[Peace-discuss] Idi Amin Revealed

[David Green]

There's always more to a story:

Idi Amin: Crazy Like a Fascist 
 
An accounting of Amin's many crimes against humanity
is necessary, but so is an accounting of the role of
other nations in bringing him to power. 
 
By Steven Niven 
 
Dictator. Madman. Tyrant. Butcher. Sadist. Genocidal
Maniac. Cannibal? Mmm. Even the ever-inventive White
House has yet to accuse Saddam Hussein or his sons of
that particular crime against humanity. Nor is the
consumption of humans among the many crimes allegedly
perpetrated by those other evil-doers, Bin Laden,
Pinochet, Suharto and Ceaucescu. Hitler was a
vegetarian. We must be talking about Idi Amin, the
former Ugandan leader, who died Saturday in Saudi
Arabia. CNN, among other media outlets, reminded us of
Amin's partiality to the culinary pleasures of the
flesh. 
Amin's buffoonery and the charges of cannibalism
deflect attention from the undeniable and
well-established list of crimes perpetrated by him, or
in his name, during his eight-year rule of Uganda.  
Yet there is no concrete evidence that Amin was a
cannibal. He did once tell reporters who asked him
about the rumors that he had "tried human flesh and
it's too salty for my taste." That statement may have
been true. It may also have been one of Amin's many
weapons of mass distraction — the only weapons he had
when it came to dealing with the world's major powers.
He loved to tweak the foreign press and foreign
governments, particularly the British and Americans,
as can be seen in his frequent letters to "Mrs.
Queen," his promise of 600 pounds to help the ailing
British economy, and his suggestion to Richard Nixon
during Watergate that the President take a much-needed
rest in Uganda. African American slaves in the old
South had an expression for such feigned ignorance: it
was called "putting on Massa." Perhaps that is why the
Nigerian musical legend Fela Kuti — no mean trickster
himself — viewed Amin as a progressive, anti-Western
hero, like Nkrumah, Lumumba and Mandela. 

But Fela was wrong. Amin's buffoonery and the charges
of cannibalism deflect attention from the undeniable
and well-established list of crimes perpetrated by
him, or in his name, between 1971 and 1979. Experts
may quibble about the numbers killed during his reign
— 300,000 to 400,000 is the generally accepted figure;
Human Rights Watch says 500,000 — but either number is
startling, given the nation's population of only ten
million when Amin replaced president Milton Obote in a
1971 coup. There is a clear consensus that Amin
oversaw (and sometimes participated in) the
imprisonment, torture, and executions of thousands of
political and personal enemies (including one of his
wives). Amin's secret police force, the State Research
Bureau and Public Safety Unit (SRBPSU), was
responsible for the systematic repression and murder
of thousands of dissidents and innocent Ugandans. 

Most notoriously, Amin's "economic war" expelled 70,
000 Ugandan Asians in 1972 and redistributed their
confiscated businesses and property among his most
loyal aides. The Uganda Asian writer Mahmood Mamdani
(now at Columbia University) has noted the popularity
of the expulsion within Uganda and in other East
African nations. Many Africans resented the Asians as
middle-men who did the bidding of their British
colonial masters, and who reaped the benefits of
economic success in the "pearl of Africa". Milton
Obote, Amin's predecessor, had also threatened to
expel the Asians. 

Yet as Mamdani has suggested, Amin's willingness to
use the Ugandan Asians as economic scapegoats brings
us closer to understanding the true nature of his
regime: Uganda under Amin was a fascist state. It had
strong, charismatic ruler who claimed to embody the
nation, a brutal apparatus of internal repression, and
an economy geared towards sustaining a powerful and
expansionist military. 

An accounting of Amin's many crimes against humanity
is necessary, but so is an accounting of the role of
other nations in bringing him to power. The flurry of
recent articles prompted by Amin's illness and death
have, by and large, ignored the role that the Cold
War, and even the Middle East crisis, played in
creating the monstrosity that was Amin's regime. A
recent editorial in the Washington Post, for example,
described Amin as a "morally unambiguous...criminal
pure and simple," but remained silent about his
regimes dependence on a succession of sponsors,
including the British, American, Soviet, Israeli, and
Libyan governments. 

