Buried Beneath A Tree In Africa (eBook)

Chapter 1

A Visit to Death Row

Knowing you can kill someone and walk away without consequences—morally blameless even—is very different from actually doing it. As I prepared to meet the man who either participated in the capture, torture and murder of my father, or at a minimum, covered-up the killing I wondered what would it cost to have him killed in his prison cell—maybe just a pack of Marlboro cigarettes?

In the Uganda, East Africa I had lived as a teenager, I learned anything could be accomplished for a small price. A single cigarette I offered to a “kondo” (thief or armed robber) at an impromptu tire-shredder roadblock in the bush late at night had once saved my life.

“What if he refuses to talk about what he did?” I asked. “Can we force him to tell me?”

The soldiers escorting me through the prison shook their heads dutifully, “Sorry, sir, torture is now prohibited under international law and Article 24 of the Ugandan Constitution.”

“That’s too bad,” I said, “Can’t we bring it back—just this once?” We all laughed nervously at my remark which was not entirely a joke.

After decades of human rights abuses, the Ugandan Army no longer engaged in torture. That was the official policy, but I knew better. Despite these laws, torture still happened in Uganda.

If I wanted it bad enough, I was certain I could bring the murderer’s pathetic life to a quick, painful end.

Perhaps I would choose to have him killed.

If I made the choice—this day at this prison—to take his life in exchange for the life of my father he had taken decades earlier, I could live with it.

Luzira Maximum Security Prison, located in a suburb of Kampala, the bustling capital city of Uganda near the banks of Lake Victoria in East Africa, was built by the British in the 1920s—thirty years after the country had been made a British protectorate. In colonial days, the prison, which today houses both men and women, was less crowded but still inhumane: substandard living conditions, systematic humiliation and cruel discipline, including the use of punishment cells deliberately flooded with water to make them uninhabitable. The British used the prison to jail nationalists and political dissidents.

Post-colonial Uganda, after independence from the British in 1962, was even less humane to its prison population. Luzira is often mentioned in accounts of atrocities committed under the brutal regimes of former leaders General Idi Amin Dada and Dr. Apollo Milton Obote in the 1970s and 1980s. By the early 1990s, Luzira was ravaged by HIV and so poorly funded that less than a quarter of the inmates were supplied with basic necessities, such as blankets. Prisoners buried the dead in mass graves and grew vegetables on the same earth to keep the living fed. In 1993, a group of former soldiers started a two-day riot that required army intervention and left two prisoners dead and many injured.

While Luzira—the only maximum-security prison in Uganda—is hardly the most forbidding prison structure (at least compared with American correctional fortresses), conditions inside the Third World facility are notoriously harsh. Even today, the exact population of Luzira is unknown; however, it is the largest prison in Uganda. It was designed with a maximum capacity of 1,700, but often houses as many as 20,000—including about 500 men and women on the country’s only death row.

Murderers have long been isolated from free society by confining them behind Luzira’s high walls and huge gates. Unsurprisingly, this makes the prison an ideal place for committing murder.

In 2005, a key suspect in the murder of a lawyer and chairperson of Transparency International, a leading anti-corruption organization, was shot seven times in the head while in Luzira. He survived the initial attack, but later died while in medical care, despite being under tight security with three elite guards. Prison personnel suspected foul play, potentially poison, or suicide, but the real cause was never entirely clear.

It has long been easy for Uganda’s ruling elite to slaughter their victims in the shadows of Luzira’s walls—the only potential witnesses being convicted murderers, rapists, armed robbers, and kidnappers, locked in their cells along with many lost souls awaiting trial, often for years due to the glacially slow Ugandan court system. No one ever needed worry about any of these unfortunates talking.

Although I have visited prisons a few times as a pre-law college student studying criminal justice reform, prisons terrify me—even supposedly well-managed and adequately funded prisons in the United States.

Luzira Prisons Complex Main Security Gate

It was a bright, sunny day when we drove up to the prison. Inmates could be seen working outside on the grounds in crews without shackles and in the prison courtyard. The prisoners were dressed in a rainbow of color-coded jumpsuits. Remand prisoners awaiting trial, and those serving less than twenty years, wore pale yellow overalls; prisoners wearing more intense yellow were serving more than twenty years; psychiatric patients were in green. Inmates who wore a red stripe had tried to escape, and a blue stripe indicated seniority and privileges. Due to staff shortages, some inmates had been designated as regimental police who wore white arm bands, and they helped keep the peace. The inmates on death row lived separately from the main prison population and wore white overalls. The condemned convicts were not allowed to interact with the other prisoners and were let out just a few minutes a day to sit in the compound (under heavy guard) to take fresh air.

This day in 1997, I was escorted through Luzira’s maze of hallways by Major Albert Kareba, who was in full military uniform—burgundy beret, olive green fatigues and spit-shined black combat boots. In his early thirties, tall, proud, physically fit, and handsome, he commanded respect from the demoralized prison guards and the clammy, flu-infected warden who was profoundly unenthusiastic about his assignment to the prison and hopeful the assistance he provided to us might offer him a way out.

My visit to Luzira Prison had been arranged by Major General Mugisha Muntuoyera, Commander of the Ugandan Peoples Defense Forces and commonly referred to as “General Muntu” by civilians and soldiers alike.

“Please be sure to tell General Muntu how helpful I have been,” the sniffling warden pleaded. “Remind him, if you will, that I was originally only temporarily assigned to the prison and that was seven years ago. Has the General forgotten about me?” He coughed and then wiped his runny nose on the sleeve of his frayed uniform.

Major Kareba (or Albert, as I called him) and I were easy friends by now, having spent the week prior traveling together through remote regions of the country. Our destination had been the town of Mbarara—where my father was last seen alive. Mbarara was included in Robert Young Pelton’s “indispensable handbook for the intrepid adventurer” entitled, The World’s Most Dangerous Places. Concerned for my safety, I had read the chapter on Uganda closely in preparation for my journey. Pelton begins by ominously stating:

“The pearl of Africa, the mountains of the moon promises a sense of Africa renewed, pristine, undiscovered and perhaps pure. What Uganda offers, though, is a mist-covered glimpse into hell.

It is where Western tourist were ruthlessly hacked to death with machetes, a place where jails are stained with the brains of former inmates, where children are snatched and sold into slavery... Uganda is a fertile and deadly place, always has been.”

With respect to Mbarara, Pelton said, “The maxim for most dangerous places is, don’t go unless you have to.”

Little did I imagine when I read Pelton’s book I would soon be jogging, under guard, alongside killing fields in Mbarara where the bodies of hundreds of bludgeoned Ugandan Army soldiers had been heartlessly scattered decades earlier.

Albert’s appearance reminded me he was one of the most promising officers in this impoverished army—a beleaguered force where soldiers who retire after a lifetime of service receive a seemingly paltry retirement benefit of $1,200, I was told.

“Do you mean $1,200 a month?” I asked. “I imagine a retired soldier could live very well indeed in Uganda on that amount.”

“No, $1,200—period—a one-time, lump-sum payment,” said Albert.

“How do you retire on that?” I asked.

“Easy,” Albert explained. “It’s enough money to buy a plot of land to farm and a small herd of cattle for milk and beef, which together, absent disaster, will produce a stream of income adequate to provide for a soldier’s declining years.”

Albert was the Army’s Chief Protocol Officer, charged with handling all matters of etiquette—including the delicate task of escorting this son of an American who had disappeared in the custody of the Ugandan Army decades earlier during Idi Amin’s murderous rule, on his journey to find answers.

As we approached...