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A Ugandan Movement and the Deaths of 2000

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A Ugandan Movement and the Deaths of 2000

The Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God was a Ugandan religious movement that broke from the Roman Catholic Church, combining intense Marian devotion (its leaders claimed visions and messages from the Virgin Mary) with strict observance of the Ten Commandments and an apocalyptic expectation of the end of the world.

Founded by figures including Credonia Mwerinde and Joseph Kibweteere, it drew a substantial following and imposed a highly disciplined communal life, including, reportedly, periods of near-silence and rigorous rule-keeping in preparation for the predicted end. When an initial date for the end of the world passed without event, tensions within the movement reportedly rose.

In March 2000, hundreds of members died in a fire in the group's church at Kanungu, in an event that investigators concluded was not a spontaneous mass suicide but that, together with bodies later found buried at other group properties, pointed to killing on a large scale; the leaders' fate was never conclusively established, and the case was never fully resolved in court. The deaths, with a toll estimated in the hundreds and possibly exceeding those at Jonestown, rank among the deadliest events associated with any modern religious movement, and the incomplete investigation has left it one of the more obscure such cases in the scholarly record.

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