UGANDA: Amin:The Wild Man of Africa

Of all the places of Africa, none so epitomizes the beauty and mystery of the continent as Uganda. The poet’s eye —or the camera’s—rarely grasps its lyrical magic. Winston Churchill visited Uganda in 1907 and called it “the pearl of Africa.” There, Lake Victoria flows northward to form the White Nile, whose waters boil over the majestic Murchison (now Kabalega) Falls at the start of their long journey to the Mediterranean. The Ruwenzori mountain range, better known as the Mountains of the Moon, rise to the southwest, while herds of game roam the green plains and rolling hills. Elysium was never more heavenly or tranquil.

Only one shadow mars this idyllic land: that of Uganda’s porcine President-for-Life, Field Marshal Idi Amin Dada, 49, a man of mercurial personality, who in a short six years has caught the world’s attention with his unpredictable and often deadly antics. He is killer and clown, big-hearted buffoon and strutting martinet. He can be as playful as a kitten and as lethal as a lion. He stands 6 ft. 4 in. tall and carries a massive bulk of nearly 300 lbs., and within that girth courses the unharnessed ego of a small child, a craze for attention and reverence. Last week Idi Amin was playing to the hilt the role he loves best: he was standing full-glare in the spotlight, forcing a major power into a state of consternation. He had done it before and in all probability would do it again.

Cuban Delegation. This time, the major power was the U.S. At his press conference earlier in the week, Jimmy Carter had declared that recent events in Uganda—the reported murder of Archbishop Janani Luwum and two of Amin’s Cabinet ministers—had “disgusted the entire civilized world.” Carter added that he supported a British demand that the U.N. should “go into Uganda to assess the horrible murders that apparently are taking place in that country—the persecution of those who have aroused the ire of Mr. Amin.”

That sort of statement tends indeed to arouse the ire of Mr. Amin. He had claimed all along that the three men had died accidentally. Now the President of the U.S., a man whom Amin had publicly welcomed into the exalted ranks of world leadership, was accusing Big Daddy of infamous crimes. Furious, Amin decided to strike back in the way he knows best: bullying. Though there are perhaps no more than 200 or so Americans living in Uganda (missionaries, oil company and airline employees), Amin forbade them to leave the country, and sent his soldiers to round them up—together with their “chickens, goats, pigs or any other animals”—and deliver them to the capital city of Kampala on Monday morning of this week (later postponed to Wednesday).

That the Americans would be safe from harm was widely accepted; Amin kills his own countrymen, rarely foreigners. Still, the man’s long history of abnormal behavior worried Washington. “Goddammit,” said one White House adviser, “why couldn’t our first crisis have been a more dignified one?”

Carter’s National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, learned of the Uganda developments at 7 a.m. last Friday from wire-service reports. At 8:30, during the routine morning briefing, he informed the President, who asked to be kept advised every hour of what was happening. There were American intelligence reports that a high-level Cuban military delegation, probably headed by a general, had arrived in Uganda. There were no Cuban troops in sight, but it was possible that the delegation had come to discuss the question of military support. The White House decided to consult other African leaders for advice and to avoid provocation. It was also decided that the National Security Council need not be called into session, and the President spent his scheduled weekend at Camp David. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance conferred with U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim and U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young. The U.S. Embassy in Bonn remained in touch with the West German Foreign Ministry, which has handled American interests in Uganda since the U.S. Embassy in Kampala was shut down in 1973.

What would the U.S. do if a real crisis developed? The State Department set up an operations center, and the Pentagon ordered the nuclear aircraft carrier U.S.S. Enterprise and five other naval vessels, which had been cruising in the Indian Ocean, to stand by off the East African coast. The ships were not really equipped for an airborne rescue operation—together they carried fewer than 200 Marines—but Washington hoped that their presence would have an inhibiting influence on Amin. White House Press Secretary Jody Powell told reporters: “The President will take whatever steps he thinks are necessary and proper to protect American lives.”

Late Friday morning in Washington, Paul Chepkwurui, the Ugandan chargé d’affaires, assured the State Department that Amin “merely wants to meet the people to reassure them that nothing will happen to them.” Later, reporters asked Chepkwurui why Idi Amin was detaining the Americans. “Well, you know,” said the diplomat blithely, “there are some bad people in Uganda, and maybe if some of these missionaries tried to leave on their own, they might be harassed or something.”

