Dan Mugarura
On January 8, 2003, at 3 a.m. Dan Mugaruraâs house was surrounded by thirty armed men in civilian clothes in five cars. The men ransacked the house, refusing to identify themselves; they had no search warrant. They arrested him.âWho are you?â he asked. âYou know,â was the answer. 49 He was blindfolded, and put in leg irons and handcuffs. In a car two of them sat on him for two hours and he fainted. He awoke in an unknown hospital room.He was transferred to another location, where his interrogation began. âWhy are you here?â50 they taunted. They asked extensively about Col. Samson Mande, who had been assigned to the diplomatic mission in Tanzania with Mugarura more than a decade before.Mugarura was made to sleep in handcuffs.51 In another room they showed him a cage with metal bars. In it were three big snakes about eighteen inches long with yellow and black spots, and they threatened him with the snakes. Later they told him they would take him back to the room with the snakes if he did not write what they wanted. He complied.52When his lawyer brought a habeas corpus, he was taken to the Magistratesâ Court on January 21, 2003, charged with treason and misprision of treason, and remanded to Luzira Prison.53 Much later, in late 2003, he was released on bail for medical reasons.
"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
