“The Pearl of Africa is Bleeding”

BY HANNA HOMESTEAD

The first thing I noticed as we drove into town was the smell. The familiar fragrance of Kasese’s dusty air, usually scented by flowering coffee plants and smoldering kitchen fires, was replaced with a stench that turned our stomachs.

The second thing was the stillness.

I had been gone one week. In that short time, everything I knew changed.

It was 2016. The massacre took place over the weekend of November 26, seven days earlier.  I had been living in Kasese for six months through a global health fellowship program. Kasese is located in the western region of Uganda along the Rwenzori mountain range bordering the North-Kivu Provence pf the Democratic Republic of Congo. Although I didn’t travel often, I had left for the capital city of Kampala, a ten-hour drive away, for a friend’s Thanksgiving holiday gathering.

 As I helped my host prepare our feast in Kampala, I began receiving distressed messages from a friend back home: Kasese was under attack. 

“Soldiers are everywhere,” Afan wrote in a text message. “They are shooting in town and in the mountains.” 

The Attack 

The Uganda People’s Defense Forces (UPDF), the Ugandan military, had arrived in armored military vehicles on Saturday morning and raided the office of His Majesty King Charles Mumbere, whose headquarters are in the center of Kasese town. King Mumbere is the leader of the Bakonzo tribe, the largest ethnic group in the Rwenzori region. News of the UPDF assault spread quickly. Soon a handful of the king’s loyalists began reprisal attacks against police officers stationed in remote mountain posts.

Another friend witnessed the assault on the king’s office where his brother worked as a program administrator. While hiding in a shop down the street, he watched soldiers surround the office where the king’s staff had barricaded themselves. After an hour of standing around the soldiers climbed on top of the building, pried open the metal sheets of the roof, and began to shoot.

When they were through, they busted down the office door. “I watched my brother’s body being carried out by the UPDF,” they said. That was the last time they ever saw him.  

For the rest of the Thanksgiving weekend I was glued to the TV and my phone. The military encircled the king’s palace and compound where hundreds of civilians lived and worked, demanding that the king’s royal guards disband and hand over King Mumbere, who was inside. On Sunday, King Mumbere surrendered himself to the UPDF in an attempt to defuse the tense situation. Instead, the soldiers whisked him away in an unmarked government car, and then attacked. 

I watched news footage of the palace burning less than a mile away from my house in disbelief. The media reported that “clashes between the UPDF and the Rwenzururu King’s armed tribal militia” had escalated, leaving an unknown number dead. 

 My inbox was flooded with Whatsapp messages. The king had been arrested and taken to Kampala where he was charged with murder. Photos began to circulate online that were not featured in the official government-approved news – photos of bodies littered in front of the palace’s burning gates. Bodies that had been stripped, tied, shot, and hacked open, exposing intestines and pink brain matter. 

“They are killing us,” another friend wrote. “Don’t come back yet.”

Now everything was silent.  

A week later, my housemate and I finally returned to Kasese. The shooting was long over but corpses remained in the compound of a nearby local health center, rotting in neat piles under the equatorial sun. Armed UPDF soldiers stood by to ensure they wouldn’t be photographed. At first, grieving family members didn’t dare approach them for fear of being added to the stacks. After a few days, the decomposing bodies became too difficult to identify.

Kasese is the sprawling town center of a district where 70 percent of the population are subsistence farmers. On a normal day, music plays continuously in the shops along the main street, competing with the din of trucks passing through town on their way to the Democratic Republic of Congo border and bleating goats being chased out of compounds they’ve wandered into. Women chat in the shade while selling charcoal and vegetables from their gardens and children in primary school uniforms kneel to greet their elders as they walk home from school. On weekend evenings, crowds of young people gather in the strip of cafes near the main bus depot to enjoy grilled chicken and animated conversation before heading to one of the two clubs in town. On Sundays and Wednesdays, hymns radiate from the churches; on Fridays, elegantly dressed men gather at the main mosque for jummah prayer. 

Now everything was silent. The UPDF were everywhere. We stayed at home for days, like everyone else, and made do with the remaining potatoes and plantains in our pantry. It was hot. I passed time by washing everything I could, scrubbing sheets and clothes by hand until we ran out of powder detergent.

Soon after we returned to Kasese the UPDF soldiers finally moved the bodies. Some were buried in military barracks in the mountains. Others were discretely loaded into trucks and dumped into nearby Lake Edward and Queen Elizabeth National Park. Then the soldiers left. 

