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Amin's Foot Soldiers: The Untold Story By CHARLES ONYANGO-OBBO THE EASTAFRICAN UGANDA'S FORMER dictator Field Marshal Idi Amin, one of the most infamous tyrants of the 20th century died in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on Saturday, and was buried at a small funeral within hours after his death. Press reports routinely described him as "one of Africa's bloodiest despots." And so he was. Amin took power in January 1971, and by the time he was ousted in April 1979 by a combined force of the Tanzanian army and Ugandan exiles, his regime had killed up to 500,000 Ugandans, tortured hundreds of thousands, exiled about an equal number, and destroyed the economy and the nation once touted by Winston Churchill as the "Pearl of Africa." There is nothing in the above that is new. The stories about the madness and excesses of the Amin regime are legion. Many are true, and many are not. Amin is alleged to have chopped up his wife Kay as his children watched to punish her for adultery, had her limbs sewn back the wrong way, and showed the body to the children as "a lesson". Some versions say he kept some of the limbs, as he did that of other opponents, in the deep freezer in State House. And he occasionally feasted on the remains of his victims in some bizarre ritual of immortalisation. The story has all the elements that made Amin's regime, and the man, one of the most fascinating global character of his time. The giant black man, in uniform, wearing a revolver with an ivory butt, with a voracious sexual appetite was so good a stereotype, no one was willing to let the truth and big picture spoil it. However, in the Kay murder, it is not mentioned that she and Amin had been enstranged for about a year by the time she was decapitated. The only truth is that she had a relationship with another man. The poor woman then got pregnant - and her doctor boyfriend panicked. They decided to terminate the pregnancy, but the abortion went terribly wrong. Kay died. The doctor chopped her to bits, and carried bits of her away at a time in the boot of his Citroen. The security services got to him, after Kay was reported missing, before he got rid of all the body parts. The parts were sewn back to give her a semblance of a respectable burial. Amin had nothing to do with it. But it is a story where he has become the culprit, and the doctor has disappeared into anonymity. And therein lies the untold story of the Amin phenomenon. The evils of his regime have become so personalised, that the infrastructure of terror that kept him in power - the network of doctors, the lawyers, university professors and students, diplomats, and businesses - have escaped scrutiny. The stories of cannibalism, both real and imagined, serve ultimately to cover up the complicity of the "self respecting" elite who were Amin's foot soldiers. In the small closed intellectual circles in Uganda and in exile in the Amin years, and the period after, it was often whispered that Ugandans should be careful when they call Amin "an idiot" or "a buffoon", because it begs the question of what that makes the country he ruled for eight years. Though there were 12 unsuccessful attempts to assassinate Amin, and a few brave attempts to oppose him by organising armed resistance, they all failed. In conditions that were fertile for the growth of a mass national anti-dictatorship movement, none ever emerged. Eventually, the exile groups galvanised, after his disastrous annexation of the Kagera salient in Tanzania in late October 1978, and the Tanzanian army had repulsed Amin's troops and entered Uganda in hot pursuit. The Tanzanians didn't want to take Uganda and be an occupying power. They need a "Ugandan face" to their campaign. One reason the national resistance to Amin didn't emerge, had to do with the extent of the collaboration with the regime by the people who would normally lead such opposition. Because the Milton Obote government had become so unpopular, jailed so many opponents, and turned Uganda into a one-party regime, most sections of society embraced Amin as a "saviour." And intellectuals, from both the right and left of Uganda's political spectrum, were tripping over themselves to join up. This collaboration, contrary to popular perception, never ended after Amin's rule turned bloody and targeted intellectuals, exiling most of them. After the Amin regime fell, the Uganda National Liberation Front (UNLF) government that succeeded him rode the outrage against the military terror and so it published photos in the newspapers of the agents and informers of the dreaded State Research Service from the organisation's files. One could literally hear the country hold it breath when the morning papers came out. Wives of husbands who had been disappeared turned out on the list, as did young people from middle-class families, dozens of some of the most liked students at the prestigious Makerere University, professionals of all types. None of them fitted the profile of the illiterate thugs who were seen as the bedrock of Amin's vicious control machine. The whole list was never published. Today, no one talks about it. And many people on it have found respectability. Some are even ministers. Amin, perhaps more than any other Ugandan president, seems to have understood that beneath the sophistication, the self-satisfied generosity of a people spoilt by a land that is fertile to a fault, of these "citizens of the pearl" lay something sinister that he could exploit. The more irreverent scholars argue that that is the reason why Amin was the last president to rule over the territory of Uganda as a whole. Ever