Idi Amin - Uganda's Brutal Despotic Dictator Documentary

The man known to history as Idi Amin was born in unclear circumstances in the mid-1920s in Uganda. Some accounts, including a statement by Amin’s own son Hussein, place his year of birth as late as 1928, but he was most likely born in 1923 or 1924. His place of birth is also disputed, but the suggestion that he was born in the capital of the country, Kampala, is probably spurious and Amin was more likely born at Koboko in the Muslim-dominated north-western part of the country near the border of what is now South Sudan. His father’s background is

similarly unclear. Andreas Nyabire was a member of the Kakwa people according to some accounts, and he converted to Islam from Roman Catholicism in the early twentieth century and then changed his name to Amin Dada. However, other sources suggest that he was ethnic Nubian and that he may have been raised as a Muslim. If so his family probably came from Sudan originally and had been among Sudanese communities which had been brought south by Emin Pasha, a late nineteenth century governor of the Ottoman province of Equatoria who had ventured as far south as Uganda in the 1880s.

Amin’s mother was Assa Aatte, whose descent is also disputed. She may have been an ethnic Kakwa or Lugbara, different peoples living in what is now northern Uganda. What little we know of Idi’s childhood indicates that his father abandoned him and his mother when he was young and he was raised by her alone. He attended an Islamic school at Bombo in the early 1940s while the Second World War was raging to the north and east in Italian East Africa and the Maghreb. Any assessment of Amin’s life must start by exploring the history of Uganda under colonial

rule. Like many other parts of Sub Saharan Africa, Uganda was a country which had been contrived more from the imaginations of its colonial rulers, than one which had an ethnic or religious coherence to it. The region which the country covers today was inhabited by different peoples in the pre-colonial period, the largest being the Bagandans who ruled a large swathe of the country in the south of modern-day Uganda, including the region around the capital of Kampala. However, the area also contained many Nilotic peoples in the north and east such as the Kakwa and Lugbara, and in

the north-west there was a substantial Sudanese population. Pockets of Kuliak people also inhabit the regions which today lie along the border between eastern Uganda and western Kenya. And to compound matters, the people of the country were also divided along religious lines, with a large Muslim population in the north where Islam had spread south from Egypt and Sudan, while elsewhere others followed the Ugandan native religions. A great many had also accepted faiths such as Roman Catholicism or Protestantism. This was the patchwork of competing ethnicities and religions out of which modern-day Uganda emerged. The Kingdom of Buganda

covered much of the country when the British began to encroach here in the late nineteenth century. The Uganda Protectorate was established in 1894 as part of the ambitions of some British imperialists in Africa to obtain control of a continuous stretch of territory on the continent running from Cairo in Egypt to Cape Town in South Africa. Under British rule, some of the internal divisions of the country were exacerbated when the colonial regime favoured elements amongst the Bagandans which had adopted Protestantism and used them as a proxy to govern the country and overrule the Muslim elements in

the north. Colonial rule was exploitative but also brought benefits in the shape of the beginnings of a modern infrastructure and economy, notably in the production of cash crops such as sugar and cotton, whilst literacy levels also increased considerably in the first half of the twentieth century. Another important development was the creation of a Ugandan military under the British when the colonial regime began training and arming native Ugandans in the early twentieth century, a process which accelerated prior to and during the First World War as a means of striking at Germany’s colonial possessions in East Africa.

Later claims that he had joined the British army during the Second World War and had fought on the Burma front against the Japanese were fabrications largely created by Amin himself. He rose quickly in the KAR. He was popular among the British officers and made a strong impression with his athletic abilities and his work as a solider. Accordingly he was promoted as quickly as was possible for an individual of African descent at the time within the ranks of the KAR. And by the late 1940s he was stationed in neighbouring Kenya, where there had been greater agitation

against British colonial rule than in his native Uganda. As a result Amin was here in 1952 when the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, also known as the Mau Mau, began a revolt against British rule which would drag on for the remainder of the 1950s. Amin served with distinction during this campaign in Kenya, though he would later try to downplay his involvement in a war which was designed to defend British imperial rule. He was promoted too, first to the rank of corporal in 1952 and to sergeant the year after. Throughout the 1950s Amin continued to meet

with some success. Iain Grahame, Amin’s commanding officer in the KAR and a man who later wrote a memoir on his relationship with Uganda and the future dictator, subsequently claimed that Amin was one of the best soldiers and mid-ranking officers he ever commanded. And other officers agreed with this assessment. It was also during these years that he was sent to Europe for additional military training and found himself stationed in Stirling in Scotland for some time. This was the beginning of an affinity for the country which as we will see led to Amin toying with the notion

that he could become King of Scotland in later years. Having returned to Africa he was given the title of effendi, or affande in Swahili in the KAR in 1959. This made him a class 2 warrant officer and was the highest rank which an African could rise to within the British armed forces in East Africa. But there were also indications of the trouble which lay ahead with Amin. In late 1961 and early 1962 the KAR were called on to intervene in widespread cattle raiding which was occurring on the border between Uganda and Kenya. During this, Amin

commanded his platoon to massacre scores of villagers. He only escaped being court-martialled for this civilian atrocity because Uganda was on the brink of gaining independence from Britain and the colonial governor, Sir Frederick Crawford, did not want a scandal emerging surrounding one of only two native Ugandans who were commissioned officers in the colonial army there. As Amin was rising within the ranks of the Colonial British Army in East Africa great change was sweeping across Africa. In 1941 the Western Allies had agreed to the Atlantic Charter following pressure from the USA, which stated that there would be

