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*Thirty
years ago, Idi Amin announced
the expulsion of 80,000 Ugandan
Asians. Trevor Grundy
remembers those fevered days and
explains how a better
understanding of the
erratic dictator's flawed
character might have prevented
[incomplete text at source]
The Daily Telegraph, August 2,
2002
During the early hours of
Saturday August 5, 1972, General
Idi Amin, Life President of
Uganda, Conqueror of the British
Empire and the Last King of
Scotland, had a dream. Still in
his pajamas, the six-foot
three-inch former British Army
sergeant called some of his
senior military advisers into
the State House in
Kampala
and told them that God had
ordered him to expel the
Indian/Asian community.
That morning in
Nairobi,
I and other editors of the
tabloid newspaper The Nation
read the first news agency
reports describing how The
Almighty had also ordered Amin
to take over Asian-owned hotels,
mills, breweries, sugar
refineries and cotton factories.
In Amin's dream, God told the
general to nationalize all of
the houses and flats owned by
Uganda's
80,000-strong Indian community,
made up of Hindis, Muslims and
members of the Aga Khan's small
but wealthy sect, the Ismailis.
The Ugandan Life President gave
non-citizens just 90 days to
leave the country.
That same day, 18 leaders of the
Indian community - wealthy,
usually optimistic men - were
summoned into Amin's
awe-inspiring presence. They
shook their heads in disbelief
when they heard what he had to
say.
They had all "milked the Ugandan
cow without feeding it", and had
ripped off the economy by
sending millions of Ugandan
shillings to relatives in
Britain.
They should make plans to get
all the members of their
universally detested community
out of the country by November
9.
"If you don't go by then," Amin
told them, "I will make you feel
as if you are sitting on fire."
In Nairobi,
the mood among Kenya's much larger and even more
powerful Indian community was of
good-humored incredulity.
Weren't Ugandan Asians Idi
Amin's best friends? He had said
so dozens of times since
overthrowing the quasi-Marxist
President Milton Obote the year
before. In January 1971, Ugandan
Asians had joined hands with
blacks and whites and danced in
the streets of
Kampala
when they heard that the
"Redeemer" Amin had ended the
corrupt and always menacing rule
of Obote.
The day after Amin's thunderbolt
announcement, I joined a close
Ismaili friend, who worked as an
accountant at The Nation, a
paper owned by the Aga Khan, for
a family picnic. Mansoor told me
that Idi Amin was so erratic, he
would probably retract his
expulsion order within a few
days. "He has probably had a row
with the British High
Commissioner, Richard Slater,"
he suggested.
"He was probably rejected by
some Indian beauty and wants his
own back," said Mansoor's wife,
as we laughed and enjoyed our
picnic.
But Idi Amin was in no mood to
retract a single word. On August
9, he appeared on television to
tell the Asian community that
even Indians with British
passports must leave within 90
days. They included teachers,
doctors, nurses, business
leaders, lawyers, building
contractors and the men and
women who ran the twin pillars
of the
Ugandan economy - agriculture
and tourism.
"Asians," he said, in front of a
sea of beaming black Ugandans,
most of whom wore military
uniforms, "have kept themselves
to themselves and as a community
have refused to integrate with
Africans. Their main interest
has been to exploit the economy.
They have been milking our
economy for years and now I say
to them all - Go!"
At the start of October, I was
called in to see one of the Aga
Khan's advisers. He lived in
Paris
and helped oversee the spiritual
leader of the Ismaili
community's vast fortune. I was
told that, for the next few
weeks, he did not want to see
hostile features in The Nation
about Idi Amin. I should choose
"light, bright" articles and
avoid horror stories from Uganda.
Mansoor took me aside and said
that the Aga Khan had sent his
diplomats to Uganda,
where they had reached an
agreement with Amin. He would
receive an undisclosed sum if
the Ismailis left unharmed.
Diplomats working for the Aga
Khan had also made arrangements
with Pierre Trudeau, the
Canadian Prime Minister, to
"ease the way" for Ismailis.
Large sums were invested in that
country's embryonic tourism
industry.
It was at that time that the
first reports came through that
Idi Amin had started to turn
against his black countrymen.
Anyone who criticized his
anti-Asian policy was picked up,
murdered and fed to the
crocodiles.
