November 12, 1972, Section SM, Page 35Buy Reprints
The dreams of Gen. Idi Amin, heavyweight boxer, flyweight philosopher and the seemingly punchdrunk President of the Second Republic of Uganda, have transformed life in his lush, landlocked East African state into a nightmare of terror for inhabitants of all hues. In one dream last August, according to the burly ex‐sergeant, God appeared in person and instructed him to exorcise Uganda of its 50,000 Asian residents, most of them third‐generation Ugandans who collectively form the country's economic middle class. The Asians, Amin charged, had been sabotaging Uganda's economy, deliberately retarding economic progress, fostering widespread corruption and treacherously refraining from integrating in the Ugandan way of life. He gave them 90 days to quit the country, “or they will find themselves sitting on the fire.”
This decision, its cause and effect, has created dark whirlpool of uncertainty in the heart of Africa. It has brought Uganda to the brink Congo‐style turmoil, outraged world opinion, enraged and embarrassed moderate African leaders and exposed the continent's susceptibility to raw and ruthless military despots.
Idi Amin Dada (the latter is his family name and has no relevance to his media tag of “big daddy”) has broken every rule of statesmanship, even the emergent ‐Africa brand, and boggled diplomatic minds everywhere with his verbal buckshot, exhortations, pronouncements and threats. He has established a state sinister that would startle fiction writers. Dissidents, real or potential, are dragged screaming from bar or cafe by gun‐toting young men in dark glasses; bodies of well‐known former citizens are washed up on the shores of otherwise picturesque lakes; swaggering glazedeyed soldiery waylay and molest tourists and travelers in the bush. Entire army units have been massacred in their barracks; policemen suspected of less than wholehearted loyalty have had their heads smashed with sledgehammers; more fortunate citizens of other countries have been deported almost daily; and the jails are witnesses to unmitigated brutality.
In the midst of all this, Idi Amin has called on his army to be prepared to liberate South Africa, offered to help Britain solve the Ulster crisis, disclosed that the United States has been seeking his help to end the Vietnam war and appointed himself a one ‐man peace emissary to the Middle East. He has also found time to entertain his first state visitor, Gen. Jean Bedel Bokassa, Life President of the Central African Republic, whose last public appearance was at the head of an army unit which toured the country's jails beating, in some cases to death, prisoners accused or convicted of petty theft.
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A bemused world has pondered aloud on Amin's sanity. Britain's Opposition leader, Harold Wilson, told a television audience recently that he considered Amin “mentally unbalanced.” President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia described him as “a madman... a buffoon.” London's tabloid Sunday Mirror screeched in heavy front‐page type: “He's nuts!”
But having watched the man and his ways at close quarters during the last three months, I doubt if any doctor would find Amin certifiable. Capricious, impulsive, violent and aggressive he certainly is, but to dismiss him as just plain crazy is to underestimate his shrewdness, his ruthless cunning and his capacity to consolidate his power with calculated terror.
- Thanks for reading The Times.
Last month, Uganda's 10 million people were marking a decade of independence from British colonial rule. They have not been happy years, despite the economic promise of the bountiful coffee and cotton crops which flourish in the rich soils on the northern shores of the equatorial inland sea of Lake Victoria. Political trouble beset the country from the time of independence in 1962. The problems have been predominantly tribal, emanating in no small degree from the arbitrary boundaries traced by colonial administrators who paid scant attention to ethnic and tribal.
British rule in the protectorate of Uganda was conducted through the five ancient kingdoms in the south, in particular the sophisticated people of Buganda, whose comparatively civilized way of life had impressed the earliest 19th ‐century explorers. But the Bugandans’ power, prosperity and arrogance made them unpopular with the 40 other tribes in Uganda, most of them impoverished Nilotic peoples in the northern regions. This intertribal disaffection prevails today. Open animosity is never far below the surface.
Britain's hope, at the time of independence, rested in a federal relationship between the kingdoms and a central government. The first president was the Kabaka — the royal ruler—of Buganda, Sir Edward Mutesa, familiarly known as King Freddie. The Prime Minister and executive head of Government was a young trade unionist from the northern Lango tribe Milton Obote. Obote, ambitious son of a goatherd, also led the Uganda Peoples’ Congress, a left‐leaning party broadly representing all tribes outside the kingdoms.
Obote saw himself as an intellectual African messiah in the Nkrumah‐of‐Ghana mold. To that end he purchased for himself a doctorate of philosophy and, in 1966, made a successful bid for absolute power. He suspended the Independence Constitution, abolished the tribal kingdoms and declared the country a republic and himself President.