greater independence granted to the colonies of the European powers in the aftermath of the Second World War. This, combined with an inability to preserve their empires following the war, ensured that a great many nations in Africa would attain independence in the middle of the twentieth century. In 1945 the vast majority of the continent was held either by France in the north and north-west or Britain in the south and east of the continent. In the central regions Belgium had a huge territory in the Congo, while Portugal had two large blocks around Mozambique and Angola, whereas Italy

had held most of the Horn of Africa and Libya. Little happened in the immediate aftermath of the war to grant independence to these extensive colonies, but by the 1950s the pressure to do so had become too great. As a result in 1956 Morocco and Tunisia gained independence from France and the process accelerated quickly thereafter. 1960, in particular, saw Cameroon, Senegal, Togo, Mali, Benin, Niger, the Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Chad and Madagascar all gain their independence from France, at roughly the same time that Belgium relinquished control of its colonies and created the countries of the Congo,

Burundi and Rwanda. Britain had relinquished control of Ghana in 1957 and followed with Nigeria in 1961. The process of decolonisation in East Africa occurred a few years later than in parts of north-west Africa. The manner in which it came about in Uganda and adjoining regions also differed considerably from other countries further to the north-west. In many of these other countries political groups had emerged of pro-independence indigenous peoples who had often been educated in London or Paris and then returned to their homelands determined to achieve self-rule. In Uganda there were some calls for independence but little

by way of a coherent political movement or political parties to speak of by the late 1950s. Accordingly there was not a mature political environment into which power could devolve when independence was finally declared on the 9th of October 1962 and the Republic of Uganda came into existence. Nevertheless, three major political parties quickly emerged, the Democratic Party representing the Catholic population; the Uganda People’s Congress, largely representing the Nilotic people of the north of the country; and the Kabaka Yekka, a Bugandan nationalist party. In its first post-independence elections in 1962 the People’s Congress and Kabaka Yekka united

to exclude the Democratic Party from power and Milton Obote, the UPC leader became Uganda’s first Prime Minister. Obote would dominate Ugandan politics during the 1960s thereafter, but his period in office was dogged by many of the same problems which had affected other African nations in the post-independence period, namely the problem of uniting a country which was an artificial construct of the British and had many different ethnic peoples and religions within it. As such the mid-1960s saw a battle between some who wished for a de-centralised federal state where the Bagandans and the Nilotic people and other

groups would largely govern themselves in their own provinces and those who wished for a powerful, centralised Ugandan state governed from the capital of Kampala. This conflict climaxed in February 1966 when Obote suspended the constitution and assumed extensive powers which amounted to little more than a dictatorship. But this was not exactly an uncommon occurrence in post-independence Africa. All across the continent strongmen were seizing power in the 1960s, with vicious dictators such as Joseph Mobuto in the Congo, Jean Bokassa in the Central African Republic, Francisco Macias Nguema in Equatorial Guinea and Aboubakar Sangoulé Lamizana in what was

then the Republic of Upper Volta, but which we know today as Burkina Faso. Thus, Uganda was following this depressing trend when Obote seized power in 1966. For Amin, Obote’s consolidation of his hold on the country was beneficial. Already in the early years of independence he had continued to rise within the Ugandan armed forces. He was made a captain at independence in 1962, then a major in 1963 and deputy commander of the Ugandan military in 1964. Finally, in 1965, when he was still only forty, Amin was made one of the commanders of the army. In 1970

he reached the peak of the Ugandan military and was made overall commander of the armed forces of Uganda. Much of this meteoric ascent throughout the 1960s was secured on the back of his complicity in Obote’s corrupt dealings in Uganda. With the rise of the dictators across much of Africa during the period, had come the emergence of kleptocratic states, where the dictators and their followers effectively asset stripped the resources of their countries to become immensely wealthy themselves. In the mid-1960s Amin was aiding Obote in a gold and ivory smuggling operation between the Congo and Uganda. Some

of this activity was intended to facilitate the arming of separatists and rebels within the Congo, but much of the proceeds were also purloined into the pockets of Obote, Amin and their accomplices. Discovery of Obote and Amin’s smuggling activities in 1966 was central to Obote’s decision to seize absolute power in Uganda that same year. By the late 1960s, then, Idi Amin was one of the most powerful individuals in Uganda. Obote’s regime became increasingly oppressive as it went on, particularly so following an attempted assassination of the dictator in 1969, one which failed, but which saw a further

crackdown on any political or military dissent across the country and as Obote’s enforcer, Amin was central to these measures. However, despite his close associations with Obote, it now seems clear that Amin was conspiring throughout the late 1960s to seize power himself or at least to consolidate his hold over the military. In particular he was hiring extensive numbers of troops from the Kakwa and Nubi areas of northern Uganda bordering on Sudan. These were his own ethnic people and fellow Muslims. By filling the Ugandan military with soldiers and officers drawn from this area, Amin was consolidating his

control of the army in advance of a possible seizure of power. Moreover, Amin was probably courting the support of Britain and Israel for such a move. Britain continued to have considerable influence in East Africa and was concerned in the context of the Cold War with what it perceived to be the socialist policies being pursued by Obote, while Israel had been involved in Uganda during the 1960s and was anxious to use Uganda and adjoining regions as a means of drawing the attention of its northern neighbours, Sudan and Egypt, away from Israel’s ongoing occupation of the Sinai

