Securitisation of terrorism undermines rule of law
Racheal Wanyama
An epidemic of enforced disappearances and arbitrary murders has cast a shadow of terror across the country over the past couple of months. For the older section of the population, the current environment has stirred dreadful memories of the panda gari security operations and the anarchy that wracked the country between 1971 and 1986.
Akin to security operations then, Opposition-leaning youth have been hunted down, dozens summarily executed and hundreds abducted and detained incommunicado with no one acknowledging their fate. Those released have alleged extreme torture, with glaring scars attesting to their harrowing tales.
Robert Kyagulanyi, aka Bobi Wine, the National Unity Party president, has estimated that more than 3,000 members of his party supporters have been abducted. The abductions have allegedly been carried out by security operatives in black uniforms with no identifying insignia, and often, in unmarked Super Custom vans dubbed ‘drones’. In his address to the nation last Saturday, President Museveni said those summarily killed or detained were terrorists, who had plans of sabotaging the recently concluded general elections.
While contemptible (in as far as it blatantly disregards the presumption of innocence of suspects), President Museveni’s convenient appeal to terrorism to legitimise the array of ongoing human rights violations is not unique. It fits into a global trend of securitisation of terrorism that has seen the declaration of the ‘war on terror’ morph into a fear/threat project. Many African strongmen have adeptly ridden this tide, exploiting the enabling environment to shrink civic space and criminalise dissent. Uganda has not been immune.
A quick look into recent history shows that Uganda has long been on a well-calculated path to transforming securitisation into a hegemonic policy. For those that might be asking, securitisation happens when an issue is presented as an existential threat, justifying emergency security measures outside the sphere of the rule of law to address it. As such, security is not introduced in response to the threat, rather, the threat is created to justify the security. Accordingly, the security agenda dominates all other priorities and establishes itself as hegemonic. Human rights, development, democracy and the rule of law are all marginalised. This has been the case for Uganda.
In the aftermath of the World Cup bombing at Kyadondo in 2011, government appealed to the rhetoric of countering terrorism to mount sweeping security operations that were fraught with allegations of illegal detentions, detainee torture, and mass crackdown on minority groups, members of the Opposition, and human rights lawyers.
In 2009, following the September Buganda riots, the same approach was used to charge dozens of riot suspects with terrorism and to defend the cold-blooded killings of more than 40 Ugandans. Witnesses in neighbourhoods affected by violence during the unrest disclosed that government forces frequently used lethal force indiscriminately, at times in locations where no active rioting was taking place. On occasion, security personnel purportedly fired live ammunition into locked homes, killing and wounding those inside.
In all these incidents, like in the ongoing abductions and arbitrary murders, it is difficult to see how those who were attacked by security operatives could have been conceived as threats warranting lethal force. Rather, the conclusion can be made that they were attacked through securitisation precisely because of their vulnerability. Terrorism has also been used to condone the use of ‘safe houses’; trial of civilians in military courts; enact draconian legislations such as the Public Order Management Act, the NGO Act and the 2002 Anti-Terrorism Act; and to curtail people’s fundamental freedoms of assembly, expression and opinion. Civil society organisations working on issues of governance and human rights defenders have in particular been systematically targeted by policies and practices of othering where they are cast as traitors, agents of foreign governments and enemies of development, among others.
Ms Racheal Wanyana is a lawyer and a pan-Africanist.
