How did Kyemba and the other compilers of the Amin record come to catalogue these grisly acts? How did he get to know in such detail what Amin's killers in the State Research Bureau had done or were doing? The answer is that Kyemba was fed this information by FRONASA. As a matter of fact, if most names of Amin's supposed murder victims listed in A State of Blood were to be substituted for Museveni's name, then the true picture of Museveni's callous and utterly ruthless mind would be understood. As a general rule when reading A State Of Blood, it is important to bear in mind Kyemba's connection with FRONASA. In writing that book and highlighting instances of Amin's supposed

 brutality, Kyemba would have been laying emphasis on those deeds done by FRONASA in order to blemish the Amin government. In January 1971 when the coup took place, Obote's Principal Private Secretary Henry Kyemba was part of the Ugandan presidential delegation in Singapore. Kyemba flew to Tanzania with Obote and other aides. While in Dar es Salaam, Kyemba met Museveni. During their converation, the two men decided that Kyemba returns to Uganda to continue working for the government under Amin. But in that position to know the inner workings of the Amin government, Kyemba would provide information secretly to FRONASA and generally work to undermine Amin from within his own office. That is how Kyemba's assessment of the Amin years came to match the exact assessment by FRONASA. However, Kyemba did not know that Amin's inner intelligence was trained and advised by Staasi, the counter-intelligence service of the then East Germany. Painstaking in their

 work and detail, Staasi helped Amin uncover the people working to undermine his government from inside, one of whom was Kyemba and this is what prompted Kyemba to flee into exile in London in 1977 from where he wrote his account of the Amin years. For clues to what grisly deeds that FRONASA undertook, these received special mention and emphasis in A State Of Blood. In a Radio Uganda broadcast on November 20, 1977, Amin issued orders for the following people to be brought back to Uganda "dead or alive" to face crimminal charges at home: Henry Kyemba, former Ugandan ambassador to France Paulo Muwanga, former attorney general Godfrey Binaisa, former Justice minister Godfrey Lule, and former ambassador to the United Kingdom, Fred Isingoma. This is the way the matter was analysed by the Africa Contemporary Record: "Amin was silent about his former brother-in-law and ex-Foreign Minister, Wanume Kibedi, and his other ex-Foreign Minister, Princess Elizabeth Bagaya of Toro. And he did not mention ex-President Milton Obote, whom he probably fears the most.

" (Africa Contemporary Record, 1977-78, page B. 446-447) Why did Amin single out Kyemba, Muwanga, Lule, Isingoma, and Binaisa, and not the more obvious opponent of his regime, Milton Obote? The men mentioned in that November 20 Radio Uganda broadcast were some of the key figures in the anti-Amin propaganda being spread around the world. Binaisa and Lule as lawyers are likely to have been the people who provided Amnesty International and the International Commission of Jurists with the "estimates" of the number of people killed under Amin's rule. Paulo Muwanga was another architect of some of the assassination plots against Amin. That Amin did not mention Obote among the prominent exiles whom the Uganda government wanted "dead or alive", reinforces an extremely important point: it is that Amin had one of the best intelligence services in Africa at the time. 

Although many of the letters and phone calls that "implicated" prominent Ugandan government officials and businessmen were supposedly written by David Oyite-Ojok and Milton Obote, President Amin was informed enough to know that these "letters" were hoaxes. Otherwise, Obote would have topped the list of people Amin wanted to face crimminal charges. Oyite-Ojok, whose names appeared on most of these letters supposedly indicating that he was working with a particular civil servant or politician, would certainly have been mentioned by Amin in that November 20 broadcast. Why was Henry Kyemba mentioned as one of those people Amin wanted to have face crimminal charges? The answer is that already explained: Kyemba was a FRONASA agent working from inside the Amin administration, whose chief work of sabotage became the book, A State Of Blood. Once Kyemba's key role as a

 FRONASA man is understood, it unlocks the clear interpretation of the events in Uganda during the Idi Amin years. We begin to look afresh at all the murder and assassination cases highlighted in the book A State Of Blood and ask why they were highlighted. We start to wonder what propaganda value FRONASA hoped to reap by having their agent Kyemba publish these stories. We start to wonder if these murders and disappearances of prominent Ugandans, as has been demonstrated so far, were mainly the work of FRONASA. To understand that is to better understand the Idi Amin years. This story, then, is of how Idi Amin, a man who came to power in 1971 with only the best intentions for Uganda on his mind and a wish to see Africa strong and progressive, ended up as one of the most maligned and despised leaders in history. If the contrast between the truth and the distortion is to be measured, then there have rarely been more people whose image has been as tarnished as that of Idi Amin. Amin's naivety, low

 education, and inexperience were taken advantage of and exploited and as a result, his regime has gone down condemned in history and even the most authoritative and respected encycolpedias and works of reference have ingrained in stone Amin's supposed crimes against humanity. Among Uganda's heads of state, none before and none since has been as sincere in their motivation as Amin was. None too has been as naïve as was Amin, and this more than any other reason, including the allegations that he was a mass murderer, was to prove his undoing. No matter how many different versions of the number of people killed by Amin have been stated and mentioned, on average the actual number of individual names of people the public knew or had heard about remains between 50 and 120. Various books were published on Amin and his legacy by different authors representing different political leanings and in some cases academic backgrounds. The picture of the number of dead and the specific victims listed was always the same: Amin was a butcher who killed "between 300,000 and 500,000 people" but the actual names

 mentioned remain less than 200 people. This is indeed astonishing: when we bear in mind the legend of evil that Amin has become as recounted in the history books, it is staggering that with reports of "an estimated 300,000 people killed", there has never been a single list of any kind published or reported about anywhere in the world that gave the names of the people who were directly or indirectly killed by Amin as many as 200 people! Seldom in human history has there been such complete deception as this and a deception that was believed and is still believed by some of the world's most brilliant investigative journalists, police detectives, historians, military analysts, and researchers. The main lesson for all history from the eight-year rule of Amin is not in the decline of a once-promising African nation,

 Uganda. It is not even in what has been the main story of that decade, the reign of terror blamed on Amin and his henchmen. When all the distorted history is corrected one day, when all the facts have been corroborated and revealed, when the many assumptions and generalisations have been swept aside and the events of Idi Amin's rule better understood, the most astounding and enduring story of significance will be how hollow a world this is. It will be the story of how the world was deceived about the truth of events in an East African country and how this deception that could have been checked by diligent

 scrutiny went on to become the permanent record of Uganda and Amin. The tragic history of Uganda, viewed two hundred years into the future will be understood not in terms of the lives lost and the nation's vibrancy snuffed out, but how possible --- and unbelievably easy too --- it is to tell a lie to the entire human race and that race believes it. It will be the story that reminds us that no matter how advanced technology gets, how far wide modern scientific education and inquiry spreads and what strides are made in the adancement of knowledge, mankind remains, at the heart, a simple creature, far from perfect. The extent of this distortion of Ugandan history will be examined further in the next section of this treatise.

 The answer to this question of who then committed or masterminded the atrocities during the 1970s can be summarised this way: there was no such thing as Idi Amin in the 1970s spreading terror amongst the Ugandan population and horrifying the world. Idi Amin was Yoweri Museveni. Once that is understood, the next chapter of Uganda's dark history is better understood in all its horrible detail. Part 2: The fall of Amin and the UNLF period What caused the 1978 Kagera invasion? On April 19, 1978, the vice president of Uganda, General Mustapha Adrisi, was involved in a serious motor accident. He was flown by the government to Cairo, Egypt, for treatment. Immediately after the accident, rumours began to

 spread that the accident had been arranged by Amin because of "tensions" between the two men over the allocation of the scarce foreign currency in the central bank. According to these reports, even after Adrisi returned to Uganda, tensions with Amin continued to grow. Amin, the reports said, had to find a quick scapegoat. On October 30, 1978, President Idi Amin ordered the army to invade Tanzania to claim the Kagera province for Uganda. It was the climax to more that seven years of tensions and open hostility between Uganda and Tanzania. When we examine deeply the invasion of the Kagera by Amin,

 something about it feels unreal and hard to believe. Most accounts of the invasion given in newspapers, magazines, and the history books have said the invasion was an attempt by Amin to divert his army from growing tensions and the threat of mutiny. It has been written that a supposed fallout between Amin and vice president Adrisi led to the maneouvres that in turn resulted in two opposing factions of the army ending up in northwestern Tanzania. Another theory set forth to explain the Kagera invasion was presented in January 1979 by the former President Milton Obote, in a paper which he titled "Statement on the Uganda situation." In this paper, Obote reviewed developments in Uganda over the eight years since he was ovethrown by Amin. Here are Obote's observations on what might have happened: "There is plenty of evidence to show that the recent invasion of Tanzania was a desperate measure to extricate Amin from consequences of the failure of his own plots against his own army. The immediate story

 begins in early October, 1978 when Amin was told of a plot by some officers and men from the Simb

a Battalion in Mbarara in western Uganda. The plot was to have him arrested or killed on or about the 9th October 1978. Not long before, Amin had sent murder squads composed of men from the infamous State Research and the marines regiment to massacre soldiers of the Chui Battalion in Gulu, northern Uganda on the ground that those soldiers supported General Mustapha Adrisi. Someone within Amin's inner

 circle sent a warning to the Chui Battalion. On their way to Gulu the murder squads were ambushed and wiped out. Amin ordered the incident to be given maximum publicity on radio. The radio told Ugandans that a group of armed robbers had been killed by troops of the Chui Battalion. Unfortunately for Uganda, the chief robber himself was not amongst them. Amin even praised men of the Chui Battalion for what he called a splendid action. When the Simba plot became known, Amin chose to plot revenge on Chui for humiliating him. He ordered men of the Chui Battalion to go to Mbarara to put down a "mutiny". That was when radio Uganda (Uganda broadcasting Corporation) first announced that Tanzanian troops of a battalion strength had invaded Uganda but that Ugandan troops were not engaging the Tanzanians! In fact the Chui Battalion was moving from Gulu to put down an imaginary mutiny at Mbarara and the

 Mbarara troops were later tipped to expect an attack from a force which was not disclosed. The Battle which Amin expected to develop between Chui and Simba battalions never took place because the two units had discovered the plot to have them kill one another. Amin became desperate. He now had at Mbarara two "Unreliable" units - Simba and Chui. He ordered his most loyal and best armed regiment, the marines, reinforced by a Brigade of newly passed out troops to go to Mbarara and disarm Simba and Chui Battalions. The subsequent battle saw the annihilation of the Brigade and the marines withdrew

 having been seriously mauled. Radio Uganda kept on with the lies of an invasion by Tanzania while in fact killer Amin was busy planning and ordering his own troops to massacre themselves. The defeat of the Marines by Simba and Chui compounded Amin's desperation. He changed tactics. The new tactics was the actual invasion of Tanzania to be spearheaded by the Malire regiment. Malire began to move out of their barracks on 20th October, 1978. Troops were told that they would be free to take back any booty, and loot, women, movable property, cattle and anything they could carry.... ....Amin spoke and continues to speak of a second phase which would take his troops deep into Tanzania. In his utterances, he wanted Ugandans and the world at large to believe that his aggression against Tanzania and his conflict with the

 people of Uganda, constituted, one and the same issue. That certainly is not the case." That was Obote's statement on the situation inside Uganda late in 1978. The gist of Obote's account, as with the one given just before it, hinges on a supposed power struggle between Amin and his vice president. Nobody, it seems, has ever bothered to ask why in all the years since the fall of the Amin regime, Adrisi has never mentioned any disagreements with Amin or drawn any connection between them and the invasion of Kagera. As already stated in the first section of this story, Radio France International spoke to Mustapha