Political Violence 

The Ugandan government claims it went to Kasese to disarm King Mumbere’s royal guards, whom they portray as an illegally armed rebel separatist group despite zero corroborating evidence.  They claim the military’s use of force was necessary and proportional to the threat posed by the royal guards. But witnesses, members of parliament from Kasese, as well as human rights organizations who investigated the incident tell a different story.

The UPDF used rocket-propelled grenades to blast thatched-roof buildings and fired machine guns indiscriminately into the palace compound where they had trapped hundreds of royal guards and their family members. Video footage verified by Human Rights Watch shows men being undressed, bound, and beaten by UPDF soldiers, some laying face-down in the road, after fleeing the burning compound. Afterwards, the military said they recovered a total of 14 rifles from the palace wreckage, as well as bows, arrows and pangas, or common household machetes used for clearing bush and chopping wood.  

King Mumbere has been critical of President Museveni’s increasingly authoritarian rule. As a tribal king he is constitutionally prohibited from interfering in political affairs in the central government, but has considerable influence over members of his tribe, many of whom live across the colonial-imposed border in North Kivu, DRC, who revere him as the steward of their culture and traditions. Royal guards are members of the community who volunteer to support the king in addition to their full-time jobs, mostly as farmers. They receive no formal training and are not armed. Typically they perform maintenance and administrative tasks, such as sweeping the palace compound or organizing events.

During the previous presidential election held earlier in 2016, districts encompassed by the Rwenzururu Kingdom in western Uganda accounted for the majority of opposition party members elected to parliament that year. “[President Museveni] thinks if the king had put his weight behind him, he wouldn’t have performed miserably like he did and I think he wants to punish our king for that,”  Kasese MP Winnie Kizza, the former leader of opposition in Parliament, told a Ugandan news site, The Daily Monitor.  

Aftermath 

Following the attack, government officials admitted that 126 people, including 16 police officers, were killed over the weekend in Kasese town and the rural sub-counties. However, Human Rights Watch reported that more than 150 civilians were killed by the UPDF, including at least 15 children who died in the palace attack. Local estimates report the death count was much higher, at least 300 people. More than a hundred more were arrested, stripped, loaded onto trucks, and taken to the prisons in the eastern city of Jinja, more than 15 hours away.  

“The assault on the palace in Kasese, which killed more people than any single event since the height of the war in Northern Uganda over a decade ago, should not be swept under the carpet,” Maria Burnett, associate Africa director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. 

In the following months, the community mourned those who were killed, the arrest of their King, and the anguish of those being held and tortured in prison. Some fled into the mountains in fear of further violence. Hundreds of children stopped going to school, their widowed mother’s unable to afford school fees.

“The fish will be big this year,” a neighbor said grimly, referring to the bodies that had been discarded in the lake.

 A particularly devastating effect of the attack on the Bakonzo tribe was that the government’s disposal of bodies prevented families from holding burial ceremonies for those who died, which is taboo in their culture. Without a proper burial, deceased loved ones are not able to make the journey to the place of their ancestors. Without this unification, there would be no rain. Incidentally, the following planting seasons were especially dry, and the harvests weak – compounding the suffering of Kasese’s farming community.

As I prepared to leave Kasese nearly a year after the attack, the outside world had long forgotten about the events that took place in late November 2016. Even in Kasese, few seemed to want to discuss it – especially with me, an outsider. There was nothing to be done, and no need to burden each other by recounting painful memories. Besides, talking about what happened may have dangerous consequences. Museveni was known to plant spies, and those who disparage him sometimes end up having “accidents” or are mysteriously poisoned. Despite the risks, however, some grew even more determined to fight back.

PART II: Tomorrow’s leaders fight back  

When I opened my computer on the morning of April 29, 2019 the first image to appear on my newsfeed was a familiar street in Kasese full of army caravans. The photo, which seemed to be taken hastily from a cell phone, was captioned “Tasting tear gas all over.” I immediately checked my inbox and found a message from Afan. “More bullets in Kasese,” he wrote. 

The military had sprayed gathering crowds with tear gas and shot live bullets into the air to break up a rally held by the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) party, the most formidable opposition to Museveni’s National Resistance Movement (NRM) party. Former NRM president, Dr. Kizza Besige, was expected to speak about ongoing NRM government corruption and the importance of participating in the 2021 presidential election. He and his wife, Winnie Byanyima, fought alongside Museveni during the 1981–1986 Ugandan Civil War which resulted in Museveni toppling the Okello government and becoming president of Uganda. Since then, they’re political relations have been contentious. Dr. Besige ran against Museveni for president several times, enduring multiple arrests for espousing dissenting views. 