In his palace atop one of the seven hills of Kampala, the Uganda capital, King Freddie's guard attempted a futile resistance which was rapidly crushed by Obote's army. The Kabaka fled to exile in London, where he died a few years later. The attack on his palace was led by the army commander and the man most Ugandans regarded as Obote's close friend — Maj. Gen. Idi Amin.
It was, as it turned out, merely a friendship of convenience. The devious Obote, surviving no fewer than five assassination attempts, came to rely increasingly on his army for his security and power. He leaned heavily on the mercurial Amin, who had worked diligently at making himself the force's favorite.
In January, last year, with Obote overconfidently attending a Commonwealth conference in Singapore, Amin and the army seized power. More delighted with the overthrow of the corrupt and oppressive Obote than with the prospect of military rule, joyful Ugandans danced in the streets. The genial general announced an amnesty for political prisoners, disbanded Obote's notorious secret service, appeased the Bugandans by permitting King Freddie's body to be returned from London for a royal funeral, and blandly assured the people that he would be handing over the reins to civilian rule as soon as the situation permitted.
Amin insisted that he had staged the coup d'etat merely to foil an Obote plot to kill him. But there has emerged much evidence to suggest that on that bright, hot Kampala morning, the Uganda heavyweight had grabbed the title he had been coveting for many years—President of the Second Republic.
Idi Amin (pronounced EEdee ah‐MEEN) revels in peasant oratory and barrack‐room philosophy. His tribal background and military career gave him a thorough training in both. Essentially, he is a product of African village politics and colonial paradeground pugnacity. A Moslem Kakwa tribesman, Amin was born in the remote village of Arua in Uganda's West Nile district, close to the confluence of the Congo and Sudan borders. His parents scratched a subsistence living from the land and young Idi, like other sons of this impoverished soil, enjoyed only a sparse educa‐tion.
But his brawn and energy gave him the advantage he needed. The King's African Rifles, one of Britain's crack colonial regiments, deprived Arua of the village bully when the 18‐year‐old Amin, already 6 feet 3 inches tall and weighing 230 pounds, enlisted.
The beefy teen ‐ager took readily to army life. He served with the regiment in Burma and later, brawling and bawling his way to the rank of sergeant major, he fought with the British against the Mau Mau insurgents in Kenya. By all accounts, he relished the fight against fellow Africans.
He excelled, not unnaturally, at robust sports. He played a ferocious but fair game of Rugby, swain energetically every day and, in 1951, won Uganda's heavyweight boxing championship. The army taught him to read and write English, somewhat uncertainly, and he picked up the basic, colorful Swahili which was the regiment's lingua franca.
His sporting prowess, coupled with his tough but genial nature and a popularity with ordinary troops which he constantly sought and won, stamped him with some affection on the memories of the white officers. Col. Hugh Rogers, once Amin's company commander and more recently the leader of a 17‐man British military training mission to Uganda which was peremp
Britain's burden torily expelled by the President last September, said of him, He was a splendid and reliable soldier and a cheerful and lenergetic man.”
In fact, Amin's ambivalent attitude toward Britain in the present crisis stems largely from his nostalgia for the King's African Rifles. When he asked for a British military mission shortly after seizing power, he specifically asked for a pipe major to be included, recalling with affection the skirl of the regimental bagpipes. And, having accused the British officers in the team of preparing to lead an invasion force against him, he radioed a message to their departing aircraft thanking them for their work in Uganda. “My argument is not with the British officers. It is with the British politicians,” he said.
Another of his former colonial officers, who has been his presidential guest in Kampala on several occasions, summed up Amin the soldier. “He was one of nature's sergeant majors.” That, in the view of many of his former friends, is where he should have ended his career and, anywhere else but in Africa, he probably would have.
Amin's big break, and most likely the point at which his eyes were opened to the heady prospects of power, came in the immediate preindependence period. Britain's colonial administration, with some haste, was preparing to hand over political and institutional responsibility to the Africans. An army selection board, dispatched to Uganda to find officer material, interviewed two possible candidates—Idi Amin and his longstanding army rival, Shaban Opoloto, who were then both “effendis,” the highest noncommissioned rank.
Much to Amin's chagrin, they chose Opoloto. But a few weeks later, on instructions from London's War Office, they returned to find another Ugandan officer. There was little to choose from. Idi Amin became a second lieutenant and managed to hold the rank despite a threatened court martial for insubordination a few weeks before independence.
