Even a barbaric State needs some order
We are told that under Adolf Hitler’s dictatorship, events were often recorded with great attention to detail.
Officials of the Third Reich comprehensively documented the identities, punishments and medical information about their victims in the concentration camps.
The inmates were properly numbered. There were roll calls of those condemned to the gas chambers. Senior officials in the ministry of transport ensured that the death trains to Auschwitz were scheduled and ran on time. And everything was archived.
You marvel. So huge were the crimes committed by the Nazis, you would think that concealment, or limiting what was to be recorded and the destruction of implicating records would have been the practice. But even in one of the most barbaric hours in human history, the mindset of an efficient society tends towards highly organised activity.
The result was that the Germany that sinned so greatly, and whose will to pursue Nazi criminals during the post-war years was patchy; this is the same Germany that kept many of the documents without which the hard tasks of delving into the past and seeking justice would have been even more difficult.
So, paradoxically, even a barbaric regime owes it to the citizens to commit its crimes in a frame of orderly practice to make it easier for society to cleanse and renew itself. It is a lesson African leaders can learn from European civilisation.
Uganda sometimes seems to be condemned to periodically return to the nightmarish condition where shadowy brutes materialise from the depth of dark nights and pounce on unsuspecting individuals, seize them and bundle them into mysteriously identified (or unidentified) motor vehicles, before speeding off with them to even more mysterious destinations.
The common belief that these brutes emerge from the machinery of the State is not contested by government officials. What they quibble over is why people describe the events as ‘abductions’ and not ‘arrests’, even though all the lawful procedures of an arrest are violated.
Some of the abductors neither wear uniform nor identify themselves. Clad in rough plain clothes, they are said to look like ordinary armed thugs.
Months after the abductions, the whereabouts of many victims remain unknown. Those who come back alive show severe injuries and talk of extreme torture. Under the rule of Idi Amin or Milton Obote, this was ‘normal’. Forty years later, Uganda is apparently restoring that ‘normal’.
Before Gen Kale Kayihura was dropped as police chief a few years ago, he had created (or approvingly watched the creation of) various irregular squads that executed their missions with unusual savagery; from terrorising political Opposition gatherings to invading the High Court.
The best-intentioned watchers warned that the use of non-uniformed thugs to do the dirty work of the ruling elite could get out of hand and be exploited by ordinary criminals who could masquerade as law-enforcers or be otherwise mistaken for agents of the State.
The informality and casualness of the current wave of abductions are as alarming as the savagery. Without uniform, without standard procedure, and without proper records, the abductors, their commanders, the holding facility supervisors, the torturers and executioners, the relevant ministers and even the President cannot confidently describe what is happening or give the correct number of the victims. And the gaps have not helped the regime to exonerate itself. They have exposed further its incompetence.
Just as our engineers could learn from the Germans how to build serious roads and quality automobiles, our leaders could learn from German history how to operate an efficient evil State.
Mr Tacca is a novelist, socio-political commentator.
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