 Adrisi on the morning of August 18, 2003, two days after the death of Amin in Saudi Arabia. Adrisi paid glowing tribute to Amin, saying the only problem he ever had was that Amin was "fond of telling lies." He did not mention the alleged plot by Amin to assassinate him in the 1978 car accident. He did not then and has never even in several newspaper interviews since the end of their regime suggested that the invasion of Tanzania was the result of differences with Amin. In that Radio France interview, Adrisi said Amin was loved by the ordinary people and that Amin was not a killer. Adrisi would not have stated

 categorically that Amin was not a killer knowing well that he nearly lost his life in a car accident staged by Amin, if that was a true story. Adrisi as vice president was not such a powerful force as to constitute a real threat to Amin. Like many officers of the Uganda Army, Adrisi was very much subordinate to Amin and this is confirmed in the report on Amin compiled by Israel's Mossad during the July 1976 Entebbe hostage crisis. Following the overthrow of Amin, Adrisi fled into exile in Sudan with his large family and only returned several years later, to live a humble and in some way impoverished live in his hometown of Arua. Once Amin was overthrown and became an international disgrace, there would have been no

 further incentive for Mustapha Adrisi to respect or show public support for Amin. On the contrary, it would have made Adrisi somewhat of a belated hero to play up the story that he had been involved in some kind of power struggle with Amin and that Amin's desperation during that struggle had led him to divert his troops by staging an invasion of Kagera. Adrisi lived a near destitute life in exile in Sudan and any indication that he had stood up to the just overthrown monster of Uganda would have brought him sudden stardom and even a change in his desperate financial situation, with wellwishers offering him money for his courage in standing up to fascism. Certainly the Tanzanian government would have known, through its military intelligence, of this Adrisi bravery and treated him leniently. Adrisi has never come out and confirmed this supposed power struggle with Amin. This brings into doubt the credibility of that story. As for Obote's claims that Amin encouraged his officers and men to plunder not only the

 homes of Tanzanians in Kagera in 1978, but also the homes of Ugandans living close to the border, they are contradicted by something nobody has ever disputed: when Amin was retreating from the advancing Tanzanian army in the final weeks of his rule: he did not embark on a looting spree as many Ugandans had feared. As a matter of fact, on April 10, 1979, the day before his government collapsed, he drove up north of Kampala toward Bombo town accompanied by some of his bodyguards. As he headed for Bombo, he kept stopping and greeting the people who came out to meet him. He gave away much of the money he had on him to those who came to greet him. He did not have piles of looted items with him and none of the accounts ever given of his fleeing have ever noted acts of looting or arson on his or his

 soldiers' part. If, with the certainty of defeat in April 1979 Amin and his troops did not loot Uganda or carry off herds of cattle or bundles of looted property, it is difficult to believe that when they were less desparate and still controlled the government in 1978, they would have acted in the thuggish way suggested by Obote and (as we shall see), Museveni in their explanation of the havoc in Kagera. So, as we can now suspect, the rumours of an Amin-Adrisi confrontation were spread by the same kinds of people who had wrecked havoc on Amin and his government throughout the 1970s decade of subversion. Who exactly, though, would have had the cunning mind to orchestrate this set of events? Upon hearing news of Amin's invasion of Tanzania, Museveni who was in Dar es Salaam celebrated and exclaimed:

 "Now my chance to be the president of Uganda has come! I will one day be president of Uganda even if I die in the process." A Langi woman, Rose Akora, who was in the same place as Museveni in Dar es Salaam at the time later confirmed hearing him rejoice at the news of Amin's invasion. Museveni himself in Sowing The Mustard Seed describes his feelings upon learning of the invasion: "Never since Amin's coup in 1971 had I felt so buoyant as I did on the day following the invasion. I knew that Amin was finished...I remember walking along State House Drive in Dar es Salaam, on my way to consult with Edward Sokoine, with a feeling of complete satisfaction about the future course of events." (page 93) The account given by Akora who overheard Museveni celebrate the invasion of Tanzania by Amin and

 Museveni's own description of his sense of elation at the news, reveal what was going on in his mind. Of all the exiles working to overthrow Amin during the 1970s or simply living in Tanzania, Kenya, Europe, or North America, none has ever been quoted on record as rejoicing or otherwise celebrating Amin's invasion of Kagera. All who came out and spoke about it, without exception, condemned Amin and expressed regret at the invasion. Museveni alone of all the exiles, is the one who not only did not condemn the Kagera attack; he welcomed it, in his own words, "with a feeling of complete satisfaction about the future course of events." No news could have come at a better time for Museveni. He was starting to tire of the redundancy of coordinating secret guerrilla work that seemed to produce only negligible results. He was also having to live with the disappointment that came with the realisation that even with Amin's growing international isolation, there was still up to late 1978 no sign that his regime was about to collapse. Most important, though, was how these dramatic events fitted into Museveni's

 personal ambitions. He had always since his early 20s craved to one day be Uganda's president. In light of these events and all previous events that took place in Uganda under Amin since 1971, we must approach Museveni with skepticism. If he was so successful at undermining Amin's regime and managed to somehow shape world opinion of Amin, then Museveni was capable of anything. Might he have come up with a scheme to lure Amin into attacking Tanzania in order to trigger off a fierce counterattack and, perhaps, a fully fledged invasion to topple the military regime? The answer is suggested by Sowing The Mustard Seed, page 92 in which he fills in the blank spaces: "In August 1978, as part of the infiltration project, I visited Uganda again for the first time since 1973. I went with a man called Sabiiti to the border area of Kigaragara. We walked across the border at night, made some contacts and went back to Kakunyu village in Tanzania." Would this have been the time Museveni was finalising his plans to tempt Amin

 into invading Tanzania? It seems so, for two reasons. The first we have already seen: Museveni was the only major exile for whom the invasion of Tanzania by Amin brought undisguised delight. The second comes in Museveni's vague explanation of why Amin attacked Tanzania. It is the eye-opening key in understanding what happened. Here is the way he put it on page 92 of Sowing The Mustard Seed: "I think the main factor behind this invasion was the incapacity of Amin and his group. They must have merely been posturing: it could not have been that they underestimated the capacity of the Tanzanian army...Therefore, the explanation for this blunder must have been his ignorance...President Nyerere's reaction was music to our ears...Nyerere sais that Amin's attack had given Tanzanians the cause,...and they already had the will...and the means...to fight, having bought a great deal of Soviet equipment, including SAMs, MiG fighters and medium-range artillery. Amin had, therefore, played right into our

 hands." Under normal circumstances, Museveni would have condemned Amin's attack, seeking to convince the world that this brutal leader was a threat to peace and that is why they had decided to fight him right from the first day. Yet he did not. Instead, Museveni goes on to explain as the reasons for the invasion Amin's ignorance, gullibility, and incompetence. Museveni is dismissive and scornful of Amin in that explanation. But he is, uncharacteristically, neither angry nor condemning. Why does Museveni not accuse Amin of invading Tanzania? Why does Museveni not tell us that the invasion was part of Amin's bloodthirsty character and go on to remind us that this is the way Amin always was: a murderous butcher for whom human life had no value and Tanzanian citizens in Kagera were only the latest of this dictator's victims? To attribute Amin's invasion of Kagera to Amin's "incapacity" given the fact that Amin is suppposed to have murdered 500,000 people in a reign of terror in Uganda, is such an

 understatement that it proves to be no statement at all, especially from a freedom fighter whose primary reason for opposing Amin was to stop the bloodletting in Uganda. This set of reasons advanced by Museveni leads unerringly to one verdict: Amin did not invade Tanzania because of a power struggle with Mustapha Adrisi; he did not invade Tanzania because he was an evil, bloodthirsty dictator; and he did not invade Tanzania because his indisciplined and poorly paid soldiers got out of hand. He invaded Tanzania because he was deliberately given false intelligence by Museveni through Museveni's

 FRONASA agents stationed in Amin's security system, well knowing that this would be, in Amin's eyes, a "last straw" by the provocative Tanzania, which required that Uganda take preemptive action. That is why the usually judgemental Museveni, in this instance, was almost sympathetic to Amin, only pointing vaguely to Amin's ignorance, not Amin's dictatorial aggression. Confirmation of this is contained in this last line from Museveni's explanation: "Amin had, therefore, played right into our hands." To do that, Museveni would have had to supply Amin with false intelligence to the effect that Tanzania was planning a definite attack on Uganda. That could easily have been arranged using the FRONASA agents inside Amin's State Research Bureau posing as intelligence officers. The scheme would have had to be as plausible as possible, with such pieces of "evidence" of an impending Tanzanian invasion as photographs of guerrillas posing as Tanzanian troops; perhaps faxes or telexes sent by Museveni from Tanzania

 purportedly from the Office of the President or the Tanzanian army headquarters. As Museveni explains, Tanzania had just acquired Soviet military equipment, photographs of which he could easily have obtained from his Tanzanian military intelligence sources. It would not have been out of question for Museveni to smuggle these photographs --- of Tanzanian army leaders inspecting the military hardware --- to Amin and his senior military commanders and explaining them to mean that Tanzania had assembled its equipment for an imminent attack on Uganda. Since the war, it has clearly emerged that the British government and the American secret services gave much support to the Tanzanian army in its battle against Amin. Museveni, no doubt, would have known about this from his close association with Tanzanian intelligence. Sure enough, that November Tanzania launched a counter-attack and on December 9, 1978, President Nyerere announced that the Tanzanian army, the TPDF, had repulsed the

 invading Ugandan army and driven it out of Tanzanian territory and back into Uganda. Atrocities and anarchy in Kagera However, we still need to find out something. If, as we can deduce, Amin invaded Tanzania not in anger or as a brutal, aggressive, inhuman act, who then caused the havoc, looting, and destruction in the Kagera area? Museveni explains what happened in Kagera on page 95 of Sowing The Mustard Seed: "All this time, Amin's troops were massed on the north bank of the Kagera, looting and attacking villagers. Amin declared the Kagera Salient annexed and his troops looted the Kagera Sugar Mill and Mishenyi Ranch. The pastoralists of western Uganda believe that it was the cattle of Mishenyi Ranch...which put a curse on Amin because of the way they were treated. The cattle were driven all the way to Mbarara,...145 km away, and distributed to Amin's clowns." The Ugandan airforce might have bombed Kagera from the air and inflicted damage on the ground. Amin had announced that he was

 annexing the Kagera Salient and making it part of Ugandan territory. He would have had in mind the establishment of an administration there and a sense of law and order. He could not have been the same leader to instruct his troops to loot the Kagera Sugar Mill and Mishenyi livestock ranch. Furthermore, Amin has been known to have certain appetites: women, fast cars, and sports. Cars, especially, were a well-known indulgence of the Amin establishment in general. Cattle and animals of any sort are not what come to mind when the interests and indulgences of Amin and his henchmen are listed. What Amin's troops might have done would have been to raid Mishenyi Ranch, slaughter cattle, and feast for days on end on beef roast at huge bonfires. The other thing would have been to ferry the cattle off to Kampala to make immediate money by selling beef in the city's butcheries. Museveni, in creating this lie about

 Amin's soldiers, did not stop to think that it would be most difficult to believe. There almost no single photograph ever taken anywhere that showed Idi Amin near cattle. The image of Amin's officers interested enough in cattle to herd them away to Mbarara and take possession of them, does not fit with who they were. If indeed it is true that in the latter stages of his presidency, Amin's army was predominantly West Nile and Sudanic in ethnic composition, then Museveni's false account of the looting of cattle from Tanzania becomes more pronounced. There is no serious tradition in West Nile and southern Nubian Sudan of cattle. That cattle-keeping tradition belongs mainly among the Karamojong, Iteso, and Banyankole-Bahima and Ugandan Tutsi tribes. As just mentioned, the main value of cattle to Amin's roving bands of soldiers would have been an impromptu feast at the border with Tanzania or

 selling the cattle off in Kampala to make quick money. Had Museveni accused Amin's soldiers of looting cars, jeeps, or electronic equipment like televisions and music stereo systems from Tanzania, that perhaps would have been easier to believe. Drive cattle all the way to Mbarara to distribute among Amin's West Nile and Sudanese army officers? Not likely. Which Ugandan army officer, though, has shown the greatest interest in cattle for the longest time and for whom cattle is a hobby, an obssession almost? The answer can be seen on the back cover or jacket photograph of Sowing The Mustard Seed as well as uncountable photographs of Museveni among his cows at his country home in Rwakitura, his ranch at Kisozi, clearly displaying a love for these animals that exceeds that of even the most ardently professional of veterinarians. In narrating what happened to the cattle looted from Mishenyi Ranch,

 Museveni gives himself away as the one who arranged to carry off the cattle, when he claims that Amin's army took the stolen cattle 145 km away to Mbarara. So far in this treatise on Museveni, we have seen something of a pattern emerge --- the bullets that killed Brig. Okoya in January 1970 came from army barracks in Mbarara; the two Americans Siedle and Stroh were killed in July 1971 in Mbarara; hundreds of Acholi and Langi army officers were murdered in 1971 in Mbarara; the September 1972 guerrilla invasion was launched and centred on Mbarara; the reprisals allegedly carried out by Amin's army after the 1972 FRONASA-Kikosi Maluum invasion were mainly in Mbarara; and now in

