Mohammed Amin Abdishukri offers a compelling account of recent coordinated transnational repression targeting cross-border activism by East African activists in Tanzania, Uganda, and Kenya. He discusses the arrest and ill-treatment of human rights advocates who travelled to Tanzania to observe court proceedings involving Tanzanian opposition leader Tundu Lissu, who faces treason charges. These acts of injustice remind Abdishukri of the infamous Operation Condor—the campaign of state repression that shaped South American politics during the 1970s and 1980s. He argues that this cross-border crackdown on dissent demands new forms of resistance that transcend conventional activism and target the vulnerabilities of authoritarian regimes in East Africa.
by Mohamed Amin Abdishukri
On Sunday, May 18, 2025, Martha Karua, Kenya’s former Justice Minister, opposition figure and leader of the People’s Liberation Party, arrived at Julius Nyerere International Airport in Dar es Salaam with two colleagues: Law Society of Kenya Council member Gloria Kimani and Pan-African Progressive Leaders Solidarity Network member Lynn Ngugi. They had come at the invitation of the East Africa Law Society to observe court proceedings for Tanzania’s opposition leader Tundu Lissu, who faces treason charges that could result in the death penalty.
They never made it past the airport. All three were detained and deported back to Kenya within hours. When former Kenyan Chief Justice Willy Mutunga arrived at the same airport the next day with human rights activists Hussein Khalid and Hanifa Adan, they met the same fate. Unceremonious detention for hours beginning at 2am on Monday and eventual deportation. Kenyan activist Boniface Mwangi and Ugandan activist and lawyer Agather Atuhaire, who somehow managed to slip through this first dragnet, were hunted down in their hotel rooms and disappeared into Tanzania’s detention system.
The next day, at the launch of Tanzania’s new foreign policy, President Samia Suluhu Hassan delivered a speech dripping with unmasked hostility. “We will not give a chance to anyone to come and destroy us,” she declared. Suluhu then instructed authorities not to allow “those who have spoiled their countries to cross over to Tanzania and spread their indiscipline here.”
On Friday, May 22, Agather Atuhaire was found at the Tanzania-Uganda border, bearing visible scars from handcuffs after enduring a harrowing ordeal of torture while held incommunicado by Tanzanian plainclothes agents. She would later recount to the BBC how she was blindfolded, violently beaten, stripped naked and sexually assaulted. The Tanzanian authorities have not commented on these allegations. The previous day, Boniface Mwangi had been dumped at the Horohoro border post by Tanzanian security agents, barely able to walk after what he described as “the worst form of torture.” Mwangi was later seen in a wheelchair at Moi International Airport in Mombasa, from where he was airlifted to Nairobi for medical attention.
One cannot help but wonder if Tanzania was returning a favour to Kenya—activist for activist, torture for torture. Just months earlier, the machinery had operated in reverse when Maria Sarungi Tsehai, a prominent Tanzanian activist who had fled to Kenya in 2020 seeking asylum after facing increasing threats from the Magufuli government, discovered that borders offered no sanctuary. On 12 January 2025 four unknown assailants abducted her in broad daylight and forced her into a vehicle outside Nairobi’s Yaya Centre mall. They choked and manhandled her as they demanded access to her phone. “I am sure that the reason for abduction was to get access to my social media and the whistleblowing job that I do,” she later recounted.
Tsehai, a critic of Suluhu’s regime and an advocate for land rights and freedom of expression, had been using her exile in Kenya to document and expose human rights abuses in Tanzania through her organization Change Tanzania. Her abductors, who she believed were both Kenyan and Tanzanian agents, interrogated her about her social media activities before eventually releasing her on a dark road outside Nairobi.
The Tanzania-Kenya dynamic represents the latest facet of a broader regional pattern.
In November 2024, Ugandan opposition leader Kizza Besigye had disappeared while on a visit to Kenya, where he had traveled to attend Martha Karua’s book launch. The details that later emerged read like a cold war spy novel. Besigye had been lured to a meeting in Nairobi’s Riverside Drive area with individuals, including a British citizen, who promised financial backing for his newly formed People’s Front for Freedom. Upon arrival, eight men claiming to be Kenyan police officers arrested him and his associate Hajj Obeid Lutale. They were driven under the cover of darkness and crossed the Malaba border post without standard security checks, switching from a Kenyan-registered vehicle to one with Ugandan plates.
