Netanyahu statue at Entebbe is an assault on Uganda’s sovereignty, constitutional order

Public monuments are more than stone and bronze. They are official declarations of a nation’s historical memory.

They tell future generations whom the State chooses to honour, what values it chooses to celebrate, and what version of history it chooses to preserve. They are not mere works of art; they are constitutional expressions of national identity.

For that reason, the reported erection of a monument at the Old Entebbe International Airport terminal in honour of Lt. Col. Yonatan Netanyahu – the Israeli commander killed during the July 4, 1976 Entebbe raid raises issues that extend far beyond diplomacy.

It touches the Constitution, the rule of law, Uganda’s sovereignty and the integrity of our national historical memory.

If, as publicly reported, this monument has been erected at the direction of the Chief of Defence Forces, Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba, without any publicly disclosed civilian approval or lawful process, it represents a disturbing departure from constitutional government. Public authorities derive their powers from law, not personal preference.

Decisions affecting Uganda’s official historical memory cannot properly rest upon the unilateral discretion of a serving military commander. Demanding the removal of this monument is therefore not political theatre. It is the minimum required to defend constitutional governance, national dignity and institutional accountability.

Rule by Law or Rule by Personal Decree?

Uganda is a constitutional republic founded upon the principle that all public power must be exercised according to law. Public land, national infrastructure, state symbolism and foreign policy are matters of public authority exercised through constitutionally established civilian institutions.

No publicly identified statutory or other legal authority empowers the Chief of Defence Forces to unilaterally determine whom Uganda should immortalise on State land. Nor has any public explanation been offered identifying Cabinet approval, parliamentary oversight, or a lawful administrative process authorising the dedication of public airport property to honour a foreign military commander.

The constitutional principle is straightforward: every public power must have a lawful source. Where no legal authority has been demonstrated, executive action becomes impossible to reconcile with the rule of law and the principle of legality that lies at the heart of constitutional governance.

The Constitution deliberately subordinates the military to civilian constitutional authority. While the Uganda People’s Defence Forces performs indispensable national functions, decisions concerning State symbolism, public memorialisation and the nation’s historical narrative belong to civilian government acting under law.

Constitutional democracies distinguish military professionalism from political and symbolic authority for precisely this reason. This raises another constitutional question: by what legal authority does the Chief of Defence Forces determine Uganda’s official historical memory?

The symbolism is equally troubling. The State appears prepared to honour the commander of a foreign military force that entered Uganda without consent while offering no comparable national recognition to the Ugandan soldiers who lost their lives defending Entebbe Airport in the course of their military duties.

Whatever one thinks of the government of President Idi Amin, those soldiers died defending Ugandan territory against foreign military force. Public monuments should unite a nation around its constitutional values. They should not celebrate events that remain deeply contested within Uganda’s own historical experience.

Parliament – specifically through the Committee on Foreign Affairs together with the Committee on Defence and Internal Affairs – should immediately exercise its constitutional oversight responsibilities by investigating the legal and administrative basis upon which this monument was authorised.

Where no statutory framework exists governing the erection of physical monuments on public land, Parliament should establish a clear legal regime to ensure that national memory is protected from arbitrary executive decree.

Operation Entebbe and International Law

For half a century, Operation Thunderbolt has been celebrated in much of the Western world as one of history’s greatest hostage rescue missions. Yet international law demands a more rigorous examination than popular mythology.

Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter prohibits the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of another State. Israeli military aircraft entered Ugandan airspace without Uganda’s consent and carried out an armed assault on Ugandan territory.

In the circumstances then prevailing, the operation amounted to an act of aggression against a sovereign African State. Israel defended the raid as a rescue mission undertaken to protect its nationals. That justification is, however, deeply contested. In Uganda’s case, diplomatic efforts involving third-party mediation and proposals for a negotiated prisoner exchange were reportedly underway before military force was employed. Israel chose unilateral military intervention rather than allowing the diplomatic process to run its course.

The Organization of African Unity vigorously condemned the raid before the United Nations Security Council as a violation of Uganda’s sovereignty. The principle at stake extended far beyond Uganda. It concerned whether powerful States may unilaterally violate the territorial integrity of weaker nations whenever they deem it expedient.

Against that background, honouring the commander of the attacking force on Ugandan soil asks Ugandans to celebrate the violation of their own sovereignty. A Republic should never be expected to commemorate, at the very site of the incursion, the commander of the force that breached its borders by military means.

