Blood and Circuses: The Uganda-Tanzania War

For Bill Fawcett’s How to Lose a War

He was a clown with a difference—when he wasn’t busy amusing the press, he killed some 300,000 of his own people and invaded a neighboring country. Even the war had aspects of a circus.

He was Idi Amin, of course. As a young man he had enlisted in the Kenyan army, and had actually become its heavyweight boxing champion. When he returned to his native Uganda, he rose rapidly in the military, and when he could rise no higher, he overthrew Dr. Milton Obote, who was no Lincoln-in-the-making, and became President in 1971.

Obote fled next door to Tanzania, where the President of that nation, Julius Nyerere, gave him sanctuary—and when Amin decided it was easier to kill off his political opposition than win them over to his side with compelling arguments, Nyerere also offered sanctuary to some 20,000 Ugandans who were fleeing for their lives.

All this took place during the first two years of Amin’s reign.

Amin, for reasons a lot of us have yet to comprehend, was the darling of the Western press—at least for awhile. But in bits and pieces, Uganda’s darker secrets began coming out. He turned government buildings into mass torture chambers. He began committing genocide on any Ugandans who were not from his own tribe. He erected a statue of Adolf Hitler in the middle of the capital city of Kampala, declaring the Fuehrer to be his hero. Though Uganda’s economy was pretty much run by, and dependant upon, Indians, Amin kicked them all out of the country. Then, when the economy tanked and inflation skyrocketed, he invited them back—only to kick them out (and appropriate their property and their businesses) a second time. He couldn’t afford to feed his army, so he allowed them to poach their meals in the game parks. It’s said he even practiced cannibalism on his own infant (or unborn; the accounts differ) son.

He was just a real sweetie.

It took him seven years to bankrupt the country, kill off a sizeable portion of its population, get rid of every Indian, get rid of every technocrat, and go a few billion dollars into debt. Then, just to be on the safe side, he converted to Islam in case he ever had to leave in a hurry; according to the tenets of the religion, no other Moslem could turn him away or fail to offer him sanctuary.

As you may have guessed, not every Ugandan was thrilled with the situation. In 1978, the Malire Mechanized Regiment mutinied, and others followed suit. Then the crack Simba Battalion joined them. They actually mounted an attack on the Presidential lodge in Kampala, but Amin escaped by helicopter.

Amin then sent those troops that were still loyal to him after the mutineers. Many mutineers were killed; the survivors fled across the border into Tanzania, where Julius Nyerere was still providing sanctuary for Milton Obote and 20,000 others.

Amin’s subjects were getting restless as the decade drew to a close. It was okay to kill a few rivals, but Big Daddy (the Western press’s nickname for him) had carried things too far. At the rate he was going, pretty soon he’d be the only Ugandan left alive. They also weren’t thrilled with the fact that it now took twenty million Ugandan shillings to purchase what you could buy with fifteen shillings before Amin took over. Streets, buildings, everything was in disrepair, though Amin lived in obscene luxury.

It has become traditional that no African leader ever criticizes another. It makes sense: most of them are corrupt dictators who attained their offices through murder, revolution or rigged elections, and if Dictator A criticizes Dictator B, why, he leaves himself open to similar criticism, and honest criticism is not what any African dictator wants.

There were only two leaders in all of Africa who constantly spoke out against Amin, and not surprisingly, they were the two who weren’t dictators. One was Sir Seretse Khama of Botswana, who was secure in his British knighthood and the fact that he was almost two thousand miles from Uganda. The other was Julius Nyerere, known to his people as Mwalimu—“the teacher”—and he was Amin’s next-door neighbor.

So when Amin concluded that the Simba Battalion and the others might start giving his troops and his citizenry too many bothersome ideas about freedom, or at least about replacing him with another dictator, he decided to divert attention by following the few escapees of the rebellion into Tanzania.

That began one of the most futile wars ever waged on the African continent.