Peninsula. Eventually Amin’s machinations came to a head in the early 1970s. In October 1970 Obote, who was by now suspicious of Amin’s intentions, removed the general from overall command of the Ugandan military and appointed himself to the role. He then set about preparing charges of financial misconduct against Amin, but he moved too slowly, which proved to be a fatal error. In the interim, Amin had learned of Obote’s intentions and moved aggressively against the president. On the 25th of January 1971, while Obote was absent at a meeting of the Commonwealth nations in Singapore, Amin launched a

military coup. The capital of Kampala was quickly secured, as were some of the main communication outlets such as the radio stations. Consequently, Amin was able to inform the nation that he was seizing power from the corrupt Obote before the president several thousand kilometres away could even react. Amin presented himself as the restorer of the constitution. He would, he claimed, hold office for just a few weeks or months during the transition back to a democratically elected government. Obote would head back to Africa, to neighbouring Tanzania where he spent the 1970s in exile. Amin would hold power

for eight years in one of Africa’s most brutal dictatorships. Amin quickly consolidated his control of Uganda in the weeks following the almost bloodless coup of January 1971. On the 2nd of February he declared himself to be the new president of Uganda, as well as reappointing himself as overall commander of the Ugandan armed forces. The new regime speedily morphed into a military dictatorship, with any pretence of honouring the legal system and old constitution being quite ephemeral. Military tribunals broadly replaced the court system and Amin’s followers within the army were appointed to a range of senior political

offices and civil jurisdictions, positions which they generally had no training for. Amin would henceforth rule by decree and he renamed the government headquarters in Kampala as ‘The Command Post’. And then in order to consolidate his hold on both the military and civilian government, extensive purges of both were undertaken with thousands of individuals removed from their positions and replaced by committed adherents of Amin and his military government. And these individuals were often not simply stripped of their positions, but killed by the regime, in the beginnings of the massive bloodletting which characterised the Amin regime in Uganda

throughout the 1970s. Amin’s seizure of power did not go completely unopposed. As we have seen, Milton Obote had sought refuge in Tanzania in 1971, Uganda’s larger and more affluent neighbour to the south. Here the Tanzanian president, Julius Nyerere, offered support to Obote and withheld official recognition of Amin’s regime in Uganda. Moreover, in the weeks and months that followed as many as 20,000 Ugandans fled south into Tanzania to find political asylum here. These were soon conspiring on how to remove Amin from power and forming into bands of militarily trained guerrilla fighters. These forces included a young

Yoweri Museveni, who would play a major role in Uganda’s subsequent politics. Finally, in September 1972 elements amongst these Ugandan exiles moved into action. A strike force of some 1,500 fighters crossed over the northern border into Uganda with the goal of initiating a coup similar to Amin’s the previous year. Entebbe Airport outside Kampala would be seized, then the capital would be secured, along with the main radio stations, so that news of the coup could be broadcast to the nation. These plans however never came to fruition. The invasion was a fiasco and was quickly suppressed by Amin

who had advance knowledge of it. Hundreds of the invaders were killed and it was over within days, but it is a significant indicator of the role which Tanzania would play in future events. In its early years Amin’s regime was greeted with open arms by the international community. The British and the Israelis had supported the coup in 1971 and moved quickly to recognise Amin’s regime as soon as he seized power, believing that the former KAR officer would be easier to deal with than Obote had been. And Amin was more than happy to encourage their delusions, presenting

himself at this early stage as a reconciler of Uganda’s political, ethnic and religious problems, someone who would unite the varying religious groupings and ethnic peoples of the country. Thus, in July 1971 Amin was welcomed on state visits to both Britain and Israel. In Britain he met the Prime Minister, Edward Heath, and even had lunch at Buckingham Palace. He also took the opportunity offered by the state visit to return to Scotland, where he had trained in the 1950s. Amin had a special fondness for the country and he would go on to give several of his sons

Scottish names and even dressed a regiment of the Ugandan army in Scottish kilts. As we will see, a few years later in the mid-1970s he even entertained a bizarre alliance with a Scottish paramilitary organisation which resulted in him offering to become King of Scotland. In both London and Tel Aviv, Amin requested additional weapons in order to take the fight to Tanzania, but both governments declined. Curiously, neither the government in Britain nor in Israel seem to have gained the measure of the individual they were actually dealing with when Amin visited their respective capitals in the summer

of 1971, but they soon came to have suspicions about his true nature and this quickly gave way to regret. In July 1971, while Amin was dining at Buckingham Palace and reacquainting himself with Scotland, back in Uganda two Americans, a journalist by the name of Nicholas Stroh and a sociology lecturer called Robert Siedle, who were investigating some of the early political killings associated with Amin’s regime, went to the Mbarara Army Barracks. They had been warned not to go there, but ignored these warnings, a decision that would prove fatal. Both men were murdered at the Barracks. The

