By Elias Biryabarema
KAMPALA (Reuters) – Kenya’s government has said it was investigating how a prominent Ugandan opposition leader was spirited out of Nairobi this week, amid growing criticism that it had failed to protect foreign dissidents on its soil.
Kizza Besigye, a longtime rival of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, disappeared in the Kenyan capital on Saturday. He reappeared on Wednesday at a military court in neighbouring Uganda, where he was charged with offences including the illegal possession of firearms.
Uganda’s government spokesperson said on Wednesday it did not carry out abductions and that arrests abroad were done in collaboration with host countries.
However in a television interview on Wednesday evening, Korir Sing’oei, principal secretary at Kenya’s foreign ministry, said Besigye’s detention – which he referred to as an abduction – was “not the act of the Kenyan government”.
Sing’oei said the Kenyan interior ministry had begun an investigation into how Besigye had been “forcefully removed from premises in our country and taken to Uganda”.
The Ugandan court’s charge sheet alleges that Besigye was found with a pistol and eight rounds of ammunition in the Riverside neighbourhood of Nairobi, where it claimed he had been seeking support to prejudice the security of Uganda’s military.
Besigye’s wife Winnie Byanyima, who heads the United Nations HIV/AIDS agency UNAIDS, said he has not owned a gun in the last 20 years.
“As a civilian, Dr Besigye should be tried in a civilian court NOT a military court,” she wrote on the social media platform X.
His detention and transfer to Uganda has fuelled criticism of Kenya’s record on human rights and international law.
In July, Kenyan authorities deported 36 members of Besigye’s political party to Uganda, where they were charged with terrorism-related offences.
Last month, Kenya deported four Turkish refugees to Ankara, drawing criticism from the United Nations.
James Risch, the ranking member on the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said on X that Besigye’s abduction “raises serious questions about important U.S. partners violating (international) norms”.
Besigye, who was Museveni’s physician during the guerrilla war of the 1980s but later became an outspoken critic, had travelled to Kenya to attend a book launch, said Byanyima, who is UNAIDS’ executive director.
His transfer to Uganda was “reminiscent of a terrible period in East Africa’s history when state-sponsored kidnappings and cross-border renditions were the order of the day,” the International Commission of Jurists said in a statement.
Besigye has lost to Museveni in four elections, although he has rejected the results as fraudulent.
(Reporting by Elias Biryabarema; Editing by Hereward Holland, Aaron Ross and Kate Mayberry, Ros Russell)
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