Ugandan Information Minister Chris Baryomunsi later admitted that Ugandan detectives had gathered intelligence to arrest Besigye in Nairobi, claiming Kenyan authorities enabled the cross-border operation. “We have a legal framework with our counterparts in Kenya to deal with matters that threaten regional security,” Ugandan army spokesman Brig Gen Felix Kulayigye confirmed.
On Tuesday, May 20, Kenyan Prime Cabinet Secretary and Foreign Affairs Cabinet Secretary Musalia Mudavadi was questioned on Kenya’s involvement in Besigye’s abduction. He claimed the reasons for Besigye being in Kenya were unclear despite the obvious fact that he was invited to Karua’s book launch as the guest speaker. Mudavadi then revealed the cold economic logic driving the government’s decision: “We always look at national interest. Uganda is Kenya’s trading partner; a lot of lives and jobs are dependent on that relationship. What would happen to the Kenyan economy if there were no more trade between Kenya and Uganda?”
This same coldness shaped his response to the deportation of Kenyan activists from Tanzania. Rather than condemning the treatment of his compatriots, he defended Suluhu’s actions: “I will not protest that because I think there is some truth… The level of etiquette, insults, that we see in Kenya, even though we have the freedom of speech, is sometimes going overboard,” he said.
Recreating Operation Condor?
They say history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. As I observed all these injustices unraveling, I couldn’t help but think about Operation Condor, the brutal campaign of political repression that swept across South America in the 1970s and early 1980s. A campaign that turned an entire continent into a hunting ground for dissidents.
Born from Cold War paranoia and U.S. backing, Operation Condor began in 1975 when Colonel Manuel Contreras, chief of Chilean secret police, organized a covert meeting in Santiago. Security delegates from Chile, Bolivia, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay signed an intelligence-sharing arrangement designed to track “subversive persons of interest.” These included journalists, activists, trade unionists, clergy, and university professors suspected of left-leaning sympathies. Brazil joined in 1976, Ecuador and Peru in 1978.
But the bureaucratic language of “intelligence-sharing arrangement” masks the horror of what actually unfolded. At its core, Operation Condor involved the mutual exchange of intelligence and the tracking, surveillance, detention, torture, forced disappearance, and extrajudicial killing of political opponents across national boundaries. It represented the internationalisation of domestic state terror.
The coordination was methodical and clinical in its efficiency. Operatives of one country were permitted to operate freely in another, sharing facilities, resources, and even victims. The infamous “death flights”, where kidnapped victims were thrown alive from aircraft into water bodies, became a signature method. Children were stolen from their parents and given to families loyal to the regimes.
When Operation Condor officially ended in 1983, it had claimed an estimated 50,000 lives, disappeared 30,000 people, and imprisoned up to 400,000. This operation demonstrated to ruling classes worldwide that coordinated repression could eliminate dissent more effectively than isolated autocracy.
East Africa has not reached this scale. But we cannot turn a blind eye to the structural similarities: formal and informal intelligence sharing to track political opponents across borders; extrajudicial cross-border renditions that make critics “disappear” in one country only to reappear in home nation prisons; treason charges deployed as legal weapons in theatrical proceedings designed to eliminate opposition; a climate of fear that transcends national boundaries, making exile a fragile refuge; and the prioritization of vaguely defined economic stability and regional geopolitics over human rights and democracy.
The blood of Operation Condor still stains South America’s conscience. It took decades of sustained struggle, international solidarity, and eventual transition away from military dictatorships for the full truth about transnational repression to emerge. Many victims never received justice, and some perpetrators maintained powerful positions even after democratic transitions. East Africa stands at this same precipice and this should terrify anyone who understands where this trajectory leads.
