Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (105 page)

It is important to grasp that even at this stage Idi Amin was known to be an exceptionally cunning and wicked man. The giant son of a Lugbara witchwoman, he had become a Muslim at sixteen and drew his power from the northern Kakwas and Nubis. He enlisted in the King’s African Rifles as a boy and his promotion to officer, though he was virtually uneducated, reflected the desperate need to avoid a Congo-type mutiny as independence neared. He quickly acquired an evil reputation in Kenya, fighting against cattle-rustlers. It was discovered he had murdered Pokot tribesmen and left them to be eaten by hyenas, got information from Karamajog tribesmen by threatening to cut off their penises with a
panga
, and had actually sliced off the genitals of eight of them to obtain confessions. He was also known to have murdered twelve Turkana villagers. The British authorities were themselves reluctant to prosecute one of the few black officers on the eve of independence, and referred the case to Obote, already Prime Minister-designate. Obote settled for a ‘severe reprimand’, a curious punishment for mass-murder.
⁸⁰
Indeed, he promoted Amin colonel, used him to put down the Baganda and permitted him to build up a military tribal base in the north, to
engage in large-scale smuggling of gold and ivory, to recruit Muslims without reference to the government, to murder the only other senior black officer, Brigadier Okoya (and his wife) in January 1970, and thereafter to treat the army as his own. When Obote was told by the auditor-general that £2.5 million was missing from army funds, the Prime Minister left for a conference in Singapore, telling Amin he wanted a ‘full explanation’ by his return. That was to invite a
coup
, which Amin had already been pressed to undertake by Colonel Gadafy and the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who wished to oust Obote’s Israeli advisers.

Amin’s was a racist regime, operated in the Muslim—Arab interest from the start, since he began massacres of the Langi and Acholi tribes within weeks of taking over. In July 1971 he asked the Israelis to help him invade Tanzania by seizing the port of Tanga; they responded by pulling out. The British repented their support at the same time, and thereafter Amin was Gadafy’s client. Muslims form only 5 per cent of the population and only Libyan support made the long tyranny possible, though Palestinian terrorists provided Amin with his personal bodyguard and the most adapt of his executioner-torturers. Gadafy persuaded Amin to throw out the Asians, and it was at that point, in August 1972, that the real looting of the country began. But it ought to be on record that Britain was shipping armoured cars to Amin as late as December 1972.
⁸¹
Indeed, freighting of scarce luxuries to Uganda from Stansted airport, an important traffic which enabled Amin to keep up the morale of his soldiers, continued with British government approval almost to the end of the terror.

Surviving cabinet minutes give a unique glimpse of the emergence of a primitive tribal tyranny in the outward forms of British bureaucratic constitutionalism. Thus cabinet minute 131, dated 14 March 1972, read: ‘Should any minister feel that his life was in danger from unruly crowd or dissatisfied persons, he was at liberty to shoot to kill.’
⁸²
In fact it was not dissatisfied persons but the President whom ministers feared. His Minister of Education, Edward Rugumayo, who escaped in 1973, sent a memorandum to all African heads of state which claimed Amin had ‘no principles, moral standards or scruples’ and would ‘kill or cause to be killed anyone without hesitation’.
⁸³
His Attorney-General, Godfrey Lule, wrote: ‘He kills rationally and coolly.’ Henry Kyemba, Minister of Health, said that it was the murder of Michael Kagwar, President of the Industrial Court, in September 1971, which ‘revealed to the country as a whole that the massacres were not to be limited to the army or the Acholi and Langi’.
⁸⁴
The dead soon included any public figure who in any way criticized or obstructed Amin: the governor of the
Bank of Uganda, the vice-chancellor of Makerere University, the Foreign Minister, the Chief Justice, dragged out of his court in broad daylight, Archbishop Janan Luwum – the last beaten to death, along with two cabinet ministers, by Amin himself. Amin often participated in atrocities, sometimes of a private nature. Kyemba’s wife Teresa, matron-in-charge of Mulago hospital, was present when the fragmented body of Amin’s wife Kay was brought in: Amin appears not only to have murdered but dismembered her, for he kept collections of plates from anatomical manuals. He is also said to have killed his son and eaten his heart, as advised by a witchdoctor he flew in from Stanleyville.
⁸⁵
There can be little doubt he was a ritual cannibal, keeping selected organs in his refrigerator.

