Mystery of mass murder and rape in the Kagera Salient

Thirty years ago, Idi Amin's military government was overthrown by a combined force of the Tanzanian army and a motley of armed Uganda groups exiled in Kenya and Tanzania during the 1970s. It ended the eight-year rule of the man who has gone down in history as one of the most brutal leader in post colonial Africa. In this second part of our series on the fall of Idi Amin, Timothy Kalyegira reveals new information on the 1979 war, which started 30 years ago
yesterday, that challenges the hitherto generally accepted version of events:-

The Uganda Airforce bombed Bukoba town and Kyaka village on October 28 and 29, 1978. Idi Amin sent 3,000 Uganda Army troops into the Kagera Salient and on October 31, 1978, he announced that Uganda had annexed the territory.

On November 2, 1978, Tanzania announced that it was going to counterattack Uganda in a full-scale military operation.
How Amin expected the annexation to be recognised by the international community is not clear.

In any case, pressure from several African governments and Uganda’s main arms supplier, the Soviet Union, finally persuaded Amin to announce the withdrawal of the Uganda Army on November 17.

In November, Amin, dressed in dark blue jeans and a matching jacket, called on Ugandans to turn out in large numbers at the Botanical Gardens in Entebbe to donate reserve blood for the Uganda Army.

Thousands turned up and made their donation, with Amin himself jovially announcing in English that “I have donated two bottle [sic] of blood.”

Maj. Gen. David Msuguri, the commander of the 20th Division of the Tanzanian army, was selected to head the large assault on Uganda by the Tanzanian army. 45,000 Tanzanian troops were mobilised for the war with Uganda.

What particularly stiffened the Tanzanian resolve were reports that Ugandan troops had engaged in the most appalling looting and destruction of Kagera.

The Kagera Sugar Mill and the Mishenyi cattle ranch were looted. More ominously, bodies of civilians were found mutilated and in a number of instances, many of the corpses did not have heads.

This latter development, insignificant at the time, bears some examination. It had never been the style of the 1970s Uganda Army to mutilate bodies during conflict.

When Brig. Isaac Maliyamungu arrived in Kagera in his Mercedes accompanied by a girlfriend, he shed tears at the devastation that he saw in Kagera. That, he insisted, could not have been the work of the Uganda Army he knew.

It is worth noting that all through the 1979 war, the Uganda Army made a point of evacuating civilians from the battle fronts.

Every time a battle or counter-attack was being planned, units of the Uganda Army were ordered to go to places like Mutukula, Kyotera, Masaka, and Mpigi to evacuate the civilian population.

This is part of the reason that, to this day, there are almost no reports of massive civilian deaths. No records, no books published of the 1979 war speak of civilian casualties at the hands of the Uganda Army.

All books and records, when they speak of civilian deaths, speak of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Ugandans at the hands of Amin’s state security service before the start of the war.