M7 should stop torturing Ugandans when arresting them

Regardless of crimes, unless we reach the Robert Mugabe stage, we should not demean the people we oppose to a level that literally undresses them. President Museveni included. However, if anybody has abused him, it is because they learnt the bad behaviour from him and his ministers. Otafire for example. President Museveni has calmed down a little, but he is the architect of abusive language, and this is in public domain. We all know the back ground of many of our leaders as Kalundi said, they come from very humble backgrounds. I think “humble background” is just a fancy way of saying, they came from a poor background, but as you rightly said, we have all at some point in time taken tea with out sugar.

Many of us have got sketchy information of what exactly transpired in that
debate that led to the arrest of Kalundi, but if there is a genuine case to answer, then let the law take it’s course.

What we detest is the culture of arresting people, because they have
revealed something government doesn’t want others to know about, infringing
on their right to free speech. If Kalundi says many Baganda were deliberately eliminated during the final phase of the liberation war, then you challenge him with facts, but also, give him the opportunity to prove his utterances. What we detest is to arrest an Innocent person until proven guilty, and then pounce on them like hungry lions beating them to unconsciousness. This is the culture that has been inculcated into our security services, and that is exactly how the wanainchi pay them back when they get angry. They also kill, destroy, harm, violate etc, because the authorities have taught them, and that the way they know how. This is barbaric, backward, and a violation of both our constitution and international law on the side of the authorities.

I’m sure you have seen many people, especially men who get arrested, and
then ordered to take off their shoes, shirt, watch, etc..and finally some one holds them by the belt…eeeeh! Don’t you remember how an officer tried
to undress the FDC MP Nabila in public as she was being arrested?

But as this person did this, some onlookers used their mobile phones to
record footages which clearly showed a person peeping and admiring some
Gombolola, south of Bermuda. But we all know there is some hajji the chairman of that Gombolola, what was this person’s problem? This must be
condemned again, and again, especially if you start treating women like this. This kind of behaviour belongs to the Obote and Amin governments, and
president Museveni must intervene to stop this since the Kayihuras have
failed to stop it. What is so disturbing, many of our people who get arrested this way, end up with a not guilty verdict.

And you wounder!

John Nsubuga


UAH forumist

Listen members, good ideas are not adopted automatically, but driven into
practice with courageous patience and determination. Now, get moving!!

Ugandan Army a Disgrace to the region

What i saw on Kenyan Television yesterday left me terrified.For so
long i have been told that the Ugandan is not professional rather a
personal property of Yoweri Museveni.How can the Army deploy itself in
the streets to quel Civilian unrest?????
Here in Kenya we usually have civilian unrest……but then i have
never seen Military Officers on the streets.In fact the Kenyan law
enforcement is professional.There are four types of officers tasked to
deal with civilian unrest ie
1.Regular Police Officers
2.Administration Police
3.General Service Unit
4.National Youth service

we heavily depend on regular police to quell chaos because they better
understand the law and they are the only police officers who can
present you to the court of law.Administration police come in when the
regular police need a back up.The General Service Unit is  a semi
millitary unit with more than three quarters of its officers trained
in Israel.They are the last resort to deal with civillians
I have never seen our Army on the streets……not even during the
post election violence.Even on post election i only spotted two trucks
of Kenya Army in Naivasha and they were not there to chase youths
around but to clear a road which had been blocked by
youths………What a shame to Ugandan Army to chase un-armed youths
at the streets of Kampala!!

Musoto

Kenyan

UAH forumist

UPDF is certainly better than Obote and Amin’s armies

Fellow Ugandans,

Gen. Yoweri K. Museveni and Gen. Salim Saleh are retired. Gen. David Tinyefuza hails from Ssembabule District, Buganda region other than Ankole sub region. There was a time when the Army Commander was Al Haji Lt. Gen. Abubaker Jeje Odong and Inspector General of Police was Cossy Odomel and no body raised a finger. Ankole in particular and Western Uganda in general is not one tribe or ethnicity. Ankole is a product of 1001 Agreement. Prior to that it was made up of kingdoms of Nkore (Kaarokarungi or present day Mbarara, Nyabushozi, including Kazo, and Kashaari. Other kingdoms were Igara, Shema, Buhweju and even Mporororo where President Museveni and Col.Kizza Besigye come from. In all these kingdoms, there were Bahima pastoralists and Bairu cultivators, and a few others. Banyaruguru just like Batagwenda in Tooro, were originally Baganda. Bukanga county is predominantly Baganda especially Bakooki. Isingiro and Kajara also have a reasonable number of Baganda. By 1991 census, Mbarara Distirct including Ibanda, Isingiro and Kiruhura, had 100,000 Baganda.

