KAMPALA, Uganda
Uganda's government must stop
using illegal detention centres as a weapon against dissidents and close
the facilities, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said Tuesday in a report
documenting the prevalence of torture at the clandestine sites.A police officer beats a female orange vendor on a street in Kampala, Uganda, on March 26, 2020
The report featured interviews
with 51 people, including 34 former detainees and eyewitnesses to
abductions, who described a litany of abuse at the hands of police, army
officials and Uganda's domestic intelligence agency, the Internal Security
Organisation (ISO), between April 2019 and November 2021.
The crackdown reached a fever
pitch during the two months leading up to and following Uganda's January 2021
general elections, which saw government critics, opposition politicians and
protesters unlawfully detained and forcibly disappeared.
In many cases, the whereabouts
of those detained remain unknown, HRW said, more than a year after the
re-election of President Yoweri Museveni, who has ruled Uganda with an iron
fist since 1986.
"Human Rights Watch calls
on the government of Uganda to immediately close all so-called safe houses and
other unauthorised detention centres," the global rights body said.
"The authorities should
immediately release all detainees held in such places of detention or bring
them promptly before a court to be charged."
Victims told HRW about being bundled into vans known as "drones", which are associated with abductions of government opponents in Uganda, before being taken to secret detention sites supervised by the ISO.
The locations ranged from
residential neighbourhoods in the capital Kampala to an island in Lake
Victoria, where detainees were allegedly tortured, with their captors pulling
out their fingernails, burning their bodies with an iron or sexually assaulting
them.
In some cases, victims were
handcuffed, chained and suspended from the ceiling for a dozen hours at a time,
in a technique called "Rambo".
A pregnant detainee told HRW
she was raped twice and beaten by an officer while in custody, causing her to
miscarry and undergo a hysterectomy.
After leaving the hospital,
she was tortured once more.
"I was tied up -- they
called it "Rambo" -- I was crucified," she said.
Others spoke of being injected
with unknown substances or subjected to electric shocks, while some described
seeing detainees with bricks hanging from their testicles.
Hassan Mutyaba, a businessman
who spent eight months in captivity, told a press conference in Kampala most of
his fellow detainees were too frightened to speak out publicly.
"We are not going to
survive. Today (I) am here but I won't be there tomorrow because I have come
out," he said at the event organised by HRW.
In February 2020, the
parliament's house committee on human rights published a report documenting
cases of torture at detention centres operated by the police and ISO and called
for further investigations.
But no such probes have taken
place, HRW said.
"Urgent steps are needed
to help victims, to hold abusive security agents to account, and to end this
spectre of impunity and injustice," said Oryem Nyeko, Uganda researcher at
HRW.
In recent years, Uganda has
witnessed a series of crackdowns aimed at stamping out dissent, with
journalists attacked, lawyers jailed, election monitors prosecuted and
opposition leaders violently muzzled.
Award-winning Ugandan author
Kakwenza Rukirabashaija fled to Germany last month to seek medical treatment
after allegedly having been tortured following detention on charges of
insulting Museveni and his son.
In December, the United States
slapped sanctions on Uganda's former military intelligence chief Abel Kandiho
over alleged human rights violations committed under his watch.
People arrested by his bureau
were "subjected to horrific beatings and other egregious acts by
officials, including sexual abuse and electrocutions, often resulting in
significant long-term injury and even death," the US Treasury said,
announcing the sanctions.
Kandiho was appointed to the
top command of the country's feared police force last month. - AFP
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