Unanswered questions from Lhubiriha school killings

Almost five days later, there are more questions than answers to the grisly killing of 42 people in Western Uganda’s Kasese district by suspected rebel forces.

At least 37 students (17 boys and 20 girls) from Mpondwe Lhubiriha secondary school, the school’s security guard and two other people from the community were killed in the attack. The attackers also ransacked shops, fleeing with property worth millions of shillings. A home in Kyogha, Bwera town council was also torched by the perpetrators.

In his Sunday, June 18, 2023 statement published on Twitter, President Museveni said the victims were hacked and burned to death by the assailants. Museveni blamed the ADF, a Ugandan rebel outfit based in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, for the attack.

In the statement, Museveni asked, “Was an alarm sounded, and by whom? How did the nearby security people respond? Why didn’t our people on the Congo side have intelligence on this splinter group?” He added that Uganda will send more troops into the area south of the Rwenzori Mountain and plug any gaps. On top of Museveni’s questions, several others remain unanswered.

Was it an ADF attack or a school wrangle gone sour?

On June 17, 2023, Maj Gen Dick Olum, the commander of the UPDF operation Shujaa fighting the ADF in eastern Congo and the mountain division, which covers the Mpondwe sector, claimed the perpetrators of the attack on the school were linked to the ADF.

According to Museveni, the pressure exerted on the ADF by the UPDF since November 2021 has forced the rebel outfit to break into splinter groups which at times attempt to return to Uganda and cause havoc like the unfortunate incident at the school.

In her June 17, 2023 media address about the grisly murder of the students, the First Lady and minister of Education and Sports, Janet Museveni, pointed to a wrangle over the school ownership’s as a possible explanation for the killings. Her address was hours apart from Olum’s earlier claim of an ADF-inspired attack.

Mrs Museveni added that auditors had been sent to the school to audit the school’s financial records. The school was torched on the fateful Friday evening. Why then would the assailants burn down the boys’ dormitory and the store with petrol bombs?

Why wasn’t the office or the residence of the headteacher where the files are suspected to be kept attacked? Why then did they burn down a home in Kyogha? How is it linked to the school ownership wrangle?

By Monday, June 19, 2023, 20 people including the headmaster and director of the school had been arrested to aid in investigations. Why is it that no security officer has been arrested to date? Although the security forces have remained silent on whether the attack on the school was reported, a source said that one of the students from the school had reported the attack to the nearest police post.

“The attack on the school was reported at 9:45pm. by one of the learners to the police. This boy was escorted by a boda boda cyclist. The boy was just interrogated by the police but police did not dispatch a team to the scene of the crime to investigate what happened,” the source said.

There’s a police post within a radius of 800 metres from the school and a fortified military barracks and other police posts within a 10km radius from the school. How come the police did not respond to the gunshots or the petrol bombs in the area? Should we say they were cowards? The militia committed all the mayhem and left untouched.”

The country home of General Wilson Mbadi, the chief of Defence of Forces, is located about 15km from Lhubiriha. This alone should have seen the security situation in Kasese beefed up. Many people will question why such a grisly butchering of innocent people should happen in the area that boasts of the country’s chief of Defence forces.

The Observer has established that frantic calls for assistance from the public to the police were made from as early as 10 pm on the fateful day but security officers took about three hours to respond. Is it possible that the community was harbouring wrong elements who eventually meted out violence on their own?

Although Olum claimed the community hosted these terrorists for about two days, he didn’t declare that the security forces had been informed of several complaints about the presence of suspicious individuals hiding in unfinished houses.

Another source said: “For a month, most of us Bwera residents had been complaining to police about some wrong elements hiding in unfinished houses. The security officers remained aloof to these concerns until hell eventually broke loose. We expected heads to roll but nothing has happened yet.”

Was it a laxity in intelligence or it was a question of lack of expertise to act on the information?

Speaking to NBS TV on June 19, 2023, Brig Gen Felix Kulayigye, the UPDF spokesperson, admitted that there were lapses in intelligence. Kulayigye also blamed the residents for collaborating with the people unknown to them that eventually caused mayhem.

Is the intelligence failure due to the mass retirement of senior UPDF officials from the army? With major parts of Uganda now peaceful, it is most likely that some military commanders have not been to the bush. They instead had got their peeps from training institutes. Should the retired military officers be enlisted into Uganda’s intelligence system to mentor the young Turks?

On the other hand, Kasese district enjoys a fortified security presence owing to its strategic importance both as a tourism hub and a border district to a volatile neighbouring country (DRC). The 87km Rwimi-Mpondwe stretch has six security roadblocks while the 340km Rwimi-Kampala stretch has one security roadblock at Buloba.

Also, there’s a military barracks at Kaveera in Hima (77km from Mpondwe), a Rwenzori East Police Division in Kasese Municipality (55km from Mpondwe), a Military bar- racks around Bwera (5km radius), and a military operation ongoing in eastern Congo just 15km from Uganda.

If it was an intelligence failure, how come, other commanders, didn’t respond to the information if those around Bwera failed? How didn’t any of these security officers manning the roadblocks heed the frantic calls for assistance? The earliest security response came at around 1:50 am when the assailants had dusted their hands and abducted some students without any form of resistance.

A neighbour said, “Before the Friday incident, we observed heavy military movement more than usual around the Bwera and Lhubiriha areas. We ignored the movements in the hope that we were safe. I was shocked to hear frantic noises from the school in the wee hours of the night. We thought maybe the police were pursuing armed thugs. By 3 am, information started sipping in that Peter Hunter’s school had been attacked. It is on Saturday morning that I was able to revisit the events of the previous day. It means that the security forces had received the intelligence information but they didn’t know how to act on the information.”

How does the community cooperate with security yet the same security operatives have been accused of masterminding abductions of political opponents from their area? The military presence in Kasese significantly outnumbers the police presence in the district. The military has been accused of masterminding the abductions of political opponents.

In February 2023, the leader of the opposition in parliament, Mathias Mpuuga accused the security officers of masterminding the kidnapping, torture and final death of Constantine Muhonja an 80-year-old NUP supporter from Karambi sub-county in Kasese district. Muhonja died at the police detention facility in Kireka in Kampala.

Will the community support the security forces to wipe out the wrong elements?

Since the rise of the ADF in the mid-90s, several groups worked with the Maj Gen James Kazini-led UPDF to wipe the rebels out of the Rwenzori. The Bakonzo home guards helped in gathering intelligence information, identifying wrong components in the community and also rallying their colleagues to hand over the guns from the captured dissidents.

It is not by coincidence the Omusinga of Rwenzururu, Charles Wesley Mumbere rallied the community to work closely with the security officers so that the perpetrators of the heinous Kasese crime are brought to book.

The Omusinga’s message of unity in times of despair was broadcast on the kingdom-affiliated Engeya Radio based in Kasese. Omusinga’s speech read in part, “We should recognize that our border communities in Bundibugyo, Ntoroko and Kasese with DRC are in danger. I request that we should be vigilant like we were in 1998 when these rebels first surfaced in the Rwenzori region. If possible, we would discourage the establishment of schools along the border until when DRC finds peace. (…)”

Before the Lhubiriha school attack, several schools in the Rwenzori region had also been attacked and torched down by suspected ADF rebels. On August 14, 1997, St. John the Evangelist Minor Seminary, Kiburara was attacked and several children were abducted; Mitandi Seventh Day Adventist College in Kasese was attacked in February 1998 and Uganda National Technical College, Kichwamba attacked in June 1998. Between 50 and 80 students were lost during the infamous Kichwamba attack.