Widespread torture in Uganda, in so-called ‘safe houses’ and elsewhere

One by one, they come. They talk about the incessant beatings, the water that was poured over their nose and throat until they couldn’t breathe and the bricks that were tied to their testicles. One says a soldier cocked a gun in his mouth and said “Now you’re dead.” Another recounts how a bagful of chopped, fresh red pepper was pulled over his head, how his eyes and skin felt like they were on fire and he couldn’t breathe. A young man says dead bodies were dropped off in his room, and he was ordered to clean off the blood. Right, demonstration of torture in Karamoja. (15-MAY-08)

Written by Wendy Glauser, this article was first published in the new issue of the Ugandan magazine the Independent yesterday. It has been edited and prepared for republication here by HRH F / Niels Jacob Harbitz. In a series of articles starting in the 10th issue, the Independent investigates the alleged torture of civilians by state para-military organisations. Photo of demonstration of torture in Karamoja: HRH F / Harbitz.

The victims interviewed by The Independent say they were tortured for different reasons – some are Peoples Redemption Army (PRA) suspects who claim the government was trying to cow them into confessing, others were accused of associating with the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), and yet others were punished for revealing classified government information. But, while interviewed separately, the stories of the victims are remarkably similar. They say they were driven to safe houses blindfolded, usually with masking tape. They were told that no one knows where they are, they could easily be killed, and so they better talk. Some were kept in dungeon-like basements for weeks, others for months. But they now live with the same fear, the same hardened hearts and, in some cases, the same depression. Left, PRA suspects being led led by military police. Having signed an amnesty, the man to the right now lives as a refugee in Canada. Undated photo, the Independent.  

The state uses torture to wear people down, both physically and mentally, to extort information, confess to a crime or until they become so instilled with fear that they are no longer considered a threat to the regime. In the last 10 years, the Uganda Human Rights Commission (UHRC) has lodged more than 7,500 torture complaints.

While Sharon Lanwako, advocacy officer at the African Centre for Torture Victims (ACTV), says progress has been made in prisons, due to the outlawing of corporal punishment and better training and monitoring, UPDF soldiers continue to torture civilians in non-gazetted areas. Victims are sometimes compensated when their cases are heard at the UHRC tribunal, but the perpetrators are hardly ever brought to justice, and they can rarely be identified anyway, since the torture tends to be executed by plain-clothed security operatives.

A few famous torture cases have made the press in the last couple of years: in early 2006, Stig Barlyng, the Danish ambassador to Uganda, confirmed to Andrew Mwenda at The Daily Monitor that Ronald Kasekende had jumped onto his property in an attempt to escape the secret detention centre that he had been held in for several months. Unknown to Barlyng, he’d been living next door to one of Uganda’s infamous safe houses, which is located on the grounds of CMI headquarters. That summer, New York-based Human Rights Watch asked the government to investigate the death of Abdu Semugenyi, who a fellow captive claimed had died while begging for water after being electrocuted in a Kampala safe house. And leading up to CHOGM, Patrick Okiring, a PRA suspect, recounted his agony to a London Daily Telegraph reporter: “They tied my hands behind my back and emptied a 25-litre jerrican of water over my head until I could not breathe,” he was quoted to have said.

Still, most torture cases remain unknown to the public and uninvestigated by the state. While 264 people came to the UHRC alleging they’d been tortured in 2006 (the most recent year for which data is publicly available), many torture victims are either too traumatised to seek legal reparations or too afraid to draw attention to themselves. “People who have been detained for years and then released without even getting a trial often don’t file a complaint because they fear they’ll be tortured again,” explains Roselyn Karugongo-Segawa, director of monitoring and inspections at the UHRC.

Those who get to hear the testimonies of torture victims are convinced that safe houses exist. “They keep changing the locations, but they’re there,” says Faith Bothuwok, a trauma counsellor at ACTV. She says some of the people who say they were tortured in safe houses “come limping, others come with rotten wounds, others come when their nails plucked off by pliers.” In its 2006 report, the UHRC said the commission has registered cases of disability caused by torture, including immobility due to joint pain and impotence due to genital mutilation. Karugongo-Segawa says she’s “certain” that safe houses exist.

Left, Brigadier Henry Tumukunde, who was central in establishing the system of safe houses that is still very much in use today. Tumukunde was at one point head of Uganda´s Military Security Organisation, but fell out with the Museveni regime and was sentenced to a spell of house arrest at the Senior Officers´ Mess in Kololo, Kampala. Tumukunde has since worked his way back on good terms with Ugandan authorities.

