Uganda’s army chief tells Turks to leave the country and orders a protest at the Turkish Embassy on 18 September.
Uganda’s Chief of Defence Forces, Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba, said on Wednesday he has cut all ties with Turkish interests in Uganda and wants Turkish nationals to leave. He also ordered supporters to demonstrate at the Turkish Embassy in Kampala on 18 September.
“I have already severed ANYTHING to do with the Turks in Uganda. They should pack their bags as soon as possible and get out of our country,” he wrote on X.
About two hours later he named the protest and the person to run it.
“We are demonstrating in full force at the Turkish Embassy on the 18th of September. Hon. Fadhil is in charge of this demonstration. PLU better do a good job. My order will not change this time. Instead we will arrest ANY Turkish agent who says anything different!”
PLU is the Patriotic League of Uganda, the political group he chairs. Supporters replied that the order had been received. There was no matching statement from Uganda’s Foreign Ministry or from President Yoweri Museveni, his father.
This is not a new fight
Muhoozi has been attacking Turkey in public for months. In April he demanded $1 billion from Ankara over Uganda’s military role in Somalia and threatened to close the embassy and block Turkish Airlines.
In June he claimed Uganda had cancelled a multi-billion-dollar Standard Gauge Railway contract with Turkish firm Yapi Merkezi, gave Turkish citizens 30 days to leave, and called for earlier embassy protests that were later postponed. A central demand in that dispute was that Turkey hand over, or expel, Ugandan critic Fred Lumbuye.
Wednesday’s posts restart that campaign with a new date and a threat to arrest anyone from the Turkish side who “says anything different.”
What is not clear
Muhoozi is the country’s top soldier and a senior presidential adviser. He is not the foreign minister. His posts do not, on their own, amount to a formal government expulsion order.
What they do amount to is an instruction to his political network to mass outside a foreign embassy in nine days, after months of the same quarrel.