Kenyan churches torched
Reuters (28.09.2001)/ HRWF International Secretariat (01.10.2001) - Website: http://www.hrwf.net - Email: info@hrwf.net - Two wooden Christian churches have been burnt to the ground in the predominantly Muslim northeastern part of Kenya, police said.
Witnesses said the Muslim call to worship "God is great," and the words "We condemn America" were carved on the charred remains of the Methodist church and the Universal Church of God in arid Isiolo district, torched late on Tuesday night.
Muslim leaders condemned the attack, saying its perpetrators were trying to fan religious tension stemming from the September 11 attacks on the United States and the likely American retaliation.
"Somebody is trying to... tarnish the name of Islam," said Sheikh Hussein Ibrahim of the Isiolo mosque.
But local police played down the significance of the arson attack, denying it had religious overtones.
"Those churches have stood here for the past five years. This was a normal arson attack," Isiolo police chief James Shile said, adding no arrests had been made yet.
Relations between Kenyan Christians and Muslims are normally good, but last year a Catholic Church and a Christian centre were stoned and set ablaze in the capital Nairobi following clashes over land ownership.
Muslims make up approximately six percent of Kenya's 28 million population.
Cops tear-gas Kenyan sect
WRNS (19.04.2001) HRWF International Secretariat (20.04.2001) - Website: http://www.hrwf.net - Email: info@hrwf.net - Riot police on Wednesday tear-gassed some 300 members of Kenya's Mungiki religious sect who were staging a demonstration in the capital against the police killing last week of one of their members. The victim was mistaken by police for a robber and shot dead.
The sect members, carrying a coffin with the body of the slain man, marched through the city to parliament, where the House was in session. There they were confronted by police, who fired teargas, forcing them to flee and causing them to abandon the coffin in front of parliament. Police later took the body back to the city mortuary.
The Mungiki sect, whose members normally wear dread-locked hair and who advocate a return to African traditional values, mainly support the Kenyan opposition and have often clashed with police. Kenyan security forces last weekend confronted heavily armed robbers in bloody clashes in the capital, which left at least 14 people dead, including four policemen. The slain Mungiki member was mistaken for one of the robbers during the shootouts.
Uganda cult mass murder anniversary
by Henry Wasswa
Associated Press (16.03.2001) / HRWF International Secretariat (12.03.2001) - Website: http://www.hrwf.net - Email: info@hrwf.net - The rusting tire rim that served as a bell to summon the faithful swings from the branch of an avocado tree. A tangle of young saplings pushes up from the mass grave.
And the cult leaders presumed to be behind the fire that killed 330 of their followers are still at large one year later.
A ghostly silence hangs over the burned-out hall and the tidy, solid houses where the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God prayed and sang.
They were awaiting the day when God, angered by the world's sins, would send flames to destroy it and take the virtuous to heaven.
But the cult's leaders hastened judgment day and on March 17, according to police, herded 330 people, mostly women and children, into the makeshift mud-and-wattle temple, sprinkled combustible material, nailed the doors and windows shut and torched it.
In the following weeks, police followed a grisly trail to several houses owned or rented by presumed cult leaders, and found 448 more bodies stacked like firewood under concrete floors.
Hundreds of bodies ended up being bulldozed into a mass grave at the site, a converted farm.
Today, people in the hilly corner of southwestern Uganda say the place is haunted by the ghosts of their friends and relatives.
" As dusk approaches, we see figures of people moving up and down as they used to do before they were killed in the fire. They put on the same red and blue uniforms,'' said 18-year-old Deus Tweyongere, whose aunt and four cousins perished in the inferno.
Police still guard the site, and officially the investigation continues. But authorities seem to have little prospect of tracking down the alleged cult leaders, Joseph Kibwetere, defrocked Catholic priest Dominic Kataribaabo and a woman named Cledonia Mwerinde, who passed herself off as a nun.
Uganda is a poor country. Its police have no access to computer databases that might link them to neighboring countries where at least one suspect has been seen. They even lack gasoline for their few vehicles.
" The investigations are not easy, and we were not successful,'' said national police spokesman Asuman Mugenyi. " We only got air.''
He said Kataribaabo was seen last year in Rwanda, at the camp of a different cult, and then in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi. Mwerinde, who once ran a bar, was seen in a village in southwestern Uganda. No one has seen Kibwetere, and many believe he could have perished in the fire.
Cult members were pushed to work 12-hour days in the fields and live frugally. They sold their belongings, and once inside the cult compound, could not leave again.
" Even during the day, I fear the place,'' said Peter Mogadi, a farmer. "We hear the ghosts wailing at night, and we see them moving. I know of a whole family of parents, children and grandchildren who had converted to the faith and died on March 17.''
The compound's stone houses are still strewn with torn clothing, half-used tubes of toothpaste, jars of face cream and bits of candles.
No one has decided what to do with the compound. Charles Rwomushana, a former regional legislator, says it should be a place people can visit and remember the dead.
" This was an episode of its own in the century, an event of its own,'' he said.
