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FRONASA’s role in Ben Kiwanuka’s murder
President Idi Amin (left) converses with Mobutu Sese Seko and Somalia’s Siad Barre (middle) at the opening of the OAU summit in Kampala, July 28, 1975. * By Timothy Kalyegira* One of the still-unresolved murder mysteries in Ugandan history is that of the former Chief Justice and DP party president Benedicto Kiwanuka.
Most people believe that Kiwanuka was murdered personally by President Idi Amin, or on orders of Amin, or by Amin’s henchmen, while a few others believe that Amin’s Foreign Minister Joshua Wanume Kibedi was partly behind it.
The truth, as with most other events in Ugandan history, is far from that and more spine-chilling that most people realize.
On June 27, 1971, five months after the military coup, President Idi Amin, swore-in the President General of the Democratic Party, Benedicto Kiwanuka, also a lawyer, as Uganda’s new Chief Justice. He had, in all probability, been nominated for the job by Amin.
Always outspoken and militant, Kiwanuka oversaw many cases in the High Court in which he stood for the oppressed and was not afraid to tell Amin what he thought. Amin did not seem bothered by Kiwanuka’s attitude and seemed to encourage it.
Late in 1971, letters started to come to Uganda from Tanzania, written to prominent public officials, ostensibly from their collaborators among the exiled Ugandan community in Dar es Salaam, in which these prominent public officials in Kampala appeared to be working with the exiled groups in Tanzania to overthrow Amin.
Amin told his cabinet ministers and army officers to turn these letters over to security, some of which bore the names of a L. Col. David Oyite-Ojok and were purportedly from this army officer loyal to Milton Obote.
It has been claimed over the last 30 or so years that Kiwanuka ruled in a court case that did not please Amin, spoke out on Amin’s human rights violations, and Amin sent Kiwanuka an oblique warning, referring to a “prominent Muganda from Masaka” as being a collaborator against his military government.
Even if this were so, it presents some difficulty in laying the blame for Kiwanuka’s abduction and subsequent murder on Amin.
Amin was a decisive, open, action-oriented man. He believed in taking action in the open. He believed he needed to explain his actions to the public. When Museveni’s FRONASA guerrillas were arrested in Jan. 1973, their trial was public, their execution even more public, in their home towns with crowds watching.
When Janani Luwum, the Anglican Archbishop, was arrested in Feb. 1977 under suspicion that arms intended to overthrow Amin’s regime had been smuggled into Uganda through him, diplomats, the cabinet, army officers, the media, and the public were kept fully appraised of the developments.
A public gathering was called at the Nile Mansions Hotel in Kampala, the proceedings aired on Radio Uganda and Uganda Television, and published in the government newspaper, the Voice of Uganda, the next day.
The fact that this was the Anglican Archbishop, in the centenary year of the Anglican church in Uganda, did not faze Amin and he did not respond to public pressure.
Likewise, he would have had no reason to sent state security agents to the Uganda High Court in Kampala to seize the chief justice from the premises and then make him disappear without a trial or public reprimand.
In 1972, Amin was much more popular than he was in 1977 and if he went out openly to call for Luwum’s trial, there would have been no reason to fear public anger if Kiwanuka was arrested and tried in 1972, with Ugandans grateful at Amin’s recent decision to expel the much-resented Asians and with the euphoria still high after the track athlete John Akii-Bua having won Uganda its first ever Olympic Gold medal at the Munich Summer Olympic Games.
What, then, happened to Benedicto Kiwanuka?
After Benedicto Kiwanuka was abducted, Amin summoned a meeting of the Defence Council at Bulange in Kampala. Senior intelligence officers were also asked to attend the meeting.
Later, during a conversation at the army officers’ Mess at Nakasero in Kampala, some State Research intelligence officers said the three men who had abducted Kiwanuka had come to the High Court carrying State Research Bureau identity cards.
One of the men, dressed up in a women’s traditional robe, the Busuti, a wig, and heavy make up, walked up to Kiwanuka and said: “You are under arrest!”
A source who was in the 1970s Uganda Airforce once told this writer that two intelligence officers, Lt. Ali Willa and Sergeant Frank Besigensi of the State Research Centre (or Bureau) carried out investigations into Ben Kiwanuka’s disappearance.
They said their evidence showed that the people who abducted Kiwanuka had entered Uganda from Tanzania through the Mutukula border area via Kyotera.
