In his murderous, almost psychotic, schemes for a communist utopia, Pol Pot, Brother Number One, outran anything in George Orwell’s imagination. During a reign of just under four years, he oversaw the deaths of between two and five million men, women and children—over a third of the entire population of Cambodia.
IDI AMIN
1925–2003
Hitler and all German people knew that the Israelis are not people who are working in the interest of the people of the world, and that is why they burned the Israelis alive with gas.
Idi Amin, telegram to Kurt Waldheim, secretary general of the United Nations, 1972
Idi Amin represents the disastrous tendency of post-colonial African states to fall into the hands of murderous, long-serving, corrupt and inept dictators—from Doctor Hastings Banda of Malawi and President Mobutu of Zaire to the Emperor Bokassa of the Central African Empire and President Mugabe of Zimbabwe. Amin was one of the worst. Illiterate, garrulous and burly, as terrifying as he was ridiculous, Field Marshal Idi Amin Dada was a buffoonish bully and sadistic mass murderer who earned the soubriquet the Butcher of Uganda. The soi-disant Last King of Scotland impoverished Uganda, once the jewel of Africa, a megalomaniacal cannibalistic loon who killed so many of his countrymen that the crocodiles of Lake Victoria could not consume them fast enough.
As a boy, Amin was abandoned by his father, and received little in the way of formal education. In 1946 he enlisted in the King’s African Rifles, and went on to distinguish himself by his marksmanship and sporting abilities—he was nine times heavyweight boxing champion of Uganda. In the 1950s he participated in the suppression of the anti-British Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya, serving with distinction but attracting suspicion for using excessive brutality. Nevertheless, he was promoted to warrant officer, and in 1961 became only the second native Ugandan to receive a commission.
After Uganda gained its independence from Britain in 1962, Amin emerged as a high-ranking military officer under Prime Minister Milton Obote, becoming deputy commander of the army in 1964. This was a period of economic boom and an era in which the new federal constitution balanced the desire for regional autonomy with the centralizing impulses of national government. Yet all of this was destroyed by Obote, who in 1966 arrested several government ministers and suspended Parliament and the constitution. In their place Obote installed himself as executive president with vast powers; Amin was made overall commander of the army and played a leading role in suppressing the opposition to Obote’s coup, resulting in hundreds of deaths.
In January 1971, when the president was out of the country, Amin seized power, encouraged by his patron Britain. Initially he was welcomed by many who had grown resentful of Obote’s growing tyranny. Such supporters were further encouraged by Amin’s early acts of reconciliation: political prisoners were released, the emergency laws relaxed, the secret police disbanded. Amin also promised free elections.
However, the killing soon started. An abortive invasion from Tanzania by Obote supporters in 1972 prompted Amin to create Special Squads to hunt down suspected opponents. He created an all-powerful secret police, the Public Safety Unit, dominated by Muslim Nubian and southern Sudanese tribesmen who delighted in killing. As he gradually killed more and more ministers, lawyers and anyone of any prominence, he created a further special murder corps called the State Research Unit under Major Farouk Minaura, a Nubian sadist. Massacres followed—targeted initially against Obote’s Langi tribe and the neighboring Acholi clan. But anyone suspected of harboring dissent was deemed a legitimate target. Amin’s victims included Chief Justice Benedicto Kiwanuka, Joseph Mubiru, the former governor of the Ugandan central bank, Anglican archbishop Janani Luwum and two of his own cabinet ministers. Rumors began to emerge that Amin practiced blood rituals over the bodies of his victims, even indulging in cannibalism. Many of the bodies, dumped in the Nile or on the streets or found hooded and tied to trees, were sliced open with organs missing, clearly the victims of tribal rites. Amin himself often asked to be left alone with bodies in the morgues, which he visited frequently, and it was clear he tampered with the cadavers. “I have eaten human flesh,” he boasted. “It is saltier than leopard flesh.” The terror extended to his own wives: the beautiful Kay died during an abortion, but Amin had her body dismembered and then sewn together again. Lesser women suspected of disloyalty were simply murdered.
Increasingly, Amin ruled by autocratic whim. In addition, huge amounts of money were diverted to secure the support of the Ugandan military. As money ran short, Amin simply ordered the central bank to print more. Inflation soared, economic life entered on a downward spiral and consumer goods ran short.
With his popularity plummeting, Amin sought a scapegoat and settled on Uganda’s wealthy Asian community, who controlled much of country’s trade and industry. In August 1972 he ordered Asians with British nationality to leave the country within three months. As some 50,000 fled, including much of the country’s skilled workforce, the economy began to collapse.
As his country suffered under his depredations, Amin started to lose touch with reality, possibly suffering the insanity of tertiary syphilis. He began awarding himself various medals, including the Victoria Cross, and such titles as Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and the Fishes of the Sea and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular. He also insisted on being carried on a wooden litter, with British expatriates (organized by Major Bob Astles, his chief British henchman) serving as bearers. Equally strange was the bizarre correspondence he engaged in with other world leaders. He thus offered Ted Heath, the former British prime minister and keen amateur conductor, a job as a bandmaster after his 1974 election defeat; on another occasion, he advised Israeli prime minister Golda Meir to “tuck up her knickers” and run to the US. More sinister was his praise for the Palestinian terrorists who carried out the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, and his admiration for Hitler’s treatment of the Jews.
In June 1976 Idi Amin invited an Air France plane hijacked by Palestinian and German terrorists to land at Uganda’s Entebbe airport. Upon landing, the hijackers released all non-Jewish passengers and took the rest into the airport terminal, demanding the freedom of some forty Palestinians imprisoned in Israel and a further thirteen in Kenya, France, Switzerland and West Germany. Captain Michel Bacos—followed by the rest of the crew—refused to leave without the remaining passengers, while a French nun offered to take the place of one of the hostages but was forced to leave by Ugandan soldiers.
If their demands were not met by July 1, said the hijackers, they would begin executing the eighty-three Jewish hostages and twenty others held. On the night of July 3, after an extension to the deadline, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (later assassinated for making peace with the Palestinians) dispatched a commando unit which staged a stunning raid. The surprise was complete: no one could have expected faraway Israel to cross half of Africa to rescue its own. Despite Ugandan resistance, Operation Thunderbolt rescued almost all of the passengers. Three hostages were killed, as was one Israeli soldier, Yonatan Netanyahu—the older brother of the future Israeli premier Binyamin Netanyahu—in whose memory the operation was retrospectively renamed Operation Yonatan. All seven of the terrorists and forty-five Ugandan soldiers were killed. The whole assault lasted just thirty minutes. The raid was an astonishing achievement that symbolized Israeli military power and daring.