Writer: Godwin Toko. Photo/Courtesy
On March 25, 2002, the Field Court Martial in Kotido presided over one of the fastest trials ever. In total, the trial lasted just two hours and 36 minutes. In the dock were Cpl James Omedio and Pvt Abdullah Muhammed accused of murdering Rev Fr Declan O'Toole, his driver, and field cook.
The two were convicted within the 156 minutes of the trial and sentenced to death by the firing squad. In the evening, they were executed – case closed! The hurried nature of this trial and execution received international and local condemnation, including from the Mill Hill Fathers, and Kotido Diocese to which O'Toole belonged.
The Uganda People's Defence Force (UPDF) defended both as being within the dictates of Article 28(1), the requirement of speedy trials.In my first year at Makerere Law School, the “Kotido UPDF execution”, as the incident is called, was the subject of an intense debate. Was it the case of a speedy trial? In that class, a consensus was reached that trials must be “expeditious” – not necessarily “speedy” then. Thanks to that class, I had my first “interaction” with the court martial.
As an activist and lawyer, I have had many more – mostly unpleasant – interactions with the court martial.
Starting in 2023, a colleague and I picked interest in the case of the 32 youth who were arrested in March 2021 and charged before the court martial.
The most prominent of them was Olivia Lutaaya around whom the case came to revolve. By the time we started following the case, the group had been in jail for more than two years; made several trips between prison and Makindye and applied for bail without success several times.Soon enough, we learnt that a typical day at the court was a practical lesson in exercising patience, receiving harassment with grace, and taking disappointments. Typically, we would get to Makindye around 9.30am, the first step involved registering in a book at the gate.
There, our phones, laptops, keys, and others would be taken away without an explanation and each of us would be thoroughly searched.On most occasions, journalists were bounced at the gate and ordered to record or take shots of whatever looked interesting from across the dusty road that separates the court premises and shops. Still at the gate, females who turned up in trousers of any kind, or whatever the soldiers deemed “inappropriate” were turned away.
Those who made it past the gate, we soon learnt, could not make it to the courtroom. Instead, they were directed to a shade next to the canteen and told to “follow” the proceedings from there.Desperate for information from friends and relatives facing trial at the court, those who sat under the shade stretched and turned their necks with ears on high alert for any sound or light from the adjacent building where the court proceedings happened.
For years, nothing came. After sitting for hours, the lawyers would come out bearing bad news – it was always bad news!One time, it so happened that a new chairperson had taken over the court, and the trial that had gone on for years was to start afresh. Another time, the lawyers informed us that the court chairperson didn't turn up because he had a meeting with the President, we were then told to return after three months.
These kinds of disappointments happened so many times that, like the families of those facing the court, I stopped hurting and simply attended the sessions as a way to show solidarity. At that time, a child of one of the inmates left as a pregnancy was born and would attend court with us. Tragically, some of the people we attended with the earlier sessions died and were buried.
Like a mob that catches, judges, and passes the harshest sentence against a ‘lawbreaker’, the ‘court’ in Makindye was really not a court. Just a lame argument, but one dressed in beautiful clothing, that covered up injustice and I am happy it could die – finally!
Godwin Toko is a lawyer with a keen interest in governance, politics and human rights.
