The martyrdom of Archbishop Janani Luwum

By Prof. Semakula Kiwanuka

On February 16, Ugandans will be remembering the murder of Archbishop Janani Luwum. It is now an annual event.

I fled from Amin's Uganda in 1976, spending the first year of my exile in Kenya.

When Amin murdered Archbishop Janani Luwum, I was still in Nairobi and I attended the memorial service on February 20, 1977. Below is what I wrote after the murder of the Archbishop.

It is from a 300-page unpublished manuscript, which I wrote that year while I was a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge. It is entitled, Inside Amin's Uganda.

Apart from the murder of the Chief Justice Kiwanuka, none of the tragic and violent deaths had tarnished the image of Amin and shocked the world as the brutal assassination of Archbishop Luwum. In Amin's scheme of things, this marked the climax of his war on Christians.

The murder led to worldwide condemnation and for the first time the world had began to see and to understand what Amin was really like and what surviving Uganda Christians faced. Matters had been building up since beginning of January with widespread disappearance of leading Christians in the country.

On the night of February 5,   the Archbishop's house was attacked by the State Research men, who, after entering pushed a gun in his stomach demanding that he should show them arms!

That same weekend, the SRB had arrested Bishop Yona Okoth of Tororo. Again at night. But because they did not find any arms either in Luwum's or Okoth's house, the latter was released.

On Tuesday, February 8, the Bishops of the Province of Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and Boga Zaire met and expressed their shock and horror. They wrote to Amin on February 10, pointing out that they were not questioning the right of the government to administer justice or to arrest offenders. (They had to be careful remembering how the Chief Justice had been maligned by allegedly questioning such right).

The SRB had used Ben Ongom, whom they had tortured as a decoy to get the Archbishop to open his door at night. Archbishop Luwum probably knew Ben Ongom and when he called him in distress at night he opened for him. Luwum and Okoth reported the incidents to the assembled Bishops on February 8, and their reports were appended to the letter written to Amin on February 10. The same letter was copied to leaders of other churches and to Amin's vice-president, Mustapha Idris as well as to the Muslim Chief Khadhi. Amin did not like the letter because the bishops asked him to bring the law of the gun to an end. They wrote the following letter;

Christians are asking if this is what is happening to our Bishops then where are we? The gun whose muzzle has been pressed against the Archbishop's stomach, the gun which has been used to search the Bishop of Bukedi's house is the gun which is being pointed at every Christian in the church, unless your Excellency can give us something to change the situation. The security of the ordinary Christian had been in jeopardy for a longtime…….we have buried many who have died as a result of being shot and there are many more whose bodies have not been found. Yet their disappearances are connected with the activities of the members of security forces.                Your Excellency, if required, we give concrete evidence of what is happening because widows and orphans are members of our church.

Having known what was happening in Uganda, the London Observer of February 13, warned of an impending reign of terror.

 At that time Amin was still entertaining his guests whose trips he had paid for so that they could attend his celebrations in January. Among them was Major and Mrs. Ian Grahame.

On Monday February 14, Amin summoned the Archbishop to Entebbe State House and accused him of treason. After that he, Major Grahame and his wife and the Archbishop were photographed in the Entebbe State House Gardens.

Then on Wednesday February 16, Amin collected about 2,000 of his handpicked soldiers at the Conference Centre and again summoned the Archbishop. As many bishops as could attend were also present.

He accused the Archbishop and ministers Oryema and Oboth Ofumbi of plotting to overthrow him. Whereupon the soldiers shouted "kill them, kill them today".

Kenyan and British journalists in Nairobi were present on that fateful afternoon when Luwum was accused and subsequently arrested. The arrest took place after that military show of force and after the journalists were on their way to Nairobi.

One of these, a BBC correspondent was telephoned by Amin's British executioner, Bob Astles, to tell him that the Archbishop and the two ministers had been arrested. "But I want to assure you that the arrest was gentle….it is a pity that you have left already. However, remain by your radio.

There will be an announcement". The BBC correspondent returned to Nairobi and the next day, Thursday at 10.00 am. February 17, the awaited radio announcement came. Luwum and Minister Oryema and Ofumbi had "died in a motor accident when being taken for interrogation!"

