NOR SHOULD WE FORGET PRESIDENT Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. While his tally of killings are nowhere near those of el-Bashir – who has all-but obliterated an entire people – Mugabe has managed to lay waste to a country on an almost apocalyptic scale.
Sadly, much of what has taken place at the hands of these African vulgarians was – and still is – racially motivated. In the Sudan, for a long time, it was black people who were being massacred, by a staunchly fundamentalist Islamic government. Mugabe’s campaign, by contrast, was initially aimed at getting rid of white people living in Zimbabwe, though in the process he ended up persecuting millions of his own black subjects, many of whom fled.
The pivot of Amin’s initial fervour centred on his bid to expel Uganda’s Asian community, the majority of whom, in a gesture of British magnanimity, moved to the United Kingdom. Brutal dictator that he was, he then turned on his own black people.
When this oppressor eventually died in Saudi Arabia, African journalist Makau Mutua went on record as stating that Idi Amin had ravaged Uganda as thoroughly as any leader in modern history has ravaged any country and that he almost single-handedly turned a nation’s prosperity into economic ruin plunging a peaceful society into a nightmare of chaos and terror. Mutua goes on to tell us that while ruling by decree, Amin was one of the first post-colonial dictators in Africa to unleash mass killings as a response to internal opposition and that during his eight years as president, beginning in 1971, his government was responsible for the deaths of as many as half-a-million of his countrymen. Another 100,000 fled into exile while thousands languished in prisons and underground torture chambers. Before Amin, Mutua tells us, Uganda’s economy was regarded as one of the healthiest in East Africa. Like Zimbabwe today, it was soon in utter ruin.
There is no question that Amin, who in 1951 won the Ugandan heavyweight boxing championship while serving as an NCO in the then still British-dominated East African Army, was certifiably mad. It was also one of the reasons why those of us who reported from Uganda at the time believed he was suffering from an advanced form of syphilis. What made his rise to the top that much more astonishing was that he would never have achieved power had his British mentors, of all people, not encouraged him to oust his equally demented predecessor, Milton Obote.
That equally contemptible ogre, it should be noted, ended his years in exile in Zimbabwe and enjoyed both the protection and the patronage of his host, Robert Mugabe. It says much that Westminster was also responsible for bringing Robert Mugabe to power.
Of all Africa’s dictators, Idi Amin was arguably the most unhinged. While in power, he awarded himself the Victoria Cross and announced that he was adding to his list of titles – which included ‘Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea’ – that of ‘Conqueror of the British Empire’.
Perhaps then, and not altogether surprisingly, it was Amin the buffoon, not Amin the butcher, who first caught the world’s attention. He raced around Kampala in a red sports car, watched Tom and Jerry cartoons, plunged into swimming pools in full military uniform during diplomatic functions and boasted that he had fathered 35 children.
A cruel, ruthless man, Amin presented himself to the world as a ridiculously absurd figure. He volunteered himself as King of Scotland, so that the Scots, as he liked to say, ‘could be free of British rule’ – a theme which resulted in a brilliant film that went on to win an Oscar. Then he would send telegrams to the Queen of England, insulting and taunting her and he once challenged the President of Tanzania to a boxing match.
When the capital, Kampala, fell on 10 April 1979, Amin, along with his wives, mistresses and a very substantial quota of children, had already boarded a plane for Libya. From there the entourage was quickly dispatched to Saudi Arabia. Muammar Gadaffi, another African delinquent very much in the spotlight, really did not need Amin’s presence to tarnish further his dubious reputation.