‘He’s an old dog that can’t bite’

Ugandans are divided about a possible return or burial in home soil for Idi Amin Dada, the former president responsible for a brutal regime where an estimated 400 000 people were killed or disappeared for ever.

Amin is in critical condition at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He has reportedly recently emerged from a week-long coma after suffering from hypertension and kidney complications. However he remains in intensive care and doctors are close-lipped about his condition.

Speaking at a peace workshop in Kampala this week, President Yoweri Museveni said Amin’s family could bring his body back to Uganda, but that he would be buried like any ‘ordinary Ugandan”.

Museveni was less sympathetic when asked if the former dictator could return while still alive — as his family has requested. ‘If Amin comes back breathing or conscious, I will arrest him because he committed crimes here.”

Milton Obote, who was deposed by Amin in 1971 and lives in exile in Zambia, has also weighed in, saying in a statement that if Amin died he should be buried in the land of his birth. ‘Should Amin’s condition worsen, the people of Uganda should be magnanimous enough to accept his proper burial in Uganda, despite the fact [that] he was a dictator.”

Meanwhile in Kabalagala, a strip of nightclubs, restaurants and open-air bars on Kampala’s outskirts, the former dictator’s fate was a subject on everyone’s lips.

‘He’s an old dog that can’t bite and he’s on his deathbed, so he can’t be of any harm to anyone,” Leonard Ssanguuda (29), a driver, said. ‘The government will be remembered for how they treat their former enemies.”

But an administrator, whose life was touched by the dictator’s cruel hand, had a very different view. ‘Like almost everybody else in Uganda, I had a relative who disappeared while Amin was in power and we grew up with that man’s children,” Sandra Kamenya (28) said.

‘Unless he’s willing to come back and face trial, we don’t want him. He’s going through the pain people always prayed he would go through and should feel the same agony he caused so many Ugandans.”

Chappa Karuhanga, chairperson of the National Democrats Forum Party, was put into a military prison for organising against Amin in 1976. Yet, even though he was supposed to be killed by the man now on his deathbed, the politician isn’t calling for vengeance.

‘We should discuss and debate in Parliament and in public to find a way to bring back these former leaders and deal with them,” he said. ‘But we should be governed by our wish for national reconciliation and nothing else.”

Born in 1924 or 1925 into the Kakwa tribe in Arua district, the future ‘President for Life” had an unprepossessing start. With little formal education, he joined the King’s African Rifles of the British colonial army as a private.

After seeing action during the brutal Mau Mau revolt in Kenya (1952 to 1956), Amin rose through the ranks to lieutenant.

After independence from Britain in 1962 Obote, the first president, rewarded Amin’s loyalty by promoting him to captain in 1963, making him deputy commander of the army in 1964 and finally chief of the army and air force in 1970.

Relations with Obote soured and Amin began recruiting members of his own tribe into the army. Then, on hearing that the president was preparing to arrest him for misappropriating army funds, he staged a coup on January 25 1971 while Obote was in Singapore.

Within months of taking control Amin’s reign of terror began. He ordered the wholesale massacre of soldiers from tribes he accused of being loyal to Obote while also targeting professionals and intellectuals. Military tribunals took precedence over civil law. Amin filled top government posts with army personnel and anyone thought to be disloyal to the regime was in jeopardy.

In 1972 he decided to ‘Africanise” the economy, and between 50 000 and 70 000 Pakistanis and Indians were given 90 days to leave the country. Their assets were nationalised and later ended up in the hands of the president’s cronies.

Eventually christening himself ‘Conqueror of the British Empire” and even ‘King of Scotland”, Amin, a Muslim, strengthened ties with Libya and other Arab nations while alienating the West.

In 1972 he severed diplomatic relations with Israel and in 1976 did the same with Britain. That same year Israeli commandos launched a raid on Entebbe airport to free about 100 passengers on an Air France jet hijacked by Palestinians.

Eventually the country disintegrated into chaos.

In one of his final acts Amin invaded Tanzania in late 1978 to cover up an army mutiny. Aided by a group of Ugandan rebels, the Tanzanian army responded, and by April 1979 their combined forces were in Kampala.

Amin fled to Libya where he remained for 10 years before finding final asylum in Saudi Arabia.