American reaction was swift and an investigation, to which an American legal official named David Jeffrys Jones was attached, was launched. Jones quickly determined that the pair had been murdered by Amin’s men, but he fled the country in fear of his own life before the investigation could be concluded. The killing of Stroh and Siedle was the first serious indication that Amin would not be the reliant strongman the West believed he might be in Uganda. Other clearer signs of how problematic Amin might be were soon becoming apparent. Having had his request for additional arms and modern weaponry

rebuffed by the governments in London and Tel Aviv, Amin next called on Colonel Mu’ammar Al-Gaddafi, the de-facto dictator of Libya. Following his seizure of power in 1969, Gaddafi had established himself in opposition to the former colonial powers, expelling much of the Italian colonial community and seizing control of Western military bases which had a strategic significance in the Cold War, as well as introducing elements of Islamic Sharia Law. It was thus quite ominous to find Amin seeking an alliance with the Libyan ruler. And when he visited Libya Amin presented a fantastical view of his own country

and of himself in order to acquire military support from Gaddafi. For instance, Amin depicted himself as a committed Muslim and appears to have convinced Gaddafi that as much as 70% of Uganda’s people were Muslims, whereas the true number was in the range of about 6%, mostly found in the northwest of the country bordering Sudan. But Gaddafi was sold on Amin’s claims and the Ugandan brought his country into the Organization of Islamic States and promised to place limits on the religious freedoms of Christians back in Uganda in return for Gaddafi’s weapons. Back in Uganda, in 1972,

the violence being unleashed by the Amin regime increased. It was aimed in particular at the Acholi and Lango ethnic groups who opposed Amin’s regime. By early 1972 at least 5,000 of these had disappeared, including soldiers, lawyers, students, religious leaders and local political figures. Often bodies were found floating in the River Nile. At this stage, though, the international media was broadly unaware of what was occurring. One incident, however, gained widespread attention, and that was in January 1972 at Mutukula near the Tanzanian border, but this had only been extensively reported because it had spilled over into Tanzania

itself. Nevertheless, while the western media and other countries’ foreign services were quite ignorant of what was occurring in Uganda at this time, the bloodletting was ever increasing. Figures for the death toll and the number of displaced during Amin’s dictatorship are notoriously difficult to determine with accuracy, but already by the summer of 1972 there were tens of thousands who had either been killed or forced to flee into exile in Tanzania or elsewhere, while religious and political persecution was growing steadily. It would only get worse in the years that followed. The action which first made Amin’s regime

notorious to the international media came in the autumn of 1972 and concerned the country’s large community of ethnic Asian people. Indian and South Asian settlement in East Africa was longstanding, and dated back at least as far as the twelfth century. With the dawning of the first age of globalisation in the second half of the nineteenth century it increased dramatically and by the end of the Second World War in 1945 there were well in excess of half a million Asians living in East Africa, many of them from India in particular. But it was not just that

there was a large community of Asians in regions such as Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Mozambique, but the fact that this Asian spread into East Africa was perceived to play an overly large role in the economies of these regions. By the mid-twentieth century Asians had established a dominant position in the trade and industrial activity of the region such, that eighty to ninety percent of commercial trade and industry in Uganda was in the hands of the Asian community here. For instance, it was recorded in 1948 that of 195 cotton ginneries or factories in Uganda, 183 were run

by individuals of Indian descent. And this was reflected in the currency in use in the country. The banknotes of the East Africa Shilling, a currency used by the British colonial government in the region between 1921 and 1969, had their values written in Gujarati, as well as Arabic and English. Not long after his ascent to power, Amin determined to try to remove much of the Asian population from the country and to try to wrest control of commercial activity and industry in Uganda out of their hands and place it in those of ethnic Ugandans. Consequently on the

4th of August 1972 he announced that those of Asian descent within Uganda who did not have full Ugandan citizenship would have to leave the country within ninety days. This now created a quandary for the British government as it had promised at independence to give Asians living in the region British citizenship if they desired it. As such a logical place for many of the tens of thousands of non-citizen Asians living in Uganda who had to leave the country to head to was Britain. Yet large sections of the British political establishment were concerned about the potential arrival

of tens of thousands of refugees into Britain from Uganda. As a result Edward Heath’s government in London tried to dissuade Amin from his course of action and delay the expulsion order. As the deadline at the beginning of November 1972 neared, panic set in. Eventually a United Nations emergency airlift was required at the eleventh hour to bring 27,000 Ugandan refugees of Asian descent to Britain. Amin’s motives for the expulsion order were clear to see before the tens of thousands of people were forced out of the country. On their way to the airports and borders, those who

were forcibly exiled were generally robbed of everything of value which they had. Those who objected within the country to this, such as the chief justice, Benedicto Kiwanuka, suffered a harsh fate. Kiwanuka was an important figure in the transition to independence within Uganda. He had briefly served in the early 1960s as a technocratic Prime Minister of Uganda following the granting of the right of self-governance to the country and before the elections which had brought Obote to power. He had been imprisoned by Obote’s government in 1969, but was released by Amin when he seized power in 1971.