Then Kigezi is predominantly Bakiga, Bahororo, Bafumbira. Rwenzoori is of Batooro, Bakonjo, Bamba, Banyabindi, Basongora etc..Bunyoro; Banyoro, Bagungu, Bacope, Bahuma, Bakiga, Baganda etc….That is your Ankole or Western Uganda.

However in my view, offices like Chief of Defence Forces, Deputy Chief of Defence Forces, Commander of Land Forces, Commander of Air Force, Chief of Marines, Inspector General of Police, Deputy Inspector General of Police, Commissioner General of Prisons, Deputy Commissioner General of prisons, have been politicised just like cabinet ministers and RDCs.

They should be regionally balanced. But it should be gradual. Obote l had Opolot as CDF, Amin as Army Chief of Staff, Oryema as IGP and Okurut as Prisons C.G. They were all coming from the North and North East.

Amin had Maj. Francis Nyangwezo, Brig. Malera, Mustafa Adrisi, Isac Lumago and Yusuf Gowon as Army Chiefs of Staff. Other than Nyangweso, the rest hailed from his home region of West Nile. He had Colt. Toko and Brig.Guweddeko as Air Force Chief. Toko was from West Nuile and Guweddeko from Buganda, he later killed him. The Inspector General of Police was Luke Ofingi and later Kassim Obura. Commissioner General of Prisons was Kiyonga, from my home Mawogola county, whom he later killed, and replaced him with the late Gyagenda, who was formerly Commissioner of Buganda Prisons.

During UNLF days of Lule , Binaisa and Muwanga, people raised why both the Army Commander and the Chief of Staff were from the North. They were told that those were the ones who pioneered the nati Amin struggle. When Oyite Ojok died in a rush in 1983, he was replaced by Smith Opon Acaka, who served Uganda Army until 1977. The Acholis were not happy. When Binaisa tried to get another Chief of Staff, he had brought in Sam Nnyumba. But that was short lived.

When Olara Otunu’s Junta came in, the CDF was Lt.Gen.Bazilio Olara Okello as the Commander in Chief was Gen. Tito Okello Lutwa. The Army Chief of Staff was Maj. Gen. Zeddy Maruru.

NRA had Ahmed Sseeguya and Magara in the bush, and Elly Tumwone, Salim Saleh, Mugisha muntu, Jeje Odong, James Kaziini and Aronda in peace times. The deputies include Fred Rwigyema, Brig.Joram Mugume and Lt. Gen.Ivan Koreta, a FRONASA veteran. Chiefs of Staff include Fredrick Oketcho, Sam Nannyumba, Fred Tolit, Cheif Ali, Nakabius Lakra, James Kaziini, among others.

Amin’s Commissioner General was Kigoonya from Kikoma, in Mawogola not Kiyonga. Kigoonya family had a Mailo land estate in Mawogola which is still in existance. He was suspected to have collaborated with guerillas based in Tanzania and was not given a fair trial, like other Amin’s victims.

Had UFM won the war, the CDF or Army Chief of Staff would have been Maj. Oboma, their original Chief of Staff, had he not been killed by his fellow Acholis in UNLA, or a Pakistani Sajjad Sorri, and his successors whom l don’t remember as by 1985 UFM was no more but in name. Then if it was FEDEMU, lT. Lt. Col. George Nkwanga and probably Brig. Kasirye Gwanga. If it was UNRF. It would have been Maj.Amin Onzi. If it was FUNA, major generals Isaac Lumago, Yusuf Gowon.

