An Unexpected Phone Call Following Investigation Into 14-Year-Old Boy's Murder

When I received a call one morning from a number I did not recognize, I assumed it was a wrong number. But, as it turned out, the man on the other end was looking for me. He said he had gotten my phone number from David Abitekaniza, a police officer I had been hoping to interview regarding the brutal murder of a 14 year-old boy. I had been trying to meet with Abitekaniza for weeks, so I got excited.

Weeks earlier, a lawyer from my organization and I led a team investigating Innocent Kirungi’s murder. You can read about the case here, here, here, and, for those of you who read Luganda, here. As you can see, it has gotten some press. My organization, with a few others that protect children’s rights, held a press conference about the boy’s murder and what we were doing about it. Here are the press release we drafted, the executive summary of a report we are completing, and the complaint we filed against the people responsible. (I’ve also posted some pictures from the press conference.)

In case you don’t have time to read the linked documents, here’s a summary of the gruesome facts: Innocent Kirungi, 14, was brought to a temporary remand home (similar to a juvenile detention facility) to be watched over for 5 days before he was to be transfered to a more permanent remand home for rehabilitation. The only crimes he had committed were petty thefts. Over the course of the next five days, he was forced to perform hard labor, beaten unconscious, buried alive, then taken out of the ground — alive — and beaten to death. The kicker is that the person who had hired his (and the other remand home boys’) services was a police officer, one David Abitekaniza.

So, as you can imagine, when I got that early morning call from a stranger telling me that he had gotten my number from Abitekaniza, I was excited but also a little concerned. You see, I hadn’t been looking for Abitekaniza to find out how his investigation into the murder was going; I was looking for Abitekaniza so I could investigate him about the murder. The man on the phone told me that Abitekaniza had refused to speak to me because I was from a human rights organization. But then, he said, "I am Abitekaniza's friend. He will talk to you now. Where are you? I will come get you and bring you to him."

When I heard those words, I began to wonder...Had Abitekaniza sent this guy after me, to lure me away, take me to some empty field, and slice me to pieces with a machete? I quickly forgot about Innocent, the poor murder victim, and started thinking about myself and my family and friends. Had I finally crossed the line? Had I been so naive all this time? I am living in Africa, I thought, in Uganda, in a country where I have watched a police officer beat a young man in the middle of the central police station; where cops rape poor, weak, defenseless women; where powerful leaders are trying to kill every gay man, woman, and child. And now my fight against these injustices was coming to bite me in the ass. My family and friends were right. I was being too provocative over here. I had crossed one too many powerful people. I was finished. I was scared.

But I was not stupid. I told the man that I would call him back. When I got to my office, I spoke with my organization's legal officer and executive director. They told me the obvious: speaking to this man could be crucial to our investigation, so we needed to find out as much as we could from him. We decided to have him come to our offices. There was no way he would harm any of us there.

I called the man and asked him how he could take me to Abitekaniza if Abitekaniza lives in Masindi, 3 hours outside of Kampala. He said that Abitekaniza was on a security detail here in Kampala and that he could bring me there. I told the mysterious man that I would not go anywhere with him until we sat down and spoke. I gave him directions to my office and told him to come by immediately. He said he would.

Two hours later, a tall, harmless looking, poorly dressed man entered our offices. He, another attorney from my organization, and I went into our conference room to talk. I asked him who he was and why he so badly wanted to take me to Abitekaniza. Three minutes later, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The man was a witch doctor.

According to this witch doctor, Abitekaniza’s family had hired another witch doctor in Masindi to protect Abitekaniza, to prevent the police from arresting him for Innocent’s murder. It appears to have worked since he wasn’t, and to this day hasn’t been, arrested. But when my colleagues and I showed up in Masindi to snoop around and I started calling Abitekaniza to try to meet with him, he got scared. So, his family got in touch with a higher-level witch doctor in Kampala to try to get me off his scent. That higher-level witch doctor was the person sitting in my office telling me this incredulous story.

Part of me thought this was all a joke; I asked the man right to his face whether he actually believed in witchcraft (dumb question, I know, but I just couldn’t believe this whole thing). He naturally confirmed that he did, and startlingly enough he’s not the only one. According to the premier independent newspaper in Uganda, 6 million Ugandans, or about 20% of the population, believe in these doctors’ special powers.

It turned out that Abitekaniza’s family had not been able to afford this particular witch doctor’s fee and so he was hoping to play the double agent game. He promised either to bring me to Abitekaniza so that I could interrogate the police officer or to get us whatever information, documents, photographs we wanted from Abitekaniza — all, naturally, in exchange for a fee. He was a scam artist, just like any self-professed sorcerer I might come across in the U.S.

We refused to pay the doctor but were able to learn some more important information from him about the case, so the meeting was helpful, and I was grateful for the call, despite being afraid for a little while.

For all I know, everything he said was a lie, and he actually was there to put some sort of spell on me. But spells are one thing I do not fear. Especially not from that witch doctor. He just didn't seem all that powerful.