Originally he tried to work with the new regime and was made chief justice of the country. But his criticism of Amin over the treatment of the Asian community and other issues saw him arrested in September 1972. He was executed on the 22nd of September by Amin’s forces at Makindye Military Prison. The manner of his execution is indicative of Amin’s brutality. Kiwanuka’s ears, nose and lips were severed, before he was castrated, disembowelled and set on fire. Another very significant aspect of the expulsion of the Asian community in 1972 was seen in the months and years that

followed with the collapse of the Ugandan economy. The 50,000 to 60,000 Asian-Ugandans who had been forced out of the country had controlled an extensive amount of the country’s trade and industry. These businesses were now handed over to Amin’s followers within the military. However, these were usually individuals who had no idea how to run the companies which they were given and often lacked the basic literacy and numeracy needed to conduct trade. Farm machinery which was used for crop production eventually broke and could not be fixed. Cotton gins which jammed or stopped working never re-entered use. And

perhaps the most ironic sign of the total mismanagement of the economy was seen in the collapse of cement factories at Tororo and Fort Portal. As a result the Ugandan economy went into a tail-spin in the mid-1970s. Shortages of all kinds of goods which had been either produced or imported by these businesses followed and with it prices increased. Inflation grew steadily and by 1975 and 1976 the Ugandan economy was effectively collapsing under Amin’s rule. The years following the expulsion of Uganda’s Asian community saw Amin striking an increasingly confrontational pose on the international stage. By the end

of 1972 most Britons had left the country and early in 1974 Amin succeeded in alienating London by expelling fourteen members of the British High Commission who had been installed as a kind of post-colonial oversight committee in Kampala following the granting of independence in 1962. Despite this, and increasing sanctions directed against Amin’s regime by western countries, there was also a very strange situation in which planes were regularly flying out of Stansted Airport in London carrying cargoes of luxury European goods for Amin and other senior members of his regime. The so-called ‘Whiskey Run’ operated outside of any

trade sanctions which were meant to apply to Amin and his followers. And this was occurring at the same time that Amin was increasingly turning to Libya and the Soviet Union for assistance, while also denouncing continued western support for the apartheid regime in South Africa and denouncing his other former ally, Israel, as a result of its involvement in the Arab-Israeli War of 1973. This diplomatic schism with the west came to a head in 1975 when Amin’s regime hosted the summit of the Organisation of African Unity in Kampala with Amin serving as the summit’s chairman. Here he

essentially press-ganged several Britons into carrying him into a reception at the summit, while he publicly embarrassed the British foreign secretary, James Callaghan, who had come to the summit specifically to intercede with Amin to release the British author, Denis Hills, who in a recent book, called The White Pumpkin had referred to Amin as a ‘village tyrant’. Callaghan left believing all hope of co-operation with Amin was over, but Hills, who had been sentenced to death prior to Callaghan’s intervention, was spared by the Ugandan government. Meanwhile, Amin continued to tie himself ever closer to the Soviet Union. By

the end of 1975 the regime had received tens of millions of dollars in economic aid and military assistance from Moscow, while Amin had also dispatched several thousand Ugandan troops to Eastern Europe to receive modern military training. And for its part the Soviet government was interested in courting Amin as a way of geographically offsetting British influence in Kenya and the perceived Chinese involvement in Tanzania. It was in the mid-1970s as well, that Amin developed a connection with a paramilitary organisation back in Scotland that has become the subject of books and even a film in recent years.

At this time the nascent Scottish National Liberation Army, a fringe paramilitary group in Scotland which had begun a low-level terrorist campaign in their home country, involving posting letter-bombs, contacted Amin, having clearly heard of his fondness for the country. Amin indicated some sympathy for their desire to acquire independence from Britain, even offering to become King of Scotland should they need him to step in and perform the role, a proposal which would make him the first ruler of Scotland independent of Britain in nearly 400 years. This bizarre suggestion, while an interesting indicator of Amin’s increasingly unhinged state

of mind, was simply a footnote to his tenure as Ugandan dictator, despite its subsequent notoriety as a result of a book and film, starring Forest Whitaker and James McAvoy. As all of this was happening on the international stage in the mid-1970s the regime continued its brutal ways at home. Amin and his followers were openly favouring some religious and ethnic groups within Uganda and persecuting others. The dictator’s own ethnic groups, the Kakwas and Nubis of the northern regions were favoured, while the Bagandans, the predominant ethnic group in the south near Lake Victoria and around Kampala were

also courted. Similarly, the small Muslim minority were shown great preference as they shared a religion with Amin. By the second half of the 1970s, for example, Muslims occupied over 80% of the top positions within the military and government, despite making up just about 6% of the population. However, the state continued to effectively persecute some of the other religious groups and ethnic groups, most notably the Acholi and Langi of the north-eastern and eastern parts of the country. Throughout the mid-1970s tens of thousands of people from these groupings continued to be killed, demoted, attacked, imprisoned or displaced

from their lands and homes. And to achieve this level of oppression Amin continued to expand the already sizeable Ugandan army, making it effectively into a military aristocracy of his supporters who ruled the country. Amin was facilitated in this oppression through the work of the State Research Bureau, a secret police organisation which had been set up shortly after he seized power. Its work, though, is largely associated with Robert or Bob Astles from the mid-1970s onwards. Astles was a legacy from the colonial era, a British soldier and official who had fought in the Second World War and

then entered service in Africa. He eventually ended up in Uganda in 1949 and after spending the next thirteen years there, he decided to remain after independence and worked for Obote’s government. Although he was briefly imprisoned following Amin’s seizure of power in 1971, he eventually wormed his way into the dictator’s good graces and was appointed as head of the State Research Bureau in the mid-1970s. Under Astles the Bureau was charged with uncovering plots against Amin and the regime and was responsible for the disappearance of thousands of individuals who were suspected of various crimes. It was not

an uncommon sight in the streets of Kampala and other Ugandan cities throughout these years to see individuals forced into the trunks of cars and driven off, often never to be seen again. Amin seems to have trusted Astles, as he became increasingly deranged and paranoid in the mid-1970s, as one of the few individuals whom he knew wasn’t trying to overthrow him. Amin’s own behaviour and lifestyle was changing in the 1970s as he became increasingly unpredictable. The dictator was a polygamist who married at least six women in the 1960s and 1970s. He divorced three of these in