“What is in Kasese is no different than what is in the rest of the country,” Dr. Besige said in an interview with NTV, a Ugandan news station, in response to the military intervening in the rally. “We are struggling for our rights, that’s it.” 

“These guys came for my life.”

One month earlier, I had been sitting with Afan in a café on the same street that was captured in the photo. It was my first time back in Kasese since 2017. 

During our conversation, a teenager pedaling cat-eye sunglasses strolled over to our table, barefoot and ashen in tattered clothes. Afan immediately became quiet. I followed suite and sipped my passion fruit juice with a stony face, remembering that local NRM party officials pay street kids to spy on people in town and report anyone speaking against Museveni’s government. We glared silently at the boy who lingered by our table before wandering past the café and around the corner. Afan then continued as if the interruption never happened. 

I noticed a new bitterness in his tone in addition to the shiny six-inch scar that now wraps around the right side of his head. When we met in 2016, his mischievous sense of humor could relieve even the most tense of situations. Now he seemed weary. Nearly two and a half years had passed since the Kasese attack. The 180 people who were arrested at the palace that weekend are still languishing in jail. King Mumbere is still under supervised house arrested in Kampala, and is forbidden from returning to Kasese or speaking publicly. Museveni’s government has doubled down on brutal treatment against individuals who dare to question it’s authority. As we spoke, he touched his scar.

The last thing he remembered about the night he was attacked was walking from the main road to his home around 8 o’clock, before being jumped by three men. He woke up hours later in the dark on the side of the road, covered in dusty clots of blood. “Robbers would have taken my phone, my wallet. I had everything. These guys came for my life,” he said. 

He believes his activism and public criticism of government corruption was the reason he was targeted. Following the 2016 massacre, Afan co-founded the Great Lakes Peace Center, an organization that collected names of more than 200 children who could no longer afford school because one or both parents were killed. He utilized his vast network and scheduled meeting after meeting, pressuring the government to provide assistance to these families so these children could receive an education. Eventually the government allocated some money, though much was stolen and the remaining funds were not equitably dispersed. 

“I hate this government.” He pronounced each syllable slowly and deliberately. “This is the country where I am raising my son. They are taking our future from us.”

Torture as a Tool

I found Hussein in his new office on a quiet side street in Ntinda, Kampala. It’s the third new office space he’s moved into since I met him in 2016. He says he’s used to changing locations frequently now. Once landlords find out who he is and what he does, it’s only a matter of time before they ask him to move out.

Hussein Kato Muyinda is a lawyer who cut his teeth by successfully fighting the 2014 Anti-Homosexuality law in Uganda. Since then, he founded Earth and Rights Initiative (ERI), a human rights-centered law firm which has been the sole Ugandan organization to advocate on behalf of the Kasese detainees.  

“These people are really suffering, and no one will risk saying anything about it,” he told me.

During visits to various prisons where the detainees have been held on charges of treason since November 2016, ERI has documented obvious signs of torture, including burns on both the male and female detainees’ inner thighs; cuts, welts, bruises, and other signs of being tied and beaten; severe weight loss due to poor diet and untreated illness while detained; as well as mental illness and deterioration due to psychological abuse. 

Among political prisoners, the Kasese detainees are especially vulnerable. Their families are subsistence farmers who cannot afford the trip to Kampala. Many are illiterate and have never been out of the mountains. They may not speak Luganda, only their local language. They are looked down on by members of other tribes who, as a result of Museveni’s divide and conquer politics, regard the Bakonzo as unruly and unsophisticated troublemakers. 

Last year, Hussein was working on filing a shadow report to the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT) treaty body, which is charged with investigating reports produced by signatories of the convention. Signatories are required to submit reports about their compliance with treaty every four years. Uganda ratified CAT in 1987, but has submitted only one report on its compliance in the last 33 years.

After completing extensive interviews with the Kasese detainees and spending significant time on their cases, Hussein showed up to work one day last fall to find his office had been destroyed. His desk was in pieces, and all of his computers and files were taken. He recalled filing a police report with frustration, knowing the military were the ones behind the break-in.

“They come and say ‘what a pity,’ and that they will launch an investigation. Of course, nothing ever happens,” he said. 