The image of refrigerated cannibalism encapsulated the regime, which was a grotesque caricature of a Soviet-type terror. The traditional police simply faded away, as their senior officers were murdered for investigating Amin’s crimes. Like Stalin, Amin had competing security services. They included his personal creation, the Public Safety Unit, the military police and his equivalent of the
KGB
,
an organization called the State Research Centre which had evolved out of the old Cabinet Research Section and still retained its bound volumes of the
Economist.
The
SRC
was run on the advice of Palestinians and Libyans who had themselves, in some cases, had Russian training. It usually killed with sledgehammers but it was by no means primitive in all respects. It was linked by tunnel to Amin’s villa so that intended victims who came to see him (he liked to ask them to cocktails) could be taken away without being seen again.
SRC
beatings were regular affairs, carried out at specific times every day. In contrast to Amin’s impulsive nature, there was an element of totalitarian routine and bureaucratic order about the terror. As in the Soviet bloc, at least two
SRC
agents were attached to Ugandan overseas missions. Like the
KGB
, the
SRC
financed itself by commercial activities (including drug rackets) and often killed for hard currency.
⁸⁶
Amin was not just a case of a reversion to African primitivism. In some respects his regime was a characteristic reflection of the 1970s. His terror was a Muslim—Arab phenomenon; his regime was in many ways a foreign one, run by Nubians, Palestinians and Libyans.

It could be argued that the
UN
power-politics of the 1970s, the ugly consequences of the relativistic morality impressed on the organization by Hammarskjöld and his school, were responsible for prolonging the Amin regime by six terrible years. According to one authority, the failure to take international action in 1972, when the nature of the regime was already glaringly apparent, cost the lives of 200,000 Ugandans. Britain bore a heavy responsibility. The
SRC
records revealed how important the ‘Stansted whisky run’ was to the regime. British appeasement reached its nadir in June 1975 when Amin threatened to execute a British lecturer, Denis Hills, for calling him ‘a village tyrant’. James Callaghan, a weak Prime Minister even by the standards of the 1970s, sent out General Sir Chandos Blair with a letter from the Queen begging for clemency, and later he flew to Kampala himself. But he allowed the Stansted run to continue until 4 March 1979, the very eve of Amin’s overthrow. The only government to emerge with credit was Israel’s, which acted vigorously to save lives when Amin and the Palestinians hijacked an airliner at Entebbe in June 1976.

Most African states actually supported Amin, in accordance with the old Latin-American principle of
‘Caudillos
stick together’. Despite the revelations of his genocidal atrocities by his ex-ministers, the
OAU
elected him its president and all except three of its members attended the
OAU
summit he held in Kampala. Nyerere objected, not so much on moral grounds as because he was an Obote ally and rightly feared an Amin invasion. ‘By meeting in Kampala,’ he protested, ‘the heads of state of the
OAU
are giving respectability to one of the most murderous administrations in Africa.’ Furious, the
OAU
even considered a motion condemning Tanzania. The heads of state showered Amin with congratulations during the summit when, having consumed parts of his earlier wife, he married a new one, a go-go dancer from his Suicide Mechanized Unit. They applauded when Amin was carried on a litter by four white businessmen, a Swede holding a parasol over his head, and when the Ugandan Air Force made a demonstration bombing on Lake Victoria against a target labelled ‘Cape Town’ (the bombs all missed and the Air Force commander was murdered as soon as the delegates had left),
OAU
heads of state again gave Amin a warm reception in 1977, and there was no criticism of Amin whatever by the
OAU
until 1978; even then it was muted.
⁸⁷