 November 1978 cattle looted from Tanzania were allegedly being driven by Amin's rampaging soldiers not to Kampala or Masaka or West Nile, but to Mbarara. Considering that Mbarara was in many ways Museveni's home town, is it not a little too obvious that this all suggests the hand of Museveni in these events? We get further details of what Museveni ordered his FRONASA men to do in Kagera, in order to arouse the greatest anger and determination by the Dar es Salaam government not to simply drive Amin back across the border, but to come all the way to Kampala and overthrow him. On page 95 of his book, Museveni says: "On 3 November, Amin's men eventually succeeded in blowing up the Kagera River

 Bridge at Kyaka, having lost several MiGs to Tanzanian anti-aircraft fire in the process...As the Tanzanian troops moved through the salient, they found grim evidence of its brief occupation by Amin's thugs in the shape of decapitated and mutilated bodies of Tanzanian civilians." A question must be asked here: Museveni is telling us on page 95 of his book that "Amin's men eventually succeeded in blowing up the Kagera River Bridge at Kyaka, having lost several MiGs to Tanzanian anti-aircraft fire in the process." Amin's army was on the ground in Kagera where they had attempted without success at first to blow up the Kagera bridge but eventually succeeded in doing so. The same sentence says they had lost several MiG fighter planes to Tanzanian anti-aircraft gunfire. It seems here that the Tanzanian army and the Ugandan army were in the same area, almost within eye sight of each other. How? The Ugandan war planes were attempting to bomb Kagera mainly and were being met by Tanzanian anti-aircraft fire

 coming from the ground in Kagera. How could this be possible, unless Museveni is not telling the truth about what was happening then? The same Tanzanian army that was trying to shoot down Ugandan planes over Kagera might just as well have walked over and shot dead the Ugandan army that was trying to destroy the Kagera bridge or that was looting property in Kagera town. It is these sorts of unquestioned accusations against Amin and his army that have so discredited his legacy because there was little effort made to challenge or validate them. In trying to understand Museveni, it is important to look for a number of clues that he tends to leave along the way, traces of evidence clear from his way of doing things. First clue is that he often adopts an indignant and fiery moral stand, condemning the acts and blaming them on his political opponents or rivals. (There is one exception, which we shall examine shortly.) The greater the condemnation by Museveni of a particular atrocity, the greater the proof that it was actually done by him. Second, his pattern of atrocities is usually designed to cause the maximum

 amount of revulsion and horror in the minds of those reading or hearing about them. That, as we have already seen, is what FRONASA under Museveni's orders did to prominent Ugandans during the Amin era. If Amin was afraid of a particular politician or guerrilla leader, it would have been enough to have him killed. To mutilate the body would have achieved nothing further, be it military or psychological. As seen already in Museveni's 1971 paper glorifying violence as a political tool and a psychologically cleansing process, gory details, heads decapitated, were as early as 1971 already a chosen Museveni method of achieving the maximum impact. Finally, acts of destruction and anarchy and most of all, atrocities committed by Museveni in the most horrific manner against innocent civilians are carefully catalogued and used for reference in order to blemish the reputation of his rivals and opponents, be they individuals, groups, or governments. Let us return to Kagera and try to find out who could have

 deliberately destroyed buildings, looted cattle, and decapitated the heads of civilians, leaving dozens of headless corpses littered around the countryside and roads. On page 62 into 63 of Sowing The Mustard Seed, Museveni first mentions the Kagera Salient. This was during the first invasion of Uganda in September 1972 by the Ugandan exile groups of Kikosi Maluum and FRONASA. Was Kagera just a territory that FRONASA briefly passed through on their way to Uganda? Or might it have been a permanent base for the FRONASA guerrillas? Here is the answer from Museveni: "The part of Tanzania on the north side of the river is known as the Kagera Salient and that is where we were operating from. In order to transport arms across the border, we would wade through the river carrying guns on our heads. On our return we would walk back into Tanzania through the Salient and then, because we were carrying no arms, we could openly cross the Kagera by the large bridge at Kyaka." So, according to Museveni, the Kagera was a base for FRONASA, a place "where we were operating from." That statement by Museveni

 is a useful guide into who it is that committed atrocities against Tanzanian civilians, cut off their heads in order to horrify the Tanzanian army, and then true to form, Museveni records it in his autobiography for history to once again condemn Amin as the Butcher of Africa. The full significance of the discovery of corpses without heads, first seen in November 1978 in Kagera, Tanzania, will be understood when this narration gets to events in Luwero in central Uganda in the early 1980s. During this period following the Ugandan invasion of Tanzania, Museveni says, he traveled to Nairobi to meet his Ugandan guerrilla contacts. In December, Museveni went to join the frontline in northwestern Tanzania. In Obote's

 "Statement on the Uganda situation", he roundly criticised Amin's record and lamented the loss of hundreds of thousands of innocent lives under the Amin dicatorship. Obote quoted reports by Amnesty International that accused Amin of murdering hundreds of thousands. The contents of this paper are important in understanding the differences between Obote and Museveni. Museveni, as already mentioned, went to Tanzania and knew that it was crucial for him to develop an intimate relationship with Tanzanian intelligence as a way of understanding what was going on inside Uganda. Obote was not of the same thinking and because he did not see the vital role played by intelligence and a command of first-hand information, his paper on the Uganda situation came across as the ramblings of a disgruntled former head of state. Obote, it seems, had scarcely a clue at the time he wrote that paper that most of the news of Amin's supposed killing of "hundreds of thousands of innocent Ugandans" was the disinformation that Museveni's FRONASA had undertaken in order to undermine the military

 government. Obote had employed Museveni as an intelligence officer but somehow was unable to see the value of keeping an eye on Museveni's activities in Tanzania. This shrewdness on Museveni's part would serve him well in the coming years, as we shall see later. The bombing of Mbarara and Masaka towns By February, Museveni's FRONASA fighters accompanying the Tanzanian army had entered Uganda in the war proper and on February 26, 1979, Museveni's group received instructions to advance on Mbarara town. (Once again, Mbarara features prominently in the story of Amin and Museveni.) Museveni describes the gradual move on Mbarara by the Tanzanian army: "On the morning of the 27th, we captured Gayaza Hill and went beyond it up to Masha...18 km from Mbarara. Again there was little fighting because Amin's soldiers ran away. Our medium artillery, based at a road camp at mile 14, shelled Mbarara the whole of that afternoon...At midnight on 27 February, we advanced on Mbarara and by morning we had entered the town. We captured it easily because there was no resistance...The TPDF battalions fanned across Mbarara, checking the town up to and including the barracks, which they found abandoned." (Sowing The Mustard Seed, page 99) In his 1980 book, Imperialism and revolution in

 Uganda, Dan Wadada Nabudere mentioned this fact of Ugandan support for the invading Tanzanian force and the ease with which they gained territory: "When Tanzanian troops advanced into Uganda they were met by jubilant crowds. As Amin threatened to punish villagers who were welcoming the advancing Tanzanian and Ugandan fighters, a unity of purpose was cemented between the fighters and the people." (page 332) There is a shocking story that Museveni leaves out of his account of the 1979 war --- the heavy destruction visited on Mbarara and Masaka towns by the Tanzanian army. Starting on February 24, explosions were heard in Mbarara and as citizens later came to discover to their horror, many of the best buildings in the town had been destroyed by explosives. The destruction continued in Masaka. These two towns suffered the worst damage of any town during that war and the effect of the damage could still be felt 25 years later. The coffee factory at Kakoba just outside Mbarara town was burnt to the ground. The generally accepted reports had it at the time that the Tanzanians had taken this opportunity, once they

 captured these two southern towns, to avenge Amin's bombing of Kagera. This version of what happens does not measure up to the facts and the logic of the events. To begin with, the Tanzanian army was in general regarded as very disciplined. This confrontation with Uganda was the first and only war it has ever fought and it is one of the few African armies that has never staged or attempted to stage a coup against the government. The only known unrest occurred in January 1964 during army mutinies that took place simultaneously in Kenya and Tanzania over pay. Secondly, wherever the Tanzanians were advancing inside Uganda during the first few days and weeks, as Nabudere pointed out, they were being received by jubilant Ugandan crowds. There was every reason for this foreign army to wish to remain popular with the ordinary people since this would not only help boost the morale of the Tanzanian solders but also reduce on the need to use ammunition. And, according to Museveni, Idi Amin's soldiers were

 putting up practically no resistance. The Tanzanian army had come right up to the Simba battalion barracks in Mbarara and found them abandoned. In Sowing The Mustard Seed, Museveni does mention this destruction of Masaka and Mbarara at all, nor even hint at it. Having described in quite some detail the entry of the Tanzanian troops into Mbarara almost kilometre by kilometre, Museveni skips this episiode altogether. It is one of the strangest omissions in the book. Museveni would have it believed that he is a Munyankole, born and bred there, a proud admirer of the history and traditions of the people of Ankole. As president of Uganda for twenty years, hardly a week went by without him in a speech or public address quoting a proverb or saying from Ankole. He attended secondary school at Mbarara High School and Ntare School, both in Mbarara. Most of his friends and guerrilla colleagues were from the Ankole tribe. He talks about the community work he did in Ankole during his student days, teaching

 peasants and the nomadic Bahima people modern agriculture and animal husbandry. In the manifesto of FRONASA, he had lamented the decline of Uganda under Idi Amin. The third point in the manifesto had been given as one "to salvage what remains of the economy of Uganda and nurse it back to health." Over and over again, Museveni in his autobiography condemns the hooligans who passed for Amin's soldiers, dismissing them as thugs and fools whose only preoccupation was looting, rape, and destruction. There is also an additional note to make on this: Museveni, even as he was grateful for the support Tanzania had given to the Ugandan exile community and their role in the fight to oust Amin, was not afraid to voice his occasional disagreement with the Dar es Salaam government and its armed forces over certain

 policies. He regularly stated his disagreements with them during their conversations and meetings. Given that background, the destruction wrought on Mbarara and Masaka towns by the Tanzanian army would have been one of the most distresing experiences in Museveni's life. Museveni would have turned onto the Tanzanians and in a state of shock, condemned them ceaselessly over the bombing of his beloved Mbarara town. He would have questioned what the difference was between them and the Idi Amin they had come to fight and overthrow. In his fury, Museveni would have immediately rang President Nyerere and in the strongest possible terms, condemned what the Tanzanian army had done to this southern town. Even if damage had already been done, this crusader for the advancement of Ankole's economic wellbeing and cultural pride would have demanded an apology from the Tanzanian authorities and war reparations paid. He, in other words, would have made an issue of it. Pages of condemnation of this unforgivable misbehaviour by the Tanzanians would have blazed in his autobiography. Instead, there is the most unusual silence for someone who has always projected himself to the public as a leader

 opposed to any dictatorial tendencies and destruction of Uganda's and Africa's economic prosperity and specifically a great admirer of all things culturally and historically Ankole. Why, we must ask, was there such conspicious silence over the demolition of public buildings in Mbarara by this champion of the rule of law? Who was responsible for this bombing of most public buildings in Mbarara? The destruction of Mbarara town was ordered by Yoweri Museveni who then gave the public false reports that the Tanzanians had bombarded the town out of anger at Amin. The forensic evidence indicated that this was not the work of tank or artillery shells, as Museveni claimed, but of dynamite. On February 28, 1979, a day after the fall of Mbarara to the Tanzanian-led force, Museveni visited the home of the Byanyima family in Ruti, just over four kilometres out of the centre of the town. He arrived in a landrover accompanied by Major Kessy, the commander of Tanzania's Special Battalion, as well as five Tanzanian soldiers. Museveni was dirty from head to toe and told the Byanyimas that he had not had a bath in three months. He asked that he might take a hot bath. Later during their conversation, an angry Boniface