What had happened was that after arrest, the Archbishop and the two ministers were taken to Amin's suite in the Nile Hotel or at his Nakasero lodge where Amin himself shot them. After that, his British friend (Bob Astles) advised that the bodies should be removed at once. That was how and when the accident was hatched.

Photographs of an SRN car No. UVS 2999 (Japanese Subaru), which had crushed several months before and had been seen lying in the Transocean yard of the Industrial Area, were taken. That was allegedly the vehicle in which the three victims crashed. Then another version was that they had crashed in a Range Rover while going uphill to the Officers Mess or to Nakasero lodge. This time even Bob Astles, Amin's general factotum had failed to concoct a consistently good lie.

After some days, the bodies were secretly flown to their respective districts for burial, but no one could say for certain that they were the bodies of the three victims. No postmortem was allowed and in the case of Luwum, Amin outlawed church effort to bury its leader in the church grounds.

After a week, an SRB man called major Moses was produced for the international press to tell them that he had been the driver taking away the prisoners when they attacked him. But he had been in a coma since the accident and he actually remembered nothing else!

As the international commission of jurists stated, Amin's pretence that the three men died in an accident deceived no one". Amidst worldwide condemnation, Amin not surprisingly found strong defense from his friend Major Ian Grahame who regards "Amin as a truly great and truly misunderstood man".

Major Grahame had the distinction of accepting Amin's version of how the Archbishop and the two ministers died. That is in a road accident. Interviewed by the Observer, he was reported to have asserted: "Amin has made a statement and I have no reason to doubt it".

Justifying Luwum's arrest, the major continued: "The Archbishop was implicated in political events, otherwise he would have been left alone in his house. I know that for a fact…." Massacres and atrocities? I believe that if you divide the figures that the Observer and other newspapers have been putting out, by one thousand, will get somewhere near the truth…..".

To show that Amin was a truly great man, Major Grahame pointed out that "if you asked the first ordinary person you saw when you walked down Fulham Road who the presidents of Lesotho or Tanzania are, they won't know" but entirely due to this one very remarkable man, the whole world had heard of Uganda".

Yes, indeed the whole of Europe had heard of Hitler during the 1940s. Everyone down Fulham Road had heard of Germany because of that "remarkable man". That is Major Grahame's idea of greatness.

His idea of "real Uganda" as opposed to that painted by the press was in the gardens of the State House, in the luxury hotel rooms in which he used to stay whenever he visited his friend.

 

His real Uganda was in the restaurants all of which were maintained at the expense of the suffering millions in order to make men like Grahame happy and say the things he said. His real Uganda was in the game reserves and on the laxury boat launches sailed down the River Nile.

All this luxuries thrived on the blood of our dead people and whose graves Amin and his friends danced. Major Grahame had the further distinction of making a claim which even Amin himself never made. That he arms were found in Archbishop's house. Such statements remind me of Amin's praise of Hitler to the extent which even Arafat the PLO leader had never done. That us "Hitler was right to kill six million Jews".

"Home He Has Gone"

These were the words of Rev. John Gatu, Chairman of All African Conference of Churches at a Memorial Service in Nairobi on February 20, 1977.

The world had run out of words in its condemnation:  The Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Coggan, President Carter, the Pope etc. They all called for an end to senseless killing of innocent people in Uganda. Others called for Amin' overthrow. Luwum was dead. He joined our long list of victims whose deaths dated to the night of January 24, 1971. On February 20, 1977 I was part of a large congregation at Luwum's memorial service which was organised by the Christian Council of Kenya. As I knelt I felt sure Amin was laughing at us because the whole of the service, as well as all the ringing sermons, especially that of Bishop Lawi Imathiu of the Presbyterain Church of East Africa, were being tape-recorded by Amin's men. He must have been laughing because Christians in Uganda as well as friends of the country everywhere had been praying for the last seven years. He was laughing because being a violent man the only language he understood was that of the gun. The depth of the indignation which swept the world in February 1977 had died down by the end of that year. All the sermons and speeches are now part of history.

The writer is a diplomat and former minister