| Idi Amin Executions |
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Amin only needed Obote to make the blunder of attending a commonwealth summit meeting in Singapore on the 25 January 1971. Like a true combatant, he seized the opportunity and grabbed it with supreme precision. Apparently, Obote en-route to the fateful conference had demanded that on his return he should be given written explanations by General Amin and Defence Minister Felix Onama of the fate of missing army funds. The president then secretly ordered his close government colleagues to arrest Amin while he was away. By then, Kampala was awash with rumors of a coup and Obote was preparing the ground for a showdown with the increasingly dissent, impatient and desperate General. But in Obote’s absence, his deputies, who acted neither swiftly nor decisively failed him. Their dilly-dallying was welcoming bait for Amin and his supporters, who had got wind of Obote’s scheme, to act and strike first. The battle was way over before it had begun and General Idi Amin needed no democratic election nor coherent programme and etiquette to declare himself president of Uganda, Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, Army Chief of Staff and Chief of Air Staff. What ensued from Amin’s ‘victory’ was a promise of goodies the hoi polloi of Uganda had never dreamed of. But alas! Among the first words recorded of Major General Amin Dada after he seized power on that day were: “I am not a politician but a professional soldier. I am therefore a man of few words and I have been very brief throughout my professional career.” If anybody believed his words, they were soon proved wrong by Amin himself, as he never stopped hoo-ha and hogwash since then, with his mouth, hands, and weapons which he used to mete out atrocities never witnessed and bloodstained the Pearl of African nation. In his eight-year tenure as Uganda’s summit man, from 1971-1979, the country saw a tyrant at his vindictive best. Thousands of soldiers and purported dissent civilians were massacred. Religious leaders, journalists, senior bureaucrats, judges, lawyers, students and intellectuals, foreigners and criminals all faced the sword of Idi Amin. He is said to have butchered between 100, 000 to 500,000 of Ugandan men and women. From 1977 to 1979 Amin titled himself as “His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, and Conqueror of the British Empire.” Although not so many Ugandans remember all these titles, his rule characterized by extrajudicial killings, human rights abuses, ethnic persecution, political repression and the expulsion of Asians from Uganda, are well planted in their minds. During Amin’s rule, Uganda’s international relations was at it’s sour worst. In Africa, he had been simply a boil in the continent’s Skin. But he was not a perfect man. When his own err had to come, it was irresistible. He plunged neighboring Tanzania into military conflict, perhaps his biggest mistake as a military personnel and a general per se. Amin accused Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere of waging war against Uganda, ordered the invasion of Tanzanian territory, and formally annexed a section of the Kagera Region across the boundary. Nyerere mobilized the Tanzania People's Defense Force and counterattacked, joined by several groups of Ugandan exiles who had united as the Uganda National Liberation Army (UNLA). Amin's army retreated steadily, and despite military help from Libya's Muammar al-Gaddafi, who’s still the President of the North African nation, he was forced to flee on 11 April 1979 when Kampala was captured. He escaped first to Libya and ultimately settled in Saudi Arabia where the Saudi royal family paid him a generous wage in return for him staying out of politics. It’s in the oil-rich Saudi state that the husband to at least six women met his death on 16th August 2003 putting an end to an era of nightmares for Ugandan people. According to reports, few attended the funeral. |