People Power, Our Power 

It is not only the Kasese detainees who have suffered torture and arbitrary detainment. In recent years, Museveni has become increasingly brazen in his exercise of force against political opponents. There have been several high-profile cases of alleged torture committed by the Ugandan government against well known political opponents since the 2016 Kasese attack. 

In April 2017, popular scholar and queer advocate Dr. Stella Nyanzi was arrested after months of government harassment, including being fired from her job as a professor at Makerere University, for calling President Museveni “a pair of buttocks” on her public Facebook page. She was charged with committing “offensive communication” under the 2011 Computer Misuse Act. While in custody, she was severely beaten by security officers and denied access to a lawyer. She was later released on remand but remains under full surveillance and prohibited from travel to this day while her trial remains pending. 

In September 2017, MP Betty Nambooze’s spine was broken by members of the Ugandan Special Forces, an elite security team that serves to protect the president. Ms. Nambooze was the leader of the “Togikwatako” movement which translates to “don’t touch it,” a campaign that attempted to filibuster the amendment that would eliminate the presidential age limit clause in Uganda’s constitution. After the attack on Ms. Nambooze which required her to travel to India to have metal plates inserted into her back to stabilize her broken spine so she could walk again, the amendment passed in December 2017, clearing Museveni to run for president again in 2021. 

MP Robert Kyagulanyi, an immensely popular musician and member of parliament from Kampala known by his stage name, Bobi Wine, is rarely sighted without his signature red Che Guevara-style hat with the words “People Power, Our Power” centered around a clenched fist. In August 2018, he was attacked by the Ugandan Special Forces after attending a rally against government corruption which drew thousands. His driver was shot and killed during the attack, and Mr. Kyagulanyi was detained for over a week without contact with his family or lawyer. He was beaten so badly with metal pipes that his “injuries rendered him almost unrecognizable,” and had to be carried by security forces into the courtroom upon his release. 

Fertile Ground

In September 2018, Mr. Kyagulanyi traveled to the United States for medical treatment due to the severity of his wounds inflicted by Ugandan security forces. He also hired a lawyer to meet with American lawmakers about the U.S. military funding provided to Uganda. “The gun that was used to shoot my driver is an American gun,” he told NPR.

Uganda is the biggest recipient of both U.S. military and humanitarian aid in the region, and is regarded as an important U.S. counterterrorism ally. According to the Congressional Research Service, in addition to hundreds of millions of dollars Uganda receives directly from the Department of State and Defense, “Uganda has been the largest recipient of U.S. support for AMISOM, which has totaled roughly $2 billion” in recent years. Uganda is also the leading provider of “private military contractors,” more commonly referred to as mercenaries, hired by the US to work in warzones like those in Afghanistan, where 75 percent of U.S. forces are contracted.

“It’s important also for the U.S. to know, especially the U.S. taxpayer, that the money they give the Ugandan military is mainly used to torture Ugandans,” said Mr. Kyagulanyi.

Mr. Kyagulanyi’s call to end military support to the Ugandan government comes precisely at a time when U.S. concerns about the Islamic State’s influence in the region are growing. In April of this year, the ISIS took credit for their first attack ever against security forces within the Democratic Republic of Congo. The attack took place in Beni, just across the border from Kasese. U.S. officials worry that ISIS is finding “fertile ground” in Congo’s Northern Kivu province among anti-government sympathizers. 

“We can forget some things.” 

While I was last in Kasese, I paid a visit to the respected elderly couple with whom I had shared a compound when I lived there. Standing only as tall as my shoulders, they reached up to hug me when I arrived, their smooth skin crinkling around their eyes as they smiled. 

“Bring tea for your sister” they told their youngest daughter, who had just returned home from University sporting a “People Power, Our Power” pin on her backpack. 

We sat outside, relaxing on the steps of their house. I did my best to answer their questions about my family, my studies, and why I wasn’t married yet. We leisurely sipped our tea. I could hear women in the compound next door laughing while chopping vegetables for dinner, and watched a group of children across the road help each other knock mangos out of a tree. I was told it had been a good harvest year, and that the coffee farmers did especially well. The sun was setting over the Rwenzori mountains, the golden light soft and warm.  

As children, this couple had watched the sun set over these mountains as their grandparents told stories about the first white colonizers who arrived in Kasese. They had lived through the 1964 Rwenzori uprising, the Amin, Obote, and Okello regimes, the ADF war, and Museveni’s 32 year rule thus far.

“We are okay here. We can forget some things,” one of them said.

“But we want our King back.”