SUICIDE OR MURDER?
Straight after the inferno news spread of the mass suicide by the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments, but soon discoveries were made that brought a new question into the equation – was this in fact mass murder?
Four days after the fire, five bodies were found buried under fresh cement in the compound’s latrines. When the people died and who killed them remains a mystery.
On March 25, 2000, 153 further bodies were found under the house of Dominic Kataribabao. The bodies were killed in a variation of ways; hacked, strangled and poisoned. How these murders were carried out without raising any awareness from surrounding neighbours is alarming. Local villagers heard no shouts or screams for help. The only sounds were of the diggers hard at work. When asked what they were doing by local villagers they answered that they were digging new latrines. What it seems like in hind-sight is that the members were digging their own graves.
The mass graves still remain a mystery. Everything is just speculation. The graves are believed to date back to a year or more prior to the blaze. One conclusion for why the graves were there, could be due to the strict categories that the members belonged to. It is possible the lower groups, who did not have fully-fledged members that were ‘willing to die in the arc’, lost their lives here anyway.
GOVERNMENT COVER-UP / PUZZLE
As well as the theory that Mwerinde and/or Kibwetere had in fact set up and murdered their followers, there is also another belief circulating that the whole thing could have been a government cover-up, with the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments being the scape-goat.
There are so many conflicting news stories reported and written on this case that mass suicide, murders and government/ police cover up are all equally plausible theories.
Newspapers showed pictures of the mass graves that were found in the weeks after the fire. The images showed dead bodies piled up on top of each other. Whereas the police said that these had been added one by one, another source said that the way the bodies were piled looked more as though they were buried all at once, and had been thrown off a dump truck all together.
Another queer event was that a police spokesman had declared that a number of policemen had died in the fire. If this is the case, what were they doing there?
The Ugandan government were also happy to use the tragedy to enforce the restriction of non-mainstream religious groups.
Professor of Religious Studies, Irving Hexham, goes as far as to believe that after the initial number of deaths – which tallied with the number of registered group members – was used as a cover up and stated: ‘Some enterprising police and army officers may have decided to use the tragedy as a cover to dispose of the bodies of murdered political prisoners.’
It could have been easy for this to have happened. It wouldn’t have taken much for the media to start spreading ‘evil-cult’ stories, which would immediately draw the audience in to believe that it was a weird bunch of people brain-washed by the belief of a heavenly after life. People then would get so carried away with that thought process that the government could then start to back it and confirm that this was the truth and no one would even start to think that there could have been conflicting evidence. The media were eager for another story like the Jonestown incident that had happened in Guyana, South America, in 1978.
BLURRED HISTORY
The problem is that there is not enough known on the people involved in the group or the years running up to the tragedy. So many actions and events went unnoticed for so long that a factual account and the truth will probably get further and further away the more years that pass.
It has already become something of an urban legend for the new millennium. People make up their own account of what actually happened depending on their political and religious standpoint. Easy answers come from stating that the leaders were evil beings possessed with greed for money, or that they were a sect brainwashed with twisted religious ideas. Either may be the case but there is definitely a lot more to it. Due to the location of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God and the lack of inside information it is difficult to paint a completely true and factual picture of what went on within this group. Reporters and local citizens of the area are so culturally different that any facts will be interpreted a thousand ways, and anti-cult groups have also forced their own beliefs about the tragedy into print, that it is hard to filter out what is the truth from what is just hearsay and whisper.
All this text can do is lay everything out for individual interpretations to be made but there are definitely no answers as to how or why such a massive tragedy took place whether it be murder or suicide.
Reverend Jim Jones
At first it was believed that the deaths of 913 people in the Guyanese Jungle were a mass suicide. As the gruesome details of the last few days in what had become known as ‘Jonestown’ came to light however, the horrendous truth emerged that the deaths may not all have been voluntary, and that one man may have been responsible instead for mass murder. The deceased all belonged to a group known as ‘The People’s Temple’, led by the Reverend Jim Jones.
Jim Jones was born in Lyn, Indiana, on May 13, 1931. Lyn was a farming town, and Jones did not have many friends as a child. Home life was difficult for the family as, due to a severe lung disease, his father was unable to work and therefore relied upon only a minimal pension to maintain his family. In order to bring in some extra money for the family, Jim Jones’s mother worked in a factory. Embittered by this hardship, Jones’s father, a veteran of the First World War, began to sympathise with the racist activities of the Ku Klux Klan. This leaning always seemed strange to the young boy though, as Jones’s mother was of Cherokee Indian descent. He did not understand how his racist father could support such a relationship, and therefore saw flaws in his father’s beliefs and values.
He did not want to be a follower of this hypocritical ideology. Perhaps because he had not been shown a clear religious path by either of his parents, Jim Jones took an exceptional interest in Bible Studies at school. In all other classes he was an average student. Inspired by what he learnt and the more he came to believe in the Christian faith, the more active he became in it. When the other children would leave school together and play, Jim Jones returned home, took up his position on his parents’ front porch, and preached to the people who passed by the house.
At the age of 18, Jim decided to enrol on a religious studies course at Indiana University, and took a job as a porter at a Richmond hospital to fund this education. One year later, Jim became a pastor and also married Marceline Badwin, a nurse at the hospital. Now directly involved in the running of the church, Jim decided to introduce black worshippers into the congregation. One of his main pursuits was the running of the racially integrated church youth centre.
RESISTANCE AND DISAPPROVAL
In a segregated society such as that of Indianapolis, this was a move which met with much resistance and disapproval, not only from the bigoted members of the community, but also from the conservative affiliates of the church. Jones was not deterred however, and became even more determined to put a stop to this racism. His determination encouraged some of those who had initially wavered in their support to back him more fervently. As this support grew stronger, Jim Jones came to be seen as a leading figure in the fight for black people’s rights. His following soon became large enough to enable him to break away from his former church and set up his own, which he named ‘The People’s Temple’. It was a church for all races, and nobody was turned away. Jones prided himself on his bi-racial background and his Cherokee heritage. As a result, the area became a magnet for black people and the ethnic minorities of Indianapolis.
With the large majority of his congregation being black, Jim Jones turned to well-known, influential black preachers to guide him, and modelled his manner and performance on them. One of his mentors was Father Divine, a black preacher and faith-healer from Philadelphia. He asserted such influence over his flock, that they responded by bestowing gifts and luxuries on him. He led a very comfortable life based purely on donations and contributions
