April 4, 2000, San Francisco Chronicle, When Cults Kill,

April 4, 2000, San Francisco Chronicle, When Cults Kill,

THE SCALE of the death toll is staggering. Some 924 members of a Christian doomsday sect in Uganda lost their lives in a chilling combination of mass murders and mass suicides after the world failed to end as they expected on December 31.

A March 17 fire inside the compound of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God left 530 sect members dead. The subsequent discovery of mass graves yielded 388 more bodies, many stabbed or strangled.

Amid the trauma comes familiar questions, echoes of Jonestown and Waco and Heaven's Gate. How could so many people prove so gullible that they would turn over their worldly possessions and their souls to cult leaders? And what were the warning signs -- and were they ignored?

"Through deception and conspiracy, these criminals outwitted the security network (and) exploited the ignorance and illiteracy of thousands," said Ugandan Vice President Speciosa Kazibwe.

But recent history has shown, too many maddening times, that a society's literacy rate is not necessarily a shield against evil people who use their charisma to manipulate the emotionally vulnerable in exploitive, and sometimes even deadly, ways.