The British connection to Idi Amin was initially the
most significant. Amin had joined the King's African
Rifles in 1946 and earned a reputation among his white
officers as a shrewd, highly loyal Askari, who served
the Empire well in its efforts to crush the Mau Mau
and other rebellions in East Africa. British
government documents released two years ago confirm
well-established reports that the UK intelligence
services repaid that loyalty by backing Amin's 1971
coup against Milton Obote, who had planned to
nationalize several British-owned companies. The
British intelligence services also believed that Amin
would be "easy to manipulate," since he was a "little
short on the grey matter." Relieved that Obote had
been removed, British Prime Minister Ted Heath
initially provided Amin $10 million in aid, including
armored vehicles for his police forces, but refused
his requests for military jets. 

Amin then turned to Israel, which had provided
military aid to Uganda since the 1960s, helped
engineer the 1971 coup, and maintained 700 military
advisers in the country (Israel was then aiding
Sudanese rebels near Uganda's northern border, so as
to divert the Sudanese government from its support of
Israel's main enemy at the time, Egypt). Like the
British, the Israelis believed that Obote's
increasingly leftward — and pro-Arab — stance
threatened their interests, and that Amin would be a
more pliable leader. Amin broke with Israel in 1972,
however, after they too, refused to sell him the
military hardware he demanded. 

Amin, a Muslim (like 16% of his fellow Ugandans), then
allied himself with Israel's enemies, notably Libya's
Colonel Gaddafi, and the Soviet Union. The Libyans and
Soviets provided more of the direct military training
and assistance Amin requested, though, again, both
governments believed that they could manipulate him to
their advantage. The Soviets even cast the sole
dissenting vote — most African nations abstained —
against a United Nations Human Rights Commission
resolution condemning human rights abuses in Amin's
regime. By contrast, the United States government
condemned Uganda's mounting toll of human rights
abuses, closed its embassy in Kampala in 1973, and
declared that it would no longer provide economic aid
to Uganda. 

However, the United States' officially hostile stance
obscured its ongoing support of Amin's regime. It
continued to provide military helicopters and parts
long after the US had claimed to have cut off aid and
also provided "special police training" to high
ranking officers in Amin's SRBPSU. In July 1979, the
Washington Post quoted a CIA official's explanation
for assisting the Ugandan secret police. His answer
suggests that, like the other governments who assisted
Amin, the US believed that it could control and
manipulate him. "By training Amin's men," the CIA
official remarked, "we were able to have some
influence over Amin. It was also a possibility that we
could go back to the trainees later for intelligence
operations." 

In December 1986, the New York Times reported that CIA
operatives provided bombs, military equipment, and
training to Amin in 1975, to assist him in subduing
domestic unrest, in spite of congressional legislation
forbidding such sales. The Times report, issued during
the unfolding Iran-Contra scandal, noted that "there
was no indication whether George [H.W] Bush, the
director of Central Intelligence at the time, was
aware of the operation." Throughout the 1970s, former
CIA operatives funneled sophisticated surveillance
equipment made by American companies to the Ugandan
secret police. British companies — including the
state-owned car manufacturer, British Leyland —
likewise provided Amin with state-of-the-art
surveillance and military equipment, even though the
UK broke diplomatic relations with Uganda in 1976.
Ironically, British trade with Uganda continued even
though, as the Sunday Herald of Glasgow reported
yesterday, Britain's Labour Government was at the same
time considering assassinating Amin. 

None of the above should strike us as surprising. Our
current post-9-11 fixation with catching "bad guys"
betrays a similar desire to personalize individual
"evil doers," rather than to examine the murky and
often contradictory roots of state-sanctioned
atrocities. Nor does it absolve Amin — and those
Ugandans who willingly helped him — from their
responsibility for one of the more dismal chapters in
recent African history. Now that he is dead, Idi Amin
can no longer stand trial for past crimes, but others
who aided and abetted him are alive and well. A "truth
and reconciliation" investigation that examined not
only the domestic horrors of Amin's regime, but also
the international forces that sustained it, would be
very interesting indeed.
  
First published: August 18, 2003  
 
About the Author

Steven Niven is an editor at the African American
National Biography Project.  


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