1974, two of whom died under mysterious circumstances in the months that followed. Then he married a 19 year old go-go dancer called Sarah Kyolaba in a vast two million pound wedding in the summer of 1975 at which the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, acted as his best man. In total he sired as many as fifty children and perhaps many more through numerous concubines. Many of these were variously raised at palaces and luxury houses which Amin increasingly acquired across the country. Meanwhile, Amin, who had been athletic and a keen sportsman in his younger years grew larger in

size as he settled into his fifties. He was rabidly paranoid about conspiracies being launched against him, a not unjustifiable concern for an individual in his position, but this would often extend into bouts of sheer lunacy. Bob Astles later described being rung by members of the government who believed he acted as a moderating influence on Amin when he was, quote, “out of control”. An issue which seems to have become a major factor affecting his personality and his actions as ruler of Uganda was that he had contracted syphilis in his younger years and by the 1970s may

have been suffering from partial dementia resulting from tertiary syphilis. This would perhaps explain some of his more bizarre behaviour and the accusations of cannibalism which attached themselves to him towards the latter end of his dictatorship. In the late 1970s an Israeli doctor who had served in Uganda sometime earlier had openly stated “It’s no secret that Amin is suffering from the advanced stages of syphilis, which has caused brain damage”. Perhaps this also accounts for a telegram which Amin sent to Kurt Waldheim, the secretary general of the United Nations at the time, praising the actions of the

Nazi dictator of Germany, Adolf Hitler, and seeming to suggest that the Holocaust had been carried out by setting people on fire with gas. Word of the message got out quickly to world leaders and it was increasingly clear after this, that Africa was dealing with a partial madman. Meanwhile, the praise Amin heaped on German actions in the Second World War, damaged his relations with the Soviet Union, one of his last remaining backers economically and militarily. This was all compounded in 1976 in one of the most infamous incidents associated with Amin and his regime. On the 27th

of June that summer an Air France plane was hijacked on its way from Tel Aviv to Paris via Athens. It was diverted to Entebbe Airport outside Kampala and it soon became clear to the international media that Amin was in league with the Palestinian terrorists and members of the West Germany urban guerrilla movement, the Revolutionäre Zellen which had orchestrated the hijacking. In the hours that followed the non-Jewish passengers were released from the plane, and demands were now issued that dozens of Palestinian political prisoners being held in Israel were to be released otherwise, starting on the 1st

of July the kidnappers would begin executing the Jewish hostages. However, what followed was an incredible rescue operation when Israeli commandos flew from Israel to Uganda, refuelling in Nairobi in neighbouring Kenya to free the hostages. The airport at Entebbe had been built by the Israeli contractors years earlier and they knew the exact layout. Consequently, on the night of the 4th of July approximately 100 Israeli commandos managed to land in a surprise attack, freed nearly every single hostage, blew up most of the Ugandan air-force’s fighter planes which were stationed at Entebbe and took off again out of

Uganda, in a mission that lasted just 90 minutes. Amin was bewildered and enraged by what had happened when he awoke the next morning. Amin’s role in facilitating the Palestinian hijacking of the Air France flight in the summer of 1976 was just one of the increasingly incendiary activities he was engaging in on the international stage in the second half of the 1970s. It was largely clear that the Kenyan government had facilitated the Israeli mission to free their citizens at Entebbe, by allowing them to refuel in Nairobi. The Kenyan regime was no doubt antagonised by Amin’s increasingly

jingoistic attitude towards them. Back in 1902 the British had included a large portion of what was western Kenya within the borders of the protectorate of Uganda. These same lands were eventually returned to become part of Kenya when it was given independence. But in the mid-1970s Amin began pressing a largely baseless claim that this part of western Kenya was actually Ugandan land or part of a ‘greater Uganda’. And this would no doubt have encouraged the government in Nairobi to facilitate the Israeli rescue mission in July 1976. But it did have implications as in the weeks following

the Air France episode Amin had hundreds or perhaps even thousands of ethnic Kenyans who were living in Uganda killed in reprisals. Throughout the mid-1970s religious leaders across Uganda had become increasingly concerned about the divisive nature of the regime’s approaches towards Uganda’s Christians and its Muslim population. Amin had deliberately courted the Muslim population and oppressed some of the Christian churches. The Archbishop of the Church of Uganda, Janani Luwum, had been especially vocal about the need to cool religious tensions and late in 1976 he chaired a conference of Anglican, Catholic and Muslim leaders. An agreement was reached

at this meeting, that all involved would work going forward to ease religious divisions within the country, but when Amin, who had not been informed of the gathering beforehand, learned of this, he had Luwum arrested on fabricated charges of having plotted an armed insurrection. Then on the 17th of February 1977, Luwum was effectively paraded before the international media. The following day a statement was issued by Amin’s regime that the archbishop had been killed in a car accident. Yet no one was deceived, and reports since suggest that Amin even shot Luwum himself. The archbishop was subsequently acclaimed

