Africa-Press – Uganda. For many politically conscious visitors to Uganda the unhappy conclusion would be that this is a place where political dissent is outlawed. A police state where the police are either actively breaking the law, or taking an almost morbid pleasure in spitting on the rule of law.
The police have demonstrated this illegal tendency, despite several reminders, in their repeated and incorrigibly violent breaking up of peaceful protests.
The police force pretends to be exercising lawful authority in stopping peaceful protests from happening. It does so while ignoring the constitutional, inalienable and inherent rights of citizens to hold a peaceful assembly; to demonstrate and to submit petitions to the authorities. The latest example of this lawless misconduct by the police was in Tuesday’s manhandling and subsequent detention of students at Kyambogo University in Kampala. Hardly a week earlier, several Opposition MPs were roughed up and briefly detained by police. Their purported crime – attempting to deliver a petition protesting the violent attack on the Buvuma District woman MP, Ms Susan Mugabi, by the police.
Not many days before that, another gang of noticeably unruly policemen were busy thumping medical interns. The very audacity of this attack on health professionals begs the question: now who will treat these police officers when they fall sick?
Today, it is almost de facto that legitimate peaceful protests and demonstrations as a legitimate and constitutionally guaranteed form of political expression are barred – without legal basis – by the police.
In the meantime, some senior police officers are running around saying sorry for the pepper-spraying of journalists, some of whom have borne the brunt of the police’s more primeval excesses. There can be no justification whatsoever in the claim that civil protests are being broken up because they are likely to cause a breach of public peace. Indeed, all human rights defenders have denounced this regrettable behaviour. And on the contrary, with their penchant for lobbing teargas canisters at unsuspecting citizens, the police are, in fact, many times guilty of causing avoidable breaches of the peace. A week ago, Uganda’s Human Rights Commission summoned the police chief to explain why his officers are willfully breaking the law instead of upholding it as they should. Parliament has similarly put the minister of Internal Affairs and the Prime Minister on notice over police brutality.
Hopefully, something sensible comes out of those interventions. Uganda’s police may not remember this but when President Museveni fled into the jungles of Luweero in 1981, one of his reasons for turning much of central Uganda into a ‘liberation’ war zone was to restore the rule of law in Uganda.
It is, therefore, a political contradiction of the worst sort that his government appears to give tacit approval when the legal protections of our inherent and inalienable human rights are being trampled upon.
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