East African | Daily Nation | About Us | Feedback | Site Map | License | Monitor
Mail
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Want to chat instantly with your Idi Amin: His legacy, deeds and misdeeds
By Timothy Kalyegira
July 27 - August 4 , 2003
It remains a mystery to many why, 24 years since being deposed from power
on April 11, 1979, the former Ugandan strongman and head of state Idi Amin, should
remain such a source of fascination and in the minds of many around the world.
Amin signs the proclamation abolishing parliament shortly after his
coup in 1971 as his aides look on (File photo).
Amin is usually the first name that comes to mind when Uganda is
mentioned, in spite the globetrotting and undeniably brainy President Yoweri Museveni
(or the bed-trotting Gaetano Kaggwa of Big Brother Africa and the Ugandan-born singer
Lou Bega).
Amin's place and role in Uganda's history will remain notable for many
reasons and a combination of reasons, for many years to come.
His nearly eight and a half-year rule was one of the most memorable,
infamous, absurd, nightmarish, dramatic and crucial in modern world history.
Any number of the dramas surrounding the Amin years could, by and of
themselves, be historical events worth remembering and studying for years to come.
Coming as they did - all combined in the rule and personality of one man,
they made for a sense of melodrama and a chronicle in evil that to this day exercises
the minds of world historians and analysis of human behaviour.
For the army commander Major-General Idi Amin to seize power in a
'bloodless' military coup on January 25, 1971 at the age of 46, was not in itself a
particularly unusual event given the wave of military coups that were at the time
starting to become commonplace in Africa.
However the first series of events that made serious analysts realise that
these were special times, came in August 1971 when Amin embarked on a purge of army
officers from the northern Nilo-Hamitic Acholi and Langi tribes. He feared they might
retain a lingering loyalty to the deposed president Milton Obote. (Obote is a Langi
and much of the rank-and-file and officers corps of the 1960s army was drawn from the
Acholi and Langi tribes, related to the Dinka of southern Sudan.)
A group of these officers was taken to the Makindye military police
barracks in the capital Kampala, locked in a room and then grenades were lobbed into
the room, killing all of them.
It was the callous and brutal way that this purge was undertaken; this
enjoyment of the sight of human helplessness and terror on the part of Amin's henchmen
that sent shivers of fear through the minds of Ugandans who got to know what had
happened.
Then more than a year later, in August 1972, the president, on a visit to
the eastern town of Tororo, claimed that in a dream by night, God had ordered him to
expel from Uganda the 90,000 Ugandan Asians who held British passports.
Shock waves were felt as far off as India, the world's second most
populous nation, as well as all across East Africa where Asians dominated merchant
trade.
Although this proposal to force the Asians to choose between full Ugandan
or full British citizenship was first mooted in 1968 by the Obote government, it took
an Idi Amin to execute it. He did infuse it with all the drama, heedlessness, and
bizarre imagery that made many in the western world wonder - could Africans indeed, be
literal savages?
How, in this modern world of the nation-state, international accords,
scientific method, and world opinion, could the head of state of a country make a
decree based on - of all things - a dream?
How could the economic stability of one of Africa's hitherto most
promising nations be so suddenly disrupted by the whims of one man?
But these events were but mere opening performances in a drama that would
shock, confuse, enthral, and scandalise the world for the rest of the 1970s.
A lot of brutal actions followed as the regime nipped out any perceived
opposition, real or imagined.
Amin was reported, by his former Principal Private Secretary and Minister
of Health, Henry Kyemba in his 1977 book A State of Blood to have eaten the flesh of
some of his most prominent victims.
Nothing in modern world history had ever approached this carnage in
Uganda.
Of course it did not help the reputation of the Black people that this
particular series of gruesome events was taking place deep in the heart of Black
Africa.
Stereotypes of many centuries were reinforced the leader in Uganda.
In its March 7, 1977 special cover story on Amin, Newsweek reported that
the Nubians - the Nilotic southern Sudanese and Ugandan ethnic group that had come
more and more to form Amin's trusted inner circle in the army and intelligence
services - had the world's highest homicidal rate.
They were, to put it bluntly, the world's deadliest killers.
From inside Uganda, the horrified population would have found it hard to
dismiss these figures on the Nubians.
Nothing quite like this had ever been witnessed in this country.
Besides the atrocities of the Amin regime, there were other regular
incidents that led many to question Amin's very sanity and state of mind.
A 1973 diplomatic cable to the US President Richard Nixon offered Uganda's
sympathy since, Amin said, Nixon was embroiled in the crisis of the Watergate break-in
affair.
