National Catharsis : Uganda Held in Thrall of Terrors Retold

By MICHAEL A. HILTZIK

May 20, 1989 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

KAMPALA, Uganda — The witness sat with her head bowed and a white handkerchief to her eyes as the chief counsel of the Uganda Human Rights Commission stepped to the microphone and addressed the four people behind the long table at the front of the room.

“The first case we have today, commissioners, is a kidnaping,” the chief counsel said.

Then the witness told her story, all the while holding up the handkerchief in an effort to conceal her sobs. She told of being in her shop in the town of Tororo on March 18, 1981, when friends ran in to say that her husband had been arrested.

All that day, she said, she tried to trace the route of the car in which her husband had been taken away. She followed it to the police station, then to the army barracks, and eventually to Kampala, more than 100 miles away .

“Everywhere we went, we were told to bring money if we wanted to see him,” she said.

One day at Kampala’s notorious Luzira prison, she said, her husband was finally brought forward, an abject, weeping figure unaware that he had been arrested as a member of the “wrong” political party and waiting for a court appearance that never came.

“Finally,” she told the commissioners, “they called us and told us to collect his body from the city mortuary.”

To the commissioners, the woman’s story could not but seem a little bland. Since they began their hearings in December, 1986, they have heard a numbing series of accounts of mass murder, of torture with fire and molten plastic, of prisoners being ordered to mutilate one another.

“It’s shown me a side to human beings I never knew existed,” said Commissioner John Nagenda, a writer and businessman.

And it has told Uganda a lot about itself, in a national catharsis that may be unique in Africa for its breadth and vividness.

The hearings cover a period of roughly 15 years, starting with Idi Amin’s military takeover in 1971 and ending with the military overthrow of President Milton Obote in 1985, a period that produced little in the way of heroes but many villains and victims.

The hearings have caught and held the nation’s attention. Accounts of the testimony are given prominent placement in the newspapers. Every Sunday evening, Ugandans with access to television can watch a 40-minute tape of highlights of the week’s proceedings.

“The people of this country have been greatly educated by the exercise itself, educated about their rights,” said Chief Justice Arthur Oder, the commission chairman. “For the first time, their eyes are opened to the fact that they have rights they should defend.”

A Delicate Time

It has been a delicate time for the “reconciliation” government of Yoweri Museveni, whose military takeover in 1986 appears to have given Uganda its first chance in nearly 20 years to cash in on its unparalleled agricultural potential.

For one thing, as much as Museveni has attempted to bring political figures associated with former regimes into his government, the hearings cannot but remind Ugandans of the role played in their time of troubles by tribal, religious and geographical differences. A majority of the commissioners, like Museveni, are of the Baganda tribe, the people of the south and west whose domination of the country went into serious eclipse during the regimes of northerners Amin and Obote.

Some people have questioned the point of unearthing old horrors that might be better left buried.

“It’s just designed to keep the newspapers filled with lurid exposes,” a diplomat in Kampala remarked, noting that the proceedings have not led to a single indictment.

For this, the commission blames the national Criminal Investigation Division. Still suffering from a decade of official neglect and lack of training facilities, the CID is responsible for following up the panel’s evidence and bringing formal charges.

But the commissioners argue that documenting the atrocities might help ensure that they are not repeated.

“Most people are delighted to have the lid taken off things,”

Nagenda said. “They were in despair that it would ever be discussed openly. The recurring theme we hear from witnesses is to not let the victims to have died in vain.”

The commission operates under many physical and official restrictions. Perennially short of paper, ink and stencils, its staff of 15 secretaries is a year behind in transcribing the estimated 20,000 pages of testimony elicited so far from 500 witnesses, and the hearings may continue for as long as another year.

There is also some suspicion about the commission’s charge, which only covers atrocities committed up to 1986, when Museveni’s National Resistance Army took over.

