Unruly Vote

And a muddled result

It was supposed to mark the country's full emergence from the dark epoch of Dictator Idi Amin Dada. But Uganda's unruly general election last week, the first in 18 years, only served to plunge the country deeper into its political muddle.

What one member of the British Commonwealth observer group called "the sheer sweep of maladministration" forced interminable queues of voters to wait for more than twelve hours at many polling booths. As a result, there was a second, unscheduled day of balloting. Even as the votes were counted, the ruling military commission headed by Paulo Muwanga first imposed, and then reversed, a highhanded decision to withhold the election results and even nullify them. Finally, after conflicting victory claims by the rival parties, the first official results showed that the apparent winner was the broadly based United People's Congress (U.P.C.), headed by Milton Obote, 56, the shrewd, sometimes ruthless former President who was deposed by Amin in 1971.

Obote was openly backed by Muwanga as well as by Uganda's watchful patron, President Julius Nyerere of neighboring Tanzania. The U.P.C. appeared to have captured at least 66 seats in the 126-seat Parliament, compared with 44 for the Catholic-oriented Democratic Party (D.P.) of Paul Ssemogerere, 48, a U.S.-educated, longtime Obote adversary. The outcome was immediately contested by the D.P., with accusations that Obote had been steamrolled to victory. In reply, the Ugandan Army unleashed a two-hour barrage of gunfire in Kampala to intimidate Ssemogerere's angry supporters.

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