since his fall, no president has been able to establish his authority over the entirety of country. The most troubled in this respect being Obote in his second rule, who had to contend with rebel groups in West Nile, and several in the south. The main group was President Yoweri Museveni's National Resistance Army/Movement, that eventually seized power in January 1986 after the embattled Obote army threw him out in a coup in the vain hope of cutting a power sharing deal with Museveni. Likewise, Museveni's years in government, while being the most productive and successful in Uganda since about 1972, have been marked by rebellions in one corner of the country or the other. The most persistent has been in northern Uganda, where a brutal insurgency has spread to the northeast, which had been pacified in 1991. In the north alone, about 800,000 internally displaced people are crammed into squalid "protected villages." The rebels of the paradoxically named Lord's Resistance Army have carried out a uniquely vicious war, abducting young children and recruiting them into its ranks as fighters or taking them as sex slaves. One of the most disastrous actions by Amin was his decision to expel over 60,000 Asians, most of them Ugandan citizens, in 1972. Amin said he been told in a dream to do so, and hand the economy back to the control of Ugandans. Today, a lot of people in government rightly denounce that action. And the government of Obote, which made the law to return the Asians' property, and Museveni's, which in the face of opposition fast forwarded that return, boast about their actions as landmarks of enlightened economic management. However, the Obote government had made proposals to confiscate some Asian property and redistribute it in the heady mid-1960s of radical post-Independence movements. However, it was shelved because his government thought it would be committing international suicide. About 15 years earlier, in the years leading up to Independence, there had been mass boycotts of Asian businesses. The political logic of the boycotts came from politicians who are influential in government today, and many people who denounce Amin today once lauded the earlier anti-Asian business boycotts as "revolutionary." Amin did not make the case for stealing Asian property. He merely executed the job. To this day, among the people who benefited from the business, he was a great patriot and pan-Africanist. Many times Amin would walk the streets, and there was a frenzy, with proud middle-class figures following him so he could throw a shop full of the expelled businessman's stock their way. They, of course, soon ran down the business. Many years of suffering followed. The businesses brought pain. People would falsely accuse the new "owner" of a business, he would be picked up and killed, and the accuser would become the new owner. And this cycle continued. Basic commodities disappeared, and families raised on tall birthday cakes, the finest selections of wine at dinner, two family cars, and all the frills were reduced to a livelihood where they couldn't find toothpaste, a bottle of soda, a few grains of sugar, or shoes for the children. The competition for the little there was brought out the worst in Ugandans. The scenes were straight out of William Golding's Lord of the Flies. Those in the know, but who won't speak, swear that Amin never led the coup that brought him power, although the accepted account is that Obote was due to arrest him and he struck first. One partially credible account has it that he fled when he heard news of the coup. The other has it that he was about to run away when he saw soldiers on a lorry approaching his house, then he realised they were cheering. The role of the British and the Israelis in the Amin coup is well known. But there is another little talked about group of accomplices - Obote's own UPC people. Partly as part of the "Africanisation" programme, and to consolidate power, the Obote government in the 1960s arranged for party functionaries to acquire small to medium shares in companies that were set up by the state, or private ones in which the government bought a stake in the "national interest." The biggest indigenous losers in the nationalisation programme that made Obote so unpopular, were UPC people. The puzzling failure by the security services to nip the Amin coup in the bud, is to be explained by the fact that their party people were in cahoots with the plotters. In the past 16 years, Ugandans have picked themselves up like no other war-ravaged society in Africa has, and thus found in themselves a resilience and creativity they never knew they had. In the eight years of Amin, they sank to levels of depravity, betrayal, weakness, greed, and fickleness they never thought they were capable of. Amin helped Uganda find out how low it could fall. However, we are more comfortable talking about our virtues, and don't want to think of what we saw when a dark window was opened on Uganda's soul in the Amin years. Amin is dead, but his social architecture lives on. Every government after 1979 has sought to establish its legitimacy on the base that it is "not as bad as Amin's." Many Ugandans, and the international community, are happy to go by the Amin standard. The result is that the country tends to accept generally low standards of human rights and is tolerant of "mildly" repressive politics, because "it is not as bad as during Amin's time." Now that he is dead, maybe, just maybe, Uganda will begin the self-examination that was not possible for as long as he lived. --------------------------------------------- This service is hosted on the Infocom Network http://www.infocom.co.ug