 Byanyima brought up the subject of the destruction of Mbarara. "If you say you are liberators," Byanyima turned and asked Kessy, "why are you blowing up the buildings in Mbarara?" On hearing this accusation, Major Kessy angrily threatened to arrest Byanyima, whom he accused of being a collaborator with Amin's forces. Museveni intervened and told Kessy to let Byanyima alone. He did not, however, explain anything further to his old friend what had happened to the buildings in the town. Nor did Museveni explain to Kessy that there had been a rumour and reports in Mbarara that the Tanzanians had bombarded most of the public buildings and this is what Byanyima was referring to. Instead, Museveni sat calmly in the Byanyima's living room and did not comment further on the destruction of Mbarara. This confirms Museveni's direct role in the blasting of the buildings, as well as demonstrating how his mind works. For Major Kessy to get so angry at Byanyima's accusation and label him an Amin collaborator, could only mean one thing: Museveni must have told the Tanzanians that the buildings had

 been destroyed by the remnants of Amin's army as they fled Mbarara. Then to the people of Mbarara whom he knew had seen Amin's army flee without destroying any building or army barracks, he could not repeat the same lie. Instead, he started the rumours that the Mbarara buildings had been demolished by the Tanzanians in retaliation for the destruction of Kagera by Amin's troops in November 1978. For this once in his life, Museveni could not commit outrages and openly blame them on the Tanzanians in order to discredit Nyerere's government and army, as was his tendency. Tanzania was a vital ally and for many sentimental reasons, Museveni revered Nyerere. Also in practical terms, he could not accuse the very Tanzanians that he depended on to get to Kampala, of blasting the buildings in Mbarara. Major Kessy, knowing the high standards of discipline in the Tanzanian army, took offence at Byanyima's

 condemnation. He had no idea that seated right beside him in the Byanyima's living room was the maniac who had ordered the blowing up of the town's buildings by his FRONASA forces. However, there was something more appalling. Having ordered his men to destroy much of Mbarara, Museveni then led his FRONASA guerrillas to his former high school, Ntare School, in order to burn it down. When they learnt of his intentions, tearful ordinary people in the neighbourhood came out and pleaded with the Tanzanians to block Museveni from doing what he was about to and spare one of Ankole's most beloved cultural icons, Ntare School. Now shocked, the Tanzanians apologised and left the premises. They were left with questions, nevertheless, and tried to keep the incident a secret amongst the top commanders. Why had Museveni wanted to bomb Ntare School? Why would a man order the destruction of his former school for whatever reason, if he was mentally normal? What kind of man was this

 Museveni they were dealing with? These questions haunted the Tanzanian commanders for the rest of the war. Writing in Notes On Concealment of Genocide in Uganda in 1990, former President Milton Obote said: "In early 1979 after the capture of Ankole by the Tanzanian troops, Museveni organized hooligans, mostly from the two Refugee Camps, Rusinga and Nakivale, and led them in attacks and massacres of Muslims. He led the hooligans to the Kakoba Coffee Factory and burnt it down. He also organized an assault to burn down his former school, Ntare, but this was frustrated when patriotic Ugandans appealed to the Tanzanian troops to restrain Museveni which they did. In Mbarara Town, Museveni, the son of an itinerant immigrant, lived in Omugabe's [traditional Ankole king's] Palace. His reasoning for the massacres of the Muslims, the burning of the coffee Factory, etc. was that in so doing the "wrath" of the "wananchi" (citizens) was being expressed against the Amin regime. What was of

 greatest importance was to show in the most unmistaken form that he was the new ruler in Ankole and that terror including massacres were to be instruments of his rule...When his hooligans were restrained from attacking Ntare School and after they had dynamited Public Buildings in Mbarara Town, he began to raise an army." In March 1996, the government-owned New Vision newspaper described this massacre of the Muslims in Itendero village in Kazo, Mbarara and the drownings in River Rwizi this way: "During the purge, an unspecified number of Muslims were either slain, drowned in rivers or banished from areas where they stayed at the time." Allegations that Museveni was the mastermind behind the massacre of Muslims in Mbarara in 1979 continued to trail him right up to the 1990s, allegations he tried to ward off. All this returns us to the beginning of the story of this extraordinary man. What is it that drives him? Could this be the militant ideology of Marxism-Leninism that he espoused starting in the late 1960s? Might it originate from his mental illness, the bipolar disorder that has dogged him since his teenage years? Or does this extreme ruthlessness have anything to do with his mother's rejection of him and the dysfunction in his family life and history? If Museveni were really a Ugandan and a Munyankole, how could he even think of destroying that part of his life, youth, and experience that mattered so much to him and his Ankole people --- Mbarara town and Ntare School? And most of all, how did this most

 bizzare of behaviour go unreported in the mainstream news media, unpunished by the authorities, and unaccounted for when he stood for various political offices in the following years? Museveni returned briefly to Dar es Salaam to meet President Nyerere. Upon coming back to Uganda, he left for the war front in Masaka town and the Rakai area. Here, as in Mbarara, Museveni ordered his men to blow up public buildings in a show of force supposedly from the ordinary citizens angry at the Amin legacy. How these citizens would have destroyed the very town they had lived in, worked in, and were to continue living in, Museveni did not explain. The once beautiful Tropic Inn hotel in Masaka, which was part of the countrywide chain of the Uganda Hotels group, was also targeted by Museveni. Because it was not as politically important as Mbarara, Masaka town suffered proportionately greater immediate and long-term damage to its infratructure than Mbarara. The most telling proof of Museveni's guilt in this unbelievable destruction of two Ugandan towns can be gleaned from the complete silence on the matter in his

 autobiography. At no time since those bombings of Mbarara and Masaka in 1979 has Museveni ever rebuked the Tanzanians over these supposed acts of theirs. Since the 1979 war, Uganda has been repaying Tanzania some of the expenses it incurred in prosecuting the war. As president since 1986, Museveni --- who has questioned such unfair arrangements as Uganda's continued supply of cheap electricity to Kenya under the terms of a 1950s agreement --- has never once wondered why Tanzania should not be compensating Uganda, since it is Tanzania that destroyed Masaka and Mbarara and if anything, Tanzania should be paying Uganda recompense. It is a silence on Museveni's part that has never been explained. Museveni's FRONASA forces were also ordered into the small and relatively unknown district of Rakai, further south of Masaka. In Rakai, further inland from Masaka in rural Buganda, something extremely significant happened that went almost unnoticed, except for the

 immediate news that it created. Apart from the destruction of property, Museveni's FRONASA men embarked on a spree of rape. The origin of AIDS in Uganda In late 1979, a few people began to notice residents of Rakai getting sick and their body weight dramatically dropping to the point where they took on an almost skeletal appearance. At that time, the superstitious villagers attributed this wasting condition to witchcraft. It was left at that. The misery brought on by the Tanzania-Uganda war diverted the attention of many government officials from this disturbing new disease in Rakai. However, as the 1980s dawned, the persistence of the new wasting condition for which there appeared to be no cure or even preventive medicine, started to get to the attention of medical researchers both from Makerere University and Mulago hospital, and the western world. In 1981, Dr. David Serwadda of Makerere University went to Kansensero, a small township in the area, to find out for himself about this strange new disease. In 1982, the chief medical officer of Kalisizo Hospital in southern Buganda, Emmanuel Rwegabo, compiled and sent a report to the Ministry of Health in Kampala in which he attempted to

 explain this strange and previously unknown disease that was now ravaging the Rakai area. Rwegaba's report spoke of patients from the ordinary walks of life developing such symptins as fever, night sweats, severe loss of weight, a skin rash, sores in the mouth, which all failed to respond to conventional treatment and resulted inevitably in the death of the patients. The early name given to this disease was the "Masaka-Kyotera Syndrome", because of the areas it had hit the hardest and seemed almost exclusively to originate from. The website iaen.org comments: "Kagera is at the epicentre of the African AIDS epidemic. The first case of AIDS in the region was diagnosed in 1983, although HIV was most likely present at least a decade earlier." We should remember that in Sowing The Mustard Seed, Museveni had said that the Kagera was a base for FRONASA and him, the place "where we were

 operating from" starting in about 1973. The picture we get of the origin of AIDS in Uganda is that it was reported at its earliest and at its most virulent in Kagera in northwestern Tanzania, where FRONASA was operating from at the time an AIDS-like disease was first reported in 1974, and Rakai in southern Uganda, where Museveni had sent his men on a campaign of rape in 1979. Returning to the reports that Amin's soldiers had gone on a spree of looting and raping in Kagera in October 1978, history and justice is on their side for one simple reason: they did not contract AIDS in quite the numbers that mass rape woulld have entailed. If it were true that these troops of Amin's army conducted a terror campaign of rape and six months later were driven out of power by a Tanzanian-led force, then we would have witnessed a sudden explosion of AIDS in Arua or southern Sudan, where most of the remnants of Amin's army fled into exile. Nothing of the sort happened. Instead there were rumours quietly spreading that this new disease had been brought to Rakai by the "Tanzanian soldiers" during the 1979 war. "That's the most feasible theory," Dr David Serwadda, told Reuters news agency on December 1, 2000. "Even in the neighboring Kagera district in Tanzania, the highest prevalence rates have been recorded." Since the Tanzanians were widely regarded as liberators who had freed Uganda from the tyranny of Idi Amin, the population could not bring itself to judge the Tanzanians harshly over this matter. Nevertheless, the

 rumours persisted. The people who first perished of the new disease were the women who had been raped by the FRONASA men during their rampage through Rakai in early March 1979. Still, almost nobody made the connection. If indeed this disease was brought to Uganda by the invading Tanzanian army, why did it first become significant in Rakai, which is much further inland than the places the Tanzanians first set foot in Uganda, like the border area of Mutukula or the towns of Mbarara and Masaka? Rakai is heavily Catholic and conservative, where matters of sexuality remain taboo. Were this new sexually transmitted disease to break out in Uganda, the capital Kampala or the eastern border with Kenya where long-distance goods lorries and trade go back and forth would have been the more natural avenue. In most of Uganda, the public first heard of Rakai in connection with this disease, which the locals called "Slim" because of its severe wasting and weight loss traits. Why was this new disease --- later to take on the name AIDS --- to break out first in Rakai in Uganda where the FRONASA force had

 gone on a campaign of rape and destruction, and not first break out in Tanzania? If AIDS was brought by the Tanzanian soldiers in 1979, that would mean that by then it had more or less destroyed a large part of the Tanzanian army and by extension, Tanzanian society. By the time Uganda woke up to the AIDS crisis in 1982, Tanzania would long have been a disaster area. And yet reports on AIDS in Africa first started spreading in Uganda, not Tanzania. A strange development that was in Rakai after the FRONASA men went there on a rampage. The fuller significance of this, like most other matters concerning Museveni, will be grasped when this narrative gets to the 1980s. When the war effort in Masaka and Mbarara was completed and the towns secured by the Tanzanians, Museveni set off for Fort Portal town at the foot of the Rwenzori mountains in Toro. Fort Portal was already in the hands of the Tanzanians. He went by a new title: Supreme Commissar. Once he got to Fort Portal, Museveni took up residence in the main palace of the Omukama (king) of Toro atop a hill overlooking the town. He had done the same thing in Mbarara. The Moshi unity conference In March 1979, the Tanzanian government --- stung by criticism

 that it had launched an illegal war on Uganda and so violated the OAU charter --- hurriedly organised a conference in the town of Moshi By this conference, it was hoped to create the impression that Ugandans themselves were uniting to create a common front against Amin. A number of military and quasi-military, human rights, and intellectual groups --- 22 in all --- assembled at Moshi. FRONASA and it leader Museveni was there in force. Museveni resided at the YMCA hostel in the town for the duration of the conference. He attended the conference deliberations with much enthusiasm and at all times wore military uniform. FRONASA emphasised the intertwined relationship between military science and political science and insisted that the army be given a say in all future arrangements in Uganda. Many people, especially fugures like Dr. Arnold Bisase and Dan Wadada Nabudere opposed the FRONASA proposals, preferring that civilians dominate the future politicals landscape of Uganda and that the

 military does the bidding of the civilian authorities. Typically, Museveni in his autobiography takes on for himself the credit for the idea of hosting the Moshi conference. Museveni claims that it was because Nyerere had lost confidence in Obote. According to Museveni, "the Tanzanians were anxious to put together a Ugandan front, other than Obote, whom they now knew was a liability both inside and outside Uganda." (Sowing The Mustard Seed, page 105) Once again, Museveni's distortion of history comes to the light. According to the Kenyan scholar Bethwell A. Ogot, writing in Building on the Indigenous:

