{UAH} Ugandans recall Amin's brutality

Ugandans recall Amin's brutality

Exiled tyrant dies in Saudi Arabia

August 17, 2003|By Michael T. Kaufman, New York Times News Service.

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JIDDAH, Saudi Arabia — Idi Amin, whose eight-year reign of terror in Uganda encompassed widescale killing, torture and dispossession of multitudes and left the country pauperized, died Saturday at a hospital here. He was believed to be 80.

Amin died at King Faisal Specialist hospital, where he had been on life support since July 18, a hospital official said Saturday morning. He was in a coma and suffering from high blood pressure when he was admitted to the hospital. Later, hospital staff said, he suffered kidney failure.

On Saturday, most Ugandans recalled with a shudder Amin's brutal regime.

"I am glad that Amin is dead," said Kampala market trader Nulu Nakalebe.

"I remember in 1977, one of my sisters was imprisoned in Luzira for putting on a miniskirt. She spent seven months in prison."

But others expressed regret, noting that Amin was popular when he first seized power and that many believed he stood for the common man.

"I only feel sorry that he may not be buried at home," said one woman named Aida, who was 9 when Amin was ousted. "Whereas he was a bad man, he had his good side and deserves a decent burial."

Amin, dubbed "the butcher" by many Ugandans, was buried in Jiddah, where he had lived in a villa for much of the time since being ousted from power in 1979.

The quick funeral was in keeping with Amin's Muslim faith, but the mostly family affair was a far cry from the pomp he demanded during the 1970s. He reveled then in the spotlight of world attention as he flaunted his tyrannical powers, hurled outlandish insults at world leaders and staged pompous displays of majesty.

Decades of isolation

By contrast, his last 24 years were spent in enforced isolation as Saudi Arabian authorities made sure he maintained a low profile after he, his four wives and more than 30 children fled to their country just ahead of an invading force of Ugandan exiles and Tanzanian troops that overthrew his regime. Amin, a convert to Islam, had first fled to Libya and then Iraq. Saudi Arabia received him in 1979.

By the time he had escaped with his life, the devastation he had wreaked lay fully exposed in the scarred ruins of Uganda, a rich and lush land that Winston Churchill once had called the pearl of Africa. If the exact numbers of those killed at Amin's behest and instigation remained elusive, the toll tabulated by exiles and international human-rights groups is 300,000 victims out of a population of 12 million.

Those killed were mostly anonymous people--farmers, students, clerks and shopkeepers who were shot or forced to bludgeon each other to death by members of the three death squads that included the chillingly named Public Safety Unit and the State Research Bureau.

Along with the third agency of terror, the military police, these forces numbering about 18,000 men largely recruited from Amin's home region often targeted their victims because they wanted their money, cars, houses or women or because the tribes they belonged to were designated for humiliation.

There were also many hundreds among the dead whose names were well known, prominent men and women whose killings were were meant to terrorize the living.

Before the killings reached their frenzied peak, Amin had already attained an international reputation for impulsive and Draconian rule by his expulsion in 1972 of 40,000 Ugandan residents of Asian origin. These people, most of them third-generation descendants of workers brought by the British from the Indian subcontinent to build a railroad, were dominant in the country's commercial life.

"If they do not leave, they will find themselves sitting on the fire," Amin warned, setting a three-month deadline by which Britain was forced to accept the so-called Ugandan Asians. They fled, leaving behind possessions that were doled out to the president's favorites.

Arrogant in face of critics

As an awareness of spreading horror and suffering filtered out of Uganda, Amin began to address the criticism, choosing words that intentionally added insult to injury. Wearing the Israeli paratrooper wings he had gained on a military training course in Tel Aviv, he declared that Hitler had been right to kill 6 million Jews. Having already called Julius Nyerere, the president of Tanzania, a coward, an old woman and a prostitute, he announced that he loved Nyerere and "would have married him if he had been a woman."

He called President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia an "imperialist puppet and bootlicker" and termed former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger "a murderer and a spy."

The flagrant brutality, coupled with the seemingly erratic behavior and calculating insults, aroused both disgust but also fascination with Amin far beyond Uganda's borders. Some African nationalists openly cheered his expulsion of the Asians and his insults of Europeans.

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