In October 2025, Tanzania held a general election from which the main opposition had been effectively excluded. Chadema leader Tundu Lissu was arrested on treason charges in April 2025 and his party barred from contesting. When protests erupted on election day and in the days following, security forces responded with lethal force. A government-appointed commission — the Chande Commission, chaired by retired Chief Justice Mohamed Chande Othman — documented at least 518 deaths from "unnatural causes," many from gunshot wounds, and over 2,000 injuries. Human Rights Watch and the commission itself say the true death toll is likely higher, as some families buried their dead without reporting. DW's own investigation — reviewing dozens of videos, interviewing sources, examining police guidelines, and obtaining a leaked internal police report — indicates that police likely acted beyond the scope of their own guidelines and training. The evidence includes cases of non-protesters killed, protesters shot in the head and upper body, and people in uniform beating and degrading civilians. The police's specialized Field Force Unit, identifiable by red berets and heavy riot-control equipment, appeared repeatedly in the footage. The Centre for Information Resilience separately documented uniformed personnel beating civilians and positioned near sites where protesters were shot dead in Dar es Salaam. One case from Mwanza stands out starkly: videos showed bodies of young men reportedly killed by people in police uniforms while they were watching television in a video hall — not protesting, not outside during curfew, simply watching TV. Both Human Rights Watch and the Chande Commission flagged this incident. Tanzania's own police guidelines restrict firearms to situations of absolute necessity. The pattern documented by DW and rights organizations — head wounds, shots at fleeing civilians, killings of bystanders — suggests systematic violations, not isolated incidents. The political architecture around accountability is designed to produce delay without resolution. The Chande Commission recommended further investigation but did not identify security bodies, individual officers, or commanders who may have been responsible. A second inquiry, chaired by retired Justice Shaban Ally Lila, began gathering evidence in August 2026. Its findings remain pending. President Samia Suluhu Hassan has framed the unrest as an attempted overthrow, a characterization that provides political cover for the security response rather than subjecting it to scrutiny. The Ministry of Home Affairs declined to comment, citing the legal process. The police did not respond to DW's inquiries at all. The families at the center of this story inhabit a particular kind of state-imposed limbo. Raha, whose nephew she raised was killed, asks only for an apology — not prosecution, not compensation, just acknowledgment. Zuri lost both a brother and a son and asks why the government has not even visited affected families. These are not radical demands. They are the minimum gestures of a state that considers its citizens human. The government's silence is not neutral; it is a policy choice that communicates to security forces that lethal overreach carries no consequences. The structural dynamic is clear: an election was engineered to exclude opposition, protests were met with overwhelming and apparently indiscriminate force, and the accountability mechanism has been designed to absorb public pressure without producing results. Two commissions in one year, zero officers named. The sequential-inquiry model — Chande recommends further investigation, Lila begins gathering evidence — creates the appearance of process while the political window for accountability closes. Every month that passes without named perpetrators makes prosecution less likely and impunity more entrenched. What Tanzania is building, one quiet month at a time, is a template: exclude opponents before the vote, crush dissent after, then manage the aftermath through commissions that investigate without concluding. The international dimension — German lawmakers pressing Tanzania on rights concerns — has not yet produced leverage sufficient to alter the calculus. The families know this. "They behave as if nothing happened," Zuri said. "Is this justice? There is no justice in Tanzania."
