After 14 years in exile since the fall of his father’s regime, Taban Amin — the eldest son of Uganda’s infamous former dictator Idi Amin — returned home on Monday to a remarkably warm reception from the Ugandan government.
Wearing dark glasses and a colourful Congolese outfit, he shuffled into the VIP lounge at Uganda’s Entebbe airport, before being whisked off by plainclothes security officials to an unknown location.
After a meeting with Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni at his residence in Kampala on Tuesday, the historic enmity between the two apparently melted away.
Museveni forgave Amin for years of trying to bring down his government in a variety of coup plots. Amin, meanwhile, called for ”putting aside our differences and looking to the future”.
For years Taban Amin had been living in Kinshasa, where he was reported to be occupying the derelict Ugandan embassy to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
The embassy was closed after Uganda severed diplomatic relations with the DRC in 1998 shortly before joining Rwanda in an attack on the newly installed president, Laurent Desire Kabila, at the start of the Congo war.
In 1999 Ugandan intelligence officials claimed that Amin was mobilising a rebel group in the Blue Mountains of the eastern DRC, to the west of Lake Albert, with the aim of avenging the rebellion that deposed his father’s dictatorship 20 years before.
They also claimed to have evidence that Amin, in alliance with Ngiti militiamen from the eastern DRC, was fighting against Uganda alongside the Congolese army.
Last month Amin again began worrying Ugandan officials after reports that his rebel group was regrouping in the Semliki valley, along the Uganda-DRC border.
Special adviser to the president Brigadier Kale Kaihura warned that an attack by Amin’s group in western Uganda could be imminent.
Uganda mobilised a battalion of troops along the border in response to the apparent threat. But by last week the sound and fury had died down.
Congolese interim President Joseph Kabila finally deported Amin after receiving complaints from Ugandan officials that Kinshasa’s new government could hardly call itself an ally of Uganda if it was still offering protection to Ugandan rebels.
He returned to Kampala, where he apparently repented and patched things up with Museveni.
According to the president’s press office, ”Amin thanked President Museveni for his warm invitation and welcome to him and said he is at his disposal to work under him for the good of Uganda.”
He advised the people of Uganda that there was not much to gain by fighting, dividing and destroying their own country.
Taban’s father, who ruled Uganda between 1971 and 1979 and presided over a well-publicised era of state brutality and economic meltdown, died on August 16 at a hospital in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where he had been living under the protection of the Saudi Royal family for more than a decade.
The years of bloodshed following the fall of Idi Amin’s regime eventually climaxed in Museveni’s National Resistance Movement, which seized power in 1986. Museveni managed to avoid the cycle of retribution that characterised previous governments.
Museveni moved swiftly to appoint a government from across ethnic and religious lines and welcomed former opponents into government.
Ugandan government officials declined to comment on what role, if any, Taban Amin might play in Uganda’s future.