Is the Country Returning to the Days of Amin?

Editorial

29 April 2011

editorial

The manner of Dr Kizza Besigye’s arrest yesterday, the fourth this month, should leave a bitter taste in the mouth of any Ugandan who professes faith in democracy and the rule of law.

A man who, only a few weeks back, offered himself for the highest office in the land was arrested like a dangerous highway robber. Security operatives, supported by the police, used a hammer and pistol to smash the windows of Dr Besigye’s car, doused him in pepper spray, dragged him out of his car, forced him to crawl onto the back of a police pick-up truck and arrested him.

Dr Besigye was unarmed. His alleged crime? Driving to work. Article 24 of the Constitution states that, “No person shall be subjected to any form of torture or cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment or punishment.” The manner of Besigye’s arrest clearly violates this constitutional provision and is therefore illegal.

It is also morally repulsive and deeply offensive to see a citizen of this country treated in a manner that would make even medieval torture masters flinch with disgust. Have we been reduced to this? How can so much brutality be meted out to an unarmed person whose only ‘crime’ is minding his business and driving to work? How can the police and other state agents – the same people paid to protect and serve the people of Uganda – be the very perpetrators of such loathsome violence?

April 28, 2011, will go down in history as the day it became clear that the rule of law had been replaced with the rule by law, and the day its citizens, embodied in the tear-gassed, bruised and battered Besigye, had gone from being governed to being ruled.

We have been here before. In September 1972, Amin’s goons grabbed Chief Justice Benedicto Kiwanuka out of his car and whisked him off to his death. Besigye might have been whisked off to a police station yesterday but how much longer before, instead of being taken to some far-flung prison, he is whisked off to a killing field? In yesterday’s arrest we showed that we have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing from our bloody past.

AllAfrica – All the Time