A Salute to Bob Dylan

In the spirit of Bob Dylan, I've written some lyrics about the Anti-Homosexuality Bill and Bahati, using the same meter as Dylan's "Only A Pawn In Their Game." Just as Dylan saw the white man who shot Medgar Evers as a pawn in the Southern white politician's game, I see MP David Bahati as a pawn in the religious right's game.

Feel free to sing my lyrics to Dylan's melody. His lyrics. Dylan singing them.

My lyrics:

A member from the back of the room swore the end to all gays
He was about to begin a crusade
He promised to throw them in jail
Even those who wouldn't tell
Who else was gay
Well he'd make them pay
But he can't be blamed
He's only a pawn in their game

A group of Americans preaches to this African man
You can become Uganda's president one day
It's a sure fire way to climb with no skills they say
With his parliament voice
Used in the course
Of the religious right's plan
To rid gays from the land
But Bahati'll still stand
Behind all their hands
But he can't be blamed
He's only a pawn in their game

Ssempa and Amiza they both know to yell with such force
They've got so much passion in their voice
But Bahati can't speak, he just giggles to the world like a fool
Cause it ain't his rule
To be so cruel
He just wants to win
Even if through sin
So he will aid their hate
And watch Amiza state
Devilic is lezbian
Perhaps it's him to blame
He's only a pawn in their game

From a small village he came, he was a nobody
But they picked him to lead the hate parade
And they taught him to speak to the press
And to always suggest
That gay recruiters
With their sneaky lures
Convert straights to gays
All over the place
Bahati makes space
For these lies to be embraced
Maybe he is to blame
For being their pawn in this game

The day the first homo is locked up for being himself
Foreign funds will start flowing from this land
And organizations will shut, leaving folks in a rut
HIV in every hut
But Bahati won't care
Cause he'll have got a bigger share
Of people voting his name
So to him it's all the same
The man who's the pawn in their gay-me

The Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009

"You need to understand what really goes on in 'their' bedrooms. Let me show you," Pastor Martin Ssempa announced as he turned on a projector and showed a picture he "had found on the internet" of two men engaged in mutual masturbation.

This occurred at a meeting I recently attended that the Uganda Human Rights Commission hosted to understand people's views regarding the Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2009. (The Commission is an independent government body tasked with informing parliament about the human rights implications of proposed laws.) For those of you who don’t know, Member of Parliament ("MP") David Bahati has proposed this bill to punish many acts and omissions related to homosexuality, including performing homosexual acts, promoting homosexuality, and failing to report homosexuality. Probably even saying the word "homosexual" without a menacing tone will be grounds for punishment under this law, if enacted. Specifically, any homosexual act is punishable by life imprisonment, not “up to” life imprisonment; the punishment is simply "life imprisonment." Promoting homosexuality, which could mean anything, can land you in jail for a minimum of 5 years while not reporting that someone else is gay carries a penalty of 3 years imprisonment. The bill also levies hefty fines on those who promote or fail to report homosexuality ($50,000 USD for promoting, up to $6,000 USD for failing to report).

Uganda, interestingly, is a country where people of the same sex often walk down the street holding hands, where people of the same sex grab and rub each others' hands mid-conversation to add a physical dimension to the discussion. These are normal Ugandan idiosyncrasies, and nobody thinks of them as sexual. But that might change. If this law passes, people might start reporting to the police that they saw one man rubbing another's hand in the middle of a conversation. Let the witch hunt begin...

From what I can gather, this bill is pure politics. Most Ugandans are scared of homosexuality; they think it is weird and gross and a sin and must (and somehow can) be stopped. Most Ugandans also wholeheartedly believe that “the homosexuals” are recruiting straight people to perform homosexual acts. You hear countless stories here of people being offered money to engage in gay sex. The promoters of the bill claim to have verifiable statistics; they even brought a man to the meeting who had been raped by his male school teacher when he was a kid but has now been “cured” and is straight. He described how he engaged in these gay acts with his headmaster and only later learned that gay acts were wrong and became straight. No, he wasn’t gay; he was raped by a sick pedophile, but to this man, and to Pastor Martin Ssempa who brought this man to speak, the crime was not pedophilia; it was homosexuality.

The one nice thing about the "cured" man’s speech was that he was against the automatic life sentence and the death penalty in the bill (the punishment is death for having gay sex with someone under the age of 14, engaging in gay sex with your child, giving someone HIV during gay sex, having gay sex with someone who has a disability, or being a repeat offender) because then people like him would have ended up in jail without the chance at reform. Another “former homosexual” echoed those comments, angry that the bill did not contain a provision encouraging reformation of gays. “You don’t heal someone by harming them,” he said. "For example, you are not curing someone’s headache by smashing his head with a hammer. Loving, caring, and respecting individual rights is the only way to cure people.” Better than nothing, I guess.