Accusations of murder and torture have been rising in recent months against the present government, notably from Amnesty International, which in March complained that at least 3,000 political prisoners were being detained without trial under the new regime. Earlier in the year, there were reports that government soldiers in the north, where rebel activity continues, had burned civilians alive in the process of torching suspected rebel hide-outs.

Despite all that, there is general agreement that when it comes to torture, murder and lawlessness, Museveni’s government is not in its predecessors’ league.

Museveni’s National Resistance Army is by virtually all accounts far more disciplined than those of Amin and Obote. In several instances, charges of torture against soldiers have been followed up by trials and convictions. Most recently, the army arrested a number of officers accused of taking part in the massacre of civilians in late April.

Amin, Obote Not Confronted

Perhaps unavoidably, the inquiry has not specifically confronted the men at the top. Both Amin and Obote are in exile, Amin in Saudi Arabia and Obote in Zambia. When Amin visited Zaire recently, an attempt was made to have him extradited, but it failed.

Nonetheless, neither has been far from center stage as the proceedings take place in a dank, creaking gymnasium in the Prison Officers’ Mess building on the outskirts of Kampala. Amin’s vice president, the illiterate Adrisi Mustafa, testified for 12 days--credibly, the commissioners say--about his superior’s depredations.

The highlight of the hearings thus far has been the appearance of Paulo Muwanga, chief of state during Obote’s second term as president in 1981-85. Muwanga was called to answer charges of complicity in atrocities, and the hearings into his activities were so well attended that they were shifted to the National Conference Center, a cavernous hall connected by walkway to the Nile Mansions, Muwanga’s infamous headquarters.

Muwanga was the 154th witness of 1988. He appeared in white slacks, a white shirt under a checked sport jacket and sandals. With him was a prison officer, because Muwanga has been in prison for three years on charges of having rigged elections and stolen public money.

In the hearing room, Oder tried to maintain a veneer of public order. He addressed Muwanga as mzee , a Bantu and Swahili term of respect. He allowed the former vice president to make an initial statement in which he dismissed his accusers as “small, small boys, all of them playing big.”

Impassively, Muwanga heard the charges against him: He had ordered a 20-year-old woman, a suspected rebel, tied to a seatless chair over a flaming plastic pail. Her breasts were cut off, and she was impaled on a hot poker. Another victim had been so mutilated that Muwanga allegedly ordered: “We can’t let her out of here like this. Finish her off.”

Muwanga’s response to all this was not exactly direct.

“I am the proud father of a sizable family with lots of grandchildren,” he said. “A man like myself should behave in an exemplary manner. Otherwise, there could be a curse on the family.”

Indeed, the commission has elicited few direct answers to charges and to questions about how order and respect for life in Uganda could have collapsed so thoroughly in the few years since it achieved independence. And the commissioners have avoided delving too deeply into human nature, preferring to seek the answers in events.

“History has a lot to do with it,” said Oder. “The way the British ruled the country did not encourage unity. There was no Ugandan nation. People were ethnically different. There were a lot of developed tribal states. . . .

Lack of Discipline

“Then, discipline was almost totally lacking in the security forces. That was manifested in a moral breakdown in the general public.”

Nagenda added: “There’s the kind of material you had at the top--a completely illiterate vice president, who’d only feel comfortable with people lower than himself, whose moral judgments . . . were gravely impaired.”

But it is clear that to some extent the commissioners are aware that there might be some deeper cause for Uganda’s long period of horror. Describing the experience of listening to endless accounts of death and barbarism, Nagenda said:

“At first you get hardened to it, but never entirely. You hear 40 died here, 40 died there, and then you see people without noses and you can’t help but be affected. Or someone very simply and truthfully tells you a horrible story, or just one of loss, and you can’t help but be affected.”

Nagenda was asked whether he believes that Uganda could experience such bloodshed again. Uneasily, he fingered his wire-rim eyeglasses for a moment, then replied:

“Having seen it once, one becomes more cynical about human nature.”