Minister Rugumayo’s tales of Amin’s terror

In 1973, President Idi Amin’s Minister of Education Prof Albert Edward Bitanywaine Rugumayo and Foreign Affairs’ Joshua Wanume Kibedi visited Kenya on official duties but the two decided to cable their resignation letters to Amin and opted to remain in exile. 

The flight of the two prominent ministers followed a fierce wave of indiscriminate killings and disappearances in the country followed by careless dismissal of several ministers in February 1973 including Labour Minister Abu Mayanja, Culture Minister Yekosafati Engur (who was later murdered in 1977), Tourism Minister Apollo Kironde and Animal Resource Minister Prof William Banange, branding them as “insufficient”.
Rugumayo was the first to send his resignation letter to the President.  

“After a very careful consideration of the situation in our country, I have decided to resign my office,” he noted adding: “The reasons for my resignation are purely personal and moral and are based on the fact that I have found it increasingly difficult to fulfill my duties in the atmosphere that prevails in our country.
Amin hastily replied that he was unperturbed by Rugumayo’s cowardly decision and accepted the resignation without hesitation, adding that the Education Minister had been under strain because of the death of his wife and “constant threats” made by Milton Obote’s guerrillas to assassinate him and other ministers.

The defected Rugumayo however, approached the European and African diplomatic missions in Nairobi and made his views of Amin and his government known in a memorandum to African Heads of State and Governments. 
Thus his full description of Amin and his government goes as follows:

“Amin is an illiterate soldier of very low intelligence from the minority Nubian/ Kakwa tribe and an adherent of the minority Islam religion. He is medically unfit; he suffers from a hormonal defect. He is racist and a fascist; a murderer and a blasphemer; a tribalist and a dictator. Gen Amin has no principles, no moral standards and scruples. He will kill, or cause to kill, anyone without hesitation as long as it serves his interests, such as prolonging his stay in power, or getting what he wants such as a woman or money.

He is an incorrigible liar, both locally and internationally; his word in international dealings should never be relied on. He possesses no moral or political standards. He sets his own ‘standards’, writes his own ‘rules’ and changes them as he moves along. It therefore becomes very difficult for anyone to predict his moves. If we take that level of illiteracy for a President of a modern state, the problem takes on fantastic dimensions. For instance, Amin finds it well-nigh impossible to sit in an office for a day. He cannot concentrate on any serious topic for half a morning. He does not read. He cannot write. The sum total of these disabilities makes it impossible for him either to sit in the regular cabinet, to follow up cabinet minutes, or to comprehend the briefs written to him by his ministers. 

In short, he is out of touch with the daily running of the country, not because he likes it but because of illiteracy. 
He rarely attends the cabinet, and even then it is only when he is giving directives about the problems concerning defence or “security” of the country, or when he is sacking some civil servant. So the only means of getting the information about the country which he rules is by ear from various sources. In other words, he relies solely on listening and perhaps seeing.

Since most of his ministers are what one might term technocrats, he finds them too complicated and uninteresting, although they are the people who should actually give him correct information. Instead, he has to have recourse to people of his own level of intelligence and calibre. In effect, these are the people who rule the country: the illiterate and semi-literate army officers who have recently been drafted into the service.  Practically, all of them get their information by word of mouth and get directives from their superiors verbally. Since little is ever written down, and once said, there is little or no follow-up to change the plan or check the facts. This type of government can lead to disastrous result, especially where security is concerned.

Illiteracy led to overloading of Amin’s memory. In one instance, he deported three expatriate doctors he had been told were British spies, bombastically accusing them of spreading “political gonorrhoea”. Two of them were members of his medical team. We are presented with a picture of a man who cannot fathom the complex problems of modern society...he oversimplifies the problems as well as their solutions, to the detriment of the entire nation’s future. He thinks governing a country means talking to and entertaining big crowds of people.

He does not possess slightest rudiments about economics. For instance, he was urging his Finance Minister to print more paper money if there was not enough money in government coffers. The country is bankrupt. A lot of the money is spent on spying, the army and his personal projects. He has literally millions of shillings, in USA dollars which he keeps at his house in case of troubles. He has deposited millions in Libya, to which he will retire in the event of trouble. In fact he has bought three big villas in Tripoli for his personal use.

His abysmal ignorance has made him hate education, educated people and educational institutions. He brags that if he could rule the country well, then there is no need for highly educated people. Amin fired an experienced, fully qualified public servant from the job of permanent secretary to the President’s Office replacing him with an Assistant District Commissioner educated only to school certificate level. Chairmanship of the Public Service Commission went to the Town Clerk of a small town in Karamoja region, Moroto. Both the new appointees came from Amin’s West Nile home region.

On my first trip with him to Libya, Amin assured Col. Gadaffi that 80 per cent of Uganda’s population was Muslim and that this majority had for long been dominated by Christian or heathen minority. In truth- Muslim- mainly the Nubians only accounted for not more than 10 per cent of the population. Both Libya and Saudi Arabia donated money from the Jihad (Holy War) Fund to be used to eliminate the few remaining Christians and turn Uganda into a Muslim country.

Amin’s first victims had been Catholic; Chief Justice (Benedicto) Kiwanuka was a catholic, Father Kiggundu, the editor of the Catholic newspaper Munno had been abducted and burnt to death. Munno reported a Women’s Council resolution calling for the investigation into ‘disappearances’. Amin went on to liquidate many of the important Catholics in the civil service and business world... many Catholic prison officers, administrative secretaries and others. He went further to attack nuns and priests in the press for allegedly acting as spies. He also turned against Protestants. Among the leading protestant killed: Michael Kaggwa. Amin was also known to be interested in Kaggwa’s girlfriend (Hallen Ogwang).

Methods of killing
The former minister further notes in his letter: “The methods of killing used during the first months of the coup included straight-forward shooting or beating; with disposal of dead bodies becoming a problem, the soldiers resorted to throwing bodies of their victims either in rivers, swamps or even water reservoirs. This was found to be unsatisfactory, as human bodies tend to float and to attract vultures. Later, they were simply thrown into the bush and left there to rot or eaten by wild beasts, or were burnt by petrol fires.

Amin’s principal killers were to devise harrowing tortures. The victims would line up and the first one would be ordered to lie down while the prisoner next to him was then ordered to smash his head with a huge hammer. The trend would go on until the last man who would either be shot by Towelli himself or be killed in the same brutal manner by a police officer. The victims’ heads would be smashed beyond recognition by one of the appointed executioners.
Slow killing is a common practice. Towelli would shoot into a man’s arm, leg or chest and let him bleed to death. 

Another method is to cut off any of the man’s organs, such as arm, leg, genitals, and let him die in agony. Sometimes these organs can be stuck into the victim’s mouth. There is also a technique of cutting the victim’s flesh and forcing him to feed on it raw until he would bleed to death while living on his own flesh. The other despicable method is to cut a man’s flesh, have it roasted and let him feed on it until he dies... there is a constant fire in which human flesh is roasted, and a man is fed on his own flesh until he dies of sepsis and bleeding.