Fortunately all those forces were integrated into NRA now UPDF including former rebels, UPDM/UPDA, HSM, UPA, NALU, LRA, UNRF II, WNBF, ADF etc……

The President be given time to make a regional balnce on what l regard as politicised but not technical positions.

In my view, technical offices are those like Joint Chief of Staff, Land Forces Chief of Staff, Chief of Air Staff etc…..The president can arrest the situation before it is politicised further.

Ahmed Katerega
UAH forumist/journalist

Composition of Obote’s Uganda Army (UA)

Dear UAH,
Hadn’t Obote resorted to military which was dominated by Northerners during 1966 crisis, no body would have talked about Anyanya, Luo, Acholi, Langi etc……The main source of data on the composition of Uganda Army (UA) in the evening of Obote I is Olara Otunnu’s brother:
Omara-Otunnu, Amii (1987), Politics and the Military in Uganda , 1890-1985, ( London : Macmillan).
When you look at pages 80-82, he indicates that, by December 1969, the Uganda Army officer corps was 171 strong.  Of that, 141 officers were from the North of the country: 88%.  Rank and file reflected similar ethnic proportions.  At that time, 61% of Uganda Army were from the north of the country, whereas the North constituted 19% of the national population.  I think Rev Kamugisha’s question on who did the recrutiment is neither here nor there, although of course the answer is obvious.
The C-in-C, AM Obote had the opportunity to redress some of those imbalances in 1964 following the mutinies in all the EAC countries, following which, Mw. Nyerere disarmed, disbanded and dismissed the colonially recruited Tanganyika Rifles, and set out to form a new force, who were not mere rifles, but JWTZ: Jeshi la Wanainchi.  He locked up the leaders of the mutiny.  Mzee Kenyatta did the same.
On his part Dr Obote dimissed the 300 or so mutiny leaders on 24 January 1964, and roundly reinstated them on 25 January 1964.  He honoured all their demands, upheld the promise that Felix Onama made to the soldiers at Jinja Barracks, through a tiny window at the quarterguard, of increasing soldier pay 135-300%…..and promoting all the ring leaders; after which, Uganda’s defence budget became more that 10% higher than that of Kenya and Tanzania combined; and Uganda Army soldiers became the highest paid in Anglophone Africa.  The game AM Obote was playing is well-known.  The rest, as they say, is hysteria! or is it historia in Swahilli?

Lance Corporal (Rtd) Otto Patrick

A matter of indispline within the PGB

Fellow Ugandans,
The moment we let our military police collapse or become secondary in protecting the public, we run the danger of loss on all sides, and the consequences become dire as witnessed here. The American police is made up of former MPS-who are called upon at an instant to lift up such fellows and throw them in the slammer to cool off, the minute such utterances or threats to the public are heard by colleagues of the soldier or any citizen for that matter.
We ought to invest in a special police unit, well armed and capable of dealing with such incidents, militarily.
Major  Felix Kulayigye, has missed the point here, by blaming the victims of this veteran, who had clearly run amok, I wish he had used a different choice of words, that took responsibility and showed some sensitivity towards the grieving families of those whose lives were violently taken, due to lack of proper safe guards and training that would have prevented such an incident from occurring.
This is not the first instance of  indiscipline with the Ugandan Presidential Guard Brigade, the person in charge has to take full responsibility and needs to remind those who have frayed, that they are citizens first and within the confines of the law of Uganda. Guarding the president and visiting dignitaries is a privilege and a professional job, extended to the elite within the security organs, just like being a minister or the president for that matter.
If the president they are supposed to guard: can’t go around prostituting, getting violently drunk or on shooting sprees,every time he is upset, what makes them think that they can do this with impunity?
Major Felix kulayigye, should leave no wavering doubt in the minds of those on this elite force, that they are not immune to prosecution or  public scrutiny and they cannot bring shame to a unit that prides itself in being the best in the world-for it’s job is to protect the president and visiting world leaders.
A test of sobriety should be the first qualifying measure of any would be Guard to the president, to avoid danger to the president or any visiting world leader.
If a man or woman cannot control his or her liquor or is seen prostituting, what makes you think that he won’t sell out the president or a visiting world leader he or she is supposed to protect?
I have not seen the elite men of the secret service in this country bar hoping, prostituting, threaten the public or causing such mayhem as we see in Uganda.
I’m sure the unit has such good men of integrity, but one bad apple can taint the whole Unit, so it is the job of the person in charge of the elite unit to take the matter very seriously, by admitting full responsibility and weeding out fellows of this calibre from the PGB, before it is too late-carry out random urine tests,if you have to but, keep them professional.
Members of this unit are supposed to have passed an high level psychological profile, random sobriety tests, picked from a very intelligent elite class of security, the cream of the crop and exemplary to all other security professionals.
Intolerance to non-professionalism,  individual acts that put it to shame, and avoidance through due diligence such monstrous acts by it’s members ought to be the order of the day. The key here is proactivity, teach them how to tread softly while carrying a big sticks.
That said, we also have to look at the issue of not properly caring for our returning soldiers or those who have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I wonder whether the person who is charge of the PGB, is fully aware  that such Rambos exist within his special unit?  If they do exist, he needs to seek help for them, today we have all sorts of pills, therapies, that can help out soldiers in crisis. I truly believe that this fellow was somehow deranged, and had been suffering for a while, and we should start helping our soldiers deal with PTSD.
We cannot afford to expose the president or any visiting dignitary to such dangers, remember Indira Gandhi, Anwar Sadat were all killed by a person from their presidential guard. My condolences to all the families, lets make no excuses please raise the bar, keep them professional.