as a martyr. And a further sign of how unstable Amin was and how isolated his regime had become followed when he was not invited to a meeting of the heads of the Commonwealth states shortly afterwards. Luwum and the other religious leaders’ actions were indicative of the manner in which senior figures in Uganda were increasingly opposing Amin’s regime. This extended into the ranks of his government. Already in 1975 Emmanuel Blayo Wakhweya, Amin’s Finance Minister, had defected to Britain whilst on a visit to London, but more damaging still was the defection of the Health Minister, Henry Kyemba,

in 1977. Kyemba quickly authored an account of the Amin regime from the inside and published it as A State of Blood, a blistering indictment of Amin’s brutality and bloodletting. However, while the international community’s disdain for Amin and his regime severely hampered Amin’s ability to govern Uganda it would not remove him from power. As long as Amin retained a tight control over the military and government within the country itself he was secure in his position. But this was increasingly not the case. By late 1977 a split had developed within the Ugandan military between those who remained

steadfastly loyal to Amin and those who favoured the Vice President, General Mustafa Adrisi, over the madman that Amin seemed to now be. It was in awareness of Adrisi’s growing strength and in an effort to shore up his own authority that Amin would enter in 1978 into a fatal conflict that would bring about the end of his regime. For years relations between Amin’s Uganda and Tanzania to the south had been strained, even hostile at times. It was here that Milton Obote had established himself in exile in 1971 and from here that the abortive invasion of Uganda

was launched by some of his supporters in the autumn of 1972. And now at the end of the 1970s it became the source of Amin’s final overthrow. In the late autumn of 1978 troops loyal to Adrisi had mutinied in southern Uganda near the Tanzanian border. When some fighting broke out here Amin elected to effectively turn the engagement into a war with Tanzania, one which would shore up his support within Uganda and allow him to consolidate his control of the country. This decision may have been made half-heartedly when he realised he had lost control of some

elements of the army on the southern border and he wanted to take credit afterwards for their incursions into Tanzanian territory. In any event the initial stages of the Uganda-Tanzania War went well for Amin. In the early winter Ugandan forces entered in large numbers into northern Tanzania and occupied the region in such a way that, as 1978 was coming to an end, Amin was able to announce that he intended to annex the Kagera region of northern Tanzania. However, the situation would all change very quickly in 1979. In January 1979 the Tanzanian president, Julius Nyerere, began mobilising

the Tanzanian People’s Defence Force with the goal of striking back north against Amin’s armies. They were joined by a large contingent of Ugandans who were opposed to the Amin regime and who had been living in exile in Tanzania. As they moved north Amin’s forces started falling away in places and being defeated in others. Some units fled over the western border into the Congo. Gradually the main bulk was forced back towards Kampala as winter gave way to the spring of 1979. Amin was now desperately seeking foreign aid, but despite appealing to Saudi Arabia and Saddam Hussein’s

Iraq, he only received minimal support from Gaddafi in Libya and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation. The decisive engagement of the war finally occurred at the Battle of Lukaya, south-west of Kampala, on the 10th and 11th of March. Here a force of 2,000 Ugandan troops and 1,000 Libyans, supported by 18 tanks, were overrun by a joint Tanzanian and Ugandan exile army, one which had little tank support but far superior infantry numbers. In the hours that followed the defeat, and as news of it arrived in Kampala, many urged Amin to accept the situation and step down as leader

of Uganda. In Kampala Amin remained defiant to the end. Even as Tanzanian and Ugandan exile troops closed in on Entebbe airport on the shores of Lake Victoria to the southwest of the capital he refused to back down and even fired his military chief of staff, Yusuf Gowon. However, with dwindling numbers of supporters and the belligerents closing on the capital itself he did eventually flee from Kampala by helicopter on the 11th of April 1979, the date which is generally seen as marking the end of the Idi Amin regime in Uganda. Yet in the months that followed

peace did not immediately return to Uganda. A loose civilian government was formed out of various interest groups, but it could not operate effectively, was seriously divided and eventually a new military coup occurred in May 1980. This would lead in the short term to a military government, but unlike Amin in 1971, the interim military governor, Paulo Muwunga, did pave the way for elections and a transition to civilian government towards the end of 1980. In these, none other than Milton Obote was returned as Uganda’s new president. Milton Obote’s return to power in the elections of 1980 did

not, however, go unopposed. Many groups believed, perhaps not without substantial justification, that the elections had been rigged in favour of Obote’s Uganda People’s Congress. As a result, as Obote took office for a new term as president a guerrilla war between his government and those who did not recognise its legitimacy was beginning in Uganda. The so-called Ugandan Bush War would drag on for over five years between Obote’s government and the guerrillas led by Yoweri Museveni. Eventually, as Museveni and his followers got the upper hand Obote fled from Uganda in 1985. Then in January 1986 the guerrilla

fighters entered Kampala and Museveni, who had first fled to Tanzania back in 1971 as a young man in his twenties, became the new president of Uganda. The coming of Museveni and his National Resistance Movement to power in Kampala was not a new dawn for Uganda. Museveni has never left office and is one of the world’s longest serving heads of state, having recently been re-elected in January 2021. And Ugandan politics has been dogged ever since by human rights abuses and persecution of minorities. This Ugandan Bush War, though, was played out in the 1980s and would not

involve Idi Amin. The bloodshed he was responsible for was largely confined to the 1970s. It is difficult to get an accurate idea of exactly how many deaths Amin’s regime was actually responsible for, the result of Uganda having an ill-defined population level at the time, making it difficult to assess the number of deaths from censuses and other statistical data, and also the fact that by their very nature the killings and disappearances which claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people were not recorded officially. In addition it is often difficult to decide what to count. Many

thousands died in Uganda, for instance, during these years, not as a result of a government directive, but indirectly as a result of Amin’s creation of a military state in which senior members of the army could murder people with impunity. Equally the mishandling of the economy added to the death toll, but again in indirect ways. However, these limitations aside, it is generally accepted today, based on claims made by Amnesty International, that Amin’s regime killed at least 300,000 people between 1971 and 1979, though some evidence from census records suggest a population decline of somewhere between 420,000 and

