Kayihura gets kisanja, Bodas roll on

By John Bahana (Ph D)

Kale Kayihura has defied many in getting his contract at the helm of Uganda Police renewed for the third set of three years, a feat unprecedented in the history of the Uganda civil police.

I want to join the many Ugandans that really feel he deserves the job. That the expectations of many Ugandans that think Uganda Police needs to perform much better is not misplaced and deserves note of the military general that owns a masters legal degree from a top British University.

Even more accolades need to be heaped on the only military general from Kisoro district for his election last week as Vice President of African Union Mechanism for Police Co-operation (Afripol), a recognition of attributes of his capabilities.

I lived in Kenya for many years and for many of us, we knew the Kenyan Police, the so called "Utumishi kwa wote" as one of the roughest Police Service that I had experienced. But running from the Amin's killer regime, Kenya Police, that was also understood as "kitu kidogo" or "lete chai" was angelic in comparison. I know Kenya Police has since significantly improved since the days of Bernard Hinga and the Commissioner, Shaw, whom Yoweri Museveni even remembers in his book, the Mustard Seed, having narrowly escaped from his claws.

I will keep away from the high Octane condemnation of the recent brutality following the death of their own Andrew Felix Kawesi. If the Uganda Police has not heard, or if Kale has not felt the heat, then I do not know what we need to do.

A parting statement: Kale Kayihura is a scion of a freedom fighter who died in search of freedom from colonialists. It, therefore, goes without saying that in the name of his father, Kayihura must control his wild charges.

Unfortunately, it is not Uganda Police alone that still practices this ancient method of extracting confessions. The world's top most politician, Donald J Trump, the turbulent president believes in the use of torture. In a recent TV interview, President Trump was asked if torture as a means of extracting confession was right, he answered, "Yes, absolutely", adding that he felt torture absolutely works.

Sadly, for many innocent citizens of this world, torture is still widespread and used by many governments. Yet the practice is illegal since the adoption of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which prohibited it.

Torture is understood as the infliction of severe physical or psychological pain upon an individual to extract information or a confession, or as an illicit extrajudicial punishment, is prohibited by international law and is illegal in most countries.

The use of coercion, including the inflicting of pain and extreme discomfort, to extract information has been attractive to those charged with protecting the public - as well as to criminals, psychopaths, warlords, dictators and sadists, for as long as any have existed. The ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans all used torture. The adjective "medieval" prompts a mental image of barbarous implements used to force people to divulge something they would rather keep silent about.

A few years ago, the Americans were in the news for torturing suspects of the September 11, 2001 best known as 9/11. They used what is referred to as "Waterboarding", which is an enhanced interrogation technique that simulates the feeling of being drowned. A person is strapped to a board with the upper part of his body on a downward incline. Then, a cloth is placed over the person's mouth and water is poured over his face, causing the person to have difficulty in breathing and to feel as if his lungs are filling with water

But according to historians, waterboarding dates to the middle Ages and has been a form of torture in many conflicts. The US military personnel are still trained on SERE (Survival Evasion Resistance Escape) techniques and subjected to waterboarding in training situations to help them resist if they are captured.

Nonetheless, waterboarding is no longer legal since 2009, when it was banned by President Obama eventually entering the US law that prohibits "cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment." Waterboarding is one of eight techniques of interrogation expressly prohibited from being used. But Donald Trump supports it.

According to an interview in the New York Times with the Defense Secretary, James Mattis told then President-elect Donald Trump at a meeting in November, 2016, that he did not find the technique of waterboarding to be useful. Mattis told Trump, "I've always found, give me a pack of cigarettes and a couple of beers, and I do better with that than I do with torture,"

A CID veteran of the then respected Uganda Police way back, told me how he spent months with prisoners even to the extent of getting jigger infested in order to gain the confidence of suspects and extract information leading to conviction. He was from Busoga. No insult impugned. But his CID of the time must have believed in the argument that torture does not always work for after all, courts will never accept evidence extracted from torture. My friend very well knew that the only reliable way to extract information, as James Mattis and other experienced interrogators will confirm, is to build a rapport with a subject, even at the cost of suffering jigger infestation. But I must state here that the boss of CID, a Muhammad, a Ugandan of Pakistan extraction, tortured Obote's political opponents at CID headquarters, Parliament Buildings in the 1960s until Amin's take over.  He was himself tortured and killed at Mutukula, from where our Prof Charles Kwesiga of Uganda Industrial Research Institute miraculously escaped.

In his communication to heads of security services, President Museveni clearly discourages torture of suspects. For as the Commander in chief, he would hope to see court convictions not suspects limping out of prison buses to court from the now notorious Nalufenya.

As the President admits, the first problem is that it is extremely difficult to gather useful and actionable information from an individual under torture. Anything said under duress is inherently unreliable, hence courts rejection of such evidence.

The proponents of torture, as there must be many in today's Uganda Police ignore the immense social costs of their actions. These are significant enough to outweigh any tactical gain, should there actually be any. These include the issues of Uganda having to deal with victims of torture who may be in their hundreds, even thousands of brutalized, traumatized individuals. We must never lose the fact that many Ugandans went to the bush because they were either personally brutalized or their relatives suffered immense psychological torture or even death under the Amin and Obote regimes.

The writer is an Agricultural Scientist and a regular contributor to New Vision