 Selected Essays 1981 - 1998 (Kisumu: Anyange Press Ltd., 1999), Nyerere was so set on the idea of Obote as first choice of a post-Amin Ugandan leader that as the Tanzanian army marched toward Kampala in early 1979, Nyerere asked Obote and the Tanzanian Defence Minister Rashidi Kawawa to fly to Masaka town and get ready to enter Kampala with the army should it succeed in overthrowing Amin. "Obote and Kawawa actually went as far as Bukoba, before they were recalled to Dar-es-Salaam by Nyerere," Ogot noted. Only pressure from Britain caused Nyerere to withdraw his plan of returning Obote to power in 1979. Tanzania, which was still a poor socialist country, was finding it difficult to

 prosecute the war with its own resources and requested its former colonial master Britain to help it in the war effort. Britain expressed willingness but one of its conditions was that Obote should not be returned to power following the fall of Amin. A powerful Baganda lobby in London had persuaded the British government to block the return of Obote to power. Asked whom they would prefer to see as president instead, the Baganda lobby suggested the name of Yusufu Lule, a former Principal of Makerere University College. At the Moshi conference, the Uganda People's Congress party --- aware that it had a large following among the Ugandan exile community --- proposed that all present at the conference attend in their individual capacities. The UPC knew that it would inevitably dominate proceedings if this were done. The steering committee rejected this proposal and instead committees were set up. A Constitutional Committee, which designed the structure of a proposed Uganda National Liberation Fr

ont (UNLF), was set up and this structure included a National Consultative Council (NCC) which would serve as Uganda's national assembly of the UNLF period. A constitution of the UNLF was drawn up. When time came to elect a chairman of the UNLF, it was by now assumed that Lule would easily be chosen. At the last minute, one of the delegates, the former Anglican bishop of Bukedi, Yona Okoth, stood up and proposed the name of Paulo Muwanga, a UPC delegate and former Ugandan ambassador to France, as chairman. There was drama and shock at the conference as few had expected this. Belatedly, somebody forwarded Lule's name to be formally nominated. Lule was unanimously elected and

 Muwanga was named the chairman of a Military Commission of the UNLF. Museveni was elected vice chairman of the Military Commission. Bearing in mind that it was British pressure that blocked Obote not only from being named by Nyerere as the president-in-waiting following the future overthrow of Amin but kept him away from the Moshi conference, the real preferences of Nyerere can be seen in who was elected to take up the other powerful positions except that which Lule was given. At the time of the conference, most delegates did not foresee what a powerful body the Military Commission would become in the following months in Uganda. Lieutenant-Colonel David Oyite-Ojok, the former adjutant-general, was named chief of staff of the proposed Uganda National Liberation Army (UNLA) while Colonel Tito Okello, Museveni's residential neighbour in Dar es Salaam, was named the UNLA's commander. Colonel William Omaria was also named to the Military Commission. Since Nyerere had been forced to leave his friend Obote out of the process, he made up for that disappointment by

 endowing the Military Commission with the real power to determine the outcome of events in Uganda and most of the Commission's members were all sympathetic to Obote except Museveni. How did Museveni, at just 35, come to be named the Military Commission vice chairman? His close relationship with Nyerere for one might have held the key. Might he have visited Nyerere and pleaded to be appointed as vice chairman of the Military Commission? This much is not known but would not be an impossibility. Either way, he would become one of the best-known figures in the new dispensation. He returned to Uganda after that, visiting the frontline near Mpigi. As we learned earlier, Museveni met a number of intelligence from the State Research Bureau who had secretly worked for him and used them to identify other agents from among the prisoners of war captured by the Tanzanians. 

When on April 11, 1979, the invading forces captured Kampala and the Amin regime fell, Lieutenant-Colonel David Oyite-Ojok announced over Radio Uganda that the Idi Amin "is no longer in power." It was a thrilling moment for most Ugandans who had lived in fear for more than eight years. At the news of the fall of Kampala, Museveni became very angry. Why? He had hoped all along along to be the man given the honour of announcing the fall of the Amin government to the invading forces. Frustrated that this had not come to pass, he ordered his FRONASA men in Fort Portal to blow up the King's palace. On the surface of it, this decision to blow up the palace might seem like yet another piece of evidence that Museveni at the core was a mentally unstable and maniacal man. How

by Boyi Yobbo           Yes                 

31        News Story     Murder of DP leader Benedicto Kiwanuka A well-publicised murder was that of Benedicto Kagimu Kiwanuka, the president general of the Democratic Party and at the time of his death, chief justice of the Uganda High Court. He is generally believed to have been murdered on orders of Amin allegedly for collaborating with the exile groups in Tanzania. He was then reportedly dragged out of the High Court building in Kampala in September 1972 where he was Chief Justice of the country at the time, forced into a car boot, and taken to the Makindye military police barracks where he was killed. What really happened to Kiwanuka? Two days before Kiwanuka was kidnapped, Obote had allegedly received a letter from him, presumably to affirm his support for Obote and the anti-Amin struggle. As part of their subversive activities against the Amin administration, FRONASA also used to compose

 letters purportedly written from Tanzania by the Obote aide, Lt. Colonel Oyite Ojok, and listing Oyite Ojok's postal address. These letters were addressed to selected prominent Ugandans and "leaked" to the state security agency, the State Research Bureau, in order to lead to the arrest and, if possible, murder of the person in question. Museveni had several calculations by this deadly covert action. Obote's Kikoosi Maluum armed faction was, as noted already, the main rival of FRONASA. If these subversive letters were written purportedly in the names of Obote and Oyite Ojok, not only would they endanger the lives of the targetted prominent Ugandans; if that truth were ever found out, it would create a deep hatred and resentment for Obote and Oyite Ojok in Uganda. On December 2, 1972, Amin met three senior Roman Catholic leaders in the country who had come to him to petition him over 58 white western missionaires who had just been expelled from Uganda. Amin issued a warning to the clergymen about letters that they were allegedly distributing in collaboration with the guerrillas to "spread confusion in the country."

 These three leaders were Emmanuel Cardinal Nsubuga, the archbishop of Kampala, Bishop Ddungu of Masaka diocese, and Bishop Kyangire of Gulu diocese. One of these letters was reportedly written by a Ugandan lawyer and businessman based in Nairobi named John Wycliffe Kazzora. It had been written to Cardinal Nsubuga seeking his help in the struggle to overthrow Amin. Three days later on December 5, 1972, a letter appeared in the Daily Nation newspaper of Nairobi by Kazzora in which he denied having written the letter referred to by Amin. Kazzora said that letter was a forgery. It was important for Kazzora to clear his name. Why? Kazzzora was an ardent supporter of Museveni in his campaign against Amin; so much so that one of Kazzora's cousins named Janet Kataha became a go-between Kazzora and Museveni, taking messages between the two men. Museveni mentioned this in Sowing the Mustard Seed: "It was at the Hilton Hotel in Nairobi that I accidentally met the Kazzora family in December 1972...Soon after this first meeting with Kazzora, and his agreement to work with us, Amin put pressure on the Kenyan government which obliged him to leave for England. Kazzora had thus already left by the time I returned to Nairobi in January 1973, but he nominated Janet to work as a liaison and courier

 between himself and me." (page 87) The entry of Jsnet Kataha into Museveni's world began with her role as a courier. In carrying letters between Museveni and Kazzora and other partners in FRONASA, she no doubt must have received some briefing to acquaint her with the dangerous nature of the work she was undertaking. The importance of secrecy, the use of aliases and other false identities, disguise in her dress, and the content of some of the letters and parcels must have all been emphasised to her. For Museveni to eventually trust her enough to make her his wife, she must have come to learn some of the most secret details of what FRONASA was doing. This fact would become significant after Museveni came to power, when his wife and family assumed more power than any First Family in Uganda's history. As has been said, Amin well knew what Museveni was doing and what he was capable of. During the 1970s, the national counterintelligence agency, the State Research Bureau, dedicated a desk to the

 monitoring of Museveni's guerrilla activities. When the pieces are tied together --- the role of Janet Kataha Museveni as a courier, the letter allegedly written by Kazzora to Ugandan religious leaders, Amin's charge that letters were being written to spread confusion in Uganda, and Kazzora's letter to the Daily Nation denying he had written the letter --- there is every reason to suppose that the letter supposedly written to Obote by Kiwanuka just before his arrest, could have come from FRONASA. A revealing piece of evidence that points to FRONASA's hand in Kiwanuka's murder came in an interview with the African current affairs magazine Drum in 1980 by Kiwanuka's widow, Maxensia Zalwango Kiwanuka. Asked about the circumstances of her husband's death, which at that time she blamed on Amin personally, she told the reporter V.P. Kirega-Gava: "To prevent any information from reaching us, some Banyankole who were present as my husband was being butchered by Amin were killed under

 mysterious circumstances." Several questions arise out of Mrs Kiwanuka's interview. To begin with, few heads of state in the modern world would personally carry out executions when they had squads of agents who could easily carry out the deed while leaving the president looking innocent. There have been many claims that Amin personally executed many of his victims. This would not be possible if Amin had vehemently denied any role by his government in their killing. Secondly, even if this one head of state Amin was the kind to personally murder his opponents, almost all accounts of Amin's alleged brutality mention that he surrounded himself with and relied on trusted and vicious Nubian, Sudanese, Lugbara, and Kakwa killers from his West Nile home district and southern Sudan. A few others have mentioned that Amin's State Research Bureau intelligence service also employed Rwandese Tutsi refugees who had lived in Uganda since 1959. If these accounts are correct and typical, what then would Amin have been doing with Banyankole men at the time he was personally killing Kiwanuka? Yoweri Museveni had made the Banyankole his adoptive tribe and here a few clues begin to avail themselves. It would be unusual for Amin, especially when personally killing a prominent Ugandan, to trust the Banyankole or any other tribes from southern Uganda to be at the scene of his deeds. Amin knew that he was being

 opposed by the guerrilla leader Museveni. Since Museveni came from Ankole, army and security officers from Ankole were potential supporters of Museveni. Amin would not have risked murdering Kiwanuka while in the company of these Banyankole who might pass details of these killings by Amin himself to the anti-government groups in exile in Tanzania or Europe. If indeed he committed the deed himself, Amin in all probability would have been accompanied by only the most trusted and loyal of his own tribesmen from the West Nile area. Could these Banyankole whom Maxensia Kiwanuka referred to in her Drum interview have been the FRONASA agents working for Museveni and whom he later ordered killed to cover up his role in Kiwanuka's murder? After all, if Banyankole security agents in the company of President Amin could be killed to prevent any information from reaching Kiwanuka's family, so too could security men from any other tribes. Amin who came to power through a military coup would know enough about conspiracy to be aware that anybody, even people from his own tribe, could pass

 information on to Kiwanuka's family either for money or after becoming disgruntled with Amin in later years. In 1974, a Tanzanian intelligence officer, Deusdedit Kusekwa Masanja, captured in Uganda gave an account of Kiwanuka's death to Drum which published it in the March 1974 issue of the magazine. Masanja said he witnessed Kiwanuka being killed in the Makindye military police barracks in Kampala on September 28, 1972. The most striking part of Masanja's account was his failure to reveal that Amin personally killed Kiwanuka or the failure by Drum to mention that, if indeed this is what happened. Any credible news agency or publication would know that an eye witness account of Amin's personal hand in the murder of his former chief justice would be the news story or news feature of the year, if not the

 decade. Why was none of this mentioned, if Amin was responsible? Former FRONASA assassins more than 30 years later admitted that Kiwanuka had been abducted and murdered by FRONASA. According to these former FRONASA agents, Kiwanuka was abducted from the High Court buildings and killed by FRONASA. On July 16, 1987, the Citizen, a weekly newspaper with ties to the Democratic Party explained in some detail what happened to Kiwanuka: "He was abducted on the 21st September 1972 from the High Court Chambers by three armed men in civilian clothes. He was driven in a Pegueot 504 No. UUU 171 towards Kampala International Hotel. Since then not a shred of light has been shed on the manner in which he was killed nor the place where the murder took place." In February 2005, The

