Who was still killing and robbing Ugandans after Amin fell?

They puzzled over the rampant murders. Clearly, this was politically motivated. That the killings, car-jackings, and armed robberies were being staged to create an atmosphere of anarchy in Uganda, there was no doubt.

But who could be behind it and what did they hope to gain? The one man who had all the answers to these puzzling questions of the violence and murders now taking place in Uganda on a daily basis, was none other than the ousted president Idi Amin.

Throughout his rule, Amin kept insisting that he was not killing Ugandans, but having been branded a mass murderer himself, nobody believed him and Ugandans angrily thought he was trying to put the blame on somebody else.

In that final broadcast on Radio Uganda on April 10, 1979 before going into exile, Amin pleaded with Ugandans to take his word for it that he was an innocent man and that he had set out to make Ugandans a happy, prosperous, and independent people, not to murder the very people who had shown him such warm support at the time of his coup in January 1971.

Ugandans, as naïve in 1979 as they still are in 2009, had welcomed the liberators from Tanzania believing that they were about to enter a period of peace and prosperity.

Yet here they were with bodies on the streets of Kampala every morning, daily funerals, and the sound of gunfire night after night and nobody could explain why exactly what had been going on under Amin, in the same way, had continued well into the UNLF governments of Lule and Binaisa.

There were very few people in 1979 with the presence of mind to ask a simple but profoundly disturbing question: could the people now gunning down citizens have been the same people who, all along, were murdering and kidnapping people in the Amin days?

This leads us to the questions I have been asking since 2007 while challenging Ugandans to compile a list of only 600 names of Amin’s victims.