THE wife of a prominent Ugandan opposition figure has expressed deep fears for her husband’s fate after what she describes as his abduction from Kenya and subsequent appearance before a military court in Uganda.
“In the military court, we do not expect to get justice,” Winnie Byanyima told Reuters at her home in Kampala’s Kasangati district, discussing the case of her husband Kizza Besigye, who was seized in Nairobi on November 16.
Byanyima, who serves as Executive Director of UNAIDS, said her husband was preparing to attend a book launch when he was taken. Both Amnesty International and a senior Kenyan foreign ministry official have characterized the incident as an abduction.
During a prison visit, Besigye told his wife he heard his captors speaking a Ugandan language, leading him to believe they were Ugandan operatives. The government has charged him with weapons possession and other offences in a military court – charges his wife dismisses as politically motivated.
“We can only wait for them to appear in a civilian court,” Byanyima told Reuters, calling on President Yoweri Museveni “to stop and reflect, because this solution of criminalising and eliminating opposition through criminalisation is wrong.”
While Uganda’s military spokesperson Felix Kulayigye defended the court’s integrity, Byanyima appealed to Western donors, including the U.S. and Britain, to pressure Ugandan authorities for her husband’s release. She raised particular alarm about a neighbouring country being used for the alleged abduction of an opposition leader.
The case has drawn wider attention to the Ugandan government’s use of military courts, which opposition figures and rights activists say are used to punish political opponents – a charge the government denies.
Besigye, once Museveni’s personal physician during Uganda’s bush wars of the 1980s, later became his political rival, challenging him unsuccessfully in four presidential elections while consistently disputing the results as fraudulent.