Tendo Kaluma
Boston,USA

Investigate harassment of Muslims in Uganda further

Human Rights

Omar Kalinge-Nnyago

Investigate harassment of Muslims in Uganda further

The recently released Human Rights Watch report on the torture and murder of Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) suspects entitled “Open Secret: Illegal Detention and Torture by the Joint Anti-terrorism Task Force, JATT, in Uganda” was a chilling reminder that all was not well in Uganda, especially if you are a Muslim. The anti-terror unit we are told, was formed specially to crackdown on ADF a rebel group based in Congo. This is a very dangerous approach to national security, where a section of society is specially targeted.

The vicious cycle of torture goes like this. To be seen to be working, the unit must arrest some Muslim suspects. They torture them to extract confessions. Some die in the process. Others escape death with serious injuries. Others lose limbs, other body parts and left to rot after their unceremonious release. Because they were innocent in the first place, even those who are forced to confess to escape torture cannot be charged in a court of law as there would be no evidence to sustain a prosecution. To be able leave jail, suspects are coaxed into applying for amnesty. This is in effect an admission to guilt. This becomes good statistics for JATT. The Americans and British who fund the unit pour more funds into the operation. Arresting Muslims is therefore big business. Uganda’s position as a partner in the war on terror is enhanced for every confession obtained. Consequently, the regime in Kampala extends its lease of life, despite its unprecedented corruption record, habitual electoral mal-practices and the alarming levels of nepotism in government.


These allegations must be fully investigated by an independent commission. This is not the first time that Muslims in Uganda have been targeted. Hundreds were massacred in Western Uganda and many more in West Nile in the aftermath of the fall of Idi Amin. No human rights organisation in Uganda has cared to investigate these massacres. A commission of inquiry headed by John Nagenda after the fall of Amin to investigate human rights abuses since the sixties did not find it appropriate to handle the Western Uganda and West Nile Muslim Massacres. To date, the victims of the ugly incidents which included murder, confiscation of property and displacement are still crying out for help. Something ought to be done by Uganda Human Rights Commission, other human rights organizations and the government.


Unless practical steps to address the situation are taken, the perceptions of marginalisation and harassment of Muslims in Uganda will persist. Unfortunately, the Army, through its spokesperson, and the executive, through the security minister have only invested in a disastrous public relations exercise that assumes that the population is not intelligent enough to understand that what they are doing is “smart denial of documented fact”. They must instead confront the facts, compensate torture victims, families of the those who died in the hands of JATT and thoroughly investigate the culprits who have succeeded in turning JATT in Kololo into another Naguru based Public Safety Unit or the Nakasero Headquarters of the State Research Bureau of the Idi Amin era.


