Edgar Tabaro

The Tragic Day 37 Years Ago When the Uganda State Army Baked Its Own People Alive On 11 July 1989, at Okungulo Railway Station in Mukura, Kumi District, eastern Uganda, a horrific atrocity was committed against local civilians. The victims were farmers, teachers, sons and fathers from the surrounding Teso villages, rounded up by the National Resistance Army’s (NRA) 106th Battalion on suspicion of being rebel collaborators. More than a hundred of these local men were driven into a single, unventilated steel goods wagon and locked inside. The afternoon heat at Okungulo Railway Station was already suffocating when the heavy iron door was slammed shut and the bolts slid into place, sealing them inside the metal box. Within minutes, the air vanished. Inside, it became a pitch-black furnace. Men stripped off their clothes, drenched in their own sweat and the sweat of those pressed tightly against them. They began to gasp, their chests heaving in vain for oxygen. Desperate, they hammered their fists against the corrugated steel walls, screaming for water, for air, for mercy. Outside, the response to their cries was a strike of a match. Soldiers gathered brushwood and lit a fire directly beneath the wagon. The steel floor turned into a scorching hot pan, and the wagon became an oven. The rising heat and smoke consumed the last remaining pockets of oxygen. Inside the belly of the iron beast, the frantic thumping slowly faded, replaced by the sound of men choking and collapsing onto one another. When the doors were finally opened hours later, the silence was absolute. Sixty-nine bodies lay contorted in the dark, piled in a desperate, final scramble towards the cracks in the door. A concrete monument was eventually built to mark the mass grave of those who perished that day. Yet the nation has never truly come to terms with the horror of what happened. Because this dark chapter remained unaddressed in the national conscience for so long, their restless ghosts continue to haunt the country’s memory.