London Daily Telegraph: Regime of tyranny and torture back to haunt Uganda

WARNING: This news story from the London Daily Telegraph online edition contains graphic descriptions of violence, sexual abuse, and human rights violations alleged against the Ugandan security services.

Regime of tyranny and torture back to haunt Uganda
By Adrian Blomfield in Kampala (Filed: 19/03/2005)

Suspected dissidents disappear after midnight visits to their homes; chilling screams can again be heard from Idi Amin's infamous torture chambers, reopened after a quarter of a century of disuse. From the few that escape come tales of punishment beatings and even mass executions.
Welcome to President Yoweri Museveni's Uganda. One of Britain's favourite African states in recent years has, almost unnoticed in the West, become a sinister land where a corrupt regime uses its secret police to rule through fear.


President Yoweri Museveni

The reasons for this transition are not hard to fathom. Mr Museveni has ruled Uganda since 1986, when his rebels marched triumphantly into the capital Kampala. Many of his countrymen believe he now wants to recast himself as that most African of leaders: a president for life.

Signalling his intent to jettison the vestigial trappings of democracy his government still professes, Mr Museveni has set out to remove a constitutional provision that prevents him from standing in elections next year.

Not all Ugandans are keen on the idea, but the government has ways of making them change their mind.

Last year, Yasin, a taxi driver who occasionally chauffeured a senior opposition official around the countryside, was woken by a loud rapping at his door a few hours before dawn. The men who had come to arrest him were not policemen, but members of the widely feared Chieftaincy of Military Intelligence (CMI).

Yasin knew that the CMI, a shadowy spy agency directly answerable to the president, had no powers to arrest anybody. But he also knew better than to question his captors.

He was taken to Makindye barracks, where some of the worst atrocities of Amin's infamous State Research Bureau, which used to force inmates to beat each other to death with sledgehammers, took place in the 1970s.

"Every day for a week, they would hang me upside down and beat me with clubs," Yasin said. "They wanted to know names of people working for the opposition. I kept saying I didn't know any, but they wouldn't believe me."

On his third day, Yasin watched as a fellow inmate, an elderly man accused of recruiting for the main opposition alliance, the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC), was killed using a method known as "Liverpool". The victim's head was placed in a bag that was repeatedly filled with water. To breathe, he had to drink it all, but the more he drank, the more bloated his belly became until his innards ruptured and he died in a pool of his own urine.

The official existence of political parties was only allowed last year, under considerable western pressure. Until then Mr Museveni operated what he called a no-party system, in which every Ugandan belonged to an entity known as The Movement, which was headed by the president.
In theory, the philosophy was supposed to rid Uganda of the ethnic and political divisions that helped cause the civil wars and dictatorships that characterised much of the country's history since independence from Britain in 1962. In practice it has allowed Mr Museveni to exert total control over most of his people.

The leader of the FDC, Kizza Besigye, in exile in South Africa, has instructed his campaigners to dole out copies of Animal Farm during party rallies.

But most people are too frightened to attend. Secret police infiltrate the rallies, noting down those who attend. It is usually supporters and low ranking FDC members who are taken to Makindye.

As a means of spreading fear, it is an extremely effective method.

Philip and his wife Juliet were picked up in January, accused of renting out their hall south of the capital for an opposition meeting.

Like many fellow suspects, they were accused of supporting the People's Redemption Army (PRA), a shadowy rebel outfit the government links to the FDC. The Foreign Office Minister, Chris Mullin, says that it is likely the PRA does not exist.

"Every night I was hung upside down over a pit of snakes while my wife was raped by army officers," said Philip, who was held in Room 21 of Mbale Police Station, another Amin torture chamber. "One time we had to move five dead bodies into a truck. Another time I was made to dig my own grave." Like Yasin, Philip and Juliet were released. Their captors told them to report what had happened to fellow villagers, but threatened them with death if they told anyone else.

Certainly things are not as bad as they were under Amin, who killed half-a-million people in eight years of bloodshed. Mr Museveni remains popular in many quarters for bringing stability to the country.

The president was long seen as an African role model in the West for his willingness to introduce economic reforms demanded by the World Bank.

But many donors are now disgusted both by the repression and by the corruption in Mr Museveni's cabinet, many of whom are relatives of the president. "Museveni hoodwinked many donors for a long time and people wanted to see the glass as half full," a diplomat said. "We are now learning our lesson."

