When I turned 26: first birthday Calgary

Today I woke up early in morning took a shower, dodged all the ceremony of a regular sunday and went downtown.
Mission?

I wanted to watch soccer. It was the huge European derby weekend. Everton was hosting Liverpool, Barcelona playing Madrid in a historical El Classico. Arsenal was hosting Chelsea. In Italy, Fiorentina was playing Inter Milan and these days that is a big game too.

But first I have to introduce you to the importance of a day like this one to a person like me. Where I grew up from-there's no one particular place but I like to refer to Kansanga because it is one of the coolest places on earth I have lived. Soccer provided for the most normal entertainment, I lived close to a place called Half London which hosted local concerts regulary. Most of Uganda's musicains made their bones in the industry when I was watching.

Later, I worked for Sabrina's pub on Bombo road in 2001, I was in high school vacation.
Sabrina's pub not only served the best traditional lunch buffet in Kampala, it was also a joint where most of Uganda's biggest music stars started their careers from. The pub/restaurant advertised itself as 'more than just a pub' and its famed Friday night karaoke was a huge hit in the country's low income earning and mildly educated residents of the city from the 1990s to mod 200s.

Current music giants like Bebe Cool, Jose Chameleon and Juliana Kanyomozi started singing in Sabrina's. With Chameleon I was even closer because I happened to have gone to the same seconday school as him in Katikamu. I grew up surrounded by music. The first and biggest show I loved really was Maddox Ssemetimba, the Ugandan-Swedish reggea maestro.


Therefre, from a start having worked in a music pub and lived near Kampala's party district of Kabalagala and Kansanga I got bored with the whole shebang of night clubs early in my life.

 Yet as I joined university in 2002 I got a parrt time gig as a theme night promoter at Club Silk. All I did really was go to Silk Royale, meet Andrew Rwakojo or Rwakakoko something like that, he would give me compliment tickets which I would then take to anyone I chose in Kampala and offer them a night of dance and booze on the house.

  In my first year, I used to sell these tickets to my classmates and later friends and later I got bored and giulty that I was leading fellow students to lifestyles where they would get into dangers, there were lots of free/cheap beers that was esecially common on Tuesday Campus nights.

In all this it is only soccer that gave me genuine entertainment, I was not alone, there were other people in my neighbourhood that were addicted to soccer as much I was. Most were young professionals that I liked to call yuppies, there were middle income earning people, the illetrate lot, the Kikubo business people etc.

Soccer for me was not just watching matches on TV, occassionally I actually played in some village teams just for dropping a sweat, but the kind I watched on live TV was mainly for ESCAPE purposes from my daily tribulations of life.

In fact I was not your avarage mad fan, I never shouted in arguments about soccer, I never had one particular team with which to identify-and this is a sin in soccer fellowships like in religions, I LOVED soccer sometimes for giving me an opportunity to drink beer as well.

As I grew and stopped doing pub jobs, my lifestyle changed too.
First my best friend Giusseppe Kizito joined ProLine Soccer Academy as a physiotherapist. I and Giusseppe shared a passionate love for sports, so much that Giussepe, upon admission to Makerere University on a Bachelor of Arts degree course decided to break off after a year and resumed the following year to pursue a Bachelor of Sport Science degree. Upon completing his course and getting his first job with the highly anticipated Proline Soccer Academy by MUjib Kasule, Giusseppe was stabbed by his brother to death on 12 July 2007.

Bu at some point I lost the enthuthiasm for soccer, this is because the English premiership was taking over every avaliable space of commercial radio, magazines and any other social environment. All the time radio presenters outdid themsleves in showing their listners as their competence in premiership analysis.

I feared I was becoming a hooked consumer.

By English premiership however the thing that Ugandans actually watched was only Manchester United, Arsenal, Chelsea and Liverpool. It was the madness between Manchester United and Arsenal fans that made the whole soccer craze become irritating for me. It was even more annoying whenever Arsenal was playing on a particular day, there would be nothing else for alternatives. In case one was not a fan of Arsenal. (Arsenal has a very large following in East Africa,) whenever the club is playing you'd be excused for thinking that some East Africans are actual shareholders to the thing or they are all English from London.

Earleir I had also moved to Rwanda and I had also acquired a regular fixture of my life. I'd work the whole week and spend Saturday and Sunday in a pub watching soccer.
When I moved to Rwanda in 2006 it became quite a puzzle as there were not many sports bars, but James (the tall man from Masisi) had introduced me to a couple of pubs in Remera where I'd watch soccer. After I moved from the Remera part of town to Nyamirambo I lived next to the biggest and only movie theatre in Kigali so I solved my soccer search forays in the city centre, stopped going to PanAfrique in Kigali city centre as well as visiting with Rastaman Seif Bizimana. Oh I remember the torturous days at the Kimironko market pubs and the rude people at Medi's Motel.