Self‐government found the two Uganda officers leapfrogging each other in a rapid promotion race. Opoloto made it to army commander, but so great was the friction between them that Obote promoted Opoloto to the post of defense minister, leaving Amin in charge of the army.
That was the end of Opoloto. Within months he was accused of plotting against the state and Idi Amin was in total control of the armed forces, by then the country's crucial power base. Sitting at the side of the crafty Milton Obote, Amin sensed the proximity of absolute power. It was no more than a couple of tank shells away.
It is only since the coup that the full measure of Amin's ruthlessness and cunning has emerged. Despite his benevolent protestations and apparent lack of political ambition at the time of the military takeover, every action he has taken has been designed to consolidate his position as an unassailable dictator. Even as he released Obote's political prisoners, his soldiers were rounding up the members of the ex‐President's secret police, and potential dissident tribal elements in the army. Some 700 detainees were herded into a remote military prison. In small groups each day, they were taken from their cells for execution.
Some of the prisoners, mostly Langi and Acholi people from Obote's tribes, managed to escape and flee to join the.former President in exile in neighboring Tanzania. They told horrifying stories of the executions by Amin's hatchet men. The most fortunate had been shot; some had been crammed into a tiny cell which had then been dynamited; others had been carved with knives or had been suffocated with their own dismembered genitals.
The rumors of this tribal purge spread, unnerving other Langi and Acholi units in the army. In June last year, fighting broke out in barracks throughout the country. At the end of it, more than 800 soldiers from the two tribes had been massacred and another 1,000 had fled to Tanzania.
Thus assured that the main threat of dissidence had been purged from his army, Amin began to build his military base with tribal elements whose loyalty was more certain. In six months, he doubled the size of the armed forces to 16,000 men, mostly from his own Kakwa people and other West Nile groups. Regardless of cost, new barracks and quarters were built, expensive military equipment purchased and perquisites lavished on officers and men. Corporals and sergeants, particularly those who shared Amin's Moslem faith, found themselves promoted overnight to brigadiers and colonels, while the few trained officers who survived the Purge were eased into political posts well away from the barracks.
This program effectively bankrupted Uganda. Without reference to his treasury Amin had spent an estimated $50million on defense and armaments and had sliced the country's already meager foreign‐exchange reserves to less than $5‐million, enough to pay for just two weeks of imports.
The Uganda economy, based almost entirely on its highquality coffee and cotton crops, had been the envy of neighboring states. Although the annual per‐capita income was about $70, just over half the average for Africa, the Ugandan crop ‐exports sustained a healthy balance of payments. But Amin's regime inherited an economy enfeebled by a slump in world cotton and coffee prices, by wild overspending on such prestige projects as lavish conference halls and by a drastic loss of overseas investment confidence as a result of Obote's nationalization program. Immediately after seizing power, Amin made some encouraging noises about thrift and denationalization but, in fact, he indulged himself and his army in reckless military spending, doubling Uganda's trade deficit to more than $30‐million in one year.
His hapless Minister of Finance, like most other postcoup Ugandan ministers a former civil servant portfolioed overnight, attempted to report the parlous economic position to the President. Amin rewarded him by slapping him hard across the face in front of other Ministers and Government officials. The Miniser broke down in tears.
The general is deeply suspicious of intellect, higher education and white collars. His ministers are merely the Administration staff, there to carry out orders unquestioningly. Incidents like the one with the Finance Minister rendered them and the civil service into quaking and sycophantic impotence.
Amin has only slightly more regard for his officer corps. In his frequent, almost compulsive, upcountry tours, he delights in gathering the troops around him and telling them, with a jerk of his thumb at their officers: “If you think they are wrong you come and tell me.... If they give you any trouble you must arrest them.” And more often than not he will relate the latest coarse barrackroom joke as the soldiers sit around drinking beer.
He is a man of immense energy and no little physical courage. Despite his accumulation of enemies, he scorns personal security, preferring to drive his conspicuous self around the streets in an open Jeep. He puts in an average 14‐hour day and travels several thousand miles each week to talk to the people. Popularity, with the ordinary people means much to Amin. He has the peasant's contempt for the pretentiousness of other social orders. On formal occasions, he insists on stumbling through prepared speeches in his faltering English, clearly not understanding many of the words he mispronounces.