By noon Friday, the White House had received a rambling, 1,000-word cable from Amin to Carter. After explaining away the death of the archbishop, Amin declared that he had heard reports from Nairobi that “5,000 American Marines are supposed to come and rescue 250 American missionaries in Uganda.” This would be impossible, Amin continued, because “the Americans in Uganda are happy and are scattered all over the country,” and, in any case, “Uganda has the strength to crush any invaders.” Amin, who thinks that all his difficulties are inflicted upon him by Jews, accused Carter of being “in the pocket of Zionist Israel” and then suggested angrily that instead of asking the U.N. to investigate the violation of human rights in Uganda, the U.S. should ask the U.N. to look into “the crimes which the U.S. has committed in various parts of the world.” But he closed by asking Carter “to pass my greetings to all Americans, both white and black,” and added a typically comic touch: “I hope to visit you at the White House in the near future.”

The message largely confirmed what Washington had suspected: Amin’s anger had been sparked by Jimmy Carter’s harsh press conference comment, which was bound to provoke Amin. It also seemed to imply that Amin was up to his old trick of blackmailing foreign powers into taking him seriously. Last year he restricted the movement of the several hundred Britons in Uganda after London broke off diplomatic relations with Kampala. Amin forbade the British residents to leave the country until they had met him and submitted a memorandum on how well they had been treated. They did so, and soon Amin was again expressing his love for Britain and his devotion to Queen Elizabeth II.

Still later Friday, Washington received reports from Kampala that Amin was planning to turn this week’s command performance into a sort of July 4 barbecue. By this week, Big Daddy might even be proclaiming, as he has done in the past, “I love the Americans. They are my best friends.” He might be admonishing Jimmy Carter to “pull up his socks”—a bit of advice he once gave the Queen of England.

Ancient Kingdoms. But even if the Americans emerge unharmed, the fact remains that Amin is an outrage to the world and a scourge to his own country. The tales of refugees escaping across the border into Kenya and Tanzania varied widely in details but hewed to a common theme: the Moslem Amin had ordered the killing of hundreds if not thousands of Ugandan Christians, who number about 7 million in a country of 11.6 million. His action was painfully reminiscent of the stories of the “Uganda martyrs,” a group of about 200 Christian converts who were persecuted and put to death in the 1880s by King Mwanga, ruler of Buganda, the largest of Uganda’s four ancient tribal kingdoms. In 1964, 22 of the martyrs were canonized by the Roman Catholic Church.

More specifically, according to refugees, Amin was determined to annihilate two tribes, the Acholi and the Langi, both of which are predominantly Christian. These tribes formed the power base of President Apolo Milton Obote, whom Amin ousted in a military coup in 1971, and Amin regards them as his mortal enemies.

The evidence of Amin’s frenzied campaign was painfully clear. For 30 minutes one night last week, the sound of machine-gun fire reverberated from the fetid confines of Mugire prison, one of three sites in Kampala to which Amin’s troops had herded members of the opposing tribes. One refugee who arrived in Kenya last week reported that “hundreds of soldiers and civilians” were murdered in the prison while he was there. He saw truckloads of troops, presumably Acholi and Langi, being brought into the prison and being stuffed into cells. He said that he heard no shots, and speculates that strangulation or sledgehammering was used to depopulate the cells neighboring his own. “You would hear a short cry and then sudden silence,” he said. “I think they were being strangled and then had their heads smashed. Next day the floors of rooms C and D—the elimination chambers —were littered with loose eyes and teeth . . . I was forced to load battered bodies of my cellmates into lorries.”

Some estimates placed the week’s death toll as high as 3,000, including 2,000 officers and men from Amin’s 21,000-man army and 700 from the national police. In one particularly vengeful operation, Amin’s marines were said to have killed every civilian they could find in Akoroko, the native village of Milton Obote.

Amin claimed that he was responding to an attempted coup hatched by Obote, who lives in exile in Tanzania. A week earlier, as Amin tells the story, his suppression of the coup had led to the arrests of Archbishop Luwum and the former Cabinet ministers. Amin still insisted that the three men had died in a traffic accident while trying to escape arrest, but refugees told a far different story. They charged that the victims had been taken to an army barracks, where they were bullied, beaten and finally shot. Some reports even had it that Amin himself had pulled the trigger, but Amin angrily denied the charge, and there were, of course, no firsthand witnesses. Amin refused to allow the archbishop’s family to view his body before soldiers buried the sealed coffin in his native village. Some Ugandans doubted that the coffin contained Luwum’s remains; they suspected that Amin had destroyed the evidence of murder by burning the body or feeding it to the crocodiles.

Shabby Relic. At a press conference, Amin admitted only that six officers had been killed in a short-lived uprising that had been staged by dissident tribesmen of the army’s Tiger battalion. After that, he claimed, one man had been killed and another wounded when tribesmen “burst into” the military police headquarters in the capital. The clear impression was that Amin was building pretexts for staffing both the government and his Soviet-equipped armed forces largely with members of his own small Moslem tribe, the Kakwa.