The recent harassment of Muslims comes at a time when public display of religiosity has assumed alarming proportions. When the first lady wanted to stand for parliament, she evoked God. When she became a Minister of State, she evoked God. When the IGG was desperately trying to save her job, she evoked Jesus and even sang a long praise song at a press conference. The secular foundations of the country have been shaken to the core. Religion in Uganda is no longer personal. It is official business.


The danger here is that Muslims, facing constant harassment will also find it appropriate to force their belief into the public arena, get radicalized, mobilise their people using religion, basing on the undeniable evidence of torture. This would encourage more young Muslims to join rebel activity. In fact, by their own opportunistic actions, government security agencies are helping ADF and perhaps other rebel groups to recruit more easily. It is what happened when Obote II security forces miscalculated and thought they would harass suspected young men to intimidate them from rebellion. They instead found the shortest route to join Museveni’s NRA. The rest is now history.

omarkalinge@gmail.com

0752.656.352

omar d. kalinge-nnyago

UAH forumist
e-Learning Specialist
demtac consulting-codlearn
922, Old Kira Road, Bukoto
P.O. Box 1635
KAMPALA
Cell: 0752 656 352

Illegal detention in Uganda

Human Rights

Omar Kalinge-Nnyago

Illegal detention, killings and torture of suspects in Uganda

Last Wednesday April 8, 2009, Human Rights Watch, the international human rights watchdog released a damning report on the torture of suspects by Uganda’s security agencies. The report entitled : “Public Secret: Illegal Detention and Torture by the Joint Anti-Terrorism Task Force in Uganda”. The task force, JATT in short, is a joint unit, formed in 1999, that draws its personnel from the armed forces (the Uganda People’s Defense Force, UPDF), the police, and the internal and external intelligence organizations.

The intelligence branch of the armed forces, the Chieftaincy of Military Intelligence, CMI, has operational command. JATT has no codified mandate, though the head of CMI told Human Rights Watch that JATT was established to deal with the threat posed by the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), a Ugandan rebel group based in the DRC. But individuals allegedly linked to other groups, such as Al-Qaeda, have also suffered at the hands of JATT. Former detainees told Human Rights Watch of non-Ugandans held in Kololo for long periods of time, although it is unclear why most of those suspects were detained. Almost all those illegally detained were Muslims. All were suspects. Some were killed. Few were charged in a court of law. A few are languishing in jail, without trial. The lucky were released without charge, while others were forced to apply for amnesty, a confession that the suspect is guilty of terrorism charges whereas not, to escape torture.

Although the report recommends to the Unites States and the United Kingdom, two of Uganda’s major sponsors of Uganda’s counter terrorism operations, to withhold counter terrorism funding, it is not likely to be taken seriously by the two proponents of the global War on Terror, which, others say, is euphemism for Global War on Islam. It is likely that the Ugandan government is simply doing the bidding of the two powers. The ugly incidents of human rights abuses in Abu-Ghuraib prison in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and now the Baghran airforce base detention centre in Afghanistan are not different from JATT atrocities in Uganda. The role of the British intelligence in unfair detention of so called terror suspects in third countries has been widely reported.

Away from the consuming discussion about the victims of JATT torture, I was drawn, in retrospect, to the perpetrators – the men and women who exacted the crime. How could someone become so cruel, so insensitive.


Most of the human rights abuses by governments are carried out as acts of obedience to some sort of authority. Obedience is a basic element in the structure of social life. Many studies of Nazi behaviour concluded that monstrous acts, despite their horrors, were often a matter of faithful bureaucrats slavishly following orders. Obedience is the psychological mechanism that links individual action to political purpose. Obedience is such a deeply ingrained behavioural tendency, so deep it often overrides training in ethics, sympathy and moral conduct.

Governments torture people. To do so they train the torturers. Recruits are carefully screened for physical, intellectual and sometimes political attributes. They are taken through rites to isolate the recruits from society and introduce them to a new social order, with different rules and values.

They are then helped to reduce the strain of obedience often by blaming and dehumanizing the victims, so it is less disturbing to hurt them. They are socially modelled by watching other group members commit violent acts and then receive rewards.

