.
In explaining away the intensified harassment, Ms Namaye noted that: “The Uganda Police Force [on] March 1, arrested three people for obstructing police officers on duty and disobeying lawful orders given to them by Kasangati Division police commander SP James Kawalya.”
“Those arrested, she recounted, “are [journalists] Sempijja Ismail, Remmy Bahati and Ingrid Turinawe.”
SP Kawalya has shot to infamy this season the way now police sector commander for eastern region Sam Omalla distinguished himself in containing Dr Besigye and the media during the 2011 walk-to-work demonstrations in which dozens were shot dead, injured or incarcerated.
Mr Isaac Kasamani, a former Daily Monitor lead photographer during the walk-to-work protests and currently a freelance photographer with AFP, was last month a target when police sprayed pepper into his eyes.
Whereas Ms Bahati, while covering this newspaper’s closure by the government in 2013 wrestled down a female police officer who tried to assault her, it was not immediately clear if her manhandling last week was a result of grudge the Force carried forward.
“As human rights defenders, we hold such people [perpetrators] perpetuating impunity accountable. It does not matter when the accountability will be done, but one day, they will have to because these acts are being recorded,” said Dr Livingstone Sewanyana, the executive director of the Foundation for Human Rights Initiative.
The largely State-owned The New Vision newspaper last Wednesday reported that the former police director of operations, Mr Andrew Felix Kaweesi, who has unusually been recalled from superintending the Force’s Human Resource directorate to superintend the anti-Besigye operations, had banned all live broadcast from the Opposition politician’s residence claiming it incited violence.
Police are yet to explain how live reporting incites violence or provide evidence of any violence that has been sparked by the real-time news transmission.
“Obviously, the police don’t want live broadcasts of their siege of Dr Besigye’s home because it puts them in bad light,” Dr Peter Mwesige, media academic, trainer and executive director of the Africa Centre for Media Excellence, said. He added: “However, I urge the journalists covering Dr Besigye and the police not to place themselves in avoidable danger.”
The question of journalists’ safety in precarious situations has since the increased police crackdown put media houses that employ them on the spot, especially where reporters, photojournalists and cameramen are deployed in the field without protective gear such as bullet-proof/flak jackets and helmets.
Dr Besigye ran a campaign of defiance, not compliance, and his outright rejection of the results and his sponsoring FDC party’s pledge to engage the population has the country’s security and intelligence outfits on the tenterhooks and second-guessing this undisclosed Opposition game-plan.
The current clampdown on the media in violation of constitutional guarantees, lawyers and academics say, manifests the overall whittling down of the space for free expression and deliberate curtailment of civil liberties.
It also heralds the hazards of a militarised Uganda Police Force, said James Nangwala, Monitor Publications’ external lawyer, who has successfully handled several cases involving journalists.
“I am surprised that the defenders of the law are instead perpetuating the suppression of the right to information. There must be something sinister that they are concealing,” he said, adding: “If there is nothing they are concealing, then why should they block journalists from covering them?”
Attacking media practitioners is a “backward” approach, Dr Mwesige said, saying such indiscretions should be roundly condemned.
He said the police are the ones at fault for inciting or unleashing violence and that journalists have the right and duty to shine the torch on their illegal actions.
According to Mr Robert Ssempala, the national coordinator Human Rights Network for Journalists – Uganda, about 20 journalists have been arrested in the past fortnight. Their crime, he said, according to police, is keeping watch on and reporting about police’s handling of Dr Besigye, whom FDC president Maj Gen Mugisha Muntu said on Wednesday had been arrested nine times in 11 days
