way through my first sentence describing the
suspicion. She was a U.S. resident for years but never got her citizenship and
frequently went back to Uganda. Later, I was told she was a hired spy for the
regime. Why, I queried, would she report her own business partner to the
regime, knowing that it may likely have a negative impact on her investment.
After a year of living in Uganda, I no longer wonder. I repeatedly see people urinate
in their own drinking cups, literally and figuratively speaking.
Once I got to Uganda, and began living with my husband,
there was an older guy who came around repeatedly, seeking small employment opportunities
from my husband. He had the air of someone trying to escape something from
somewhere else. He had a small house he rented from a close neighbor. It was
barely big enough for someone to lay down in. He had a wife somewhere but it
was odd that he lived by himself and cooked for himself and had not much else
to do or reason to be there. We didn’t have anything to hide from him. And so
he watched me there. I fetched water like any other African woman in that
village, while the village ladies sat on their porches and jeered as I went by and my husband's niece who was with me laughed like she was embarrassed. I did masonry work for our compound. The man came over and watched in amazement. I tilled the garden. I did many
things he would never have imagined a woman from U.S. to be doing. Then some
time after, I returned to U.S. he vanished as though he was never there.
Soon after I returned to U.S. after our Ugandan wedding, the
clicking noise on the phone stopped as well.
I discovered from Alfred Olango's case that very few Ugandans who are in deportation proceedings, are
given travel documents by their own country’s embassy in D.C. Only 11
individuals were deported to Uganda in 2015 because specifically only 11 got
travel documents from their embassy. Others couldn’t be deported because they
didn’t get travel documents. So, any others remained in U.S.—refused by their
own country.
The statement from the embassy in relation to Alfred Olango:
“A message seeking
comment from the Ugandan Embassy in Washington was not immediately returned.
The country accepted 11 people who were deported from the U.S. during the 2015
fiscal year but it was unclear how many were denied.”
According to a released report by ICE, about 224,000 individuals were deported from U.S. in the same year my husband was deported, 2010. Let’s say only a few, perhaps 11, even 20 of those were Ugandans—a reasonable estimate, given the 2015 data. It is pretty clear that the government of Uganda has a hand in who gets deported and who does not. Individuals of interest get travel documents, per the orders of the Ugandan government, in liaison with the U.S. government.
http://cis.org/ICE-Illegal-Immigrant-Deportations
The U.S. is the prime location for all the friends and
beneficiaries of the regimes of Africa to go to look around or shop. There were
so many of those that came to my husband’s restaurant. Friends of Zimbabwe’s
Mugabe would come and “talk politics” as they spent major money on drinks and
food, while the Zimbabwean waitress would hide in the back. She feared any
retaliation they might exact for any comment on her family back in Zimbabwe. I
even have a photo of a Nigerian MP sleeping in a hotel bed as a friend and I
were eating chicken and taking selfies with her in the background.
What should we make of this? Certainly, there is the
economic and trade conclusions that the author of The World is Flat arrive
at. But politically and from a military stance, how it is now possible to live and
be a citizen in a country and fire bullets against its military, as it exchanges
fire with the militia you join, in your homeland, while on holiday.
Politically, some can make everything work together to assist them while others
get caught in the cross-hairs, while governments secretly negotiate with each other, exchanging pawns. But really, none of this happened. Truly, you did not see this.
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