Can Amin seriously hope to contain Uganda’s 7 million Christians indefinitely with 800,000 Moslems? At the moment, his policy appears to be one of selective genocide, and no one is in a position to check his ruthless misuse of power.

Indeed, Uganda is a shabby relic after six years of monumental misrule. The economy is a shambles. Nobody is starving, since there are plenty of bananas, the main staple for both food and (in distilled form) liquor. Corn, tapioca and yams also help ensure enough food for survival. But apart from the soil, not much of anything works today in Idi Amin’s Uganda. Coffee and cotton were Uganda’s chief export crops, but Asian and European marketing expertise has gone, and exports have declined drastically. At a time when coffee is at world-record high prices, 2 million bags of it are stockpiled in Kampala awaiting buyers. “They can still grow export crops,” says a U.N. agronomist, “but uncertain delivery dates and past failure to live up to contracts have turned buyers off. They can’t count on supplies any more, so they have counted Uganda out.” The trouble is transport to market. Only 1 in 20 trucks registered in Uganda moves.

The result is that foreign exchange earnings are negligible, and processed food must be imported, largely with Libyan grants from Muammar Gaddafi. When Amin took over, Uganda was a net exporter of sugar. Now it must import, because the Asians who ran the sugar mills were expelled in 1972 and Ugandans do not seem able to keep the factories going. Amin has ignored the crying need for agricultural technicians to make his economy work, in favor of military technicians from the Communist bloc, to make his armed forces work. It is estimated that nearly half the available foreign exchange goes for military supplies or for tax-free luxuries from Europe to pacify the military. Uganda Airlines (consisting mainly of one Boeing 707 and one Hercules C130) makes regular runs to London’s Gatwick Airport to load up on whisky, radios, recorders, cars and other goods for the officers of the 21,000-strong army.

Civilian consumer goods are virtually nonexistent in Uganda today. Butter, milk, meat and eggs are in short supply, and what there is must be bought for hard-currency cash from Kenya. Basics, like clothing, are all but unobtainable, except at exorbitant prices. Window displays look impressive, but most of the cans and cartons on display are actually empty.

Crumbling Lodges. Everything from breweries to cement factories has broken down. The only coffee now available locally is imported stuff, most of it smuggled in from Kenya because the instant-coffee processing facilities in Uganda, like nearly all the factories, are closed for lack of spare parts or repair facilities for broken-down machinery.

Amin says he welcomes tourists, but his bizarre behavior and repeated bloodbaths hardly encourage them to come. A recent Uganda Airlines Boeing 707 flight from Nairobi to Entebbe carried exactly seven tourists. They found on arrival in Kampala that the 14-story International Hotel, one of the best in town, had virtually no food to serve: there was stringy steak one night and hairy chicken the next—no vegetables, sauces, butter, nothing else. The tourists were flown to Uganda’s once magnificent but now sadly neglected game parks. The game lodges were crumbling, ill-kept and short of food. The huge herds of elephants that once roamed the beautiful Queen Elizabeth National Park (now renamed Ruwenzori, after the nearby mountain range) were nowhere to be seen, presumably poached out for their ivory tusks.

Only the Kabalega Falls National Park on the banks of the White Nile shows signs of life. Hippos snort still in the muddy waters—though many have been shot out for greasy “hippoburgers” —and crocodiles abound, well fed by the bodies that get regularly dumped into the river. Ground transport is almost totally lacking. Less than 5% of Uganda’s total bus fleet is operable; breakdowns are permanent because no spare parts are available.

Uganda, in short, would be stone broke if it did not receive occasional Arab aid. The currency notes, all of which bear Amin’s bejowled and bemedaled portrait, have always been worthless outside the country and now count for nothing inside because people do not want them. Instead, they would rather have scarce butter or a slab of meat or a bottle of waragi, a potent, banana-base liquor. Money is worthless because there is so little to buy with it. The rare visitor from Kenya who brings in Kenya currency, and risks arrest or worse in so doing, can get five shillings for one, even though the two shilling currencies remain officially on a par.

But what worries Ugandans more than economic chaos is the post-midnight knock on the door or the tap on the shoulder in broad daylight. It can come from any of three organizations, and it is hard to say which one is the worst.

Goon Squad. Perhaps the best that one can expect is to be picked up by the Public Safety Unit (P.S.U.), which is charged with tracking down ordinary criminals. This strong-arm squad usually drags the victim off to Makindye prison and beats him blue around the genitals, then extorts money or property before letting him go. The power of the paramilitary agents is theoretically limited, but Amin pays little attention to their behavior, so they are free to beat, extort and even kill.

