Like many war stories, this one began with love.

Before the teargas and street riots, the violent arrests and hospital visits, Yoweri Museveni and Kizza Besigye were close friends, a future president and the doctor to whom he entrusted his life. They fought together to free their country from dictatorship.

Now, as Uganda undergoes its most raucous political convulsion in years, with broad-based demonstrations and dissenting officials testing President Museveni’s 25-year hold on power, the passions from a feud that began long ago between the friends are playing out on the national stage.

Unlike the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, which were borne of popular uprisings, the protest movement in Uganda has been driven by a single man, Besigye, who may know the president — and how to get under his skin — better than any other politician.

Besigye did not set himself on fire, like the Tunisian man who set in motion the Arab Spring, or take up arms like the rebels in Libya. Instead, after losing badly to the president in yet another election — he has run the last three times — Besigye simply said he was going to walk to his office, rather than use his car to protest rising commodity prices and corruption.

The resulting demonstrations were meek — Besigye was practically alone on the first day — but President Museveni’s government responded with overwhelming force, eventually locking up hundreds of opposition supporters, killing others and at times using teargas and water cannons to disperse as few as six protesters at a time.

With each clampdown, the protests became larger, fuelled by outrage over the repression. Besigye, once seen as a political dud, was suddenly credited as an alchemist, and President Museveni, long seen by the United States as a liberal ally, exhibited a more draconian side.

The protests have since fizzled, but the political row has not. Opposition lawmakers boycotted the president’s recent inaugural address, Besigye has appeared in court on numerous charges, and the police remain heavily deployed. Many have wondered why the president would inflate such a seemingly insipid challenge.

Historical feud

His critics, some of whom were once close to him, say this is the real Museveni, an arrogant and at times ruthless ruler who has silenced political opponents to stay in power this long.

But they also say that the feud is personal, tied to the president’s relationship with Besigye and his wife, Winnie Byanyima, whom Museveni has known since childhood.

The history may shed light on the depth of the political movement. It was the winter of 1980, after nearly a decade of Idi Amin’s brutal dictatorship, when Besigye, then a young doctor, started attending rallies for a popular and charismatic new political figure, Yoweri Museveni.

“He was a young person who in himself attracted us as young people,” Besigye said. “He was saying the right things that struck a chord with us, about what kind of government Uganda deserved. We started to see him as one of the shining torches.”

When Museveni’s new political party came in third in general election that year, he started a guerrilla movement in the bush. Activists like Besigye were hunted down, and Besigye says he and others were locked in the basement of a popular Kampala hotel.

He escaped and in 1982 found the rebels in the bush and was welcomed by Museveni, who made him his personal doctor. “I lived next to him in a tent,” Besigye said, “and stayed close by him until the end of the war.”

Besigye said he also met Ms Byanyima. She was a young rebel officer close to Museveni in the bush. Years later, Besigye and Ms Byanyima would marry.

A doctor, he treated both of them, gradually becoming a trusted counsel to the rebel leader. After Museveni triumphed and became president in 1986, Besigye was named minister of internal affairs.

But trouble soon began. Besigye said that when he challenged the president on corruption or constitutional issues, the relationship soured.

Byanyima also fell out with the president, as did her father, Mzee Boniface Byanyima — an elder statesman and a one-time surrogate father to President Museveni.

In 1990, Besigye was dismissed from his position as minister and was ordered to take military training, a clear demotion. He soon became popular within the armed forces and was elected to the military’s high command.

He became increasingly vocal in politics, and in the early 1990s he says he began a romantic relationship with Ms Byanyima, who left a diplomatic post in France to run for Parliament as an opposition politician. The two campaigned together, romance intertwining with politics.

While many observers agree that Uganda’s political row is about larger political differences, they say the tight nucleus of personalities is a steering force in the events. “This is about power,” said Amii Omara-Otunnu, a Ugandan professor of history at the University of Connecticut, and “animosity.”

“Besigye was the one who was closest to Museveni,” said Dr Omara-Otunnu, whose brother is an opposition politician. “The person Museveni fears the most, apart from Besigye, is Winnie.”

President Museveni has presided over a period of expansive economic growth. His country has become a military ally for the United States, playing a role in countries like Somalia and Congo, and its shopping malls and hotels cater to Western tourists.

Museveni upstaged

But the protests showed something else. At least nine people were killed by security forces, including a two-year-old child. Besigye was shot in the hand with a rubber bullet and later partly blinded by the police.

He donned a cast and dark sunglasses and flew to Nairobi for treatment: a photo-op of government oppression to many back in Kampala. Then he flew home, upstaging President Museveni’s latest inauguration with an outpouring of tens of thousands of supporters.

“The government seems clueless as to how to respond to an unarmed movement, fierce but clumsy,” said Mahmood Mamdani, an anthropology professor at Columbia and at Uganda’s Makerere University. “The irony is that the government is succeeding in uniting not only the opposition, but more and more people around the opposition.”

Boniface Byanyima, a longtime leader in Uganda’s Democratic Party, remembers a night in 1980, shortly after the fall of Amin, when a jittery Milton Obote, a former president whose government was accused of human rights abuses, arrived at his doorstep with a warning.

“He said, ‘I hear Museveni has been coming to your house,’ ” Byanyima recalled. “He said, ‘Take care of Museveni,’ meaning “watch out.”