Who killed Acholi, Langi soldiers ?

As the government-owned newspaper The New Vision reported on November 12, 1990, “Among evidence first heard, was the massacre of 417 people said to have been killed by Idi Amin and Joseph Lagu, leader of the then Anyanya fighting group from Sudan. Narrating the story, Abdon Okumu, a primary school teacher in Lokung, Kitgum said the victims were massacred in April 1971 at a place known as Ogwech corner.

He told the commission that these people were captives who had tried to go into a military training camp with an intention of coming back to topple Amin’s government. But that they were captured on their way back by Lagu’s men who brought them back and subsequently massacred them all.”
We have thus accounted for the majority of the Acholi and Langi allegedly massacred by Amin.

Then there is a disturbing story I first heard in 2007 from a woman from western Uganda who knows both the Amin and the first Obote governments well. She says Acholi and Langi airforce pilots and technicians who had been abroad for training at the time of the coup returned to Uganda, were attacked by Bantu-speaking airforce officers.

Amin’s former senior aide, Major Bob Astles, in an email to me on November 14, 2007, confirmed the harassing and killing of the Acholi and Langi pilots and technicians by their Bantu colleagues: “Most of these young men were returned by Russia.

Certainly one large group of mainly air force were lined up at the Old Entebbe airport when leaving the aircraft from Russia and then badly beaten up on the command of a Regimental Sergeant Major (RSM ). Amin was in England at the time. Certainly at the time Bantu were killing Nilotics.”

In the next part, we examine the role of another armed exile group called FRONASA in the anti-Amin struggle.