By Katharina Gorges, intern at KAS Media Africa
At 11:15 am yesterday morning, three fully packed police patrol vehicles arrived at the main office of the Monitor Publication Ltd. in Kampala presenting a search warrant, declaring the premises a scene of crime and shutting down all kind of operations and work on the newspaper Monitor as well as on its two sister radio stations and the website monitor.co.ug.
Officially searching for evidences of scanned signatures of senior government officials that were to be declared being official by the Monitor’s journalists and staff, Monitor Publication’s Management and security sources assume different reasons behind the harsh and surprising advance in sieging the office and not allowing people to leave or enter the building.
Being an independent newspaper, the Monitor recently reported rumours that Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, is preparing his son, Muhoozi Kainerugaba, to succeed him in office and at the same time is trying to stamp out oppositional movements against this. In order to avoid media coverage on the so called Muhoozi Project, as Coordinator of Intelligence Service Gen. David Sejusa dubbed it, police men laid a search warrant to confiscate any kind of information and production plants for further reports on this topic.
Alex Asimwe, managing director of Monitor Publications, was quoted as being surprised by the police siege, as they were seeing police men wielding guns but not giving anyone a communication on what happens. While they are “trying to make sure the situation normalizes as early as possible”, IPI Deputy Director Anthony Mill in the name of all IPI members demands an end to the police siege of independent media in Uganda and urges the Ugandan government to ensure that the Monitor’s operations are allowed to continue soon. Being assembled on the 62nd World Congress for two days in Amman, Jordan, leading editors, journalists and media experts from all over the world discuss today’s principle challenges to press freedom under the this year’s theme “Documenting Change – Empowering Media”.