A second source of mistreatment is the army, usually a bunch of freebooters who roam at will, breaking into houses, looting the contents, and, depending on the degree of their drunkenness and ugliness of mood, either let it go at that or work over the occupants with rifle butts or bayonets. Again, theoretically there should be restraints on this freelance terrorizing, but in practice there is not.

The worst fate is to be taken in by Amin’s personal goon squad, the oddly named State Research Bureau (S.R.B.), a sadistic crew of sports-shirted killers who wear dark glasses even at night and seem to have carte blanche to kill. They will flag down a car in broad daylight in downtown Kampala and drag the terrified driver out and lock him in the car trunk, then drive the car away, all in full view of passive onlookers who know better than to protest or intervene. Not a single person bundled off in this manner has ever been seen alive again. A day or two later, the body, badly bloated and mutilated by fish and crocodiles, turns up floating in the Nile or Lake Victoria. Some of the corpses are dragged up on shore by hyenas and further savaged.

The prevailing sense of horror is perhaps best described by the apocryphal tale of a freezer in Amin’s house that contains the heads of his most distinguished victims, including the former Chief Justice; from time to time, the story goes, Amin walks over to the freezer to lecture his frozen audience about the evils of their ways. A former Amin aide who escaped to Kenya last year described Ugandan life to TIME Correspondent William McWhirter last week: “You are walking, and any creature making a step on the dry grass behind you might be an Amin man. Whenever you hear a car speeding down the street, you think it might suddenly come to a stop—for you. I finally fled, not because I was in trouble or because of anything I did, but out of sheer fear. People disappear. When they disappear, it means they are dead.

“The second day Amin was in power, people started dying. He knows he is a man of death, and this satisfies him. ‘I am power,’ I have heard him say. ‘I have power.’ He is sane, very sane in some respects. The important thing to him is to survive—and thus to eliminate all opposition. To kill a wife, to kill a son —it doesn’t concern him.

“He still knows almost everything that happens within the country. He knows about the most important killings. Even when he is sitting in his office and smiles to reassure someone he has ordered picked up, one of his own men on a chair in the corner already knows that the prearranged signals have been given to finish him off.”

To be sure, Amin has his defenders. A European associate describes him as “a man without fear who has the courage of his convictions,” adding: “All he wants is for the world to give Uganda a square deal.” A dozen black American journalists visited Uganda some months ago and concluded that Amin had been much maligned. But neither hired hands nor strangers are the best judges of Uganda today. Says Thomas Patrick Melady, Washington’s last ambassador in Kampala: “I hold that Amin is thoroughly sane, totally shrewd and fully accountable for every action.”

In retrospect, it can be said of Uganda that its ancient monarchical divisions severely impeded its development as a nation after it achieved independence from Britain in 1962. For a while, Milton Obote, as Prime Minister, had an uneasy partnership with the last Kabaka (King) of Buganda kingdom, Edward Mutesa II, the dapper, Cambridge-educated “King Freddie,” who became Uganda’s figurehead President. But in 1966 Obote seized the presidency for himself and crushed the Kabaka’s followers; King Freddie escaped to London, where he died penniless three years later. Obote never really succeeded in uniting the contending Ugandan tribes, and was easily overthrown in January 1971 in an army coup led by Major General Idi Amin. Obote took refuge in Tanzania.

Amin had been the heavyweight boxing champion of the Ugandan army for ten years. More important, he fought with the British in Burma during World War II and in Kenya during the Mau Mau rebellion (which he described as “the finest physical training a footballer could have”), and for five years he was the chief of staff of Uganda’s armed forces.

At first, Amin promised free elections and declared that Obote could come home to contest them if he wanted to; Obote wisely stayed away. A few months later, Amin won the support of the Baganda people by bringing the body of King Freddie back to Uganda for burial. But by early 1972, to divert attention from Uganda’s growing economic problems, Amin was threatening to invade neighboring Tanzania.

The following year he began his campaign to expel from Uganda 55,000 Indians and Pakistanis, most of them small businessmen and shopkeepers who constituted the most stable portion of Ugandan society. Three years later, when a British resident of Uganda, Denis Hills, called Amin a “village tyrant” in an unpublished manuscript, Big Daddy threatened to execute him by firing squad but eventually released him after James Callaghan, then Britain’s Foreign Secretary, flew to Uganda at Amin’s insistence to negotiate for Hills’ life.