But his stiffness and discomfort disappear miraculously when, as he invariably does, he throws the prepared speech aside and stands to harangue his audiences in crude, spontaneous Swahili. Recently, he addressed stu dents from Kampala's Makerere University. His prepared speech was an explanation of his policy to “liberate the economy” by expelling Asians. It was dry stuff, and Amin detected some restlessness. He broke from the text and announced he had “a rocket” for them. “I am told that venereal disease is very high with you.... You had better go to the hospital to make yourselves very clean or you will infect the whole population. I don't want you spoiled by gonorrhea.” The students were suddenly attentive.
Again, stumbling through an opening address to an agricultural conference, he suddenly switched the topic to a lecture on the evils of Kondo‐ism —a rife brand of armed robbery. Some evil people were informing the authorities that innocent people were Kondos, he said. “Sometimes a girl has rejected them so they say the girl is keeping Kondos in her house.... This is not good. I only want factual reports. If the girl refuses you, go to another girl.”
It is of such spontaneous thoughts that much Ugandan policy is created these days. On average, Idi Amin makes 20 speeches a week, many of them off‐the‐cuff. And, as in the case of the Asian expulsion decree, the decisions appear to form in his own mind as he speaks. Certainly, they are usually as big a surprise to his ministers and civil servants as they are to the world.
Many theories have been advanced on the real reason for the anti‐Asian move. Ignoring for a moment the method by which Amin declared they should leave, the expulsion of Asians is undoubtedly popular with the wananchi — the masses — not only in Uganda but throughout East Africa.
The Asian communities, descendants of Indian traders who moved into Africa last century, are insular and selfcontained. Contemptuous of the Africans in general, they dominate the trading sectors throughout East Africa. Intermarriage is rare. and African ‐Asian cooperation rarer. Since independence. the writing has been on the wall for the Asians in Africa. It could be that Amin ordered them out in an unrealistic and callous fashion merely to win some instant popularity.
Another theory, more strange but in the unlikely land of Uganda today not easily dismissed, is that Amin decided to scourge the Asians because he was rebuffed by the widow of one of the wealthiest Asian families in Uganda. This story has wide currency in Kampala but its credence is impossible to check. Amin, a nonsmoker and nondrinker, has a large sexual appetite. His former army colleagues have testified to this and it is further evidenced by his concubines. In addition to the four wives permitted him by the Koran, be has three others who comfort him in various up‐country staging posts. Apart from any concupiscence on his part, a selection of wives from different tribes helps traditionally to cement factional relationships. In these terms, he once unnerved expatriate maidens by announcing that in the interests of harmony among all the peoples living in Uganda he would like to take an Asian and a European wife. There is no record of him making any approach to a white woman, but the story runs that he did propose to the aforementioned Asian widow. He was rejected with a shuddering refusal and the widow's family immediately arranged for her to leave the country. Hell bath no fury like a military dictator
The third, and most likely, theory is that the Asians of Uganda were yet another readily available alien enemy, the specter of whose subversion Amin could conjure up to divert attention from the very real social and economic problems his country faces. The technique is not new but Amin has given it dimensions dreamed of by few other dictators. Like the barrackroom brawler he is, he finds it spectacularly easy to raise his fists, box with substance or shadow and make fearsome threatening noises. It keeps his troops on their toes, their concentration on the threat, real or imaginary, internal or external, and keeps their minds off the prospects of receiving no pay or equipment when the exchequer
Tanzania, whose peaceable philosopher ‐President, Julius Nyerere, gave succor and sanctuary to the deposed Obote, was the first and most obvious target for Amin. Although, with Kenya, the countries constitute the East African Community, one of the most hopeful economic groupings in Africa, Arnin's opportunist belligerence has brought them to the brink of war on three occasions.
When Nyerere expostulated on Amin's behavior, the general fired off a 3,000‐word cable to the Tanzanian leader, pleading, cajoling, threatening and finally professing a desire for peace and love. “I want to assure you that I love you very much and if you had been a woman would have considered marrying you although your head is full of gray.... As you are a man that possibility does not arise.”
While Western diplomats reeled in disbelief at this weird extreme in African diplomacy, the point was not lost on Julius Nyerere. In grass‐root African terms, the proposal amounted to a cutting double‐edged insult. This was Amin the peasant speaking.
Eventually, with exasperated ineptitude, Tanzania played into the Ugandan leader's hands, equipping and permitting a small force of Obote loyalists to mount an ill‐fated September invasion into Uganda. The imagined threat had become real, and Amin gleefully crushed the infiltrators with a crescendo of saber‐rattling.