On Jan. 9, 1973, the government’s Security Committee sat at a meeting and produced its report on several prominent Ugandans who had gone missing since 1971.
This is what it reported on Kiwanuka:
“Ben Kiwanuka: Former Prime Minister in the Democratic Party government and Obote detainee at Luzira. Released by the government and made Chief Justice. Was arrested by three unknown persons on September 21, 1972 at about 8:30 a.m from the High Court.
These three unknown persons were traveling in a saloon car Peugeot 504 light blue, bearing registration number UUU 171, came to the High Court Chambers where Ben Kiwanuka was working, identified themselves as security officers and said that he was required at their office. They were armed with pistol[s]. They hand-cuffed the Chief Justice and took him with them in their car driving at a very high speed in the direction of the Kampala International Hotel. The men were all dressed in plain clothes and when they took him away most people working in the High Court witnessed the incident.
When some of these bystanders tried to follow they were threatened to be shot. On investigation, the government discovered that the people who posed as security men were not, in fact, members of the Security Forces and the number of the Peugeot 504 car which they were using belongs to a Volkswagen saloon car of the Uganda Armed Forces, P.O.Box 7069, Kampala. It is therefore clear that the planners of this plot wanted to confuse the country that the people who arrested Ben Kiwanuka were members of the Security Forces, using an official vehicle.
The Government investigated this matter thoroughly but so far no evidence has come to light as to who arrested the Chief Justice and where he is. In this connection, the [military] spokesman drew the attention of the country to a press statement appearing in a foreign paper, Sunday Post, of December 31, 1972 where it was alleged that the Chief Justice was tied up in a jeep which was then set ablaze by members of the Security Forces on the Kampala/Entebbe Road.
The country will realise that Entebbe/Kampala Road is an international route where people always pass up and down, night and day but no-one has ever seen the alleged car burning on that road at any time since Kiwanuka disappeared. This is another clear example of the enemies of the country trying to cause confusion in the country.”
Later, after the 1979 war when exiles started returning home, several were heard to speak in a way that suggested that Kiwanuka had been abducted by an exile group.
Amin in 1973 stated and would thereafter state that Kiwanuka had been abducted and killed by a guerrilla group called FRONASA led by a guerrilla and former intelligence officer called Yoweri Museveni.
Speaking on or about June 25, 1975, Amin said “the highest rate of disappearance was during 1971…President Amin said there was a high rate of disappearances in September 1972. He explained that there was the FRONASA guerrilla organisations, then, creating confusion in Uganda by kidnapping many Ugandans.
General Amin said in 1972 Uganda was invaded from Tanzania by guerrillas who killed many Ugandans including the former Chief Justice, Mr Kiwanuka…General Amin reiterated that an evil organisation called FRONASA which led by a man called Musebeni [Museveni] was in the early years kidnapping important people in Uganda, on behalf of guerrillas, just to cause confusion and disunity. By then he said guerrillas were training hard to come and invade us amidst that confusion created by Fronasa for their benefit.” (Voice of Uganda, June 26, 1975, p. 1, 6)
A source in 2005 said he had got information from a former FRONASA operative who admitted that it was indeed FRONASA that had abducted and killed Kiwanuka.
In 2005, a man went to the offices of the Daily Monitor newspaper in Namuwongo in Kampala. He was very frightened. He spoke to the then Executive Editor Peter Mwesige and said he knew where Ben Kiwanuka was buried.
He appeared to know the circumstances of Kiwanuka’s murder, too. However, he insisted that before he could reveal anything, he first had to be guaranteed an international amnesty.
It seemed odd. This man was clearly frightened and looked nervously around Mwesige’s office. Why would he be so frightened?
Idi Amin, the man who allegedly killed Kiwanuka had died two years earlier in 2003. Amin’s military government had fallen from power in 1979 and most of Amin’s henchmen had neither power, nor money, nor the connections to threaten this man in anyway, should he speak out on Kiwanuka’s murder
Who was he so afraid of, that he should seek an international amnesty? The man left the Daily Monitor offices and did not return to continue with his story.
Former FRONASA guerrillas know very well the story of who ordered the murder of Kiwanuka. They know very well that Benedicto Kiwanuka was not murdered by Amin or anybody in Amin’s regime. In time, they will start to speak out to a shocked Uganda.
END