Proving their existence is tricky, however. At the UHRC tribunal, plaintiffs don’t face the individual soldiers who tortured them, but the Attorney General, who takes responsibility for the actions of state actors and compensates the victims. “I think if the individuals were being held responsible, that would go a long way in preventing it,” says Karungongo-Segawa. “Now they do it and they know the Attorney General will represent them at the Human Rights Commission.”  While victims can, outside of the UHRC tribunal, bring cases against their perpetrators, Uganda has no specific law against torture, notes Karungongo-Segawa, whose organisation has been lobbying the government to criminalise torture for years. This means that in the criminal courts torturers can only be charged with a more minor crime, such as assault or causing bodily harm.

As for the torture houses themselves, while the UHRC has been set up to offer a legal route for torture victims, it doesn’t have the mandate to investigate the non-gazetted areas where torture is alleged to be taking place. And even if it did, victims are blindfolded during their ride to and from a safe house and usually can’t identify it. Meanwhile, both the UPDF spokesman, Paddy Ankunda, and Ruhakana Rugunda, left, the Minister for Internal Affairs, say they are sure safe houses don’t exist, making internal investigations unlikely. “The safe houses we have are not ‘safe houses’ as such,” Rugunda says. “These are areas where if Rugunda wants to have a quiet meeting with an individual, he can go and have a quiet meeting with that individual without fear of everybody being aware of the meeting.”

While Rugunda says he investigated the Kasekende case (“I’m very acquainted with it but it’s not something that I intend to discuss because of its diplomatic character”) it’s possible he’s not aware of the safe house torture incidents that bodies like the UHRC have registered. If that’s the case, the clandestine manner in which sub-UPDF organisations operate could be to blame for his ignorance. Those who spoke to The Independent say they were tortured by either the Chieftaincy of Military Intelligence (CMI) or the Joint Anti Terrorism Taskforce (JATT), or both – organisations that Human Rights Watch refers to as “ad hoc security agencies created without legal status by the government.”

CMI and JATT are made up of UPDF soldiers who, according to UHRC and ACTV, are used to handling military enemies and are not properly trained in dealing with unarmed civilians. “JATT and CMI have been leading the pack in violating rights and laws“, says Karugongo-Segawa. While Ankunda attests that CMI and JATT “have psycho-social experts to interrogate using acceptable international methods,” advocates at UHRC and ACTV claim that, having spent their careers in the harsh culture of the military, soldiers need extensive human rights training if they’re to interrogate civilians, training they’re not currently given. “The way the military operates is different from the police because the military trains with a shoot to kill policy,” says Karugongo-Segawa. “There should be a deliberate move by the state to make sure these people respect human rights.”

The NRM government has made moves to address cruel treatment and torture by uniformed state agents. Lanwako of ACTV says she’s seen major improvements in prisons, which have become “very tough on issues of torture.” The government has welcomed some institutional checks and balances as well as external scrutiny, evidenced by the investigative powers of the UHRC and by ACTV’s ability to talk privately with inmates about their treatment, without the presence of a guard or prison warden. Rugunda, for his part, says he’s “very happy” that the issue of torture is being looked at by the media, as exposure of “the incidents going on here and there” because it assists the government in protecting its citizens’ rights. “Human Rights is so fundamental to this government,” he says. “We went to the bush to fight for human rights, to fight against human degradation.”  

Still, while the government may be taking action against breaches of duty after the fact, military and police training needs to focus on changing the mindsets of authorities in the first place, Lanwako says. Many soldiers and police officers have grown up in homes or schools where violence was used as an instruction tool, Lanwako notes. “Children are beaten from a very young age, and throughout P1 to P7, there’s kiboko (whipping), from S1 to S6, there’s kiboko,” she explains. “So there’s this idea that for a person to tell the truth, he must be beaten.”

When ACTV staff educated police on proper interrogation methods, some police officers who admitted to beating suspects explained, “For us, we thought we were using valid legal methods of getting information.”

But when ministers, the military and police officials aren’t openly admitting that excessive violence is a problem among their forces, it’s unlikely that the authorities will enact proactive methods of rooting out torture. While Rugunda says “the government is aware of such incidents of human rights abuses and endeavours to deal with them legally,” the Chief of Police, Kale Kayihura adamantly attests “there is no torture.” And Ankunda, when asked about Kasekende, says that while he read about his famous jump in the press, he isn’t aware of the details surrounding his case, calling into question why the UPDF spokesman would be kept in the dark on this major diplomatic incident involving CMI soldiers. “The issue is the government doesn’t admit its mistakes,” explains Lydia Kembabazi, the legal officer of ACTV. “Most of the time there’s cover up. They say, ‘No we’re not doing this, we’re not doing that.’ That hinders progress.”