Tracking Multitude of Sects Impossible Task in Uganda

Joni Kasigaire is charged with keeping an eye on the 648 religious groups registered in this East African country, including the deadly Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God.

It is an impossible job, especially when measured against the backdrop of a country short on resources and a populace anxious for a divine escape from everyday difficulties endemic to the world’s poorest continent.

Kasigaire’s office, behind the parking lot of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, has a bare concrete floor and a roof that leaks when it rains. The photocopy machine doubles as a coffee table. He shares a single telephone with his secretary, passing the receiver back and forth through an open door.

“Most of all, I am in need of a computer,” he said, pointing to nearly 3,000 overstuffed folders squeezed into filing cabinets that do not close. “It becomes difficult to track any of these groups when you have this kind of a system.”

Under normal circumstances, Uganda’s nongovernmental organizations board, of which Kasigaire is secretary, gets little outside scrutiny. But with the apparent murder of more than 900 members of the doomsday Ten Commandments cult, the board’s shortcomings provide an important piece in the puzzle of how such a calamity occurred.

Inadequate government oversight, ill-equipped and corrupt local authorities, increasingly irrelevant mainstream churches and a country with so many weighty problems--from internal rebellion to abject poverty--that Christian fanaticism blends into the patchwork of despair--all conspired to unleash a monster so terrible it consumed an entire religious following.

“If you look at the role of churches in African society, there is a crisis situation,” said Hubert Van Beek, executive for church and ecumenical relations at the Geneva-based World Council of Churches. “Neither the mainstream nor independent churches are able to face the social and economic challenges. You have a situation where people are willing to go for anything if there is a promise of a better life.”

The magnitude of the horror in the remote southwestern Ugandan villages of Kanungu, Buhunga, Rugazi and Rushojwa--places where detectives continue to search for more poisoned and mutilated bodies of cult members, pulling 80 more bodies from a mass grave in Rushojwa on Thursday--is what has caught authorities and religious leaders by surprise.

Aside from the early missionary years and occasions of war, killing has rarely been a part of the religious landscape here, church scholars say. But then a doomsday group, whose leaders appear to have enriched themselves under the guise of an apocalyptic prophecy, has probably never before been caught in such a blatant deception, they say.

Religious Freedom Brings New Churches

Officials also worry about a breakdown in intelligence operations intended to keep unorthodox religious groups in check. Police are investigating suspicions that local officials may have intentionally suppressed damaging information about the Ten Commandments cult, perhaps for financial gain or out of loyalty to its leaders. On Thursday, police arrested a regional government official, who is apparently cooperating with investigators.

After coming to power in 1986 following a terrible civil war, President Yoweri Museveni reversed a ban on religious freedom imposed by dictator Idi Amin. Suddenly, Uganda began to catch up with the rest of Africa as people devastated by years of war and oppression found comfort in grass-roots Christianity outside established faiths.

Despite the new freedoms, authorities remain watchful because the main guerrilla group opposed to the Kampala government, the Lord’s Resistance Army, is an outgrowth of an extremist Christian cult whose members believed magic oil would protect them from government troops.

“We depend on our intelligence, but our intelligence did not pick up this kind of activity,” police spokesman Eric Naigambi said of the recent killings. “Many people are now suspected to be involved. Everybody is out trying to find out what happened.”

That 1,000 searching souls found themselves in the service of a former prostitute and a failed politician who related conversations with the Virgin Mary, however, is regarded as a wicked but ordinary sign of the times.

Last year, Ugandan riot police disbanded two other compounds run by self-declared doomsday prophets, including a teenager who claims to have returned from the dead in 1996. Scores of similar organizations dot the Ugandan countryside, many led by self-proclaimed pastors as practiced at hustling as in the ways of the Lord.

The Ten Commandments cult, whose leaders predicted that the world would end Dec. 31, falls within a broad movement of fringe religious groups in the industrialized and developing world. The cult was founded in 1987 by former prostitute Keredonia Mwerinde, who claims to have received divine inspiration.

She is certainly not alone.