Amin challenged his fierce opponent, Tanzania's president Julius Nyerere,
to a boxing match in order to help settle the dispute between Uganda and Tanzania
where former president Obote was living in exile.
If Rwanda continued to interfere with Uganda's internal affairs, Amin
declared in 1973 (using his famous pseudo name "a military spokesman"), Uganda would,
to use another of his trademark phrases, "teach Rwanda a lesson it would never
forget."
In an address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York City in
1974, Amin condemned Israel and praised the German dictator Adolf Hitler over his
"final solution" to the Jewish problem.
Millions of television viewers around the world gasped in disbelief at
this remark.
At another UN forum, in the 70s, he opted to speak in Luganda, while then
Ambassador Kinene translated. "Nze sijja kwogera lulimi lwa banyunyunsi.. ", [I will
not address this forum using the mother tongue of imperialists and suckers - English
], Amini commenced his address, as those who understood Luganda gasped in surprise.
In sacking his attractive foreign minister, Princess Elizabeth of Toro,
Amin "the military spokesman" snidely remarked on Radio Uganda and in a later photo
and article in the state-owned Voice of Uganda newspaper that Princess Elizabeth had
brought the dismissal upon herself.
Even after being warned that he would not be welcome in London in 1977 to
join other heads of state of the British Commonwealth and the Commonwealth summit and
the silver jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II, Amin was unyielding.
He kept on warning that he would land in the UK by force. He even went
ahead to book a hotel in UK where he would stay. On the day of departure, government
officials lined the runway to see him off at Entebbe. His plane took off, but instead
flew to Arua.
Later he addressed Makerere University students and joked about how the
British had panicked and spent millions of pounds because they knew he was a good
paratrooper and would land into the UK by force!
He apparently was indifferent to diplomatic gaffes and embarrassment, to
protocol and propriety.
He was unable to feel any sense of how ridiculous a buffoon he came across
to millions of international television viewers and newspaper readers.
The proud and well-educated Ugandan exile community in Kenya, Europe and
America, almost more traumatized by Amin's silly antics than even his brutality,
resorted to shame-faced denial: many started to hide their nationality from any who
asked.
Among the other events of the Amin years that would - separately from his
murderous reputation would have made unforgettable world headlines - was: the
June-July 1976 hostage crisis at Entebbe International Airport involving 103
passengers on a hijacked Air France Boeing 707 jetliner.
Even by the standards of the dramatic history of the State of Israel and
the many wars and terrorist incidents it faced since its formation in May 1948, the
Entebbe hijack crisis still stands out as one of the highpoints of contemporary Jewish
folklore.
While there were many regular and routine airline hijacks during the 1970s
involving Palestinian guerrillas and leftist European radicals, only history could
have conspired to make the Entebbe, the setting of by far the most dramatic and in
terms of imagery, darkly rich and enthralling.
Entebbe involved everything that world affairs of the 1970s entailed -
Jews, Israelis, Palestinians, Arabs, international aviation, terrorism, commandos,
Israel's famed Mossad foreign counter-intelligence agency, the dark interior of
Africa.
And yes, Idi Amin.
Without him, political drama in the 1970s would have been without a lead
actor.
He claimed repeatedly that God alone knew the exact date of his death and
as such, he was never afraid.
Then, incredibly, Amin went on to live out one of the most heedless
presidencies ever witnessed. He treated his personal security as a foregone matter,
with little to fear.
When Kenya cut off Uganda's fuel supplies in 1976 after Amin abruptly laid
claim to a part of eastern Kenya, the Ugandan president took to a bicycle and rode
unprotected by bodyguards from State House on top of Nsamizi Hill in Entebbe to the
airport, waving to astonished bystanders.
Kenya held up Uganda's fuel. But it allowed fuel trucks bound for Rwanda
and Burundi to exit through her border. Amin confiscated much of the said fuel and
doled it out to his soldiers.
A bewildered Maj Gen Juvenal Habyarimana, then president of Rwanda flew
into
Uganda for talks about the fuel in transit. It's at this point that Amin
exhibited his weird sense of humour by riding on a bicycle - to portray to his visitor
that news about the said confiscation was false. His riding on a bicycle implied that
Uganda was devoid of any fuel stocks; that not even Amin had access to fuel for his
limousines.
During his rule, he routinely drove himself in an open jeep to state
occasions and once at a pass-out ceremony for police cadets in Nsambya in Kampala in
1976, he narrowly escaped assassination when a grenade was hurled at his jeep.
