Minister Muhoozi misses the missing 

Insensitive, flawed and grossly inadequate was the meandering failure of Gen David Muhoozi, the Internal Affairs state minister, to account for the 18 missing persons in parliament.

This came after opposition MPs boycotted business in the plenary demanding that government accounts for missing persons and other grave human rights concerns. I do not dismiss minister’s more than 300 pages statement flippantly. Yet, whenever we are dealing with human life, personal liberty, human rights or missing persons, we must take our tasks seriously.

We must avoid perfunctory responses. I know this because I have had to look for missing persons captured by state operatives on many occasions. No one seriously looking for missing persons in Uganda would even think of going to NIRA, Interpol or Immigration.

These bodies have our data but no idea of where missing persons are. The Minister shared irrelevant results of what he found in such places as though he did not know that such places do not detain missing persons in Uganda. This was deliberate.

The good minister would have visited places notorious for incommunicado detentions. In my considerable experience as a Human Rights Defender, these places include: Chieftaincy of Military Intelligence (CMI) detention facilities in Mbuya, the CMI detention facility inside the premises of police’s Special Investigations Division (SID) in Kireka – which locals call Wembule; military barracks in Makindye; Masaka and Bombo; torture chambers nicknamed safe houses, police stations; SFC detention centre in Entebbe where Kakwenza Rukirabashaija and several NUP detainees were recently held incommunicado for long before being released or charged; and surprisingly, some government prisons like Kitalya.

The minister, instead of recycling old statistics from Uganda Human Rights Commission, the Parliamentary Human Rights Committee and police, should have visited the places I have named above, and freshly contacted families of the missing persons for the latest details, frustrations and progress in their search for missing persons.

It was wrong for the minister to flush in parliament a report on an ongoing human rights crisis merely relying on government records from the archives. Such records should have been the starting point not the zenith of the Minister’s efforts to account for missing persons.

As shown by the incidences of Kakwenza Rukirabashaija, Francis Zaake, Bobi Wine and Samuel Masereka to highlight a few, when people go missing, we fear they are being tortured and those we ultimately find recount unspeakable horrors of physical and mental torture at the hands of those paid monthly to protect them – the military and police.

Torture in Uganda is by both public and private actors but the government tormentors out compete the other torturers. It is both painful and embarrassing.

As veteran legislator Abdul Katuntu recently said on Capital Gang and in parliament, each missing person not only reminds us of Uganda’s dictatorial past wrought with disappeared or missing persons but is also a sad reality of pain, expense and tears of a brother, sister, mother, child, spouse or friend of someone.

A missing person is someone’s worker or employer. Missing persons means tortured and afraid families, friends, clans or communities. Missing persons means insecure communities, spending resources in helpless searches during which the victims’ captors further torture kith and kin with intimidation, threats and extortion. Government needs to stop this and be the liberation force it projects itself as.

Government has a legal and moral duty to protect people and ensure that they do not go missing. Governments exist to protect the life, liberty and property of their people. To normalize the phenomenon of missing persons, enforced disappearances, and illegal detentions is a dereliction of duty.

Once government fails to protect people from disappearing or missing, it should lead efforts in looking for them and stop blaming civil society, citizens and politicians who try to help victims and families of missing persons and enforced disappearances.

Rather than blaming some victims’ families for not trusting or fearing police, government should ask itself why people fear their supposed protectors. Government must know that when institutions erected to protect us torment us, we fear and try to avoid them. Government must know that when state agencies behave like criminal gangs, the population treats them as such.

The state should use all the information helpful in tracing missing persons regardless of whether the people providing it are its political rivals or not. Enforced disappearances and missing persons create a climate of fear that undermines citizens’ trust in their government and government agencies like police.

Hence some victims’ families approach police and Uganda Human Rights Commission with doubt and caution. This is worsened by irresponsible remarks from the leaders either denying the existence of missing persons or blaming the victims’ families.

The author is CEO, The Environment Shield