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UGANDA-RADIO Feb-24-2006 (500 words) xxxi
Ruling party blocks Ugandan Catholic radios from election reporting
By Evan Weinberger
Catholic News Service
KAMPALA, Uganda (CNS) -- A high-ranking government official who ran for re-election in northern Uganda ordered a Catholic-owned radio station to stop broadcasting election coverage during national elections Feb. 23.
Two days earlier, armed police stormed a Catholic radio station and shut down a political talk show.
On Feb. 23, Health Minister Mike Mukula ordered Kyoga Veritas FM to stop broadcasting election updates from around Soroti, said the station manager, Wilson Kaija.
Kaija told Catholic News Service that the minister, who is part of the governing National Resistance Movement, told the station that reporters were breaking the law by broadcasting news the day of the elections. Ugandan law only calls for an end to campaigning two days prior to the election, not a blackout of news coverage.
Kaija told CNS that the station stopped broadcasting for two hours, then began taking updates from its reporters.
Pacis FM, a Catholic-owned radio station also in northern Uganda, was broadcasting an interview of a high-ranking official of Uganda's main opposition movement, the Forum for Democratic Change, when three armed police burst into the studio Feb. 21. According to local media reports, five more policemen waited outside as the host interviewed the forum's undersecretary general, Kassiano Wadri.
Father Tonino Paolini, Pacis FM's director, told local media that "the policemen came in with guns and said they were acting on orders from Kampala."
Police in Arua, Uganda, said they shut down all political talk shows on FM radio, but a candidate of the governing party was allowed to continue talking on a different station as Pacis FM was taken off the air.
Pamela Atyero, a marketing executive for Radio Pacis in the Ugandan capital, Kampala, told Catholic News Service that Pacis FM, like all other Catholic media, had been trying to provide an open forum for all candidates during the election campaign season. Atyero added that there had been no previous problems when stations broadcast interviews of opposition candidates.
Ugandan elections put the long-ruling President Yoweri Museveni against four other candidates, chiefly Kizza Besigye of the Forum for Democratic Change. The Associated Press reported Feb. 24 that unofficial results released by Ugandan media showed a tight race between Museveni and Besigye.
Museveni came to power in 1986 after leading his National Resistance Movement in a bush war against the dictatorships of Idi Amin and Milton Obote. Once in power, Museveni banned political parties and instituted what he called the movement system, where individuals were elected instead of parties. In 2005, Museveni won a constitutional referendum to allow him to run for a third term as president.
A 20-year war in northern Ugandan pitting government forces against the Lord's Resistance Army has left hundreds of thousands dead and many more displaced. Uganda also became embroiled in the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo and recently was ordered to pay billions of dollars in reparations for looting the country.
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Copyright (c) 2006 Catholic News Service/USCCB. All rights reserved.
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed.
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