No one was sure what Amin was up
to. Rumours flew around
Kampala,
Nairobi and Dar es Salaam that he was having trouble
holding together the army and
needed the wealth of departing
Asians to placate powerful
officers from tribes other than
his own.
In state-controlled newspapers
and on radio and television,
black Ugandans were being
whipped into a frenzy about the
way Asians had ruined the
economy. Almost overnight,
Kampala
became a city of queues - for
injections, for passports, for
the tiny amounts of currency
they were allowed to take with
them: less than pounds 50 per
family. In
addition, no family could take
more than two suitcases of
possessions.
Houses were abandoned, furniture
was left in derelict buildings.
The cost of secondhand cars
dropped dramatically, while the
price of un worked gold rose
from pounds 50 to pounds 125 an
ounce.
By September, with the November
deadline for expulsions
approaching, rumors swept Uganda, and reached Nairobi
and
Dar es Salaam.
The British would be the next to
go, it was said, then the
Americans and finally all
Europeans would be slung out of
Africa. Amin had set
a stunning racial precedent
which
Africa's poor and
downtrodden might applaud and
copy.
Terrified fathers heard stories
of Indian girls being raped by
out of control soldiers. In
their hundreds, they packed into
trains, known as Kampala
Specials, and fled to the East
African coastal cities of
Mombasa
and
Dar es Salaam.
By the end of October, as many
as 30 flights a week were
leaving Kampala for London.
On the way to the airport,
police put up roadblocks and
stole the few possessions that
Indian families were trying to
take out with them. More than
once, the giant Amin appeared at
the airport, his massively
decorated chest puffed up, to
laugh at the Indians who had
once seen him as their
protector. "This is wonderful,"
he told his cronies.
"Wonderful."
The Old Etonian British High
Commissioner wondered what to do
next. Unknown to him, and the
confused diplomats in
Kampala,
a young social psychologist,
Mallory Wober, could have
offered some sound advice.
Wober had entered
Uganda at
the end of the 1960s, under the
auspices of Edinburgh University,
to study the impact of rapid
industrialization on rural
Africans. But as the expulsion
crisis continued, he decided he
wanted to psychoanalyze Amin.
Courageously, Wober wrote an
article in the Ugandan magazine
Transition in which he suggested
that, despite his great bluster,
strength and determination, Amin
was a dependent type who
was desperate to be told what to
do by someone in authority. Good
at receiving orders, he craved
the approval of the Queen, of
organizations such as the
British Government and Army and,
above all, of hugely respected
new African leaders, Julius
Nyerere of
Tanzania
in particular.
Nyerere had won international
approval in 1967 after launching
his Fabian-style blueprint for
socialism, the widely acclaimed
but disastrously unpractical
Arusha Declaration, which
effectively stole all Asian
wealth in Tanzania.
Wober said that Amin thought he
would gain the respect of
Nyerere by kicking out the
Indians, but Nyerere continued
to
ridicule Amin, referring to him
privately - and later, in public
- as an idiot.
Throughout his dangerously
erratic military career, Amin
kept a picture of King George VI
wearing a kilt over his bed and
always referred to the English
king as "my old commander in
chief". Just before his downfall
in 1979 (at the hands of his old
idol Nyerere) he wrote to Prince
Charles and told him not to
marry Diana, because she came
from a different station in
life. "You will live to regret
this," he warned.
As well as analysing the
dictator's character, Wober
pointed out the part that Libya's Colonel
Gadaffi had played in this
African tragedy. Soon after Amin
came to power, he visited
Libya,
where Gadaffi was in the process
of booting his small but
economically powerful Italian
community out of the country.
Gadaffi urged Amin to do the
same to the
Israelis who lived and worked in
Uganda
and, upon his return home, to
declare Uganda a Muslim state, despite the
fact that only six per cent of
the population was Muslim.
"Idi Amin always needed someone
powerful to give him orders,"
said Wober. "First, it was the
British Army, then it was Milton
Obote. Next came Gadaffi and
finally, God.
"Amin both loved and hated
Britain
and used the Asians in
Uganda
as a weapon to try to punish
people for not taking sufficient
notice of him.
Perhaps if the Queen had invited him to Buckingham Palace for a cup of
tea and a sandwich in
August 1972, the whole East
African tragedy might never have
taken place." |