Jailed King Mumbere speaks out

Rwenzururu King Charles Wesley Mumbere

KAMPALA/KASESE- The embattled Rwenzururu king Charles Wesley Mumbere has refused police-provided meals as he spent a second night in custody at the Nalufenya Police Station following his brutal arrest on Sunday.

Internal Affairs minister, Gen Jeje Odongo, said security forces were on the weekend left with no option but to storm the Buhikira palace, in Kasese town’s Muyenga suburb, after the king declined to disarm, disband and surrender the royal guards as demanded by government.

At Nalufenya, outside Jinja town, King Mumbere has reportedly been incarcerated in a room previously used to hold Jamil Mukulu, the alleged leader of the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) rebel group transferred to Luzira Maximum Security Prisons two months ago.

Last evening, five Members of Parliament and the Rwenzururu Queen Agnes Nyabaghole visited and spoke with the king for about half-an-hour during which Mumbere said he required medical checkup after security forces allegedly manhandled him during his arrest.

Mr Francis Mwijukye, one of the MPs who went to Nalufenya Police Station, said the king demanded his personal doctor visits and examines him, and vowed never to eat food provided by police until his chef from the kingdom is allowed to prepare meals for him.

“He is strong; he says he is disappointed that his subjects were massacred and ‘this is genocide’. He said ‘the attack was uncalled for’,” MP Mwijukye said, quoting the king as having said.

In Kasese, a police spokesman said they killed 46 royal guards on Sunday alone, arrested 139 and recovered, among other things, an AK-47 rifle, a pistol, petrol bombs, crude fighting implements including machetes and pips of royal guards he said were promoted for killing security forces.

Some accounts indicate higher fatalities than officially stated. The army and police have blocked access for journalists and civilians to the royal palace.

A Fort Portal regional referral hospital, officials said they were overwhelmed with the number of corpses that security forces delivered to them, 50 dead bodies against a mortuary capacity for 10.

Kasese town remained tense and under security lockdown, with shops briefly re-opening in the afternoon.

The Rwenzururu Kingdom spokesperson, Mr Clarence Bwambale, in a statement said “[things] happened that way”, referring to the sudden Sunday bombing of the palace during which grass-thatched stores for priceless artifacts were torched.

He noted that: “We shall continue to engage government to have the people arrested regain freedom and request that we stand together in this.”

Lt Col Paddy Ankunda, the Defence and Military spokesman, separately told Daily Monitor that the Rwenzururu royal guards had turned “criminal gangs under the nose of the kingdom leadership”.

Police spokesman Felix Kaweesi was reported in a series of meeting throughout yesterday and he did not return our repeated calls as his aide had promised.

The government deferred an official statement on the bloody incident to today when Gen Odongo will brief Parliament. Rwenzururu queen Nyabaghole told journalists at Nalufenya Police Station that her husband (says sorry for what happened and sends his sympathies and condolences to families that lost loved ones”.

Police are yet to disclose the charges on which they are holding King Mumbere, now incarcerated beyond the 48-hour constitutional threshold for keeping a suspect in a police cell without formal arraignment in court.

The military’s invasion on Sunday of the palace and King Mumbere’s subsequent arrest and incarceration, in another kingdom hundreds of kilometres away, highlights an anti-climax in Uganda’s politics, resurrecting memories of events, 50 years ago in 1966, when then President Milton Obote sent the army to raid Buganda king’s palace.

There was drama at Nalufenya as police hurried out the visiting lawmakers and queen Nyabaghole when two truckloads of the king’s subjects, almost all naked and chained, arrived at the high security facility.