The Politics of Selective Humanity

The monument also reflects a broader ideological shift in Uganda’s external orientation. Prof Mahmood Mamdani has demonstrated how the global “War on Terror” frequently strips political conflicts of their historical and colonial context, recasting struggles over occupation, dispossession and self-determination into simplistic narratives of civilisation confronting terrorism.

Prof Yash Tandon similarly argues that contemporary imperial power assigns unequal value to human life: Western victims evoke universal outrage and mobilisation, while African, Arab and Palestinian suffering is too often normalised or dismissed.

In advancing that critique, Tandon draws upon disclosures by Edward Snowden and the wider historical record of Western intervention in the Middle East to argue that powerful intelligence establishments have, at different moments, manipulated or fostered militant proxy forces before invoking the resulting instability to legitimise permanent security interventions.

Whether one accepts every aspect of that thesis or not, Tandon’s broader warning is unmistakable: imperial power often manufactures the crises through which it later justifies its dominance.

That wider critique casts the Entebbe monument in a different light. It elevates a foreign military commander to official honour while the Ugandan soldiers who died defending their own country remain largely absent from the nation’s commemorative landscape. It reinforces a hierarchy in which foreign military power is glorified while African sovereignty is diminished.

Foreign Policy Abroad, Suspicion at Home

Uganda’s increasingly close security alignment with Israel also carries significant domestic implications.

For many years, respected Muslim leaders – including Prince Dr. Kassim Nakibinge, the late Sheikh Nuhu Muzaata, Dr. Anas Kaliisa and others – have voiced concern over what they perceive as the disproportionate targeting of Muslim communities under the banner of counter-terrorism. Similar concerns have also been expressed by opposition leaders, including Robert Kyagulanyi.

The killings of several prominent Muslim clerics, allegations surrounding illegal detention facilities, including Nalufenya, and persistent claims of religious profiling have fuelled perceptions of unequal treatment that have never been satisfactorily addressed through transparent judicial processes.

Against that background, publicly honouring an Israeli military commander – whose Prime Minister is the subject of an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court, and whose armed forces stand accused by United Nations agencies of extensive civilian destruction and grave violations of international humanitarian law in Gaza – cannot be regarded as a politically neutral act. For many Ugandans, particularly within the Muslim community, it communicates insensitivity to their legitimate concerns and reinforces perceptions of unequal citizenship.

Transactional Survival and the Abandonment of Principle

The monument must also be understood within the broader context of Uganda’s contemporary foreign policy. Governments rarely make symbolic decisions of this magnitude without calculating political returns.

For a government confronting sustained criticism over constitutionalism, governance, electoral integrity and human rights, strategic alignment with Israel could be aimed at enhanced security cooperation, access to sophisticated surveillance capabilities, military technology and valuable political influence in important Western capitals.

The monument is therefore not merely a historical tribute. It is a political signal. It communicates an opportunistic willingness to subordinate Uganda’s long-held commitments to anti-colonial solidarity and sovereign equality in pursuit of strategic partnerships that strengthen regime survival and international legitimacy.

The irony is profound. The National Resistance Movement came to power proclaiming Pan-Africanism, national liberation and resistance to foreign domination. Four decades later, Uganda finds itself publicly celebrating the commander of a foreign military force that violated its own territory.

As Chair of the Non-Aligned Movement, Uganda bears a special responsibility to defend the principles upon which that movement was founded: sovereign equality, territorial integrity, non-intervention and resistance to imperial domination. The Netanyahu monument raises fundamental questions about Uganda’s continued commitment to each of those principles.

Whether viewed as diplomacy or symbolism, the message is unmistakable: transactional political survival has increasingly displaced constitutional and ideological principle as the organising logic of the State.

The Monument Must Fall

A nation that diminishes its own sovereignty cannot credibly demand that others respect it.

If the Government believes this monument rests upon lawful authority, it should disclose the legal basis upon which it was authorised. If no such authority exists, it should be removed.

This debate is not about revisiting the politics of 1976. It is about preserving the constitutional principles that govern Uganda today.

History remembers nations not merely by the monuments they erect but by the principles those monuments proclaim. A Republic founded upon the ideals of sovereignty and national liberation should never honour, on its own soil, the commander of a foreign force that violated its territorial integrity.

To do so is to confuse power with principle, expediency with patriotism, and political convenience with constitutional fidelity.

For those reasons, the monument should be removed.

The writer is a senior advocate and former State Minister for Foreign Affairs.