UGANDA: Government efforts to end abuses in Karamoja inadequate - HRW

Efforts by the Ugandan government to prevent abuses, including torture and killing of civilians by the military during disarmament operations in the northeastern Karamoja region, have been inadequate, Human Rights Watch (HRW) stated in a report.

The New York-based watchdog stated in its 97-page report released on 11 September that perpetrators of atrocities, such as the summary executions of civilians, had gone unpunished, despite the establishment of commissions to investigate them.

HRW noted that there been a significant reduction in the number of incidents of human rights violations by the military, but abuses such as unlawful killings, beatings and arbitrary detentions had persisted.

"It’s good that the Ugandan army is trying to control its soldiers during disarmament operations, but abuses are still taking place," said Elizabeth Evenson, a researcher at HRW’s Africa division. "If these abuses continue to go unacknowledged and unpunished, future abuses are inevitable," she said in the report.

Karamoja is one of Uganda’s remotest areas inhabited mainly by pastoralists. Cattle rustling between communities is common and often violent. The Ugandan government has since 2001 been carrying out an operation to seize fire-arms, mainly from the Karamojong community, in a bid to improve security in the region.

The operation has, however, been marred by frequent clashes between armed local herders and the Ugandan army, with unarmed civilians often being caught up in the confrontation.

"The Ugandan government has every right to get guns out of the hands of ordinary citizens," said Evenson. "But its soldiers must still obey the law," she added.

The HRW report, Get the Gun!: Human Rights Violations by Uganda’s National Army in Law Enforcement Operations in Karamoja Region, is based on 50 eyewitness accounts of law-enforcement operations by the Uganda People’s Defence Forces (UPDF) between September 2006 and January 2007, and on visits to six of those operations.

The report highlights incidents when soldiers opened fire on children, used armoured personnel carriers to crush homesteads, and, on several occasions, severely beat and arbitrarily detained men in military facilities to force them to reveal alleged weapons caches.

The military dismissed the report, describing it as "out-dated".

"Many of the allegations were made to scare us away from disarmament, but we have been consistent and insistent in our resolve to end the menace of raids, road ambushes, cross-border raids and massive raids into neighbouring districts," army spokesman Major Felix Kulaigye told IRIN.

Some of the allegations made in the report had been investigated and found to be baseless, he added.

"There have never been extrajudicial killings, theft or loss of property committed by UPDF. A few individual soldiers have, like everywhere in the world, committed operational crimes but the punishments are clear to everybody," Kulaigye said.

HRW has insisted that very few soldiers have been brought to justice for serious human rights abuses committed during disarmament operations and urged the government to provide a systematic response to human rights violations.