LGBTQ Ugandans Tell of Persecution Under Cover of COVID

LGBTQ Ugandans have spoken to the global press about the persecution they have endured during the COVID crisis, with the government using the pandemic as an excuse for arrests and torture.

Ronald Ssenyonga, 21, told UK newspaper The Guardian about how he and 22 others were rounded up and arrested during a raid on a shelter for LGBTQ people in Kampala last March. After police kicked in the gate, they forced the shelter's residents to sit on the floor and submit to being photographed by cameramen from local TV stations.

"After the 'photoshoot', they tied us like slaves and marched us through a trading centre full of homophobic people. Some people slapped us. Others hit us with stones or whatever they could find," Ssenyonga recalled.

That was just the beginning. The prisoners were whipped, the Guardian story said; Ashraf, a 19-year-old man, told the Guardian in a previous article that police made him remove his clothing and burned his thigh with a hot iron bar.

Ssenyonga confirmed accounts of mistreatment, telling the Guardian that police "burned us with firewood and forced us to confess that we are gay," and adding that the prisoners were beaten with wooden sticks and iron bars and that the police "turned other prisoners against us."

The video taken by the TV cameramen circulated on social media, resulting in the residents being outed to employers and family members, with subsequent unemployment and death threats from their own relatives adding to their troubles.

The prisoners were held for 50 days on the charge of "a negligent act likely to spread infection of disease" during the pandemic's lockdown, an earlier article in the Guardian reported last summer. Twenty of the prisoners filed suit after they were, finally, released.

The incident, and others like it, drew renewed attention to the Ugandan government's persecution of LGBTQ people, which has only intensified since a so-called "Kill the Gays" bill was introduced in 2010 that would have imposed the death penalty for some kinds of same-sex activity. International pressure stopped the bill from becoming law, and Uganda's own constitutional court struck down the legislation in 2014, but lawmakers re-introduced it as recently as 2019.

"At the root of the arrests is homophobia," reported Human Rights Watch in a report on the raid, recounting that "neighbors complained to local leaders about the presumed sexuality of shelter residents, prompting the mayor, Hajj Abdul Kiyimba, to lead a raid on the home.

"A video viewed by Human Rights Watch shows Kiyimba berating residents for 'homosexuality' and beating them with a stick," the Human Rights Watch article adds.

While in prison, the shelter's residents were denied legal counsel and those who were taking HIV drugs had their medications withheld, the account said. Though the prisoners were supposedly arrested for having been together at the shelter in "a negligent act likely to spread infection of disease," their being jailed alarmed advocates who pointed out that they were at elevated risk of contracting COVID by being put in prison, news sources noted.