Understanding Amin 40 years after the coup

The month of February marks 41 years since president Idi Amin took power after overthrowing Milton Obote in a military coup. Timothy Kalyegira looks back at the man largely portrayed as a tyrant by the West:-

Working in conjunction with the British in planning to bring Amin to power were Amin’s good friends in the late 1960s: the Israelis. The Israeli military attaché in Kampala, Col. Baruch Bar-Lev, a personal friend of Amin, helped prepare the groundwork for the coup in Kampala. Then an Israeli army general, Maj. Gen. Yitzhak Hofi, flew to Kampala early in January 1971 to coordinate the coup while another Israeli general was stationed in Nairobi to coordinate the coup from there. Amin was sworn-in as Military Head of State on February 2, 1971. His first state visit after taking power was in July 1971, not surprisingly to Britain where he was accompanied by his wife, First Lady Mariam Kibedi Amin.

The British press fell over itself to heap praises on him. There had never been and might never be a Ugandan leader to come to power and be greeted with such excitement by his own people and by the West, as Amin.
However, Amin wanted to be the president of Ugandans and for Ugandans. In August 1972, he revived the 1969 proposals by the UPC government and the governments of Kenya and Tanzania to expel non-citizen Asians.

In March 1972, he suddenly cut off diplomatic relations with Israel and formed new alliances with the Arab world. British and American companies were re-nationalised and British and American residents asked to leave the country. Ugandans, including former cabinet ministers in the recently ousted Obote government, were given first right to the properties left behind by the departing Asians.

In one single year, 1972, Amin by trying to be true to his own people - the Ugandans, by trying to give them economic advantages, by formulating a foreign policy that stood up for true African independence, undid all the goodwill he had enjoyed in the West and Israel.

From that point onward, it was a downhill image and propaganda slide for him. Books started to appear in western capitals accusing Amin of murders that were not murders, of abductions that were not ordered by him or his henchmen, of horrors that we now know were cooked up to tarnish him. Amin, in short, became a Robert Mugabe.

Amin vs Museveni
This, then, is the true perspective on the Amin legacy. Amin was the inverse of Museveni. You come to power and appease all and every British and American interest in Uganda and you will last 25 years in power even if all government schools, hospitals, roads, parastatal companies collapse and your administration is dominated by repression and misrule.

As Amin, you attempt to stock all government hospitals with drugs, all government schools with books and pencils, all civil servants in all parts of the country are paid by the 25th of the month but you drastically cut off British and American interests and control in Uganda, and suddenly you will be portrayed as the Hitler of Africa forever.