Reassess response measures to protests

Police officers viciously arrest a man that was allegedly demonstrating during pro-Bobi Wine protests on Wednesday November 18, 2020. PHOTO/ABUBAKER LUBOWA 

What you need to know:

  • The issue: Protests
  • Our view:  The police should ensure protesters do not block roads or streets, access to sidewalks or buildings or disrupt counter protests. Also, the police should be purposeful in deploying riot control teams and officers with special training...

The dust is not about to settle on last weeks protests that degenerated into chaos. See ‘Death toll from riots rises to 50,’ Daily Monitor, November 24.

With hundreds more victims hospitalised, this number is bound to go higher. These scores of deaths occurred as security agencies battled protesters at 116 scenes of unrest across the country in only two days between November 18 and 20.

An interim police assessment of the confusion and disorder indicate that 836 people were arrested, with 362 of them charged in court, and 330 remanded, while another 33 were released on court bail and police bond.

But these arrests, clogging of our court systems, and cramming our prison, and deaths, including of two children, are needless and should have been avoided. Some of the victims were bystanders, passersby, vendors, and a taxi drivers, all caught up in the mess in the course of their normal duty. 

We propose that when this mess is sorted out, we all require to re-examine our citizens’ rights to legally protest and demonstrate, and how the police should manage them without sinking into violence. 

But these demand that our national leaders also recognise their boundaries and responsibilities and avoid speeches that incite security agencies into over zeal and brutalising the public, whose lives they should protect and not take away at the least provocation.

The police and back-up armed forces ought to know that protests or mass demonstrations as public expression of objection, disapproval or dissent towards an idea or action is guaranteed under the law and should not always be treated as civil disobedience, as long as they don’t violate the laws of the state. 

This means the police should guide, not always confront such activities, but ensure they do not degenerate into violence by mobs. This too implies that dissenters should recognise their boundaries in protests and demonstrations and not descend into riots that violate the laws of the land.

Here, the police should ensure protesters do not block roads or streets, access to sidewalks or buildings or disrupt counter protests. Also, the police should be purposeful in deploying riot control teams and officers with special training and equipment for quelling such violence and other public disturbances. 

On the contrary, we have seen majority police officers and supportive armed forces carry live bullets instead of tear gas, pepper spray, and rubber bullets to quell riots and other public disturbances. 

The end result has been disastrous. Such high-handedness to end protests have often forced more riots with disastrous consequences. See ’50 people died in riots – report’, Daily Monitor, November 24.