Nairobi.

Two soldiers convicted of murdering an Irish Catholic priest were publicly executed by firing squad on Monday in the Karamoja sub region of northeastern Uganda. The soldiers had been found guilty by a field court martial of shooting dead Father Declan O’Toole, his driver and a passenger in an ambush as they travelled along the Moroto-Kotido road, at around 6 pm local time on Thursday 21 March – four days before they were convicted and executed. “I see them [the executions] as arbitrary,”

Livingstone Sewanyana, Executive Director of the Kampala-based Foundation for Human Rights Initiative told IRIN on Tuesday. “The soldiers were not able to exhaust the legal guarantees available to them. They did not even have a right of appeal.” The BBC quoted witnesses as saying the men were tied to trees, had their faces covered and were then shot. A crowd of some 1,000 people witnessed the executions, it added.

Sewanyana criticised the public nature of the executions. “Public executions is an issue from the time of [former dictator] Idi Amin,” he said. The two Uganda People’s Defence Forces (UPDF) soldiers were named by The New Vision government-owned newspaper as Cpl James Omediyo and Private Abdullah Muhammad.

According to Sewanyana, the field court martial had breached provisions of the Ugandan constitution by failing to allow the men the right of appeal. “Everyone is afforded a right of appeal under the Ugandan constitution. They [the army] are just running a kangaroo court,” he said. “Unless they were given the proper legal proceedings it is impossible to establish their guilt,” Sewanyana added. The men were not given the right of appeal against the verdict because “field courts martial are so stringent”, the BBC quoted a UPDF spokesman as saying.

The army was thought to be keen to proceed quickly as it was concerned about undermining public confidence in a government-sponsored initiative to remove some 40,000 illegal weapons from circulation in the Karamoja subregion, the BBC reported. “We want to show the public that the crime was carried out by individuals, but not by the army as an institution,” Lt Peter Twesigye, a military officer in the sub region, told the BBC on Monday.

A two-month period of voluntary disarmament expired on 15 February, after which the UPDF began a campaign to forcibly confiscate over 30,000 guns remaining in circulation at that time. Small groups of Karamojong “home guards” were originally armed by the Ugandan government on the grounds that the Karamojong were under threat from cross-border raids by the Turkana and Pokot pastoralist groups from Kenya.

Other arms were acquired from rogue elements in the Ugandan army, from the northwestern Kenyan district of Turkana and from southern Sudan, where the 19-year civil war has given rise to widespread access to, use of and trade in small arms, according to humanitarian sources.

Armed cattle raiding by Karamojong pastoralists in the northeastern districts of Kotido and Moroto has made the area one of the most insecure in Uganda, and led to the displacement of some 80,000 people to “protected camps” in neighbouring Katakwi District alone, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported in October 2001.

Despite assertions from the UPDF that the Karamojong were cooperating with the forcible disarmament, Sewanyana said there was a danger that such an approach could increase tensions in the area. “Governments have used a forceful approach before and have not been able to disarm the Karamojong. We need to make sure that tensions don’t rise again,” he added.

SOURCE: [ www.thenewhumanitarian.org, Story by The New Humanitarian, Original Publication ]