The Black Hole of Kampala

DAWN had not yet crept over the papyrus swamps along the Tanzanian shores of Lake Victoria when a force of 800 men calling themselves the Uganda People's Militia assembled in the darkness. As invasion forces go, it was small, but it was well-armed and the men were in high spirits. Most of them were former Ugandan soldiers and paramilitary police who had fled the country after the ouster of President Milton Obote, himself in exile in Tanzania. They had spent several months in secret training in Tanzania guerrilla camps, preparing to overthrow the military regime of Uganda's increasingly erratic dictator, General Idi Amin Dada.

Promptly at 5 a.m. the soldiers moved off. The first column, on foot, made its way up a little-used Land Rover track through the swamps, waded across the Kagera River, and overwhelmed a company-sized Ugandan garrison near the village of Kyebe. Then, climbing aboard the garrison's trucks and Jeeps, it cut northwest to the town of Sanje. The second column, with a few vehicles of its own, easily swept through the small frontier post of Mutukula, and joined forces with the first at Sanje. Together, they raced northward to Masaka, 80 miles from the capital of Kampala.

Fifty miles to the west, a third column, its men dressed in civilian clothes, crossed the border in chartered buses. After a stiff fight at the border town of Kikagati, they headed on to Mbarara, where they stormed the garrison of Uganda's 1,000-man Simba Battalion and, aided by some dissidents who switched allegiances, succeeded in driving the loyalist troops out--but only for the moment.

The Ugandans, who had taken their weapons with them, quickly regrouped. Outnumbering the rebels by 5 to 1, they blasted them out of the garrison in less than an hour, reportedly killing most of the insurgents. The invaders in Masaka did not fare much better. By late afternoon, Amin's armor and air force (which also bombed the Tanzanian city of Bukoba on Lake Victoria, killing ten persons) had forced the militia to retreat to a position a few miles from the border. Thus, within less than 24 hours last week, the exiles' best hopes of ousting Amin had been effectively dashed.

The invasion in retrospect was both futile and foolhardy--in effect, an African Bay of Pigs. The pilot of an East African Airways DC-9, for example, was to have dropped a company of paracommandos into the northern Ugandan town of Gulu. Apparently he got lost during the night and was forced to land at the Kilimanjaro Airport. The plane was found the next morning, tires flat, fuel tank empty; the pilot and his troops had disappeared into the bush, unharmed but also unsuccessful. The rebels had also counted on large numbers of soldiers from Uganda's well-armed 12,000-man army joining in the rebellion. They were wrong.

The invasion threatened to touch off a bloodbath in Uganda. It could not only engulf the Asians, who have lived in fear since Amin ordered 50,000 of their number holding British citizenship to leave, but could also revive tribal warfare and turn into a protracted border war with Tanzania as well.

Even before the rebel attack, Amin had charged that "imperialist and Zionist" powers were trying to assassinate him; now his suspicion focused on foreigners within the country. Shortly after the invasion, 22 reporters (16 British, two French, two Swedish, a West German and an American, A.P. Correspondent Andrew Torchia) were arrested by police and military security forces, some of them not to be heard from again for several days. At the same time, the army set up roadblocks at major intersections and began arresting all Asians and foreigners caught without proper identification papers. The lucky ones were prisoners of the police. Uganda's police force, still professional despite the dismissal of most of its top officers, herded all its European prisoners (61 at one point) into a cell block in the Kampala central police station. There were no beds, only one chair and four toilets. The prisoners, including a retired British diplomat, his crippled wife, and a family with two small children, had to sleep on the concrete floor, which was sticky with stale urine.

Yet the police treated them correctly and even politely. Food was served on silver trays from a nearby hotel. Smokers were supplied with cigarettes. According to French Television Correspondent Jean-Loup Demigneux, who spent 24 hours in the "black hole of Kampala," as reporters came to call it, the most terrifying moment was at 3 a.m., when four of Amin's soldiers marched in. Slightly drunk and obviously hostile, each of the four carried a pistol in one hand and a submachine gun in the other. They beat up a police guard who tried to stop them, but their only apparent mission was to wake up the prisoners and harass them. They stayed only a few minutes, but when they left, one shouted back, "You're lucky to be here and not with us."

Because the police had formally registered the prisoners, foreign embassies were able to locate their citizens (at week's end, all Americans and Britons had been released). Less fortunate were those who were taken to the Makindye military prison, a collection of one-story buildings behind a double fence of barbed wire four miles outside Kampala, where they were held incommunicado and witnessed scenes of almost casual brutality. A.P. Correspondent Torchia was missing for three days before the American embassy was able to locate him. After his release, he described how Ugandan soldiers pinned a man on the ground while a woman beat him with a rawhide whip until the blood ran. "The beating went on for minutes--forever, it seemed--before the crowd dispersed and the screaming stopped," he wrote. "None of us knew who the woman was or what the whipping was about."

The hostilities claimed the life of one American: Peace Corps Volunteer Louis Morton, 23, a schoolteacher from Houston, who had been driving with another Peace Corpsman, Robert Freed, along the road between Mbarara and Masaka on a game-spotting tour of nearby Queen Elizabeth National Park. They were unaware of the fighting until they ran into an army roadblock. According to Freed, the troops waved them through and then fired at them. Morton was killed instantly. Freed was taken prisoner but eventually set free.

As a result of the incidents, the U.S. embassy in Kampala last week urged the 1,000 American citizens resident in the country to leave. The Peace Corps, which has 70 volunteers and 48 of their dependents in Uganda, ordered the dependents out and started bringing corpsmen working in the countryside into Kampala for safety. The British had even more reason to be concerned about their nationals. Amin has told his forces to "mark and watch" all Britons, and repeated his charges that a British invasion is imminent. Yet Whitehall fears that a mass evacuation of the 7,000 white Britons in Uganda might be interpreted as a prelude to just that.

Stripped. Almost forgotten in the wild train of events were Uganda's Asians, whose lives at this point are perhaps most vulnerable of all. Amin has said that the 50,000 expelled must be out by Nov. 7 -- an impossible deadline -- or they will be rounded up and put in detention camps. Even if the original schedule of 16 charter flights a week could be maintained, it would take four months to complete the airlift. As it is, Uganda still has not given landing clearance to the consortium of British airlines that by earlier agreement was to share half of the charters with East African Airways.

Even as the invasion was being mounted last week, the first airlift, carrying 193 passengers, flew into London. Its passengers told of being stripped of their jewelry and searched at gunpoint by Ugandan soldiers on the way to the airport. Another group, which embarked by train for India via Kenya, was also mistreated. The incidents ap parently have made others too fright ened to leave. Two other flights had to be canceled because only a few people showed up to take them.

For many of the Asians, it is likely to be only the beginning of a bleak future -- wherever they go. In London, the Monday Club, a right-wing Tory group, declared in a statement that "the immigrants of incompatible races and cultures should never have come here in the first place." In response, Prime Min ister Edward Heath told Britons last week that they could not run away from the nation's obligations. "The reputation of Britain for good faith and humanity should be observed," he said, adding that Britain's obligation to the East African Asians has its roots in "imperial history." It was a welcome note of sanity -- and honesty.

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