Ugandan president's son compares Sudan's RSF to Hitler following meeting with his father

The son of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and chief of the country’s armed forces has launched an extraordinary attack on the leader of Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary, who recently met with his father in Uganda.

“Hemedti is a criminal,” Muhoozi Kainerugaba tweeted on Sunday night, referring to RSF chief Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo. “He has the blood of thousands of black people on his hands.

“RSF feels like heroes for killing innocent black people. Very good. I bet Hitler felt like a hero too for gassing Jews in Auschwitz,” he posted.

Kainerugaba, who is the head of the Uganda People’s Defence Force and is widely expected to take over from his father as president when Museveni dies, wrote that the “RSF will have to fight the whole of Black Africa before they win in Sudan. And that will NEVER happen.”

The Ugandan general broke off from his diatribe against the RSF to reveal that he wanted to build a statue of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s brother Yoni, an Israeli military commander who died in 1976 during the Entebbe raid to release Israeli captives from the Ugandan airport.

“For the last 4 years, My God Jesus Christ has appeared to me in dreams and visions. He told me to build a statue to Yoni Netanyahu in Entebbe. And not to fear the world. He is stronger than the world!” Kainerugaba posted on X. 

Both Kainerugaba and his father, Museveni, enjoy close ties with Israeli leaders, including Netanyahu, even though the Ugandan president persistently referred to Israel as Palestine during a 2016 speech at Entebbe to mark the 40th anniversary of the Israeli operation in which Yoni Netanyahu died.

In 2020, Museveni, along with his wife Janet, brokered a ground-breaking meeting between Netanyahu and Sudanese army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, which was seen as the beginning of normalising relations between the two countries.

Middle East Eye has previously reported on the friendship between Kainerugaba and Barak Orland, an Israeli businessman who has lived in Uganda for close to two decades and has been described as an arms dealer.

One of Orland’s companies, Bar Aviation, has been implicated in supplying the RSF in Sudan through flights out of Entebbe International Airport and Kajjansi Airfield. 

Another of his companies, the security company Yamasec, employs former members of the Israeli army and Israeli intelligence agencies. 

Kainerugaba has a reputation for flamboyant outbursts on social media, and his recent barrage of posts came in the middle of the night local time. 

The 51-year-old once tweeted that it would take two weeks for him and his men to conquer Kenya, a comment his father had to apologise for.

More recently, during the Ugandan elections that returned Museveni to power for a seventh term, he posted about killing opposition supporters and threatened to have the testicles of rival candidate Bobi Wine removed.

RSF chief Hemedti in Uganda

Museveni met Hemedti on Friday at his presidential home, which is also in Entebbe. While in Uganda, Hemedti admitted that the RSF was using Colombian “drone operators”.

In a statement, Museveni said: “As always, I emphasised that dialogue and a peaceful political solution are the only sustainable paths to stability for Sudan and the region.”

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Sudan’s foreign ministry, which backs the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) in the war against the RSF, condemned the meeting as an insult to humanity and the Sudanese people. 

The war in Sudan began in April 2023 and has spiralled into the world’s widest humanitarian catastrophe. The RSF, which holds most of western Sudan, including the region of Darfur, has been widely accused of committing genocide against non-Arab groups there.

While Egypt, Turkey and now Saudi Arabia and Qatar support the SAF, the RSF has long enjoyed the patronage of the United Arab Emirates. 

Uganda, like Kenya and Ethiopia, is considered to be in the UAE’s orbit and more supportive of the RSF. 

With the government of Somalia forcing the UAE to withdraw from bases in the breakaway Somali regions of Puntland and Somaliland, countries like Uganda are now seen as being more important for Emirati supply lines.