In 2008 I moved again from Rwanda to Tanzania and even there I had issues having a decent sports bar in which to catch soccer. The only two exceptional memories I have of Tanzania were watching the 2008 UEFA Champions' League Final between Manchester United and Chelsea at a pub near Diamond guesthouse/Inn in Arusha.
Watching the UERO 2008 Finals at Via Via pub near the ICTR where I worked.
I also cherish the memory of Charlotte Kingsman, but that is a story for another day!!!'

Eerly this year I moved to North America, I arrived here in February when it was time for the 2009 Superbowl. This most important of sports events in North America was pittying the Pittsburgh Steelers against the Arizona Cardinals.
I watched the game at Robin Honderich's apartment in downtown Toronto. Robin is the son of John Honderich, chairman of Torstar Publishing group, the same man that is responsible for my coming to America.

The match-to people familiar with the game of American football was a beautiful one, I for one did not know any of the rules, but there was great beer at Robin' house. He had his freinds over as well and so I met some young Canadains in Toronto for the first time and shared the experience of a big match-North American style.
Honderich senior had also prepared very good chilli sauce and though the food was still a challenge for me at the start, I liked his dish. The Steelers won the match. After the match I was informed that what I had witnessed was a big cultural expereince in North America. The Superbowl is a very important fixture in North American life. I have listened to passionate conversations about the thing.
Today I was reminded of a big match, (superbowl) as well as cultural experiences-the way I understand it anyway.

As I mentioned earlier, I had been planning since the begining of November as to where I will be watching the 2009 EL Classico, Merseyside as well as the London derbies from. These are the most important of matches, save for Manchester United-Liverpool for a soccer enthusiast.

Since everything in North America starts with the internet I had earlier researched about soccer pubs in the city and came to the conclusion that Ship and Anchor, a pub in the city's downtown core was it. It would be my place of abode on many weekends.

Today I wake up at 7pm, an anormally on a sunday, and head to the bus stand. I get to the pub when the Chelsea and Arsenal match is left with only 15 minutes to end.
I sit and wait for the start of the big one. The all important El Classico.
Unfortunately, today was a day of the Canadian equivalent of the superbowl, after the London derby the TV was switched off and the pub staff feigned genuine interest in searching the channels that were screening the Nou Camp match. I moved from the pub, but after savouring the very well prepared Ship Burger that cost me a whooping 10 dollars!!!!

I visited four different sports pubs and they were all screening the previews of the Grey Cup where a team from Montreal was playing one from Saskachewan, the Montreal team won the game in a very close final minutes of the match. 27-28.
Hopefully the next derby weekend will be better for me.
Today I turned 29.

Eastern DR Congo: EX Nkunda lieutenant forms new rebel mov't

BY JOSH KRON
Nation Media Correspondent
Great Lakes Region

CONGO - As the rape and death tolls mount in military offensives against Hutu rebels in eastern Congo, a key leader of the military campaign is forming his own paramilitary group, the United Nations has said.

Nearly a year after being installed in a senior position in the Congolese armed forces, former rebel-general Bosco Ntaganda has formed with other the Front for the Liberation and Emancipation of the Congo (FLEC). The group has not started war, but is institutionalizing control over regions of eastern Congo, particularly Masisi territory in North Kivu province.

Unlike some other rebel groups in the Congo – including Mr. Ntaganda’s Tutsi-led National Congress for the People Defense (CNDP) who wrecked havoc on the country last year – FLEC does not appear to be built along ethnic lines.

Violence both against and between Hutu and Tutsi in eastern Congo have broiled the region in an on-again-off-again struggle that, over the last fifteen years, has directly and indirectly led to millions dead.

While it remains unclear whether FLEC will be an armed insurgency or just a way to make more money, the emergence of the group is the latest sign that the CNDP is breaking up, and the Congo’s army is unraveling in its yearlong war against Rwandan Hutu rebels.

“It appears to incorporate other dissatisfied elements associated with some Mai-Mai armed groups,” said spokesperson Jean-Paul Dietrich.

“According to local sources, FLEC was established because of the reported refusal of pro-Nkunda elements and the former political leadership of the party to associate CNDP with the reported Coalition pour la protection et la promotion du Congo (CPPC).”

Mr. Ntaganda, who became military commander of the CNDP at the beginning of the year when its charismatic Laurent Nkunda was arrested by Rwanda, was supposed to lead the group into integration with the Congolese national army, along with a menagerie of other rebel groups and splinter factions.

In the United Nations-backed offensive against the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda – Hutu rebels accused of orchestrating the 1994 Rwandan genocide – Mr. Ntaganda is accused of playing a senior role. In South Kivu, where the bulk of the fighting is focused, Ntaganda’s CNDP lieutenants are the ones doing the finding and the killing.

