Coup or Con Job?

Whether by accident or design, Uganda's President-for-Life Idi Amin Dada seems bent on making his country the world's most unfathomable nation. At the center of the puzzle, as always, are the maneuvers of "Big Daddy" himself. Last week he managed to be even more mysterious than usual. For four days, Amin simply disappeared from view. By the time he resurfaced, by way of reassuring announcements on Radio Uganda, all sorts of stories had floated that there had been an unsuccessful attempt on his life and a subsequent bloodbath by his dread State Research Bureau.

The rumors began when Radio Uganda announced that Amin would attend a celebration in the country's northwestern region; no further mention of the festivities was made in following days. The anti-Amin Kenya press reported that Amin had been ambushed by an assassination squad somewhere between Kampala and Entebbe. According to one Nairobi paper, the attempted coup was engineered by a Ugandan army major, but Amin had been tipped off and escaped with minor wounds. The alleged coup leaders were then said to have fled to Kenya.

Goon Squads. There was an amoeboid explosion of rumor after 13 Ugandan military officers and civil servants sought asylum in Kenya, claiming that their lives were threatened by Amin's security forces. Soon reports had "hundreds" of innocent Ugandan refugees fleeing the murderous wrath of Big Daddy's goon squads--a not uncommon occurrence in Uganda. Nairobi's Daily-Nation reported that Amin was being treated for his wounds in "a friendly country, probably Libya."

Was Uganda in turmoil? There was reason for skepticism. Only two weeks earlier, after all, Big Daddy had merrily hoaxed 33 national representatives at the Commonwealth Conference in London. First it was announced that he was flying in to a meeting to which he had been expressly disinvited by Prime Minister James Callaghan. Then came stories that his plane was circling Europe in search of a proper landing spot. Finally the truth, he had never left Uganda at all. Amin, apparently, is still in a joking mood. After rumors built up for two days, a New York radio reporter managed to reach him by telephone. Then Radio Uganda announced that Amin was "very much alive and very fit" and had been enjoying a belated honeymoon with his fifth wife, Sarah, a former paratrooper in the Ugandan army. Nothing was said of an unsuccessful coup.

Even discounting the anti-Amin bias of the Kenyan press, Western diplomats in Africa were inclined to believe that there had been an attempt on his life. They also thought it probable that some form of vengeful slaughter was going on inside the country. Under Amin, after all, random killing has become a ghoulish national pastime.

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