Earlier this year, when some of the consequences of his economic recklessness struck home, Amin rounded on the Israelis who, for some years, had regarded Uganda as a secure and convenient foothold in sub‐Saharan Africa. Israelis were building roads, houses, office blocks, schools and airports. Their 150‐strong military mission was training Ugandan armed forces and flying its aircraft. Amin himself had been treated to a paratroopers’ course in Israel and had survived to win a pair of bright blue wings, which he still wears.
Suddenly, Idi Amin ordered them out with a verbal barrage of anti‐Semitic, antiZionist abuse. The 1,000 Israelis downed tools and convoyed themselves into neighboring Kenya, leaving an estimated $20‐million worth of construction work unpaid for. No doubt, the Israelis’ impatience for some kind of payment influenced Amin's decision but the Moslem President, returning from a visit to the Middle East, had found himself a new soul mate—none other than the equally unpredictable, but infinitely wealthier, Col. Mo'ammar Mohammed Qadhafi of Libya.
Amin's expulsion of the Israelis, whose presence below the southern border of the Sudan had been viewed uneasily by the Arab world, was an easy and effective coup for Qadhafi, who immediately promised Uganda $30‐million worth of aid and military assistance. (The latter was forthcoming during the recent invasion scare, but there is no sign of the former.)
Whatever Qadhafi told the Ugandan leader, it obviously made a deep impression. Long after the Israeli departure, Amin would foam at the mouth whenever Jews were mentioned. In an interview with me last month, he disclosed an Israeli plot to “poison the waters of the Nile.” A little later, he fired off a telegram to the United Nations with the astounding assertion that, “Germany was the right place where, when Hitler was the Prime Minister [sic], he burned over six million Jews.”
But with the Israelis gone from Uganda and the economic position worsening, Amin had to find another scapegoat. Just as suddenly, and with an abusiveness that branded him indelibly as a black racist, he turned on the Asian community. His advisers have managed to keep the official record of the expulsion order to “noncitizen” Asians, meaning those who have failed to become Ugandans, but the general fails to make that distinction when he speaks off the record.
The Asians took the decision with an amazing calm. Grief, despair and fear were — and still are — prevailing among them but there were no stirrings of revolt or aggression. The British Government, having bestowed citi zenship on most East African Asians as a retreating colonial power, reluctantly accepted responsibility for absorbing the exodus. The general, often on record as wanting to teach “British imperialism a lesson,” has sat back cheerfully to watch his bombshell of colored immigration explode on the British domestic political scene.
The British are very worried,” Amin declared, accurately. “I have taught them a lesson and that is why am the best politician in the world.” All Britain could do, in fact, was to suspend $25‐million loan to Uganda and “review” the annual $10million aid program.
The highly suspicious Amin obviously could not believe he would get away with things so easily. Seizing on a personal letter, written by an emotional expatriate, that had been confiscated by his security men, he announced the discovery of a British plot to invade Uganda and assassinate him. The 7,000 Britons in the country would have to be “watched and marked,” he said.
He reinforced the point by unleashing his four different but equally sinister security branches on the expatriate community. In one day they arrested 40 European men, women and children and jammed them into the cells of Kampala's central police station. Eight British newspaper correspondents, including myself, were also arrested at gunpoint, accused of spying and incarcerated in the infamous Makindye military barracks.
For four days, before being deported, we learned from our fellow black prisoners what it takes to keep Amin in power. Four senior police officers, arrested two weeks before during an Amin purge, were led from our cell and murdered by what turned out to be the favorite Makindye method—a “tap” on the skull with a 20 ‐pound sledgehammer.
As we were leaving, a further 30 police officers were being marched into the barracks. There was no reason to suppose their fate would be any less horrifying. An Asian youth, caked in blood from a split jaw, was thrown headlong into our cell late one night, having been seized by soldiers at a military roadblock. What had he done? A shrug. Nothing more, it seemed, than encountering a military roadblock—and being Asian.
Among our African cellmates was a university lecturer who had been debating, too loudly, the iniquities of military government; a businessman whose large American car had been coveted by an army officer, and a Kenyan who had been caught negotiating to buy some saucepans from a departing Asian. We were, in effect, the luckier victims of a pampered, ill‐disciplined army which exSergeant Major Amin allows unlimited license, perhaps because he could not bring them into line if he tried.
Can Amin survive? Impossible, say the fleeing, impoverished Asians; unlikely, say the terrorized intellectuals; hopefully not, think the British and Uganda's African neighbors. But Idi Amin's considerable energy and resourcefulness have been applied to eliminating any viable alternative leadership. The alternatives at present to Idi the Terrible are few and fearsome —either an even more sinister military junta or total and bloody anarchy.
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