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History »
UGANDA UNDER IDI AMIN
Taking power
By January 1971, Milton Obote, then President of Uganda, was prepared to rid
himself of the potential threat posed by Idi Amin. Departing for the 1971
Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting at Singapore, he relayed orders to
loyal Langi officers that Amin and his supporters in the army were to be
arrested. Various versions emerged of the way this news was leaked to Amin; in
any case, Amin decided to strike first. In the early morning hours of January
25, 1971, mechanized units loyal to him attacked strategic targets in Kampala
and the airport at Entebbe, where the first shell fired by a pro-Amin tank
commander killed two Roman Catholic priests in the airport waiting room. Amin's
troops easily overcame the disorganized opposition to the coup, and Amin almost
immediately initiated mass executions of Acholi and Langi troops, whom he
believed to be pro-Obote.
The Amin coup was warmly welcomed by most of the people of the Buganda kingdom,
which Obote had attempted to dismantle. They seemed willing to forget that their
new president, Idi Amin, had been the tool of that military suppression. Amin
made the usual statements about his government's intent to play a mere
“caretaker role” until the country could recover sufficiently for civilian rule.
Amin repudiated Obote's non-aligned foreign policy, and his government was
quickly recognized by Israel, Britain, and the United States. By contrast,
presidents Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, Jomo Kenyatta
of Kenya, and the Organization of African Unity (OAU) initially refused to
accept the legitimacy of the new military government. Nyerere, in particular,
opposed Amin's regime, and he offered hospitality to the exiled Obote,
facilitating his attempts to raise a force and return to power.
Once in power
Amin's military experience, which was virtually his only experience,
determined the character of his rule. He renamed Government House “the Command
Post”, instituted an advisory defence council composed of military commanders,
placed military tribunals above the system of civil law, appointed soldiers to
top government posts and parastatal agencies, and even informed the newly
inducted civilian cabinet ministers that they would be subject to military
discipline. Uganda was, in effect, governed from a collection of military
barracks scattered across the country, where battalion commanders, acting like
local warlords, represented the coercive arm of the government. The General
Service Unit (GSU), an intelligence agency created by the previous government,
was disbanded and replaced by the State Research Bureau (SRB). SRB headquarters
at Nakasero became the scene of torture and grisly executions over the next
several years.
Despite its outward display of a military chain of command, Amin's government
was arguably more riddled with rivalries, regional divisions, and ethnic
politics than the Uganda People's Congress (UPC) coalition that it had replaced.
The army itself was an arena of lethal competition, in which losers were usually
eliminated. Within the officer corps, those trained in Britain opposed those
trained in Israel, and both stood against the untrained, who soon eliminated
many of the army's most experienced officers. In 1966, well before the Amin era,
northerners in the army had assaulted and harassed soldiers from the south. In
1971 and 1972, the Lugbara and Kakwa (Amin's ethnic group) from the West Nile
were slaughtering northern Acholi and Langi, who were identified with Obote.
Then the Kakwa fought the Lugbara. Amin came to rely on Nubians and on former
Anyanya rebels from southern Sudan.
The army, which had been progressively expanded under Obote, was further doubled
and redoubled under Amin. Recruitment was largely, but not entirely, in the
north. There were periodic purges, when various battalion commanders were viewed
as potential problems or became real threats. Each purge provided new
opportunities for promotions from the ranks. The commander of the air force,
Smuts Guweddeko, had previously worked as a telephone operator; the unofficial
executioner for the regime, Major Malyamungu had formerly been a nightwatch
officer. By the mid-1970s, only the most trustworthy military units were allowed
ammunition, although this prohibition did not prevent a series of mutinies and
murders. An attempt by an American journalist, Nicholas Stroh, and his
colleague, Robert Siedle, to investigate one of these barracks outbreaks in 1972
at the Simba battalion in Mbarara led to their disappearances and later, deaths.
Amin never forgot the source of his power. He spent much of his time rewarding,
promoting, and manipulating the army. Financing his ever-increasing military
expenditures was a continuing concern. Early in 1972, he reversed foreign policy
— never a major issue for Amin — to secure financial and military aid from
Muammar Qadhafi of Libya. Amin expelled the remaining Israeli advisers, to whom
he was much indebted, and became vociferously anti-Israel. To induce foreign aid
from Saudi Arabia, he rediscovered his previously neglected Islamic heritage. He
also commissioned the construction of a great mosque on Kampala Hill in the
capital city, but it was never completed because much of the money intended for
it was embezzled.
In September 1972, Amin expelled almost all of Uganda's 80,000 Asians and seized
their property. Although Amin proclaimed that the “common man” was the
beneficiary of this drastic act — which proved immensely popular — it was
actually the army that emerged with the houses, cars, and businesses of the
departing Asian minority. This expropriation of property proved disastrous for
the already declining economy. Businesses were run into the ground, cement
factories at Tororo and Fort Portal collapsed from lack of maintenance, and
sugar production ground to a halt, as unmaintained machinery jammed permanently.
Uganda's export crops were sold by government parastatals, but most of the
foreign currency they earned went for purchasing imports for the army. The most
famous example was the so-called “whisky run” to Stansted Airport in Britain,
where planeloads of Scotch whisky, transistor radios, and luxury items were
purchased for Amin to distribute among his officers and troops. An African
proverb, it was said, summed up Amin's treatment of his army: “A dog with a bone
in its mouth can't bite.”
The rural African producers, particularly of coffee, turned to smuggling,
especially to Kenya. The smuggling problem became an obsession with Amin; toward
the end of his rule, he appointed his mercenary adviser, the former British
citizen Bob Astles, to take all necessary steps to eliminate the problem. These
steps included orders to shoot smugglers on sight.
