Big Daddy's Doleful Legacy

New revelations about the ravages of his regime

Though Kampala, Uganda's capital, had fallen to a combined Tanzanian- Ugandan force two weeks ago, the main political prize continued to elude the new provisional government of President Yusufu Lule. Former President-for-Life Idi Amin Dada was still at large. He had been variously reported to have fled to Zaire, the Sudan or Iraq, as well as to several points around his own country. At week's end he was said to have been spotted in a village near the eastern Ugandan town of Mbale, traveling in a Land Rover full of radio equipment and accompanied by five Libyan bodyguards.

If the beefy ex-dictator's exact location was uncertain, the second most wanted figure in Big Daddy's reign of terror turned up fairly quickly: Robert Astles, a white, British-born onetime road-construction foreman who advised Amin on the uses of repression as well as on his public relations buffoonery. Kenyan police arrested Astles after he had crossed Lake Victoria by speedboat from Uganda. Astles once was close to Milton Obote, whom Amin ousted as President in 1971; in time he turned adviser to Amin and soon became a main architect of the dreaded State Research Bureau (SRB), the Gestapo-like organization that was responsible for the deaths of thousands of Ugandans murdered during Amin's rule.

The principal military concern of the new government was to gain control of the most important road in Uganda, the 120-mile economic lifeline from Kampala to the Kenyan border. Carrying radios, tape recorders and assorted other loot that came their way with the fall of the Ugandan capital, 2,500 Tanzanian soldiers set off for the frontier at a leisurely pace in a caravan of twelve Land Rovers, three tanks, an armored personnel carrier and a Jeep with a mounted recoilless rifle. A second force, which literally moved at a walk because of a shortage of motor transport, headed north to take control of the Israeli-built airfield at Nakasongola, 66 miles from Kampala. One group of soldiers managed to move quickly, for its assignment was to occupy key points in Jinja, an industrial town east of Kampala, and then seize the Owen Falls dam, Uganda's only source of electric power.

The fighting was sporadic and sometimes comical. One Tanzanian soldier told of his unit being attacked by a speeding black Mercedes filled with Ugandan troops loyal to Amin who fired at full tilt out the windows. "We knew they were serious," the Tanzanian said, "because they were losing all that air conditioning."

The advancing Tanzanians were trying to overtake Amin's retreating soldiers and then leave them to villagers, who would attack them with sticks and machetes. In turn, Amin's panicked forces carried out reprisal massacres of civilians in several towns.

Back in Kampala, whose downtown area was badly torn up in the spree of looting that followed Big Daddy's departure, life returned to a semblance of normality. Electric power and water were restored. The first issue of a new paper, the Uganda Times, was published, and government employees began going back to their desks. One of the new government's first jobs: collecting and burying the hundreds of bodies that littered the streets. Pledged to restore democratic freedoms, the provisional government announced that voting for local officials in the Kampala area would begin almost immediately--the first free elections held in Uganda in eight years.

While the new regime struggled to take hold, the grim details of just how badly one of Africa's relatively prosperous countries had fared under Amin's chaotic rule began to appear. The Ugandan economy had all but collapsed. Factories were closed, agricultural production had virtually stopped, and there was no hard currency to buy such essential imports as fuel.

According to George Athmani, a free-lance journalist whose uncle was a Cabinet minister under Obote (and later was murdered by Amin), the plunder of Uganda's economy was exemplified when Amin secretly exported the entire sugar crop to Libya in 1975; payment in foreign currency was made through a hotel Amin owned in Tripoli.

The economy began to get in serious trouble when Amin introduced his Mafuta Mingi (Wealth for Everyone) program. The implication was that there would be enough for all ordinary Ugandans once the Asian merchants who then dominated the economy were thrown out of the country. Amin subsequently expelled nearly all the 71,000 Asians then living in Uganda. In one typical case, says Athmani, a semiliterate Nubian told Amin that he wanted the Madhvani matchbox factory in Jinja. Beholden to the Nubians for support, Amin called the owner of the factory and said that he wanted to see him and his executives in one hour. When they arrived, Amin simply told them that they were out and the Nubians were in.

Still, the most horrifying evidence of Amin's dictatorship is not economic ruin, but the brutal slaughter of his countrymen. Perhaps as many as 300,000 were shot, clubbed, bayoneted, hanged or strangled by Amin's secret police. It will clearly take years for Uganda to emerge from its dual nightmare of bloody terror and economic collapse.

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