We did not intend to topple Amin, says Ex-Tanzanian soldier

Ben Msuya, during the interview at his home in Kunduchi, Dar-es-salaam, Tanzania recently. photo by Henry Lubega

What you need to know:

The Tanzania invasion. It is 37 years since the Uganda Army invaded and annexed the Kagera Salient in northern Tanzania and blew up the bridge connecting the salient to the rest of Tanzania. General (now retired) Ben Msuya, was in the southern part of the country and his barracks was hosting then President Julius Nyerere. This week in Witness, he tells Henry Lubega how Nyerere reacted to the invasion and the preparation to counter it and retake the territory from the invading Ugandans.

On the day of the invasion, I was serving in the southern part of Tanzania. We had known that president Idi Amin was not comfortable with Tanzania playing host to Ugandan exiles. The very day he attacked Kagera, we were with president Mwalimu Julius Nyerere in the barracks in the southern Zone. When he was told of the invasion, he did not believe it. At 8pm, it was confirmed on BBC Radio, and Nyerere decided to have dinner with the troops, during which he issued a response to the invasion. He said: ‘This man has done what he has done. What remains to be done is for us to go and flush him out of our country.”
At the time of the invasion, we did not have troops along the border between the two countries. All we had there was a small border post manned by the police, which was easily overrun by the invading Ugandan troops. We did not prepare for war with Uganda, all we did was to prepare to expel the invading forces from our territory. They had wreaked a lot of havoc in the Kagera region both to the people, their property and infrastructure.

Preparing for retaliation
Within two weeks, we had made the necessary mobilisation to have a sizeable force to take on the Ugandan forces inside Tanzania. While we were mobilising, the Ugandan troops blew up the bridge on River Kagera. This is the bridge that connects the northern parts of Tanzania to the rest of the country. They blew up the bridge knowing that without it (the bridge), we could not be able to cross over. In so doing, they believed the salient would become part of Uganda. Amin even placed troops at Kakunyu, Kyaka and Minziro border points (all Tanzanian territories) to oversee the new territory.
When we got to the north, it took us another substantial amount of time to prepare to be able to cross. I was the first one to cross with my 19th Battalion to the Kagera Salient. We built a phantom bridge and crossed with small boats and put up a better bridge at the same time fighting off the invaders for the rest of the troops to cross over. We managed to fight them out of the Tanzanian territory.
Before we had finished pushing the Uganda Army out of Tanzania, Amin announced that Kagera salient was phase one, phase two was coming and he was to go through Arusha and secure the port of Tanga for Uganda since it was landlocked. With such threats, we were not going to wait for him to walk the talk, for such a person, you stretch your hand and give him a red nose first and that is what we did.

The big decision
A decision was made in Dar-es Salaam. Our president (Mwalimu Nyerere) decided that if there is going to be war, it should be fought inside Uganda and not in Tanzania, because Amin had already killed 1,000 Tanzanians in the Kagera salient. I would say thanks to him, he psychologically prepared us. Our soldiers had to bury the dead in Kagera. We were not going to let them rot and be eaten by vultures.
The burial process gave us a lot of morale, so Amin psychologically helped us build our morale by killing our people, and the urge for revenge was built because of what we went through during the burial.
Overthrowing him (Amin) was not on the agenda, and we had no reason to do so, because he was not our problem but Uganda’s. We were driven by his words and action to continue with the war until we kicked him out of power. Had he learnt a lesson and did not continue threatening us, I doubt our president would have made the decision to go and knock him out. We just wanted to push him as far away from the borders of Tanzania as possible and in the process, we ended up in Kampala.”