Most members of the
UN
, where the Afro-Asian-Arab and Soviet blocs formed a majority, behaved equally cynically. As chairman of the
OAU
, he addressed the General Assembly on 1 October 1975 in a rabid speech which denounced the ‘Zionist-US conspiracy’ and called not only for the expulsion of Israel but for its ‘extinction’ (i.e. genocide). The Assembly gave him a standing ovation when he arrived, applauded him throughout, and again rose to its feet when he left. The following day the
UN
Secretary-General and the President of the General Assembly gave a public dinner in Amin’s honour.
⁸⁸
Attempts to raise Uganda’s violation of human rights at the
UN
in 1976 and 1977 were blocked by African votes, which rendered Amin the same service at the Commonwealth Conference in 1977. Even
when he invaded Tanzania on 30 October 1978, an act which led to his downfall five months later, the
OAU
refused to condemn him and told Nyerere to accept mediation. For once the Tanzanian socialist dictator dropped his verbal guard:

Since Amin usurped power he has murdered more people than Smith in Rhodesia, more than Vorster in South Africa. But there is this tendency in Africa that it does not matter if an African kills other Africans …. Being black is now becoming a certificate to kill fellow Africans.
⁸⁹

That, indeed, was the consequence of the morally relativistic principle introduced by Hammarskjöld that killing among Africans was not the
UN
‘s business; and Amin could be forgiven for thinking the
UN
had given him a licence for mass-murder, indeed genocide. The Amin regime was made possible by the philosophy of the Bandung generation as well as by the re-emergent barbarism of Africa. But within a year of his fall history was being rewritten. It was claimed the applause which greeted him at the
UN
was ‘ironic’. The terror was being linked to ‘imperialism’.
⁹⁰
Nor did Uganda’s sorrows end when Tanzania’s ‘army of liberation’ arrived, with Obote in its baggage. The first thing the Tanzanians did when they got to Kampala was to loot it. Though
Amin
himself was given sanctuary in the Muslim world (Libya, then Saudi Arabia), his tribal forces continued to occupy and terrorize part of the country. With Nyerere’s armed backing Obote ‘won’ the 1980s elections. Obote’s
UPC
parry and the Nyerere-controlled ‘military commission’ gerrymandered consrituency boundaries; illegally declared 17 seats uncontested
UPC
victories; killed
one
opposition (Democratic Party) candidate and beat up others; illegally removed fourteen returning officers who were not
UPC
stooges; sacked the Chief Justice and other officials to intimidate the judiciary; and finally, after it became clear on election night that the
DP
was nevertheless winning, announced on the official radio that all results would be ‘vetted’ by the military – whereupon the secretary to the election commission fled for his life. The army subsequently destroyed evidence of
DP
victories and Obote was declared the winner.
⁹¹
The result was regional and tribal civil war; and mass-terrorism by three undisciplined and mostly unpaid ‘armies’ prolonged indefinitely the agony of Churchill’s ‘fairy-tale land’.
⁹²

The case of Uganda illustrated the tendency of post-colonial Africa, from the mid-1960s onwards, to engage in internal and external wars, and for both the
OAU
and the
UN
, far from arbitrating such disputes, to exacerbate the drift to violence. This was not fortuitous. The militarization of the
OAU
began at Addis Ababa in 1963, when passive resistance was renounced, force was adopted as
the means to end the remaining colonial regimes and a ‘liberation committee’ was formed with Tanzania in the chair. The next year, at Cairo, it was the ex-pacifist Nyerere who called for the expulsion of Portugal by force, and in 1965 it was his second-in-command, Rashidi Kawawa, who told the
UN
Committee on Colonialism in Dar es Salaam that its function was identical with that of the
OAU
committee, ‘two liberation committees of historical importance in the struggle against colonialism’. M.Coulibaly of Mali, the
UN
chairman, at first protested: the
UN
could not be identified with a regional military body, he said. Then he capitulated, and his committee ruled that it was legitimate for any state to use force to expel the Portuguese. This was the first time the
UN
had committed itself to the military as opposed to the peaceful solution of political problems. Four months later, in November 1965, Nyerere persuaded the
OAU
to extend the principle to Rhodesia.
⁹³