 Monitor newspaper in Kampala was contacted by a man who claims he actually buried the body of Kiwanuka in the Luzira area of the city. This man was willing to narrate his story, but insisted on the newspaper first securing an international amnesty for him. This again begs the question of why this man who simply undertook the task of burying Kiwanuka's body should be so fearful for his life, considering that Amin's regime was overthrown in 1979 and Amin (assuming he was the one who personally killed Kiwanuka) died in 2003. What would this man be afraid of? Obviously he knew that Kiwanuka's killers were in Kampala in 2005 and in control of the government. Since Amin and his regime had unanimously been blamed for Kiwanuka's death, any news given by the man who buried Kiwanuka's body would not change the public's belief that it was the departed Amin who ordered Kiwanuka's murder, if he carried it out himself. For this man to request protection before he could speak, raised the possibility that the

 people he had to fear by his revelations about what happened to Kiwanuka were alive, in Kampala, and most probably in positions of power and in the security services. Another prominent death in point was that of the former foreign minister and former Ugandan ambassador to the Soviet Union, Lt. Colonel Michael Ondoga. He was a brother-in-law of President Amin by virtue of Amin's marriage to Ondoga's sister, Kay Adroa Amin. In early February 1974, Amin summoned a cabinet meeting at which he invited a French film crew to record the proceedings. Apparently, there had been growing slackness among cabinet ministers and Amin who postured as a strict disciplinarian would not have this. He criticised the cabinet for their late coming and singled out for the harshest words Ondoga, who sat uncomfortably during the meeting. Two weeks later, Ondoga was kidnapped and his badly mutilated body was found

 floating along the River Nile. The western news media and Ugandan exile groups condemned Ondoga's murder, blaming it squarely on Amin and charging that this was further proof of the president's maniacal dictatorship. Some evidence refutes this charge against Amin. As already mentioned, Ondoga was the president's brother-in-law and only the most extraordinary treachery on the part of Ondoga would have led Amin to order the murder of Ondoga. Ondoga's offence, as Amin himself angrily said during the cabinet meeting, was his lateness to work. Secondly, Ondoga was kidnapped and later murdered. Had this order come from Amin, there would have been no need to kidnap the foreign minister. It has been widely claimed that Amin's soldiers and security agents had the habit of dragging prominent Ugandans into cars in broad daylight and on to their deaths. Following this tendency, there would have been no need for

 Ondoga to be kidnapped two weeks after he was reprimanded by Amin. More than a few ministers and government officials had been summarily sacked by the president in a national radio broadcast. This would not have been unusual. Thirdly, Amin had criticised his foreign minister during a cabinet meeting filmed by a French television team. The president well knew that the recording would end up being broadcast in France and through much of a western world that was increasingly hostile to Amin's government. For the goal of discrediting Amin, there could be nothing more valuable to the Ugandan exiles than this documentary film. Amin would have been the last person to order the kidnapping and murder of his foreign minister, since whoever had watched the recording of the cabinet meeting would naturally blame the president for the murder. Finally, upon Amin's death in August 2003, Amin's fifth and former wife, Sarah Kyolaba Amin, was interviewed by London's Daily Mirror newspaper. In comments published by the Daily Mirror on August 18, 2003, Sarah Amin paid tribute to her late

 husband, describing him as a true African hero and a loving father. Amin in his years as president liked to portray himself as a devout family man. He often participated in motor races with his wife Sarah Kyolaba as co-driver and even while receiving foreign dignitaries, his two favourite children Moses and Mwanga were often present. This image of Amin as an indulgent and affectionate family man is consistent even in the photographs, books, and magazines that have sought to portray him in the most unflattering light. In 1972 for instance, a body named the Public Safety Unit was formed to crack down on violent crime and the Public Safety Unit became greatly dreaded by the public. Amin and the head of the Public Safety Unit, Hussein Marella, insisted that these unexplained acts of public disorder and crime were being committed not by the army but by saboteurs. A commission of inquiry was created to look into allegations that the Public Safety Unit was behind the harassment and murder of prominent

 Ugandans. After the commission cleared the Public Safety Unit of any charges, Amin in a Radio Uganda broadcast said that the verdict "proved that people who used to say that the Public Safety Unit was bad are the very people who are carrying out those subversive activities." Amin defended the Public Safety Unit. He was capable of loyalty. It would be unlikely, therefore, that Amin would have ordered the assassination of Ondoga his foreign minister and brother-in-law over a minor offence and yet the president had shown loyalty to some among his senior government officials who were widely feared or grumbled about by the public like the Public Safety Unit head, Hussein Marella. Incidentally, Amin's statement that those who blamed the Public Safety Unit were the very people who were carrying out these subversive activities throws further light on the fact of what was going on in Uganda at the time and that Amin was aware that his government was being maligned by the guerrillas based in Britain,

 Tanzania, and Kenya. Speaking to the Daily Monitor on May 29, 2005, the former Ugandan foreign minister, assistant OAU secretary general, and Ugandan ambassador to Britain, Paul Etiang in a series titled "Serving Amin" said this of the former president: "Amin was somebody who, if you told him something, he would look straight at you very deeply and get convinced about it but keep quiet because he wanted to put some mystery to it...The way Amin was behaving, no one --- not even his wives I dare say --- could say that he or she had seen the totality of him. Amin in one place would behave very differently in another place. It would take a number of people with whom he worked to come together and piece the complete picture together. All the judgements about Amin tend to depict him as a terrorist not because that was his nature but because I think those are the only things remembered about him. 

I must say that the worst that happened to Amin is what would happen to many presidents." (italics added for emphasis) On the morning of August 18, 2003, two days after Amin's death, his former vice president General Mustapha Adrisi was asked by Radio France Internationale to give his verdict of the former leader. Adrisi said he had one problem with Amin --- his propensity for lies and exaggeration, something that Etiang mentioned in his recollection of the Amin years. In the same interview, Adrisi said, however, that Amin was not the legendary killer he has been portrayed to be. Adrisi said Amin was loved by ordinary people and very popular all over the country. Another former official in the Amin government was Lt. Colonel Nassur Abdallah who was arrested in 1979 after the overthrow of Amin and spent 21 years in jail in Kampala before being released on September 11, 2000. Lt. Colonel Abdallah was widely regarded as one of Amin's most notorious henchmen. As governor of the Central Province from January 8, 1975 to April 11, 1979, Abdallah was reported to have ordered crimminals and idlers in Kampala City to forcibly eat rubber slippers as a punishment for wearing slippers in the city at a time he was trying to

 ban the habit. He told this to the Daily Monitor on July 3, 2005: "The allegations that I made people eat slippers whenever I found them wearing [them] are baseless and I have always asked anybody to come out and challenge me but no one has done so. I never made people eat slippers and this is just politics of hatred." Abdallah was also accused by some of being the killer of Francis Walugembe, the mayor of the southern town of Masaka, in 1972. Refuting that claim, he said: "That other story of Francis Walugembe is also fake. I never killed Walugembe and those people in Masaka can tell the truth about me." This accusation of Abdallah is more revealing when it is borne in mind that another of Amin's close aides, Colonel Isaac ("Maliyamungu") Lugonzo was said by the exile groups to have personally murdered

 Walugembe and marched the body through the streets of the town. Either it was Abdallah who murdered Walugembe or it was Malyiamungu or neither of them. If it is true that Maliyamungu not only commited the deed but dragged the late mayor's body through Masaka's streets, then there were enough bystanders that day in Masaka who clearly saw Maliyamungu unashamedly drag the body about. And yet in years following, rumours began to spread in Kampala that Walugembe was murdered by Nassur Abdallah. The fact that Abdallah's name came up at all even when Maliyamungu is supposed to have been publicly seen parading the dead mayor's body through the streets of Masaka leads to one conclusion: the crime might have been committed by neither of the two men. As in the case of the Americans Stroh and Siedle, there is such a conflict of accuracy in the versions given of Walugembe's murder that it once again raises the question of who it was that was distributing this misinformation and whether that party might have been the perpetrator of the crime. Walugembe, like Jolly Joe Kiwanuka, Basil and Edith Bataringaya, John Kakonge, Fr. Clement Kiggundu, Frank Kalimuzo and dozens of others, was murdered by FRONASA.

 Little thought has been given to the reports about the mutilated bodies of prominent Ugandan and foreign victims of the Amin "terror" found floating along the River Nile, sometimes as far north of Kampala at the Karuma Falls, more than three hours' drive away. It made no sense for these victims' remains to be driven all the way to Karuma to be dumped into the Nile when they could easily --- and more economically with fewer risks of being discovered later --- have been buried in secret mass graves or military cemetaries, cremeted, or in any other way got rid of. There has never a claim been made that the Nile was believed by these Nubian and West Nile killers to have special magical or ritually cleansing powers so that a trip to the river was worth the bother and risk of being found out. The Nile is the world's longest river and on average about a kilometre wide, with several turns and rapids, boulders and rocks along its course. It is difficult to believe that there was always, by some coincidence, an idle person who just happened to be standing along the river's banks and by chance somehow managed to sight what

 looked like a corpse. This idle person who was otherwise minding his own business then and on closer inspection (by swimming or getting a chance ride in a boat closer to the corpse) realised that this just happened to be a prominent citizen he had always seen on television and read about in the newspapers. No single photograph has ever been reported or published in which a single rotting or mutilated body was shown either being pulled out of the Nile or surrounded by shocked villagers and fishermen or police detectives. If it was not in the interest of Amin's government to display these photographs, it would at least have been in the interest and for the benefit of the exile community and guerrilla forces to publish these photographs to reinforce to the world the scale of Amin's brutality. These are some of the stories that have come to the surface since the end of Amin's rule which contradict the general assumption that Amin's rule was a reign of terror that he masterminded. Predictably, these brutalities allegedly committed by Amin's regime came to the attention of a shocked world. Amin's reputation slipped rapidly. On June

 10, 1976, President Amin was invited to the Nsambya police barracks as guest of honour at the passing out parade of newly commissioned officers. Suddenly, three grenades were hurled at the President's jeep, killing his driver. While in exile in Saudi Arabia in the late 1990s, Amin would explain to his family what happened that day. The grenade that hit Amin on the back and landed onto the side of the renegade jeep was a shrapnel grenade which was intended to cause maximum injury to the President and increase the likelihood that he would be killed. The explosion was absorbed by the rear tyre of the jeep and by the ground. Apparently, whoever had thrown the grenade had been either in a panic, impatient, or an amateur with shrapnel grenades which are timed to explode about 10 to 15 seconds after the lever has been released. Amin grabbed the body of his driver and dumped it back into the jeep. Amin then fixed a

 Motorola larynx communicator to his throat and roared off toward the Mulago hospital, all the time issuing orders for army reinforcements at the barracks and the cordoning off of the entire area around the barracks. Amin had escaped another assassination, the 13th of his presidency. Amin and most people at that police barracks did not know who the assailant with the three grenades was. The would-be assassin at Nsambya that day was Yoweri Museveni. In the commotion of the scene, Museveni escaped to the nearby Kibuli hill for refuge. Waiting for him there was Prince Badru Kakungulu, the descendant of the man regarded as the father of Islam in Uganda, Semei Kakungulu. This assassination plan was hatched and required that should it abort, Museveni was to quickly retreat to the prince's house atop Kibuli hill.

 The man coordinating Museveni's progress to Nsambya and back to Kibuli was named Anthony Butele, who would later be appointed minister of labour in the second Obote government in 1980. Many years later in the 1990s, some people close to Museveni would remark at a deeply felt sense of frustration by Museveni that he had been unable to get rid of Amin. And yet it was his tendency while speaking in public to remind Ugandans that "we defeated Amin". This frustration, undoubtedly, sprang from from this incident at Nsambya when he came so close to personally assassinating Amin but failed. There is

 every possibility that Museveni might have been involved in person in a few more of the 14 attempts on Amin's life between 1971 and 1979. In 1976, apart from entering Uganda to try and assassinate President Amin, Museveni came on a second mission: to survey the countryside and see what location was suitable for him to launch a future guerrilla war, as he had done in inspecting the Mozambican district of Nangade. The hilly areas of western Uganda Museveni found to be unsuitable for his preferred kind of guerrilla warfare. The northern and eastern parts of the country were too flat and bare as well. 