But now, he and other CNDP officers are spending their time organizing FLEC and already control some of North Kivu’s most fertile grounds, including large swaths of Masisi territory that the United Nations says Mr. Ntaganda and FLEC look to control entirely.

“The people are forced to pay exorbitant taxes,” said the United Nations this week. “Officials justify the provision of first by the need to assist the war-wounded ex-CNDP.”

And there’s no much that can be done, saying that the police in the region were “neither equipped nor paid” by the Kinshasa government.

For years, Rwanda and Congo have battled over the presence of Rwandan genocide suspects hiding out on Congolese soil, killers that fled after the Rwandan genocide. Rwanda’s own military has repeatedly invaded the Congo in pursuit and have left behind residual militias to do the fighting for them.

Last year, things began to get out of hand, when one of these generals, Mr. Nkunda went on a strong offensive in North Kivu, taking important parts of the province and coming within a few kilometers of the capital Goma. The Congolese military didn’t stand a chance, instead fleeing with civilians from the oncoming rebel group, looting, killing and raping in the process.

It all changed, investigators have argued when Rwanda and Congo struck a deal that placed Ntaganda in the drivers seat and Mr. Nkunda supposedly behind bars. Now, the Congolese army was no longer fighting the CNDP, but the Hutu rebels, and in the process Ntaganda and his troops took command of the war.

It’s been a sweet role of reversal for Mr. Ntaganda. According to the United Nations Panel of Experts report leaked Tuesday, he is making hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in illegal tax revenues from the lands he patrols. His elite CNDP that follow him; 60,000.

But as the atrocities mount, Ntaganda has been losing friends. The people who put him in power – including Rwanda – have not gone out of their way to keep all the soldiers below him in line and, as the The New York Times has reported, much of the region has descended into ‘warlordism.’

From Mai-Mai generals to FDLR splinters, new groups have sprung and popped, since the beginning of the year, feeding off each other like water wheels. 

A spokesperson for the United Nation in Congo said that the latest developments reflected a “possible division within the CNDP itself,” those working with Ntaganda, and those loyal to the arrested Laurent Nkunda, who remains in Rwanda, somewhere. 

“He is our man, he always will be,” says Claude Mutebutsi, a Congolese Tutsi originally from South Kivu. He insists Nkunda wasn’t simply sponsored by Rwanda. According to him, “95%” are still faithful to Mr. Nkunda, who has acquired a Che Guevara-like mystique with his constituents.

The political arm of the CNDP – Nkunda had said he was fighting for the protection of Congolese Tutsi – has accomplished little on paper since peace agreement that culminated integration into the army. Two party members are in parliament.

Mr. Ntaganda’s new group is the latest manifestation in a breakup of the CNDP that has been ongoing for months. The first incarnation was the Coalition for the Promotion and Protection of the Congo. Initially built around Ntaganda and other CNDP soldiers, it fell apart due to deteriorating support for Mt. Ntaganda.

Now, it seems, he is making shrewd utilitarian choices with his supposed enemies as his traditional friends dwindle.

Rwanda joins the Commonwealth

BY JOSH KRON
Nation Media
Rwanda

Rwanda has been formally accepted into the British Commonwealth, becoming the 54^th nation to join the post-colonial group after a two-year bid, Rwandan government officials were told this weekend.

The Commonwealth members summit, held in the Caribbean island-state of Trinidad & Tobago, reportedly admitted the Central African country after it applied for membership in 2008.

News of the admission was first made public by a spokesperson for the Rwandan government late Saturday night, ahead of announcement from the Commonwealth itself, who had given the Rwandan government formal news of the admission.

“The government sees this accession as recognition of the tremendous progress this country has made in the last 15 years,” Rwanda’s government spokesperson Louise Mushikiwabo said in the capital Kigali.

Rwanda’s foreign minister, Rosemary Museminali, said a longer statement to the press would be made available later Sunday.

Announcement from the Commonwealth itself is due this evening, but Rwanda’s envoy to the conference had been given formal notice of the admission. 

Along with Mozambique, who joined the group in 1995, Rwanda became the second nation without any formal historical ties to Great Britain to join the group, came under scrutiny due to criticisms of its human-rights policy.

The country’s ascension to the club marks an acme for its post-genocide development and President Paul Kagame’s drive to sharply redefine Rwanda’s orientation towards the English-speaking world. In 2007 the country, along with Burundi, joined the East African Community. :Last year, all sectors of government and education adopted English as the official, operating language.

Rwanda was first colonized by Germany in the late 19^th century and then by the Belgians. The country later held close ties to France, which were severed after the 1994 Rwandan genocide by President Paul Kagame’s current government. France is accuse of playing a key role in the build up and arming of the genocidal government that killed 1 million Tutsi.

Much of the current government was raised as refugees in Uganda and since then, Uganda has been one of Rwanda’s biggest backers to join the Commonwealth group.