Altogether, there were no less than 14 attempts on his life, between 1971
and 1977. These included one in June 1977 when he sat in a limousine, at the back of
his own presidential convoy and watched ethnic Bantu army and airforce rebel officers
attack one car, in which they mistakenly thought he was.
At close-up range, Amin was an enigma. His stare sent ripples of fear
through those he met.
A soft-spoken, handsome, bulky, six-foot, four-inch giant who was once
Uganda's heavyweight boxing champion, Amin usually smiled jovially, played the
accordion, swam regularly and played basketball.
But there were those moments when that smile, underneath his general's
ceremonial hat, turned into a sullen, attentive gaze, a gaze that suggested
ruthlessness of a final and boundless sort.
That steady, unforgettable gaze - those wide, calm eyes, upturned nose,
the frown, the long, deliberate look that many saw and trembled in their tracks.
It was a look that no one could quite describe, but when those eyes were
set on a person, no one was in doubt that fate had come to the panic-stricken person.
Those are some of the uncountable reasons that Idi Amin will remain for
decades to come the most recognisable name in East African history. Never before and
never since has there been an Amin in any country on any continent.
Nevertheless (depending on one's point of view), there had to have been
some positive outcomes to the presidency of a man as bizarre as this, however
unorthodox and unpredictable his leadership style.
To examine these, one has to return in mind to the world stage of the
1970s, when apartheid reigned unabated in South Africa and to a lesser extent in White
Rhodesia; and in a still lesser form, the western democracies of the United States,
Britain, Australia, France, West Germany, Canada, Switzerland, among others.
It was a world in which a Black person was still frowned patronizingly
upon, Africa was the world's laughing stock, outspoken Black Americans like the World
Heavy-weight boxing champion Muhammad Ali treated with suspicion.
Onto this stage strode Amin.
Embarrassingly blank and comical in speech, knowing no world hierarchy of
power, he spoke about or to an American president or British Prime Minister in the way
he would have a Ugandan primary school child.
The down trodden Black people of Africa and the Caribbean cheered this
unheard-of audacity by a Black man to the powerful White leaders.
The angry Arab population, incensed at the West's undisguised pro-Israel
policies and indifference to the Palestinian cause, cheered Amin even more fervently.
(Amin, born to a Christian family, later converted to Islam.)
And even though the 1972 expulsion of the Ugandan Asians started Uganda's
sudden economic ruin, nothing was - and still remains - among Amin's many deeds as
popular among A SECTION OF the Ugandan population.
This action and the summary and humiliating way in which it was done,
giving generations of Asians 90 days in which to pack up and leave, pleased sections
of our society.
For better or worse (and here the picture is mixed and debatable) Uganda's
economy subsequently entered the hands of the Black indigenous business community in a
way that is still at least two decades from being the Kenya and Tanzania experience.
To some Ugandans in the 1990s and 2000s, although president Yoweri
Museveni was of course more rational and educated than his predecessor Amin, something
in his overly cautious approach and almost submissive method of dealing with the
western powers made and makes many people nostalgic for the to-hell-with-them Amin way.
Amin was always, visibly, loudly, adamantly sympathetic to the cause of
the black African people and his own indigenous Ugandans in a way that makes Museveni
seem like a White stooge and bootlicker of the western world's powerful institutions.
In the area of sports, not only did Uganda's first and so far only Olympic
gold medal (the 1972 Munich Summer Olympic Games 400m hurdles world record of the
policeman John Akii-Bua) come under the Amin era; Uganda seemed to reach its sporting
zenith during these dark and trying times.
Ugandan boxers and track athletes became a regular sight on medal-awarding
podiums around the world. Be that as it may, the whole story of Amin will never be
completed and for many years to come, his figure will remain an enigma for Ugandans
and the rest of the world.
© 2003 The Monitor Publications
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
online friends? Get the FREE Yahoo! Messenger
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~-->
Free shipping on all inkjet cartridge & refill kit orders to US & Canada. Low prices
up to 80% off. We have your brand: HP, Epson, Lexmark & more.
http://www.c1tracking.com/l.asp?cid=5510
http://us.click.yahoo.com/GHXcIA/n.WGAA/ySSFAA/TTwplB/TM
---------------------------------------------------------------------~->
**********Keep Hope Alive!!!*************
Site of the Week:- http://www.iseehope.org
Nigeria arise to rebuild Hope
++++++++++++++
Nigerians for Nigeria, rebuilding a Country where No man is oppressed.
- ---
Unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
**********Keep Hope Alive!!!*************
Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