After perusing through maps of the physical terrain and finding out details about climate and soil conditions, Museveni settled on a district in central Uganda called Luwero. It had fertile soil, a good ethnic mixture of people, heavy tropical trees growing high enough to provide cover, and at the heart of the country, it was strikingly similar to the Nangade district of Mozambique. The death of Entebbe Israeli hostage Dora Bloch On June 28, 1976, a $16 million Boeing 707 jetliner belonging to Air France was hijacked at Athens airport by Palestinian and German terrorists on its way from Tel Aviv, Israel. During the Entebbe Air France hostage crisis in late June and early July 1976, Israel's foreign counterintelligence agency Mossad requested one of President Amin's former confidantes and friends, Israel's Colonel

 Baruch Bar-Lev to compile a profile of Amin by which Mossad could better understand the leader they were dealing with. The profile was quoted in William Stevenson's 1976 book on the hostage crisis titled 90 Minutes At Entebbe, page 61: "Amin is from a lesser northern tribe. He has never read a book in his life. The hijacking is the most important historic opportunity for him. The whole world is writing about Uganda and about Amin, its president. Important governments negotiate with him, diplomatic messages go back and forth. He visits the hostages every day, in a different [military] uniform each time...He is applauded by the hostages and he orders them food and drink, blankets and sheets. He has only shown anger once --- when one of the Jewish hostages omitted one of the titles which must be used when addressing the field marshal-doctor-president. Idi Amin Dada's mother [Aisha Aate] loved the Bible. In her will she ordered her son to honor the Jewish people. In his childhood he had no religion until convinced that he was a Muslim...There is no doubt he has the gift of leadership; his control of his

 soldiers --- most of them from his northern tribes --- comes largely from his tall stature, his great physical strength, his mastery of English, and his Fuhrerlike rhetoric." This profile of Idi Amin was commissioned by Mossad and given by an Israeli who knew Amin intimately and therefore provides one of the best bases from which we can understand the former Ugandan leader. It is important to take note that the profile was written during one of the gravest political crises to face the Jewish state since it was founded in 1948 and so it is revealing that even under such circumstances, Bar-Lev was able to render an unbiased account of who Amin really was. The profile mentioned Amin's mother ordering her son to honour the Jewish people. It refers --- very crucially --- to Amin's "control of his soldiers". It also says that he was "applauded by the hostages" at Entebbe for whom he ordered food, drinks, sheets, and

 blankets. Additionally, according to this Mossad report, Amin only once lost his temper, over a minor failure by one of the hostages to address him correctly. In 90 Minutes At Entebbe, it is mentioned on page 120 that an economist named Ilan Hartuv and a son of one of the hostages, 74-year old Doris ("Dora") Bloch, was Amin's interpreter for the hostages from English to Hebrew on behalf of Amin. Bloch held dual British and Israeli citizenship. What picture we gain of the atmosphere at Entebbe International Airport, then, is one of tension but also a surprising amount of liking for Amin by the hostages, his efforts to keep them comfortable, and his jovial or at least calm state of mind. Combining this background with information on Amin's personality and background during the hostage crisis by Colonel Bar-Lev to Mossad, we see something important because it leads us to the question of who killed one the hostages, Dora Bloch. Almost all reports say Bloch had been rushed to Mulago hospital in Kampala on Friday July 2 after she choked on a piece of food at Entebbe airport. The reports say that

 when the Israeli commandos raied Entebbe, she was still admitted at Mulago. It is said that on Sunday morning July 4, several hours after the hostage rescue, Bloch was still at Mulago where she was visited by a diplomat from the British High Commission. She was later to disappear mysteriously in Uganda, presumed dead. Some accounts claimed that two security men, the director of the intelligence service, Lt. Colonel Farouk Minawa and one Captain Nasur Odongo, dragged Bloch from her Mulago hospital bed and had her killed. Following the end of the 1979 Tanzania-Uganda war in which Amin was deposed, a former officer in the State Research Bureau, Abraham Kisuule-Minge claimed early that April that Bloch was killed on orders of the bureau's director, Minawa. Kisuule-Minge was quoted by TIME magazine in a report published on April 30, 1979: "As Kisuule-Minge tells it, she [Bloch] was brought from the

 hospital to the SRB [State Research Bureau]. There, Farouk made a slashing motion across his throat as she was flung to the floor. She was driven away, sobbing, to a nearby forest, where she was shot in the back." Another claim, pointing personally to Amin, is reported by the website Crimelibrary.com: "A single Jewish woman, the elderly and ailing Dora Bloch, was released so she could be hospitalized. An Israeli commando team stormed the plane and freed the hostages. An infuriated Idi Amin is reported to have gone to the hospital and strangled...Doris Bloch with his own hands." A third version claims that a soldier called Shaban is the one who killed Bloch. A former student at Makerere University, John Sekabira, speaking in exile, told Drum in an account published in its September 1977 issue that he had witnessed the burial of "the body of an elderly white woman" at Murchison Bay Prison Camp on August 20, 1976. Sekabira was not specific about whether this elderly woman was Bloch or any other white woman. Shortly after the end of Amin's rule in April 1979, Mossad approached a respected Israeli pathologist, Dr Maurice Rogev, to examine and certify the remains of Dora Bloch. What then happened to Dora Bloch? The evidence must first be examined. According to the TIME magazine issue of July 26, 1976, "Amin has insisted that Mrs. Bloch was at Entebbe when the Israelis landed, but a British diplomat in Uganda reported visiting her in the hospital nearly a day after the raid. Furious at being contradicted,

 Amin expelled two British diplomats from his country." To expel these two British diplomats --- the chargé-d'affairs James Horrocks and Peter Chandley, who had visited Bloch in hospital --- would have been percieved as an admission of guilt by Amin, unless he felt sure that he was being unfairly blamed for Bloch's death. The claim that Amin might have been reasonable about the raid but his indisciplined and brutal soldiers decided to take their humiliation and anger at the Israeli raid out on this elderly woman are refuted by Mossad's own report that indicated that Amin had "control of his soldiers." A former FRONASA agent confessed in 2005 that Amin's army was generally the most disciplined Uganda has had since independence. In an interview on the American CBS television network on July 11, 1976, a week after the successful raid on Entebbe, the then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was asked the following questions: "Q: Do you have reason to believe that Mrs. Dora Bloch has been killed on orders of Idi Amin? A: I have no other evidence until this moment as to the whereabouts of Mrs. Dora Bloch,

 except one --- that the Government of Uganda is the sole responsible body for whatever has happened, happens or will happen to Mrs. Bloch. Because she was under the full control of the Uganda authorities while she was in the hospital. We have hard evidence that Mrs. Dora Bloch was alive Sunday morning after the operation. Therefore the full responsibility for whatever has happened or will happen to Mrs. Dora Bloch will be the responsibility of the Ugandan government and its president. Q: In the event that you should get some tragic news about the 75-year old Mrs. Bloch, what in fact can Israel do? A: I would not discuss what are the options that are open to Israel but I would like to stress very clearly that the full responsibility will be put on the Ugandan government." Addressing the United Nations Security Council in New York on July 9, 1976, Uganda's foreign minister, Lt. Colonel Juma Oris Abdallah explained the circumstances of Bloch's disappearance from Uganda's point of view: "Up to the time of Israeli's

 invasion in the early hours of Sunday, July 4, President Amin had succeeded in having more than half the hostages released. In his humanitarian efforts my President was concerned not only with the release of all hostages but also about their welfare... ...It was in this spirit that Mrs. Dora Bloch, who had a piece of food stuck in her throat, was immediately rushed to Uganda's best hospital for medical treatment. When she got better in the evening of Saturday, 3 July, she was returned by the medical authorities to the old Entebbe airport to join the other hostages.... ...In accordance with the understanding given by the Uganda Government to the hijackers, this was done in order not to jeopardize the lives of the hostages who were at that time still at Entebbe airport. The Israelis committed a naked act of aggression by invading Entebbe airport where the hostages, including Mrs Bloch, were being held by the hijackers." Because the Amin regime was already much maligned in the eyes of the world, even if Lt. Colonel Oris was speaking the truth, it was much easier to dismiss this statement as a coverup and a distortion of the truth in order to absolve the "murderous regime." President Amin was trained in Israel as a paratrooper. He was brought to power by an Israeli- and British-sponsored coup in 1971. He, more than most

 Ugandans, knew firsthand what the Israelis could do when angered, how swift they were to deliver justice, and how world opinion since the holocaust leaned toward them. He would have known that to harm in any way Mrs. Bloch would have invited drastic action from Israel, perhaps before long a coup to depose him and perhaps assassinate him. As erratic as Amin often was, he was a hard-nosed realist. It was not for nothing that he had survived numerous coups and assassination attempts. He would not have clumsily ordered his men to kill Bloch, knowing how this would horrify world opinion. In fact, what Amin was more likely to do would have been to carry on acting as a benefactor to the hostages, playing the role of a kind-hearted, concerned African leader. He would have wanted to visit Mulago hospital,

 show concern for the elderly woman, with Ugandan television cameras to record the event. Having lost the crisis to the Israelis after they raided Entebbe, there was nothing left to bargain with. Amin could only have one last chance to look like a statesman, by making it appear that he was considerate to the hostages but an ungrateful and aggressive Israel returned his kindness with an invasion. Dora Bloch alive would have been far better for Amin than her dead or injured. And here we must remember that even Mossad's own report on Amin mentioned his "control" over his soldiers, thus ruling out the possibility that some over-zealous army officers decided to retaliate against Israel by murdering Bloch. What then was Israel's version of what happened? Rabin was the Israeli army chief of staff during the spectacular six-day Arab-Israeli war of June 1967 just nine years earlier. He had been elected Prime Minister partly on the basis of his standing as a resolute war hero. Not only was the Entebbe hostage crisis a test of Israel's resolve against its enemies. To be seen as giving in to terrorist groups and hostile governments would have been regarded as encouraging these enemies of Israel to grow bolder. By the end of July it was evident to all that Bloch had probably died in Uganda. And yet Israel did not take the kind of

 retaliatory action against Amin that the country is feared for in the Middle East --- its policy of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Had Israel hit at Uganda for a second time, it would have been given more support around the world than what it got during the hostage crisis. This second military operation would be easier to execute because there would be no need to agonize over the potential for putting Israeli citizens in Uganda in harm's way. Israel, a nation formed out of the ashes of the holocaust during the

 Second World War, learned through tragedy to value every single Jewish life. As they contemplated a raid on Entebbe, the Israeli government and military officials must have been agonizing to know that should the operation go wrong, some or all of the hostages they had come to rescue would end up dead. Every effort had to be made to keep the hostages as far from harm's way as possible. This, no doubt, would have included Dora Bloch in hospital in Kampala. 90 Minutes At Entebbe says on page 123: "In the hospital where Dora Bloch had been taken, another British diplomat, Peter Chandley, checked to make sure she was safe. The elderly woman was sleeping quietly. The nurses said she was well and could rejoin her Flight 139 passengers later. Chandley said nothing to the staff about the raid and they seemed to know nothing about it. No non-Ugandan would see her alive again." Why did Israel drop the subject of Dora Bloch soon after the July 1976 raid on Entebbe and why did the subject of what happened to her only re-surface after the fall of Amin? During Amin's 25-year exile in Saudi Arabia after 1979, 

Israel never made an issue of the death of Dora Bloch. There were no reports of Israel demanding Amin's extradition to Jerusalem to stand trial for the alleged murder by his men of the elderly hostage. In the 1980s, Israel and its sworn enemy the Islamic Republic of Iran undertook top secret arms deals in what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal, indicating that Israel had the pragmatism to talk to even its enemies. Saudi Arabia is almost pro-Israel when compared with Iran. It would not, therefore, have been an impossibility for Israel to enter talks with the Saudi authorities concerning the extradition of Amin to face justice in Israeli courts. Why did none of these events take place? If Amin's director of intelligence, Farouk Minawa, was positively identified dragging Bloch screaming out of Mulago that Sunday morning in full view of the public, how come there has never been a manhunt for him in Libya where he has lived in exile since 1979? Israel went to great lengths in 1961 to abduct the former Nazi official, 