Recruits are also systematically de-sensitised to repugnant acts by gradual exposure to them, so they start appearing routine and normal despite conflicts with previous moral standards. Most state security and militia training worldwide is designed to make recruits comfortable with violence. The ‘enemy’ is given derogatory names and portrayed as less than human. This makes it easier to have them killed. A government, designates some derogatory label like “Islamic Militant”, “Islamist”, “Muslim Terrorist”, “Islamic Fundamentalist”, “Muslim radical”, on a section of world citizens. This is an indicator that their security agencies are being shown the target to torture and exterminate the suspected ‘bad guys’ if need be, without guilt. In the name of obedience, even your fellow high school buddy can turn against you without remorse. And she is not mad. Just obeying orders. Scary thought.

omarkalinge@gmail.com 0752 656 352


omar d. kalinge-nnyago
e-Learning Specialist/UAH forumist
demtac consulting-codlearn
922, Old Kira Road, Bukoto
P.O. Box 1635
KAMPALA
Cell: 0752 656 352

Uganda is a pervasively violent society

Ugandans,

1/7 Interpersonal and intergroup group violence is so pervasive in Uganda that, what we see as torture in safe houses is just an aspect, if not a secondary or even tertiary symptom of a much bigger disease.

2/7 Those so-called state agents are not imported from mars. They are brought up in homes where spouses barter their partners. Many of those characters have seen their mothers being tortured by their fathers. Many have had their lips scalded by mothers when two grains of sugar were seen there….’ambye sukali wange’. Many have grown up in homes where the husbands/dads are terrorist beasts, who, when they return in the evening after their war gin (waragi)/tekwe/foot-and-mouth drink (mwenge bigere) sessions, every body hides under their beds. Even the geckos and mice of the home scamper for cover because they know the husband is back.

3/7 The head teachers of the schools behave exactly the same way as those husbands…terrorists who cane the lights out of their pupils. Even the parish priests/sheikhs behave in the same way: they abuse and torture their flock…we have seen some in the news that sodomise young men in their flock. The nurses in dispensaries will whip the kid that is scared of the quinine injection, or scared of the pain of having a fracture set without anaesthetic…torture in itself. So torture is all around! One of the modes of correcting wrong doers in Uganda is by killing them. You have 5 instances on your law books in which you reform wrong doers by killing them. Every now and then you hear people saying: kill defilers, kill child sacrificers, kill embezzlers, kill reckless drivers, kill witch ‘doctors’. Civilians kill each other daily in frenzies of mob justice…they kill even the goats and chicken and banana plantations of victims of lynchings. If you are so liberal with “Kill”, why can’t you torture? When you torture you are being nice, in fact.

4/7 What we are experiencing is what psychologists call “horizontal violence”. When mice are trapped in a cage and they fail to find a way out, they start biting each others’ tails and ears off. By the time they are freed, they are even too weak to run away. When the oppressed bite each other, instead of biting their oppressor or the cage trapping them, that is horizontal violence. When they bite the cage in order to free themselves, that is called vertical violence…liberation. Ugandans, like all entrapped organisms have opted for horizontal attacks on each other….Kony cutting off ears of fellow Acholis in order to overthrow YK Museveni (and then a genius like Mr Mulindwa rationalizing or white washing Kony’s action by saying it is Kabaka Mutebi doing that)…all that is horizontal violence.

5/7 When you recruit someone from such a social context into the armed forces, what you have is someone who knows only one mode of interpersonal interaction: inflicting pain. Such a person will not disappoint. As they say, when the only tool one knows is the hammer, everything starts to look like a nail…even politicians will use the hammer as their campaigning symbol….Ssenyondo! In that setting, when you blame only the violence of so-called state agents, then you will say, burn the houses like Ms Rehema. When I place Ms Rehema in a clinic, I see her giving the prescription for headache as: Rx “cut off the heads” qid!

6/7 Bottom line, Uganda is a pervasively violent society, and the security agencies are just a perfect mirror image.

7/7 I will later make comments the use of despotic power by states that lack infrastructural power…that also explains the resort of unorthodox means of extracting information from suspects.

Lance Corporal (Rtd) Otto Patrick