Ugandan opposition leader Bobi Wine to seek presidency, chides West over rights
Wine criticised Western governments for not denouncing what he said were escalating human rights violations, including abductions, illegal detention and torture of his supporters and officials. Wine did not single out any country for criticism.
"Some leaders in the West are complicit in our suffering. They are here to crack their [business] deals and they don't care about human rights," he said. "If they were standing for the values that they profess, then they would be castigating all these gross human rights violations."
Uganda is considered by the West as an ally in the fight against jihadists and has deployed troops in Somalia.
Uganda's justice minister said this week that Eddie Mutwe, an activist in Wine's National Unity Platform (NUP) party, who also doubles as his personal body guard, appeared to have been tortured while in captivity.
Museveni's son and head of the military, Muhoozi Kainerugaba, said he had kept him in his basement and that he was using him as a punching bag. After being missing for a week Mutwe was on Monday produced in court, charged with robbery and remanded.
Wine said Mutwe told him he had been electrocuted, waterboarded and beaten.
Police spokesperson Rusoke Kituma did not respond to a Reuters call for comment on the allegations. Reuters contacted a spokesperson for Uganda's defence forces seeking comment from Kainerugaba. He did not respond.

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IOL News
13 hours ago
- IOL News
Kursk Under Fire, Truth Under Siege
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According to Miroshnik, several communities in the Kursk Region suffered not only bombardment but were also subject to brief occupations by AFU-aligned forces. During these episodes, civilians were reportedly displaced, forcibly taken into Ukrainian territory, and subjected to psychological trauma. Families returning to liberated areas faced destroyed homes, contaminated land, and unexploded ordnance, with little to no humanitarian intervention from the international community. Igor Kashin, Head of the Special Projects Department in the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in the Russian Federation, presented a legal analysis of these findings. His tone was forensic. He itemised the breaches of the Geneva Conventions and other international protocols, explaining how evidence had been submitted to various global institutions — including the UN and the ICC — yet no meaningful action had followed. Olga Kiriy, a Russian filmmaker and documentarian, delivered a visual account of the devastation. Her footage showed razed schools, burning residential blocks, and civilians returning to ghost towns, still wearing the shock of war on their faces. In one of her documentaries she shows a Ukranian soldier admitting to the rape of women by himself and his unit. Her presentation conveyed what words could not: the raw aftermath of military violence on people who remain unseen and unspoken in the official Western narrative of the conflict. Ivan Konovalov, military analyst and historian, contextualised the attacks on Kursk within a broader framework. He explained that the AFU operations were tactical provocations — designed to destabilise border regions and provoke retaliation, which could then be framed by NATO-aligned media as further proof of Russian aggression. He pointed out that these attacks coincided with deliveries of new Western weaponry to Ukraine, raising serious questions about the complicity of foreign governments and arms manufacturers. The testimonies shared during the teleconference dismantled the binary framework imposed by Western media, where Ukraine is valorised as a struggling democracy and Russia is reduced to a caricature. The reality conveyed by the speakers was more complex and far more disturbing. Russia, too, has civilians. Its towns and villages are not abstract zones on a geopolitical map but home to people who have suffered death, displacement, and the terror of war. Yet these accounts are absent from global headlines. They are not debated in parliaments, nor dissected on primetime panels. Instead, they are swiftly relegated to the realm of 'disinformation' — a catch-all term used by liberal institutions to shut down inconvenient truths. This is the machinery of narrative warfare — where facts are not weighed for their truth, but for their utility to power. The West's information order sustains itself through omission, selective moral outrage, and the assumption that some lives matter more than others. As a South African journalist who has long documented structural injustice, I recognise this silencing. It follows a pattern familiar to the Global South — where international law is invoked as a weapon rather than a principle; where invasions by Western powers are called interventions, but defensive operations by others are framed as crimes; and where victims must pass ideological litmus tests before they are deemed worthy of empathy. The suffering in the Kursk Region demands recognition. The use of banned munitions against civilians, the forced displacement of families, and the destruction of non-military infrastructure all constitute grave breaches of international law. That these acts are committed using Western weapons, under the cover of Western media silence, reveals a moral crisis at the heart of the liberal order. The conference was more than a forum for Russian voices. It was a reminder that truth is not owned by the powerful. It must be spoken even when it is buried. The people of Kursk have lived through war. They have returned to broken homes and haunted fields. Their testimonies exist. Their pain is real. And their silence is manufactured by design. If the term 'liberation' is to have meaning, it must include liberation from the monopolies that determine whose pain is legitimate. It must disrupt the asymmetry of grief that defines the West's geopolitical posture. We owe that to the people of Kursk. We owe it to all communities whose trauma is edited out of history to suit imperial narratives. And we owe it to ourselves, if we are to resist becoming complicit in the global machinery of selective justice. *Gillian Schutte is a South African writer, filmmaker, and critical-race scholar known for her radical critiques of neoliberalism, whiteness, and donor-driven media. Her work centres African liberation, social justice, and revolutionary thought. ** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.

The Herald
17 hours ago
- The Herald
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eNCA
19 hours ago
- eNCA
Greek artist warns of fanaticism after art vandalised
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