By Witness Radio team.
When the industrial agriculture investor Agilis Partners Limited targeted the communities’ land for its investments in the Kiryandongo district in 2017, the poor residents never knew that the company had employed several tactics to force them (indigenous & local communities) off their land. One of them was sexual violence.
Sexual violence means that someone forces or manipulates someone else into unwanted sexual activity without their consent. At the same time, defilement of a child is any sexual intercourse with a child under the age of 18 years old.
In this article, we bring back a story published about a woman alleging sexual violence against Agilis Partners Limited.
In 2021, in an article published by Witness Radio, women were facing significant backlash in defending their land rights. In the article, a local woman allegedly said she was raped by Agilis Partners Limited’s workers. The matter was reported to area police but refused to open a case file.
Agilis Partners Limited is owned by American brothers Philipp Prinz and Benjamin Prinz. It owns Agilis Ranch 20 and 21 Limited, Asilis Farms Limited, and Joseph Initiative Limited, a beneficiary of the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) financial support and Common Fund for Commodities (CFC) based in the Netherlands.
The Company has also received funding from Vested World, USAID under the Feed the Future Uganda program. It is currently a beneficiary of a USD 1 million loan from the World Bank’s private lending arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC).
On the fateful day of 18th August 2020, when Opondo Cathy (real names withheld) was returning home from a nearby trading center Bweyale. She got attacked and sexually abused by a private security guard whom she claimed belonged to Agilis Partners. The incident happened close to her home.
According to Opondo, the rapist attacked her from behind and tried to strangle her neck and grabbed her mouth, and hit her to the ground. “I struggled with him, but he overpowered me, put me down and raped me. I yelled louder for my rescue, but the neighbors were far away and took some time to reach the scene. As soon as the rapist had them coming, he ran away,” she revealed.
“The louder yelling brought those nearby to come to my rescue, but they did not even bother to ask me what had happened because I already looked victimized. They decided to look for the rapist, who was hard to trace. Whereas I could not walk well after the horrific incident, we went to the company offices where I always used to see him, but unfortunately, he was not there,” she further revealed.
After two days, Opondo says she managed to get to the area police to report the incident. In her words, the officer on duty (a policeman) asked her if she had evidence. When she asked for a police medical form to be examined, she was referred to a nearby Health Centre Three (III) with a small chit of a paper indicating that she was assaulted instead of being a victim of rape. On meeting the medical officer, she handed over the chit and was examined on grounds of assault, not rape.
“I could hardly walk because of severe pain in my genital organs, which even a blind person could see, but because the police work with the multinational company to evict us, they said I was only assaulted not raped,” the mother of four added.
According to Opondo, she had already received several threats and warnings from the agents of her evictors (Agilis Partners Limited). “They used to tell me, if I don’t leave the land, I should not regret what will happen to me,” she mentioned during one of the interviews with Witness Radio Uganda.
Since 2017, the company has illegally evicted over 2500 residents who were lawfully occupying and cultivating more than 2000 hectares without any due diligence or a court order, no fair compensation, and it did not provide an alternative settlement to the poor families.
Witness Radio and its partners call on the World Bank and the governments of the United States of America and the Netherlands, as key financial backers of Agilis, to support an independent investigation into the human rights abuses committed by the company.
To peace and justice advocates, click on this link and ask the World Bank and other financial backers to act swiftly to end these abuses, support the affected communities in the struggle for land rights, and hold Agilis Partners Limited accountable for all human rights abuses.