But that lesson may have come too late. A gang of young thugs, known as the Kalangala Action Plan (KAP), is allegedly preparing to disrupt the elections. Styled on the youth wing of President Robert Mugabe's Zanu-PF party in Zimbabwe, the KAP was an effective tool of intimidation during flawed 2001 elections won by Mr Museveni.

With an even greater risk of defeat if elections are free and fair, diplomats fear that the KAP could be responsible for serious violence and compound Uganda's human rights reputation still further.

Urbane Analysis: Note to mainstream media - remember "The Year of Living Dangerously"? Why does journalism exist but to cover stories of epic import? Uganda is leaning toward a tipping point. That's right, Uganda: the darling of Britain and the U.S. for twenty years. And here's a clue: it is all about greed, corruption, and the ruling culture's values. Are you going to cover this story, or wait until the bullets fly and machete' do their worst, and then whine about government intransigence? Just one element of Uganda's crisis in governance (the child slave-soldiers of a rebel faction in the north) takes number one (worst) spot on the United Nation's "Ten Stories The World Should Hear More About" - that alone is a clue to the state of human rights in Uganda:

Uganda: Child soldiers at centre of mounting humanitarian crisis



With an armed rebellion threatening to undermine Uganda’s progress to economic development, child soldiers emerge as central figures amid deadly violence and growing humanitarian emergency.

The bustling capital city of Kampala, located in the south, exemplifies Uganda’s transformation from a country plagued by economic decay to prosperity. With a revitalized GDP growth of more than 8% over the past three years, Uganda comes across as a compelling story of hope for other African nations. However, an armed insurgency in northern and eastern Uganda has created one of Africa’s largest displaced populations.

The 18-year old rebellion of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) against the government has forced over 1.6 million Ugandans - half of them children - to flee to squalid and overcrowded camps in order to escape wanton attacks and killings. The number of internally displaced persons has almost tripled since 2002. Attacks on soft civilian targets continue, carried out by child soldiers much younger than their victims.

The most disturbing aspect of this humanitarian crisis is the fact that this is a war fought by children on children - minors make up almost 90% of the LRA’s soldiers.

Some recruits are as young as eight and are inducted through raids on villages. They are brutalized and forced to commit atrocities on fellow abductees and even siblings. Those who attempt to escape are killed. For those living in a state of constant fear, violence becomes a way of life and the psychological trauma is incalculable. Fearing abduction, streams of children, often with mothers in tow, leave their homes every night and walk for hours from surrounding villages to reach the relative safety of major towns, only to trek their way home in the first light. Some 40,000 “night commuters” sleep under verandas, in schools, hospital courtyards or bus parking places to evade the snare of the LRA.

Since the rebellion began in the 1980s, some 30,000 children have been abducted to work as child soldiers and porters, or to serve as “wives” of rebels and bear their children. These numbers have soared, with 10,000 children abducted in the past 18 months alone.

Despite the gravity of the humanitarian situation, less than 10% of the $130 million requested by the humanitarian community for 2004 has been received. In some areas, malnutrition rates as high as 30% have been recorded among children. Fear of rebel attacks badly hit the planting season for 2004, threatening to aggravate the already severe food shortages in the coming months. Health facilities barely function as stocks run out and health workers flee to escape LRA attacks.

Even as a peace process makes significant progress in neighbouring Sudan, the peace in Uganda is made tenuous by these developments. The “success story” that Uganda represents in the minds of the world’s economic policy makers presents a jarring contrast with the tragedy of conflict in the north and east that shows no signs of abating.

For further information:
Mr. Christian Boatswain, Political Affairs Officer, UN Department of Political Affairs (DPA) Tel: (1 212) 963-0219; E-mail: mailto:boatswain@un.org
Ms. Stephanie Bunker, Spokesperson (New York), UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) Tel: (1 917) 367-5126; E-mail: bunker@un.org ;
Mr Agostinho Zacarias, Chief, Coordination, Advocacy and Programme Development Unit UN Office of the Special Adviser on Africa Tel: (1 212) 963-8435; E-mail: zaccarias@un.org ;
Mr. Henrik Haggstrom, Acting Chief, Outreach Unit Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict Tel: (1 212) 963-0879, E-mail: mailto:haggstrom@un.org