800,000. While a precise figure may not be possible, what is undoubted is that Amin’s regime created immense hardship for the people of Uganda throughout the 1970s and it was one of the most brutal dictatorships the continent saw during the period. Following the flight from Kampala Amin did not immediately leave Uganda. For a few weeks he was at large in the east of the country and even attempted to set up an opposition government with its capital in the city of Jinja on Lake Victoria. He quickly faced up to reality though and left the country entirely, heading

first to Libya where his old ally Gaddafi gave him temporary refuge. However, in 1980 he headed further east and settled in Jeddah in Saudi Arabia where he was given official sanctuary by the government. Shortly after his arrival there he gave his first post-rule interview, in which he defended his reign as ruler of Uganda and claimed that many in his homeland wished for him to be restored to power. Despite such assertions, Amin would never return to power or play a further major role in political life, though he attempted to return to Uganda in 1989 when he

flew to Zaire where a major war had broken out with implications for several neighbouring countries including Uganda. Here Amin had hoped to use the disorder as a means of building up a support base for his return to Uganda, which had been plunged into fresh disorder itself in the late 1980s. It was an abortive mission and within months Amin was back in Saudi Arabia, where a reluctant Saudi government had been coerced by the United States and others into accepting Amin back again. Amin lived out the remainder of his life in Saudi Arabia without trying to intervene

again in Uganda. He was also firmly warned not to give television interviews or speak to the press. And he stayed relatively close to his villa in Jeddah, his later years involved a cycle of sports events, gym sessions and massage parlours, while he was often seen taking his Range Rover or Chevrolet Caprice out for shopping trips and visits to the airport where Amin regularly had to clear parcels of goods from Uganda through customs. The airplanes full of luxury goods on the ‘Whiskey Runs’ from Stansted Airport to Kampala in the 1970s had been succeeded by parcels of

cassava and other East African foods arriving into Jeddah in the 1990s. Curiously, there were only limited calls for Amin to be tried in any international court for his war crimes during these years. Finally, in the summer of 2003, when he was either eighty years of age or very near it, his family reported that the former dictator was in a coma in a Jeddah hospital brought about by kidney failure. A request by his family for him to be allowed return to Uganda to die met with the response that he would be prosecuted if he set foot

in Uganda. Thus it was, that when Amin’s life support was switched off on the 16th of August 2003 he died in Jeddah and was buried in a largely non-descript grave in the Saudi Arabian capital. There is no doubting that Idi Amin was a brutal dictator. His regime introduced extensive political oppression right from its very inception and exacerbated religious and ethnic divisions within Uganda as a way of dividing its people and ruling over them, rather than trying to unite the various groupings of Ugandan society together to make a strong Uganda in the post-independence period. Headed by

an increasingly unstable individual, one who was possibly suffering from a type of syphilis-induced dementia, and who had always been an immoral, excessively violent individual, the regime oppressed large sections of its people throughout the 1970s. It is unclear exactly how many deaths the regime was directly responsible for, but a cautious estimate would suggest at least 300,000 people, while abject mishandling of the economy further impoverished millions more. Then, as his administration grew increasingly unpopular, even amongst the groupings Amin had tried to explicitly cultivate as his allies, the dictator turned to trying to initiate regional wars with Uganda’s

neighbours in order to shore up his support back home. This policy backfired, though, and war with Tanzania in 1978 quickly led to Amin being deposed and exiled the following year, bringing to an end the eight-year reign of one of Africa’s more brutal dictators. Yet Amin’s ascent to power and the manner in which it occurred also serves as a striking reminder of the failures of the de-colonisation of Africa in the 1950s and 1960s. Amin was trained by the British and rose to power within the King’s African Rifles. When he was responsible for a major atrocity of

civilians in Uganda on the eve of the country’s independence it was decided to forego court-martialling him and brush the event under the carpet because it was not deemed politically shrewd to prosecute him at that time. His regime could perhaps have been avoided if he had been. Later the British and Israeli governments supported him in seizing power from Milton Obote in 1971 owing to their own geo-political interests. Narrow self-serving concerns such as these saw countries on both sides of the Cold War facilitating the rise and maintenance of dictators like Amin and Joseph Mobotu in the neighbouring

Congo or Zaire throughout the post-independence period in Africa. And yet those who facilitated Amin’s rise in 1971 cannot have known what would ensue. Between 1971 and 1979 an increasingly unhinged dictator and his followers were responsible for killing hundreds of thousands of Ugandans, displacing many more and destabilising the entire East African region. The pity of it all is that having fallen from power in 1979 Amin was able to live freely in exile and was never indicted in an international court. What do you think of Idi Amin? Was he perhaps the most vicious of the continent’s dictators

in the age of oppressive regimes which followed independence in the 1960s and 1970s? Please let us know in the comment section, and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.