Another near-obsession for Amin was the threat of a counterattack by former
president Obote. Shortly after the expulsion of Asians in 1972, Obote did launch
such an attempt across the Tanzanian border into south-western Uganda. His small
army contingent in twenty-seven trucks set out to capture the southern Ugandan
military post at Masaka but instead settled down to await a general uprising
against Amin, which did not occur. A planned seizure of the airport at Entebbe
by soldiers in an allegedly hijacked East African Airways passenger aircraft was
aborted when Obote's pilot blew out the aircraft's tires and it remained in
Tanzania. Amin was able to mobilize his more reliable Malire Mechanical Regiment
and expel the invaders.
Although jubilant at his success, Amin realized that Obote, with Nyerere's aid,
might try again. He had the SRB and the newly formed Public Safety Unit (PSU)
redouble their efforts to uncover subversives and other imagined enemies of the
state. General fear and insecurity became a way of life for the populace, as
thousands of people disappeared. In an ominous twist, people sometimes learned
by listening to the radio that they were “about to disappear.” State terrorism
was evidenced in a series of spectacular incidents; for example, High Court
Judge Benedicto Kiwanuka, former head of government and leader of the banned DP,
was seized directly from his courtroom. Like many other victims, he was forced
to remove his shoes and then bundled into the trunk of a car, never to be seen
alive again. Whether calculated or not, the symbolism of a pair of shoes by the
roadside to mark the passing of a human life was a bizarre yet piercing form of
state terrorism.
Amin did attempt to establish ties with an international terrorist group in June
1976, when he offered the Palestinian hijackers of an Air France flight from Tel
Aviv a protected base at the old airport at Entebbe, from which to press their
demands in exchange for the release of Israeli hostages. The dramatic rescue of
the hostages by Israeli commandos was a severe blow to Amin, unassuaged by his
subsequent murder of a hospitalized hostage who remained behind, Dora Bloch, or
by his mass execution of Entebbe airport personnel.
Amin's government, conducted by often erratic personal proclamation, continued
on. Because he was illiterate — a disability shared with most of his higher
ranking officers — Amin relayed orders and policy decisions orally by telephone,
over the radio, and in long rambling speeches to which civil servants learned to
pay close attention. The bureaucracy became paralyzed as government
administrators feared to make what might prove to be a wrong decision. The
minister of defense demanded and was given the Ministry of Education office
building, but then the decision was reversed. Important education files were
lost during their transfer back and forth by wheelbarrow. In many respects,
Amin's government in the 1970s resembled the governments of nineteenth-century
African monarchs, with the same problems of enforcing orders at a distance,
controlling rival factions at court, and rewarding loyal followers with plunder.
However, Amin's regime was possibly less efficient than those of the
pre-colonial
monarchs.
Religious conflict was another characteristic of the Amin regime that had its
origins in the nineteenth century. After rediscovering his Islamic allegiance in
the effort to gain foreign aid from Libya and Saudi Arabia, Amin began to pay
more attention to the formerly deprived Muslims in Uganda, a move which turned
out to be a mixed blessing for them. Muslims began to do well in what economic
opportunities yet remained, the more so if they had relatives in the army.
Construction work began on Kibule Hill, the site of Kampala's most prominent
mosque. Many Ugandan Muslims with a sense of history believed that the Muslim
defeat by Christians in 1889 was finally being redressed. Christians, in turn,
perceived that they were under siege as a religious group; it was clear that
Amin viewed the churches as potential centers of opposition. A number of priests
and ministers disappeared in the course of the 1970s, but the matter reached a
climax with the formal protest against army terrorism in 1977 by Church of
Uganda ministers, led by Archbishop Janani Luwum. Although Luwum's body was
subsequently recovered from a clumsily contrived “auto accident”, subsequent
investigations revealed that Luwum had been shot to death by Amin himself. This
latest in a long line of atrocities was greeted with international condemnation,
but apart from the continued trade boycott initiated by the United States in
July 1978, verbal condemnation was not accompanied by action.
By 1978 Amin's circle of close associates had shrunk significantly — the result
of defections and executions. It was increasingly risky to be too close to Amin,
as his vice president and formerly trusted associate, General Mustafa Adrisi,
discovered. When Adrisi was injured in a suspicious auto accident, troops loyal
to him became restive. The once reliable Malire Mechanized Regiment mutinied, as
did other units. In October 1978, Amin sent troops still loyal to him against
the mutineers, some of whom fled across the Tanzanian border. Amin then claimed
that Tanzanian President Nyerere, his perennial enemy, had been at the root of
his troubles. Amin accused Nyerere of waging war against Uganda, and, hoping to
divert attention from his internal troubles and rally Uganda against the foreign
adversary, Amin invaded Tanzanian territory and formally annexed a section
across the Kagera River boundary on November 1, 1978.
Declaring a formal state of war against Uganda, Nyerere mobilized his citizen
army reserves and counterattacked, joined by Ugandan exiles united as the Uganda
National Liberation Army (UNLA). The Ugandan Army retreated steadily, expending
much of its energy by looting along the way. Libya's Qadhafi sent 3,000 troops
to aid Amin, but the Libyans soon found themselves on the front line, while
behind them Ugandan Army units were using supply trucks to carry their newly
plundered wealth in the opposite direction. Tanzania and the UNLA took Kampala
in April 1979, and Amin fled by air, first to Libya and later to a permanent
exile at Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The war that had cost Tanzania an estimated US$1
million per day was over.
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