President Yoweri Museveni took the century-old official oppression of Muslims in Uganda to a different level: he allegedly started killing them routinely and systematically subjecting them to untold torture.
The first documentation of Museveni’s reported brutality against Muslims is: Is the 1979 Muslim Blood-bath in Bushenyi History? A Review of the Genocide that was Called Liberation. In this small book Makerere University Professor Abasi Kiyimba details shocking accounts of how 64 Muslim women, children and helpless villagers were slaughtered in Ankole for no reason but because a Muslim – Idi Amin Dada – had ruled this country. As soon as Amin fell in 1979, the Muslims of Bushenyi paid the price.
“On the morning of Tuesday 26th June, 1979,” writes Kiyimba, “a mob of Christians armed with spears, knives and ropes, started rounding up Muslims and tying their hands behind their backs. They said that they were doing it on the orders of Yoweri Museveni the then minister of defence.”
Kiyimba goes on to explain how alleged Museveni’s agents accomplished their mission:
They gathered the Muslims in the home of Abdallah Segululigamba from where they marched them to Rwizi river to be executed one after the other. At the river Muslims were butchered in the most horrifying manner. There was one whose head was cut into three pieces before being finally thrown into the river. Other cases included those whose hands or legs were cut off, then thrown into the river to drown. The Imam Abdallah Segululigamba was mercilessly hacked in the middle with a machete and thrown into the river. The most memorable of these cases of cruelty is the 27 year old Madiya Natende who was seven months pregnant. Her stomach was slashed open with a machete and the fetus crudely ripped out.
But that was not all. Over 400 Muslims were detained without trial and “forced to ransom themselves by paying dearly in form of money, cows, goats, sheep, bicycles, radios and other items” while many others were driven out of their homes. Three decades after the tragedy, they still live as refuges – in Kyazanga – in their own country.
The operation that also left mosques burnt, Muslim land seized and banana plantations slashed was, according to investigators, executed in a planned, systematic and methodical manner and targeted Muslims as such – a collection of characteristics typical of genocide.
Museveni’s work of tormenting Muslims became easier once he seized power a quarter-century ago. The torment heightened at the height of the ADF rebellion in the mid 1990s as his government summarily executed countless Muslims and tortured others in incommunicado detention centers known as safe houses. These atrocities, according to the Human Rights Watch, are far from over.
In its 2009 report titled, Open Secret: Illegal Detention and Torture by the Joint Anti-terrorism Task Force in Uganda, Human Rights Watch documents 106 people detained in such torture chambers and concludes, “Of the 106 named individuals detained by JATT documented by Human Rights Watch, all but two were Muslim.”
A Muslim fisherman tells Human Rights Watch about his ordeal:
They asked me, “What do you people do in that mosque? Why do you pray there and what are you planning? Are there certain things that you are trying to organize? … They said, “So you have refused to tell us what we need to know.” Then they took off my Muslim cap and took off all my clothes so I was just in my underpants. They told me to lie down on the floor and then they began beating me. They were saying to me, “Are you sure you aren’t ADF? Are you sure you have no bombs?” They beat me very badly; every part of me and blood was coming out of me all over.
Such torture, quite often, claimed the lives of the victims, as the report highlights:
JATT arrested Saidi Lutaaya around November 22, 2007, from the Old Taxi Park in Kampala where he worked as a hawker… Two days later, the Voice of Africa radio program broadcast that the body of Saidi Lutaaya was at the mortuary at Mulago hospital in Kampala…Nurses informed family that Lutaaya had been brought to the hospital early in the morning by soldiers. One said that the man had ‘a hole in his foot and the bone of his lower leg was out, and that he was hit in the head with a hammer, blood was oozing out of his body.’
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Rehema
Patriot in Kampala,East Africa
When the boot of government is on your neck,it doesn't matter if it's left or right. Today is Buganda and Besigye, tomorrow is some one else.
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