A Big Brother Army

Uganda's military dictator, General Idi ("BigDaddy") Amin Dada, had carefully arranged that each of the twelve men he wanted to execute should be shot in his own home town. The reason: so that "everyone, including his parents, can see." Last week, in seven separate ceremonies before crowds of coerced and sullen spectators, alleged guerrillas were dragged from police Land Rovers, tied to trees or stakes in stadiums, city parks or mere clearings and then shot to death with bursts of automatic rifle fire. At Mbale, where 3,000 people showed up for the event, an army captain and a 17-year-old schoolboy --whose only crime seemed to be eye-witnessing the shooting of a soldier --were stripped naked and covered with white cloth to make their bodies easier targets in the driving rain.

The public executions, Uganda's first in nearly 50 years, were clearly intended as a warning to all of Big Daddy's enemies, guerrilla or otherwise. But they were also a way of distracting attention from the growing lawlessness of his army, which has murdered hundreds, perhaps thousands, of government officials, civil servants and other influential Ugandans in recent months. Encouraged by Amin, the army has become a collective "big brother" that metes out justice and injustice without reference to civil courts, explains government policy and allocates the shops and other businesses that the government expropriated from the expelled Asians last fall.

Many of the stores have been given to utter incompetents--particularly to Amin's favored fellow Moslems--with the result that Uganda is suffering from a shortage of staples and skyrocketing prices. Soldiers make a practice of seizing private cars if drivers fail to produce operators' licenses on the spot. In more than one case, drivers have been arrested, locked in the trunk of their cars and never seen again.

As Uganda's economic situation deteriorates, Big Daddy is relying more and more on the backing of the army, which is riddled with religious and tribal jealousies. In an effort to strengthen his hand, Amin has been purging the officer corps of its Langi and Acholi tribesmen, who are mostly Christian. In their place, he has promoted hundreds of Moslem troops, including illiterates from his own tiny Kakwa tribe, and reportedly placed them in charge of newly recruited mercenaries from nearby Sudan and Zaire. In consequence, two-thirds of the army's officers are now Moslem, even though Moslems account for only 500,000 of Uganda's 10 million people. (Of the remainder, 5,000,000 are Christians and the rest pagan.)

Now that the Asians are gone, Amin appears to be in need of a new scapegoat for his country's troubles. The latest victims of his uncertain wrath are blacks from neighboring Kenya. In the past month, several Kenyans who held executive positions in Uganda have disappeared or been found murdered. When other Kenyans in Uganda began to flee in terror, Amin accused them, naturally, of being guerrillas and hinted that he might shut off the electricity that Uganda supplies to Kenya--25% of its total power. His freewheeling troops, meanwhile, crossed the Kenya border and rustled 4,000 cattle from terrified Turkana tribesmen.

Amin's Dream. Amin also accused Kenya's big Luo tribe, many of whose members live in Uganda, of plotting against his government, and his soldiers marched several hundred Luos out of Uganda at gunpoint. That was a mistake. After four Kenya-based unions threatened a total cutoff of Uganda's rail, road, air and postal communications, which pass through Kenya to the outside world, Big Daddy suddenly announced that the attack on the Luos was a "misunderstanding."

What happens next under an unstable dictator and a lawless army is anybody's guess, but it is virtually certain that violence in Uganda will continue. "If anything happens to me, get your guns," Amin warned his soldiers last week as he told them once again of a 20-year-old dream in which he claims to have learned (but has kept secret) the circumstances of his own death. "Your brother, your sister, your father, your mother is your gun."

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