Police should be allowed to freely track down criminals

Editor,KUDOS TO the Rwandan and Ugandan police forces for the fruitful cooperation in which a highly dangerous criminal suspect has been nabbed. At least one important hand behind the terrorist campaign of grenade attacks that has taken the lives of innocent Rwandans is out of circulation. Both police forces should step up their cooperative efforts to ensure that such criminals find no safe haven in either country from which they continue to terrorise their home countries. Before reading your article I had gone over Uganda’s Monitor’s report which claimed that Joel Mutabazi had been “abducted” and “arrested”. One would wish that Monitor’s editors would be more professional than that – was he abducted or arrested?While the two involve detention, there is a world of difference in their meanings and one is lawful while the other is illegal. Also, there is a need to police the working of international organisations to ensure they do not help in the pervasion of justice at the instigation of occult forces at work in our region.Most Rwandans, and not a few Ugandans, have been refugees and can attest personally to the great protective benefit the UNHCR can provide when your own government turns you into a stateless person. But we have seen in recent years how international institutions can be easily subverted and turned against the very states to which they are answerable.Reading between the lines of both this article and various Ugandan ones, I sense a very troubling, almost subversive role played by the UNHCR in trying to keep fugitives from lawful arrest for their criminal activities and give them immunity from justice.I don’t know the circumstances, even a little, to be able to judge and also determine whether the problem is at the individual or institutional level. But clearly Rwanda and Uganda need to get to the bottom of this story.We should remember that these organisations are not above the law and must be answerable to member states which comprise them and on whose territories they operate.Mwene Kalinda, KigaliReaction to the story, “Terror suspect Mutabazi handed over to Rwanda”, (The New Times, November 1)

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Police should be allowed to freely track down criminals