This newspaper yesterday published a heart-stopping account of reported vicious torture in custody at Makindye Military barracks of a UPDF soldier for alleged infractions at the battlefront in Somalia.
According to the story, Cpl Majibu Ssebyara’s hands were tied to a steel bar above his head and a dangling heavy sand bag tied to his genital with his legs suspended in the air. The outcome: blood stopped flowing and the tissues began decaying, resulting in erectile dysfunction.
The intent of this grotesque action was to inflict the worst pain humanly possible. To call this extreme cruelty evil is an under-statement. Indeed, it borders on barbarism and belies the façade of civilisation we project as a nation and puts to test the oft-quoted professionalism of our military.
Whereas we do not seek to ascribe this crude conduct as a standard operating procedure by all our uniformed and uniformed personnel, many being men and women of fine character, who risk their lives for our collective safety, a single such absurdity spoils everything.
This in no way is a clarion call to shield the corporal from prosecution. Let his trial on allegations of failure to protect war material and “offences related to security”, both of which under the UPDF Act attract death penalty, be conducted in transparent and impartial manner.
Assaulting him brutally without a fair hearing is criminal in itself. High Court judge Basaza Wasswa last month declared Cpl Ssebyara’s trial in the military court as “illegal, null and void” and ordered his release. The army has defied the court order.
We reject any ploy to justify the ignoble deed, whether the motivation for the torture was to extract confession, punish the suspect or just a surreal sadistic adventure.
Our conviction springs from Uganda’s Constitution that guarantees the innocence of suspects, equal treatment of all before the law and debars any inhumane or degrading treatment. We are also inspired by the founding principles of this newspaper which, among other things, espouses the defence of human rights and promotion of democracy.
Cognisant that every authority, institution, subsidiary law and person in Uganda is subordinate to the country’s supreme law, Article 24 of the Constitution therefore becomes instructive in the instant case and it states thus: “No person shall be subjected to any form of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”
Cpl Ssebyara’s alleged maltreatment invokes the saddening memories of damages done to suspects in ‘safe houses’. Let’s divorce the evil of the past. We call on Uganda Human Rights Commission to investigate these torture claims.