When challenged at the meeting about the so-called “mass recruitment” of homosexuals, Pastor Martin Ssempa, the godfather of this bill, simply restated this odd idea without providing any of the objective statistics he claimed to have and moved on to his graphic pictures. He went into his tirade about what “goes on in ‘their’ bedrooms,” showing us four different images that he found on the internet of two men engaged in sexual acts: one of mutual masturbation (as I mentioned earlier), one of anal licking (“anal licking, anal licking, anal licking” – he seemed to really like that phrase), one of a man putting a plastic object in another’s butt (“the more pain, the more pleasure for them”), and one of fisting. His best line was, “where do we draw the line, when the fist is halfway inside the other man’s anus or all the way in?” I am not making this up.

Many other MPs and community leaders also spoke out against homosexuality and in favor of the bill. Other than Ssempa's, MP Isha Otto Amiza's comments stand out most in my mind. MP Amiza began his angry rant by noting that he would “try to control the level of emotions in me.” He certainly doesn’t get an A for effort. He “was surprised to hear Obama, an American president, with African blood, to say he was opposed to the bill.” He then pounded his fist on the table and explained to the crowd, “homosexuality is inhuman, unnatural, devilic, goes against the principles of humanity and nature. It is devilic. It should be fought relentlessly by god-fearing persons, by Christians. I would go an extra mile and ask the Muslims in Uganda to impose a Sharia on homosexuality.” I’m not sure he used the term “sharia” exactly right. Also, is "devilic" a word?

There were some bright spots, some courageous men and women who stood up and spoke out against the bill. Some maintained it was a human rights issue; others said homosexuality was a vice or disgusted them but imprisoning people for being gay (or performing gay acts) and for not reporting on people they “suspect” are gay is a harsh, cruel, and pointless law.

A university professor challenged Ssempa's use of homosexual internet pornography, noting without emotion that Ssempa easily could have found the exact same pictures where the actors were a heterosexual couple. The most eloquent of that group, however, was a retired army major. He simply said, “what is this bill about? Anal sex? If so, well heterosexual couples have a lot of anal sex too; why aren’t we banning them from doing it? Is it about procreation, about the continuation of the African community, the African family, as many of you have claimed? Well, then we must prohibit people from becoming priests and nuns because they too are not procreating, they are not continuing the African family.” I liked this guy. He was smart.

When it was Bahati’s turn to speak (the sponsor of the bill and the man whose name here is more associated with the bill than anyone else), the room fell silent. But Bahati just laughed. He kind of giggled about the bill and about the consequences. He seemed to think it was all a joke. He had no passion about the bill, the way Ssempa and Amiza did. He simply seemed to love the limelight. This is why I believe, as Bob Dylan would say, that Bahati is only a pawn in Ssempa and the religious right’s game. Elections are in early 2011. Bahati is getting an unbelievable amount of publicity out of this bill, which is resonating with the average Ugandan. Most Ugandans have no idea what the bill says; they just think it is against homosexuality, and so they are in favor of the bill. Politically, Bahati is benefitting immensely, but he doesn’t seem to have any real, gut-felt conviction about it, the way others did. I really think for him it is politics; for the others, it is religion and hate.

Voice of America, the U.S. government's official media service, speculated that the religious right in America are the real drafters of this bill. Yesterday, the New York Times confirmed it. In Uganda, however, it is Pastor Martin Ssempa, the man I keep coming back to and the man who set up a “task force to respond to the bully pulpit of Gordon Brown and Obama,” who is the real force behind the bill. He even defended the bill and compared it to American laws in a letter to Obama and Brown that he handed out at the meeting (on his website, Ssempa posted the letter he sent to Rick Warren, which is similar, but not identical to the one he addressed to Obama).

After displaying his pornographic pictures, Ssempa told the crowd at the meeting that although people describe the separation of church and state as a hallmark of modern government, it is not modern; it is Western. And Africa is not the West; in Africa, “you cannot separate God from the law” because “for the African, homosexuality is unacceptable. It violates all four types of laws.” The Law of Nature (“it is only natural for a man and woman to be together”), the Law of Culture and Ancestors (“this did not exist in the past in Uganda”), the Law of Our Faith – Muslim or Christian (Avner comment: umm...those also didn’t exist in the past in Uganda), and the Law of the Land (“the penal code"). “You cannot say all sins are equal. You can sin but possibly only break some of the 4 types of laws, not all 4. Homosexuality violates all 4. Get educated.” Ssempa then said that he had heard that aid money from the West would dry up if the bill passes. But he didn’t care: “We would rather die in dignity and honor” than fail to pass this bill. “Africa,” you see, “is leading the way from darkness into renaissance.”

A few moments later, the chairman took the microphone and said that “the temperature in the room was getting too high,” and so the meeting would end 3 hours early. It’s a shame because I would have enjoyed hearing some more from Ssempa and his clan. I was enjoying his crusade away from the “darkness” of “anal licking” and “fisting” and “the more pain the more pleasure” and into the “renaissance” of mandatory reporting, bans on free speech and free association, and life imprisonment for consensual sexual acts.