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Uganda
0 üyeBy the 1970’s, 30,000 of Uganda’s Asians had British passports, but the other 20,000 were legally Ugandans. At the time of Amin's original announcement, nobody thought that he intended to expel both Ugandan Asians and British Asians. But it soon became clear that he did not intend to make a distinction between passports. He wanted the Asians’ property to hand over to his troops. It was a brutal and thoroughly racist decision, and one that was to deal the Ugandan economy a terrible blow.
The Asians were sent out of the country with nothing except a hundred-dollar personal allowance. A stop was put on their bank accounts. Amin did not care where the Asians went as long as they went, and he stuck to his deadline—November 8, 1972—with a countdown that proceeded remorselessly day by day on the radio. He announced that any Asians remaining after the deadline would be sent to detention camps. Informed that some Asians were attempting to avoid deportation by blacking their faces with shoe polish, he issued a dire warning to anyone found guilty of such practices. Understandably, all the Asians made every effort to move out of the country.
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The only dismissal into which I could read a deeper motive was that of Professor Banage, Minister of Animal Resources, who had been a zoology professor at Makerere University. Amin was now painfully aware of his own reputation for stupidity, and to fire a professor would have given him considerable satisfaction.
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My tenure as Minister of Culture. 1972-74, was not particularly demanding Within my own ministry there were few problems, I had to ensure that football matches between army teams and civilians were properly controlled, otherwise the bitterness towards the army tended to erupt into open violence. One particular club, the Express (since banned by Amin), was nicknamed the "Club of the Dead" because so many of its officials and supporters had been murdered In any Army-Express match the army team had to win. If it lost, the crowd would be in for a beating for being "anti-army."
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Reign of Terror
To understand Amin’s reign of terror it is necessary to realize that he is not an ordinary political tyrant. He does more than murder those whom he considers his enemies: he also subjects them to barbarisms even after they are dead. These barbarisms are well attested. It is common knowledge in the Ugandan medical profession that many of the bodies dumped in hospital mortuaries are terribly mutilated, with livers, noses, lips, genitals or eyes missing. Amin's killers do this on hisspecific instructions; the mutilations follow a well-defined pattern. After a foreign service officer, Godfrey Kiggala, was shot in June 1974, his eyes were gouged out and his body was partially skinned before it was dumped in a wood outside Kampala. Medical reports on the deaths of the Minister of Works, Shabani Nkutu, in January 1973, and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Lt. Col. Ondoga, in March 1974, stated that the bodies had been cut open and that a number of internal organs had been tampered with.
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Reign of Terror
On several occasions when I was Minister of Health, Amin insisted on being left alone with his victims' bodies. Such was the case when the acting Chief of Staff, Brigadier Charles Arube, was murdered in March 1974. Amin came to see the body while it was in the mortuary of Mulago Hospital; he ordered the deputy medical superintendent. Dr. Kyewalabaye, to “wait outside"; Amin then went in by himself for two or three minutes.
There is of course no evidence for what he does in private, but it is universally believed in Uganda that he engages in blood rituals. Hardly any Ugandan doubts that Amin has, quite literally, a taste for blood.
Amin’s bizarre behavior has much to do with the peculiarities of his own aberrant personality. It also derives partly from his tribal background. Like many other warrior societies, the Kakwa, Amin’s tribe, are known to have practiced blood rituals on slain enemies. These involve cutting a piece of flesh from the body to subdue the dead man’s spirit or tasting the victim’s blood to render the spirit harmless—a spirit, it is believed, will not revenge itself on a body that has become in effect its own. Such rituals still exist among-the Kakwa. If they kill a man, it is their practice to insert a knife in the body and touch the bloody blade to their lips.
The ritual has been observed even in the upper ranks of the government. The driver of a Kakwa official, a senior member of the administration, told me that he was driving his boss through the Murchison Falls National Park in 1976, when they came upon some big-game poachers. The official, armed with a rifle and a knife (as is common for Amin’s men), shot two of the poachers. He then went up to the corpses, stabbed each one with his knife and licked the blade.
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Reign of Terror
I have reason to believe that Amin’s practices do not stop at tasting blood: on several occasions he has boasted to me and others that he has eaten human flesh. One day, in August 1975, he was talking to some senior officials about a trip to Zaire, and said that he had been served monkey meat there. Seeing that his audience was rather shocked by this (eating monkey meat is unacceptable to Ugandans), and clearly deciding to dramatize the occasion further, he added, “I have also eaten human meat.” I heard the others catch their breath in horror. We all looked at each other, bewildered, uncertain how to react. A silence fell. Realizing he had gone too far, he went on to say that eating human flesh is not uncommon
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