Uganda using torture to deter opposition -report
NAIROBI, March 29 (Reuters) - Ugandan security forces are increasingly torturing suspected opponents of President Yoweri Museveni, with reports of detainees beaten or threatened with poisonous snakes, an international rights group said on Monday.
The government dismissed a report by the New York-based Human Rights Watch as "rubbish" born of a "fevered imagination."
Human Rights Watch said the use of torture by security forces, also including beatings with sticks studded with nails and jabbing with hypodermic needles, had increased since 2001.
"Uganda set up a shadow sector of security operations to contend with armed rebel groups and crime waves," Jemera Rone, a Human Rights Watch researcher, said in a statement.
"But now, the security system serves to punish and deter political opposition by detaining and torturing supporters of the political opposition."
Security forces had reportedly suspended victims from the ceiling for days with their hands and feet tied behind their back and beaten them with rods or hammers, the group said.
Others had been forced to lie face up while a water tap was opened directly into their mouths or blindfolded to prevent them identifying their interrogators.
A special adviser to Museveni, John Nagenda, denied that the government sanctioned torture and said the report gave a distorted impression of the east African country, where Museveni has ruled for 18 years.
"Anybody who knows anything about our country would find this really impossible to swallow," he told Reuters.
"Any time these rumours have surfaced or people have brought them up, they have been stringently looked at by the Human Rights Commission and by the courts of law, and they have been widely reported in the media," he said.
EXILE
Human Rights Watch said many of those tortured were supporters of Kizza Besigye, an opposition presidential candidate who fled into exile after challenging the results of the 2001 elections.
Adele, a Besigye campaign manager, was arrested with her husband in 2002 and accused of aiding rebels, the report said. She was beaten, hypodermic needles were used to pierce her breasts, and her captors threatened to throw her into an enclosure with about 10 puff adder snakes, it said.
Adele told Human Rights Watch she believed 46 other people were being held at the house where she was detained.
Other torture victims have been accused of supporting Uganda's armed rebel groups, including the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), which has waged an 18-year war against government forces in the north of the country, Human Rights Watch said.
The 76-page report said victims were often held in covert "safe houses" by security agents for months.
Human Rights Watch said Uganda should disband security services that fall outside the oversight of parliament and stop using illegal places of detention. It also said courts must ensure detainees are charged within 48 hours or released.
03/28/04 06:02 ET
"The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth becomes the greatest enemy of the state."
- Dr. Joseph M. Goebbels - Hitler's propaganda minister