Three years ago, 39 people in suburban San Diego belonging to the Heaven’s Gate group took their own lives in the belief that a UFO would transport them to heaven. In 1994, 48 members of the Order of the Solar Temple in Switzerland were found burned to death in the pattern of a star, their apparent ticket to the new world; five more members were found dead in Canada.

Eighty-six people died near Waco, Texas, in 1993 when federal agents raided the compound of the Branch Davidians, a religious group led by doomsday prophet David Koresh--born Vernon Howell--who claimed to be Jesus Christ. Hundreds of Christian survivalists, meanwhile, have long been preparing for Armageddon in Idaho and elsewhere in the western United States.

But Africa, the world’s least developed continent, offers especially fertile ground for scrupulous and unscrupulous promoters of the afterlife. In the 1990s, the mushrooming AIDS pandemic, regarded by the Ten Commandments cult and countless other African religious groups as God’s punishment for sinners, added fresh urgency to a litany of social and economic hardships.

“People are being driven by extreme frustration to look for an alternative community that would care for them, where God would act on their behalf almost immediately,” said John Padwick, international program director at the Organization of African Instituted Churches in Nairobi, Kenya. “Many of them join small religious groups where they have a sense of security and being looked after.”

The proliferation of such groups was one of several concerns raised by Roman Catholic bishops at a synod on Africa held in Rome in 1994. The Roman Catholic Church is the biggest denomination in Uganda, representing about half of all Christians. The Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God was founded by Catholics and was most popular among church members.

The Rev. Augustine Lukenge, deputy secretary-general of the Uganda Episcopal Conference, an organization of Roman Catholic churches, said church leaders tried desperately to draw the cult’s leaders back into the fold.

They succeeded in the case of one priest, the Rev. Paul Ikazire, who had grown disillusioned with the cult leadership’s emphasis on accumulating wealth and controlling communication among followers. The wife of Joseph Kibwetere, the former opposition politician who headed the cult, also eventually abandoned the group after concluding her husband had become “a different person.”

But the church had little sway with Kibwetere and his top two assistants--the Rev. Dominic Kataribabo, a priest in Rugazi, and Mwerinde, who served as the cult’s chief prophet. All three were ultimately excommunicated; even appeals from Kataribabo’s classmates in California, where the priest is said to have earned a master’s degree in theology, were rebuffed, Lukenge said.

“It is beyond my understanding,” he said. “It is so devilish, I think the leaders must have been hooked into devil worship.”

Catholic leaders here in the Ugandan capital have gone to great lengths to offer reassurance to the country’s 9 million Catholics since March 17, when a fire in Kanungu exposed the wayward cult’s sinister methods. Police estimate that as many as 530 members died in the blaze, which was first believed to be a mass suicide but later determined to be arson. Since then, hundreds of bodies have been found in mass graves in other locations.

Archbishop Paul Bakyenga said during a recent Mass: “Feel guilty as a nation, but not as a Catholic. I don’t feel guilty; I feel sad.” The archdiocese also is preparing a comprehensive statement concerning the cult, including its history as well as pointers about how not to be taken in by such groups. It will be distributed to parishes throughout the country.

Yet many religious leaders acknowledge that mainstream Christian churches are in large part powerless to control the growing popularity of splinter groups here and elsewhere in Africa.

Many of the groups derive their appeal by condemning the establishment religions as corrupt and insincere. The Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God, for example, adhered to many Roman Catholic doctrines but professed, according to its handbook, to be restoring the Roman church to its lost roots.

The fastest-growing Christian faiths in Africa fall outside the traditional European-based institutions, whose colonial-era missionaries introduced the gospel to the continent but whose message has grown hollow. Even established churches that have gone to great lengths to incorporate traditional African customs and traditions into their liturgy are barely able to keep up with the home-grown varieties.

Start-Ups Too Numerous to Track

The trend dates to the early 1900s, when so-called prayer bands were established by charismatic African leaders based on a vision or calling. The numbers at that time were small and largely tolerated by the dominant European mission churches; today, storefront chapels led by the divinely inspired, usually with no formal theological training, are too numerous to track, according to the World Council of Churches.