Now, on Amin’s behalf, there were extenuating circumstances: he was barely literate, and had apprenticed as a boxer, a cannibal, and a genocidal maniac. Along the way, he had totally overlooked his education as a field general.

The first thing he did was annex seven hundred square miles of an area known as the Kagera Salient. The second thing he did was blow up the only bridge across the Kagera River, which certainly slowed any advance Nyerere’s army might make, but didn’t do a lot for any Ugandan troops who were forced to retreat.

And forced to retreat they were. Nyerere was able to put together a 40,000-man army on the spot: soldiers, policemen, national service, whatever. Within a month the non-dictator had rallied enough of his countrymen to expand the army to 100,000.

Amin took one look at what was facing him across the border, realized his army had never been tested in combat—killing children, old women, and unarmed men didn’t really count—and decided he needed some help. So he contacted fellow Islamic dictator Muammar Qadhafi of Libya, who sent a couple of thousand well-trained heavily-armed troops.

Should have made a difference, right?

Well, the Libyan troops get on the front lines, ready to duke it out with the Tanzanians, and what does Amin’s army do?

As the Libyans move south to face Nyerere’s soldiers, Amin’s army starts looting and raping its way north, stealing the Libyans trucks to hold all their plunder. In the process, they managed to spread the HIV virus, which was previously confined to southwest Uganda, throughout the whole country.

Nyerere’s army was supported by 20,000 Ugandan exiles, and picked up more every day as they defeated the small handful of Libyans and marched toward Kampala. Suddenly there were other armies as well. There was one commanded by General Tito Okello, who would followed Amin and the restored Obote as Uganda’s third consecutive incompetent dictator. And there was Yoweri Museveni, Uganda’s president for the past couple of decades, who eventually threw Okello out of office by leading what was literally a children’s army, the adults all having been slaughtered during the previous three administrations.

But that was in the future. Amin took a look at the situation, and saw the handwriting on the wall: his own retreating army was doing more damage to Uganda that the conquering army would do, Qadhafi had been burned once and wasn’t about to send any more troops, and no other dictator would come to his aid. What was he to do? How was he to save his ass?

Finally he came up with a solution that could have occurred to no one else.

He called a press conference. You probably wouldn’t believe it if I didn’t give you an exact quote:

“I am keeping fit so that I can challenge President Nyerere in the boxing ring and fight it out there, rather than having the soldiers lose their lives on the field of battle.” He suggested that Mohammed Ali would be the perfect referee, and since he, Amin, was a former boxing champ and outweighed the 57-year-old Nyerere by at least one hundred pounds, he would fight with one arm tied behind his back and his legs shackled with weights.

(I feel compelled to tell you that I am not making this up.)

The press loved it. No one took it seriously, least of all Nyerere. After all, he was a small, thin man with no athletic experience—and more to the point, it wasn’t his soldiers that were dying.

His men marched on Kampala in April of 1979 and Amin fled to Libya. Ever the opportunist, he began plotting to overthrow Qadhafi, who gently urged him to find another sanctuary or die, and he wound up his life in exile at a luxurious estate in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia.

He took one brief vacation from Arabia during his later years. Convinced that his people would welcome him back after the equally bloody and inept reigns of Obote and Okello, he got as far as the Ugandan border, dead certain that he would be made President again by acclamation. President Museveni refused to allow him to cross the border, no one came to his defense, and, totally disillusioned, he went back to live out his life in Arabia.

What can an historian learn about the Uganda-Tanzania War?

Uganda is a wonderful, beautiful country. It’s said that if you spit a peach pit out of the window of your car and come back a month later, there will be a peach tree growing there. Most of the hippos, elephants, buffalo, and gazelles have come back from the army’s butchery, and so, finally, have the people—no thanks to Big Daddy. History still hasn’t decided if he was Africa’s bloodiest madman or the continent’s most idiotic clown.

Me, I vote for both.