In the months that followed, Amin’s behavior grew more and more erratic and menacing. He praised Adolf Hitler and promised to build a memorial to the Nazi leader in Kampala. He arrived at a party in a sedan chair carried by four local British businessmen who, explained Amin genially, were thus demonstrating “the new white man’s burden.” He wrongfully accused his former Foreign Minister, the beautiful Princess Elisabeth Bagaya, of sexual indiscretions. After the dramatic Israeli raid on Entebbe airport last July, an angry Amin ordered the summary execution of several air-traffic controllers, policemen and other airport officials on duty at the time. Over the past six years, according to Amnesty International, Amin has been directly or indirectly responsible for the murder of as many as 300,000 Ugandans.

In the beginning, the Israelis were among his closest allies, but by early 1973 they had grave reservations about his stability. Israel’s former Foreign Minister, Abba Eban, recalls a dinner meeting with Amin at the home of former Defense Minister Moshe Dayan in Tel Aviv:

Amin: I would like 24 Phantom airplanes.

Dayan: Why?

Amin: I need them to bomb Tanzania.

Dayan (in Hebrew to Eban): This guy is crazy. Get him out of here.

Eban (in Hebrew to Dayan): I agree, but let’s be polite.

Dayan: We would need U.S. clearance to give you Phantoms.

Amin: You are causing me trouble.

Dayan (in Hebrew to Eban): This conversation is not for me.

A fortnight later, recalls Eban, he ran into a British official who told him that Amin had been seeking Harrier jets from London for the same purpose. “What did you do?” wondered Eban. “I asked him,” said the Briton, “if he wanted another cup of tea.”

But tea is no antidote to soothe the consuming obsessions of Idi Amin. Some of his opponents, much to their regret, have tried other possibilities. Amin himself has proudly documented at least nine separate attempts on his life. He seems to have a fix on every thought, not to say plan, concerning his enemies. Once last year, as the presidential limousine was driving through northern Uganda, some opponents ambushed the car and pumped it full of machine-gun bullets, killing all the occupants. But Amin had switched cars down the road —and survived. Later, a grenade bounced off Amin’s cheek in another assassination try and rolled away before it exploded, killing Amin’s driver. He has often said that he has been told in a dream exactly when and how he is going to die. “But I cannot tell you,” he once remarked to TIME Correspondent Lee Griggs, “because that would spoil the suspense.”

The fact is that Amin seems to be in fairly firm control of his army, and no force is prepared to do him in for the sake of humanity. Other black African countries are ambivalent about him. A few African leaders, notably Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere and Zambia’s Kenneth Kaunda, have spoken out strongly against Amin; the majority find him a terrible embarrassment but have remained silent. They realize that Amin’s buffoonery has sometimes obscured a far more serious problem, the black-white struggle in southern Africa, and has given the white governments of Rhodesia and South Africa an easy excuse for condemning black leadership. But few countries in Africa, or indeed in the Third World, are prepared to oppose Amin openly. Last week the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, meeting in Geneva, debated Britain’s demand for action on the murders in Uganda for three days; but Uganda’s representative managed to block all motions and resolutions.

The British have long since learned that they cannot do anything about Amin. At the moment, they are concerned about a related problem: how to keep him from paying them an unwanted visit. Like other Commonwealth leaders, Amin plans to attend a meeting of Commonwealth nations in London next June. Prime Minister Callaghan has promised to see if the 35 other Commonwealth governments would tolerate Amin’s presence, and he devoutly hopes that those leaders will themselves disinvite their colleague. Characteristically, Big Daddy has already let it be known that he will bring a retinue of 250 people, including a dance troupe called “Heartbeat of Africa.” “I will definitely go to London,” he said last week, adding that he felt certain that the Queen would be terribly disappointed if he stayed away. In response to this generous offer, Buckingham Palace could emit only a dignified shudder.

Big Surprise. Undaunted, supremely cocky, Amin late last week seemed to have got over his pique at Jimmy Carter, and set out to assure the world that his intentions toward the hostage Americans were strictly benign. He invited several British newsmen to Kampala to see for themselves that all was peaceful in his country. On their way back to Entebbe airport, they were overtaken by Big Daddy himself, who insisted that they ride with him. Along the way, he explained that Washington had foolishly overreacted to his provocation. Nevertheless he had a big surprise for President Carter. At the Monday meeting with the American residents of Uganda, Amin would welcome them, he would give medals and citations and would exhort them to continue their fine work in behalf of Uganda.

Once more, Big Daddy had behaved true to form. “He always acts the same way,” reflected a leading Ugandan exile in Tanzania. “He threatens a group of foreigners, and then he says everything is O.K. Then he threatens them again, and then he says everything is O.K. The foreign government dances back and forth—and everyone forgets about the thousands of Ugandans who are dying.”