[citation needed] Conflict surfaced immediately between Lule and some of the more radical of the council members who saw him as too conservative, too autocratic, and too willing as a Muganda to listen to advice from other Baganda.
After only three months, with the apparent approval of Julius Nyerere, whose troops still controlled Kampala, Lule was forcibly removed from office and exiled.
Indeed, the quarrels within the NCC, which Binaisa enlarged to 127 members, revealed that many rival and would-be politicians who had returned from exile were resuming their self-interested operating styles.
Binaisa managed to stay in office longer than Lule, but his inability to gain control over a burgeoning new military presence proved to be his downfall.
The coup was engineered by Ojok, Museveni, and others acting under the general direction of Paulo Muwanga, Obote's right-hand man and chair of the Military Commission.
The TPDF was still providing necessary security while Uganda's police force, which had been all but destroyed by Amin, was rebuilt, but Nyerere refused to help Binaisa retain power.
Many Ugandans claimed that although Nyerere did not impose his own choice on Uganda, he indirectly facilitated the return to power of his old friend and ally, Milton Obote.
For a country desperately seeking funds for economic recovery from the excesses of the previous military regime, this allocation seemed unreasonable to civilian leaders.
Because the Military Commission, as the acting government, was dominated by Obote supporters (notably chairman Paulo Muwanga), the DP and other contenders faced formidable obstacles.
[2]In February 1981, shortly after the new Obote government took office, with Paulo Muwanga as vice president and minister of defense, a former Military Commission member, Yoweri Museveni, and his armed supporters declared themselves the National Resistance Army (NRA).
The Obote government's four-year military effort to destroy its challengers resulted in vast areas of devastation and greater loss of life than during the eight years of Amin's rule.
Although they were survivors of Amin's genocidal purges of north-east Uganda, in the 1980s they were armed and in uniform, conducting similar actions against Bantu-speaking Ugandans in the south, with whom they appeared to feel no empathy or even pity.
In early 1983, to eliminate rural support for Museveni's guerrillas the area of Luwero District, north of Kampala, was targeted for a massive population removal affecting almost 750,000 people.
Civilian loss of life was extensive, as evidenced some years later by piles of human skulls in bush clearings and alongside rural roads.
Bordering Sudan, West Nile had provided the ethnic base for much of Idi Amin's earlier support and had enjoyed relative prosperity under his rule.
Despite these activities, Obote's government, unlike Amin's regime, was sensitive to its international image and realized the importance of securing foreign aid for the nation's economic recovery.
He devalued the Ugandan shilling by 100 percent, attempted to facilitate the export of cash crops, and postponed any plans he may once have entertained for re-establishing one-party rule.
The government's inability to eliminate Museveni and win the civil war, however, sapped its economic strength, and the occupation of a large part of the country by an army hostile to the Ugandans living there furthered discontent with the regime.
Amnesty International, a human rights organization, issued a chilling report of routine torture of civilian detainees at military barracks scattered across southern Uganda.
North Korean military advisers were invited to take part against the NRA rebels in what was to be a final campaign that won neither British nor United States approval.
But the army was warweary, and after the death of the highly capable General Oyite Ojok in a helicopter accident at the end of 1983, it began to split along ethnic lines.
In the end, he appointed a Lango to the post and attempted to counter the objection of Acholi officers by spying on them, reviving his old paramilitary counterweight, the mostly Langi Special Force Units, and thus repeating some of the actions that led to his overthrow by Amin.
As if determined to replay the January 1971 events, Obote once again left the capital after giving orders for the arrest of a leading Acholi commander, Brigadier (later Lieutenant General) Bazilio Olara-Okello, who mobilized troops and entered Kampala on 27 July 1985.
[3] The military government of General Tito Okello ruled from July 1985 to January 1986 with no explicit policy except the natural goal of self-preservation—the motive for their defensive coup.
The reintroduction of Amin's infamous cohorts was poor international public relations for the Okello government and helped create a new tolerance of Museveni and the NRM/A.
These changes included the introduction of a full multiparty system, an increase in executive authority vis-à-vis the other branches, and the lifting of presidential term limits.
The Christian rebel group named the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) continues to harass government forces and murder and kidnap civilians in the north and east.
In 1998, Uganda deployed a sizable military force to eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), ostensibly to prevent attacks from Ugandan rebel groups operating there.
[8] In February 2016, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni described the formation of an East African Federation uniting Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi, and South Sudan as "the number one target that we should aim at.