The timing of this increased transnational crackdown is also to be considered. All three countries face crucial electoral tests: Tanzania heads to the polls in October 2025, Uganda follows in 2026, and Kenya in 2027. For Suluhu, Museveni, and Ruto, the current wave of repression serves a dual purpose: neutralising immediate threats while sending a chilling message to potential challengers about the futility of opposition. By coordinating their efforts now, each leader ensures that troublesome voices are silenced before they can inspire domestic opposition movements during election seasons.
A Radical Response
On February 24, Kenyan activists took to the streets in Nairobi and protested for the release of detained Ugandan opposition leader and medical doctor Kizza Besigye. In addition to the activists, Kenyan medical professionals under the banner of the Kenya Medical Practitioners and Dentists Union (KMPDU) also joined the protests in solidarity with their fellow medic and their fellow African.
Following the detention of Boniface Mwangi in Tanzania, Kongamano la Mapinduzi, a political coalition of leftist Kenyan individuals, organisations, initiatives and movements issued an ultimatum. “We are giving Suluhu 24 hours to release them, failure to which we will occupy the Tanzania High Commission. And that’s not all, we will go to Tanzania!” And true to their word the group alongside other organisations had camped outside the Tanzanian embassy in Nairobi until Mwangi was released.
These and many other solidarity efforts following these cross-border atrocities represent the stirrings of resistance. But if we are honest, these gestures, however admirable, are insufficient against a systematically coordinated machine of transnational repression.
The scope of the problem demands a response that transcends conventional activism. These regimes have not stumbled into coordination. They have deliberately constructed networks of repression that operate beyond the reach of traditional resistance. To counter this, we must think beyond the boundaries of what constitutes “legitimate” opposition.
Their power rests on infrastructure: communication systems that coordinate deportations, transportation networks that facilitate renditions, detention facilities that house disappeared activists, surveillance technologies that track movements across borders. This infrastructure has physical locations, digital pathways, and human operators, all of which are points of vulnerability. Their deportation machinery depends on specific airports; their surveillance systems rely on particular communication towers; their coordination requires certain government offices to function smoothly. Each dependency becomes a strategic target for systematic disruption.
We have already witnessed glimpses of this potential. The hacking of Tanzania’s Police Force X account (@tanpol), which led to false reports of President Suluhu’s death and forced the government to block X nationwide, demonstrates how digital disruption can expose the fragility of their control mechanisms. Those anonymous actors who compromised the account understood that the same technologies regimes use for surveillance and propaganda can be turned against them. Such actions, whatever one thinks of their specific tactics, reveal the vulnerability of systems that appear unassailable from the outside but crumble when approached with technical precision and strategic timing.
These regimes also survive through relationships with imperial powers who need them for stability, resource extraction, and regional influence. But imperial interests contain contradictions we can exploit. Western governments condemning human rights abuses while maintaining economic partnerships; Chinese investment competing with American influence; and international law conflicting with geopolitical convenience. These contradictions create pressure points. Strategic campaigns that force imperial powers to choose between their democratic rhetoric and their authoritarian allies can isolate these regimes internationally.
We also need to remember that the torturers, deportation officers, and surveillance operatives who carry out these operations are regular people with families, communities, and consciences. Systematic campaigns to isolate these individuals socially, expose their identities publicly, and force them to confront the human cost of their actions can break down the psychological foundations of repression. When security officers become pariahs in their own communities, when their children are ashamed of their work, when their participation in state violence becomes personally costly, the machinery of repression will begin to malfunction.
The ultimate goal is not to reform these systems but to create conditions where their continuation becomes impossible. This means deliberately provoking contradictions that force them to further reveal their true nature, escalating costs of repression until they become unsustainable, and building alternative power that can step into the vacuum when they collapse. Revolutionary situations emerge when rulers can no longer rule in the old way and the ruled refuse to be ruled in the old way. The task of progressive forces is to consciously create these conditions across East Africa simultaneously.
There is simply no reformist path out of systematically coordinated authoritarianism. The revolution will be pan-African and total, or East Africa will become a laboratory for perfecting the techniques of transnational oppression.
Mohamed Amin Abdishukri is a Kenyan journalist, writer and a digital creator whose content focuses on literature and political education.
Featured Photograph: Tanzania President Samia Suhulu Hassan and Ugandan President Yoweri Musevni (Wikimedia Commons).
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