“It is almost impossible to monitor all of these churches,” said Padwick of the Organization of African Instituted Churches. “The government doesn’t have the ability, and even to say the churches should monitor themselves is difficult. The Catholic Church would call any breakaway group a sect, but then that is how we got the Christian church in the first place--it broke away from Judaism.”

Christianity is booming in Africa. The latest estimate in the International Bulletin of Missionary Research estimates that there are 335 million believers. But much of the growth is being fueled by so-called prosperity gospel churches. The groups, often a single congregation with a charismatic but autocratic leader, preach a feel-good Christianity with an emphasis on economic well-being.

The prosperity gospel leaders often enrich themselves through the generosity of their congregants and then point to their rags-to-riches story as evidence of God’s plan for other poor people. Authorities here suspect that Kibwetere and Mwerinde masterminded the Ten Commandments killings after persuading their followers to sell their belongings and donate the proceeds to the cult. If they are alive, as police believe, the two have fled with a small fortune.

The Rev. Augustine Musopole, a Presbyterian minister who heads the Malawi Council of Churches, said get-rich pep talks play well among desperate Africans. Such churches, he said, are literally popping up on street corners every day.

“Just outside our offices there was a prayer meeting at lunchtime,” Musopole said in a telephone interview from Blantyre, Malawi. “The preacher was saying that in school all he had was a shirt. Then he became a Christian and he got two shirts. Then a suit, he said, and ‘God was blessing me.’ He ended the prayer by saying he was hoping for a BMW.”

Registration Law Widely Resented

Authorities in Uganda say they have long been aware of the abuses perpetrated by religious groups. A 1989 law requires all nongovernmental organizations, including churches, to register with the government.

The law, however, has not been popular, even with legitimate charitable groups. Kasigaire, the nongovernmental board secretary, said the organizations resent what they consider government meddling. Not even the well-funded groups, many of which have their headquarters in the United States, have offered to help equip his office.

“They don’t want to help us,” he said. “They don’t trust us.”

The faded pink folder labeled Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God has been pulled from the files in Kasigaire’s office. It was started in 1991, when the cult first applied for a license. The most recent entry is a letter, dated Jan. 15, written by the cult’s leaders.

It advises authorities that “our mission is coming to an end.” The letter says there will be no 2001. Someone has underlined the doomsday passages and scribbled in the margins that the claims need to be checked out.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

A Look Inside the Ugandan Cult

The Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God taught that Uganda was chosen as the new Israel and that believers would enter the first day of the “New Earth” on Jan. 1, 2000. Among the written objectives in its constitution:

* “To fulfill what Jesus and Mary ask of us.”

* “To restore the Ten Commandments.”

* “To teach and protect the people from doing the evil that has brought about the calamity of AIDS.”

* “To show the people that the movement does not have any racial limitations.”

* “To notify all the people in the world to prepare themselves for the closing of this generation.”

* “To give messages coming from Our Lord Jesus Christ and the Blessed Virgin Mary His Mother warning us through the people to whom they appear.”

* “To enhance zeal among people, to fight against laziness, carelessness and general human weakness.”

Details of the doomsday prophecy appear in the group’s handbook of visions, called “The Timely Message From Heaven: The End of the Present Times.” The prophecy, as told through a dream, says in part:

“After all of this came three days of darkness, an event that has never been experienced since the beginning of creation. Those who had repented were told to go in hiding to the houses they had built for this purpose. These houses are called ‘ark’ or ‘ship.’ They were ordered to shut all the doors and not to open anything at all. All activities such as eating, praying . . . should take place inside for three days.

“Anything that remained outside in the dark turned into evil. The devils lamented and cried for three days, after which they were thrown into hell.

“The face of the Earth is now as flat as a playground. I saw a new Earth coming down from heaven. . . . The new Earth is very beautiful and it has plenty of light. Death and the underworld are vanquished, Satan has been put in fetters as well as those who accepted to serve it. The new Earth will be connected to heaven.”