Adolf Karl Eichmann, from Argentina to stand trial in Israel. Israel could have easily managed the same in Uganda, a far less sophisticated country. One of the best proofs that Farouk Minawa did not drag Bloch from hospital was given by Abraham Kisuule-Minge in his April 1979 TIME account, in which he said Bloch was brought to him. As director of the national intelligence agency, Minawa hardly needed to come to Mulago hospital himself to arrest an elderly woman who posed no security or physical threat to anyone. And if reports of her being dragged out of hospital are true, it suggests that Bloch --- at 74 and ill and weak enough to be hospitalised --- resisted her kidnapping vigorously enough to require two strong men to resort to dragging her out. Hardly believable. Why is mention of Farouk Minawa's name almost subdued even in latter records on Bloch's presumed death? Can it be believed that the Israeli army that regularly demolishes Palestinian homes and buildings in the West Bank after a single Israeli soldier is

 shot dead by demonstrators, can be the same army to remain quiet for almost three years after Bloch's death, knowing positively who killed her and knowing that a move to arrest Minawa will be very popular both at home and with the worldwide Jewish community, and even among most Ugandans? A photographer with the government-owned newspaper, the Voice of Uganda, James ("Jimmy") Parma had taken photographs of the body of Dora Bloch and in order to conceal the evidence, Parma was murdered by unknown people. For Parma to have taken photographs of Bloch's body, he had to have come close enough to the scene. That means he must have been permitted to take the photographs. Had Amin's soldiers killed her, in the first place Parma would have been waved away from even attempting to take the photographs. Knowing the political situation of the 1970s and the reports of a murderous government in power, Jimmy Parma would have known better than to venture to take photographs of Bloch's body, when he would have understood the consequences, if indeed it was Farouk Minawa who dragged the elderly woman to her death. If the story of Parma taking photographs is true, it is possible that the

 pictures he took were not of a dead Bloch, but of Bloch being dragged out of Mulago hospital by the mysterious killers. Parma worked for a government newspaper in a military government that practically every news orgnisation, academic institute, and world government considered a dictatorship. Parma was no investigative journalist working for a private newspaper and intent on estblishing for himself what had happened to Bloch. He was just doing his job and was assigned by his editors to take the photographs. These editors knew the government position on the issues of the day. Whatever the nature of the photographs he took of Bloch, they were only and could only have been of the kind that made the

 government look reasonable and even heroic perhaps. He would not have been assigned to take a single photograph that did otherwise. If he had ventured out on his own initiative to take damaging photographs that incriminated the government, there is a high chance that not only Parma but many of his supervisors and senior editors would have been killed by the government. After all, how was anybody to be sure that Parma had not already smuggled the photographs or negatives to his editors or out of the country to an overseas news photo agency like Camerapix or AP/Wide World? Apart from Parma, no other reporter or editor of the Voice of Uganda was killed. This leaves only one interpretation to us: Jimmy Parma took photographs of Dora Bloch looking healthy, being attended to by Ugandan soldiers and medical

 personnel, probably smiling, and in no way harassed. That is what a government-owned newspaper in a dictatorship would want to see published in the next day's edition. For a government photographer to come close enough to Bloch to take her photos, could only mean that at the time he took photos of her, she was being well-treated, safe, healthy, confirming what the Ugandan foreign minister Juma Oris had told the United Nations Security Council. Whoever killed Parma did so for either of two reasons. The first, because Parma's photographs captured those people dragging Bloch to her death and these were not government officials; or they showed Bloch looking well, thus contradicting the reports given that she had been killed by the Amin regime. For an answer to this puzzle and the reports that two men dragged Bloch from her Mulago hospital bed, we look at a detail that TIME magazine included in its July 19,

 1976 news story on the daring Israeli raid on Entebbe: "The preparations...began almost as soon as the Air France Airbus, which had been seized on a flight from Tel Aviv to Paris, landed in Uganda. Within 48 hours, the Mossad, Israel's CIA, had slipped three black undercover agents into Entebbe and two into Kampala, the nearby capital. They sent Jerusalem a constant flow of intelligence, including photographs, about what the terrorists were doing and how the Ugandan army was deployed....Rabin's go-ahead came with less than 24 hours remaining before the skyjackers' Sunday afternoon deadline...The Mossad

 operatives cut Entebbe's communication links with the outside world and "decommissioned" the control tower, including the airfield's radar." Who could these five black agents have been? Were they Black Ethiopian-Israelis? Might they have been Black Americans sent to Entebbe and Kampala because they could blend in unnoticed among the generally Black Ugandan population? 90 Minutes At Entebbe gave more specific details on their identity that TIME magazine: "Black African agents hired by Israel's Mossad reinforced the last-minute reports on Entebbe's defences and conditions. The rescue pilots needed to know the serviceability of runways, the location of fuel tanks (should there be time to draw from them), and the degree of alertness in the control towers --- one of which took care of Uganda's fighter squadrons based on the old part of the airfield." (page 77) Black African agents? This brings us closer to the heart of the matter. The only black African agents who could be relied upon to know

 Entebbe International Airport intimately enough to provide Mossad with vital and accurate information, could have been Ugandans. Moreover, for these black agents to also be able to pass unquestioned or unsuspected through sensitive high security areas, checkpoints, and military installations both at the airport and control tower, they would have had to be either military officers or intelligence agents. Who else but these men could have cut off Entebbe's communication links with the outside world and rendered useless the airfield radar? There is every possibility that Israel dropped mention of the subject of Dora Bloch and surprisingly --- apart from a routine condemnation of Amin --- took no action against the Ugandan military leader after Bloch's disappearance for what can be only one reason: there must have

 been a Mossad operation to snatch her from Mulago hospital. There could have been a plan to either return Bloch to the airport so that she could be rescued by the Israeli commandos along with the other hostages, or a plan to take her to the British High Commission for her safety until a later time when she would be flown out by the British government. During that Mossad operation, something might have gone terribly wrong with her. Her condition might have deteriorated or she might have suffered a heart attack and thus the rescue effort from Mulago ended in disaster. To forestall a public outcry in Israel against the government, there must have been a cover-up and it was blamed on the man, Idi Amin, whom anyone coul easily have laid the blame on. What is now clear, from these facts compiled is that Dora Bloch's death was not the work of Amin or any of his army officers. But who were these two Black men who tried to drag Bloch from the hospital? Deaths of Archbishop Janani Luwum, Charles Oboth-Ofumbi, Wilson Oryema On February 5, 1977, agents of the State Research Bureau went to the home of the

 Anglican Archbishop of Uganda, Janani Luwum. They were searching for arms and hundreds of rounds of ammunition allegedly hidden in Luwum's home by coup plotters. Apparently, there had been a plot hatched in Tanzania to launch a coup against Amin during the June 1977 celebrations to mark the centenary of the Protestant Anglican faith in Uganda. From all accounts to date, the plot was hatched by Milton Obote and some of his close supporters, in collaboration with a number of Anglican church leaders, including Archbishop Luwum and the Bishop of Bukedi diocese (and later Archbishop), Yona Okoth. A large cache of arms was shipped into Uganda using the facilities and vehicles of a Ugandan clearing and forwarding company, Transocean. The arms were hidden in the premises of the

 Archbishop's home in Namirembe, in Kampala. In Dar es Salaam, Museveni who, as has already been explained, was constantly in the company of and obtained information from Tanzanian intelligence, got to know about the plot. Museveni then contacted a Ugandan Tutsi named Jackson Kyarikunda and told him of the plot by the Kikosi Maluum to overthrow Amin, using the cover of the Anglican church leaders. After Museveni learned of the Anglican plot against Amin, he was furious at being upstaged by Obote and also that Obote was still a force enough to rally such plots. Museveni decided to thwart Obote's plot by leaking it to Kyarikunda, an agent in the State Research Bureau. Kyarikunda then told it to the director of the State Research Bureau, Lieutenant-Colonel Farouk Minawa. Minawa briefed the President about the plot. Amin invited the Archbishop Luwum and his wife Mary to the presidential retreat at Cape Town Villas outside Kampala City. There, Amin lectured the clergyman: 

"Forget all about your subversive activities and preach the word of God." On February 14, 1977, Amin anounced to the world that a plot to assassinate him and stage a coup "with Chinese-type weapons smuggled in from Tanzania" had been uncovered. Radio Uganda reported that another cache of arms had been uncovered in Gulu town, while other arms were found near the home of Bishop Yona Okoth in Tororo. That same day, a large public rally was held on the grounds of the Nile Mansions hotel in Kampala. The news media, the foreign diplomats, the intelligence service, and hundreds of soldiers were invited to the rally. President Amin attended it along with vice president General Mustapha Adrisi and virtually the entire cabinet. The army's chief of combat operations, Brigadier Isaac Maliyamungu, oversaw the proceedings. President Amin said that "even some ministers are going to be arrested. And some people who may be church leaders will be arrested, charged and tried." Seated in the front row was the minister of health, Henry Kyemba, who would later in a book describe himself as 

"looking grim" that day as he watched events unfold, much to his dismay. Two days later, the government announced that Luwum, Oboth-Ofumbi, and Oryema had overpowered the driver of the Toyota Celica they were being driven in and in the struggle, the car had crashed, killing all three of them. At a press conference later in the week, the driver of the car, Major Moses ("Fifi") Okello appeared in pyjamas and walking with the aid of crutches. President Amin addressed the press and attempted to absolve the government of the deaths of the three men. Accounts that emerged after the fall of the Amin regime given by exiles now back home, confirmed that there was, indeed, such a plot and the Anglican church leadership was involved. Another account unknown to many was the dimension of Charles Oboth-Ofumbi. 

Oboth-Ofumbi was particularly close to the Israelis and he and his wife had gone on a tour of Israel during which she visited a Kibbutz. He had confided in close friends in early February 1977 that something important was underway. At one point, he told one of his friends: "I will either come back dead or as President of Uganda." Idi Amin had been married to four Christian women, Sarah Mariam Kibedi, Sarah Kyolaba, Norah Amin, and Kay Adroa Amin. The director of the State Research Bureau, Lieutenant-Colonel Farouk Minawa, was also married to a Christian woman from the Baganda tribe. 

Amin's first cabinet in 1971 had many Christians and hardly any Muslims. Amin and Minawa, even if Muslim, could not therefore have been fundamentally anti-Christian. Amin knew the consequences of harming the Archbishop in a country with a population 92 percent Christian. He knew the uproar that even their arrest would bring upon him and his government. This was such a sensitive case that could only be handled by the most public, painstakingly fair trial, for Amin to be left with any credibility. Who is it that made sure that the archbishop and the two cabinet ministers were silenced before they could speak in court and reveal details of the coup and assassination plot? There were many reasons for Kyemba's grim look. 

FRONASA agents in the State Research Bureau Kyarikunda, the man to whom Museveni leaked details of the plot, was a typical example of FRONASA's role in undermining the credibility of Amin's government. Kyarikunda's parents had come to Uganda from Rwanda as exiles following the 1959 Hutu revolution. Kyarikunda had been a member of the 1960s student group known as the National Union of Students of Uganda (NUSU). He was later to join the counter-intelligence service under Obote, the General Service Unit. An intelligence officer named Yoweri Museveni might well have recruited him into the GSU in 1970. 

When Amin took power in 1971, the GSU was disbanded and replaced by the State Research Bureau. Kyarikunda then joined the State Research Bureau. He was later stationed in Fort Portal town in Toro, in western Uganda as a Battalion Intelligence Officer. During his time in Fort Portal, Kyarikunda was implicated in atrocities against the ordinary people, including the murder of nine prominent businessmen in Fort Portal. He was later transferred back to the State Research Bureau headquarters in Kampala. Although Kyarikunda was nominally a State Research Bureau agent, his real assignment was that of an agent of FRONASA, 

headed by Museveni. Kyarikunda was a FRONASA agent whom Museveni planted inside Amin's intelligence services in order to gather first-hand information on the workings of the government, but also to commit the kinds of atrocities that would blemish Amin's reputation. This is what lends credence to the possibility that Lieutenant Silver Tibahika --- mentioned already in the July 1971 episode of the murder of two Americans in Mbarara --- was also a FRONASA agent planted in the Uganda Army by Museveni. In 1977, a British-born confidante of the Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta, a former agriculture minister Bruce McKenzie visited Uganda and met President Amin. McKenzie, a former Special Air Services commander in the British army, a Kenyan white farmer, and a Jew was also reported to be working for Mossad. What had McKenzie come to discuss with Amin? He might have been in Kampala to help heal Kenyan-Ugandan relations following the Israeli raid on Entebbe. Being a Jew and working for Mossad, McKenzie might also have been trying to follow up on the fate of Dora Bloch,

 perhaps knowing all along that Amin had nothing to do with her death or disappearance. While he was at State House in Entebbe, Jackson Kyarikunda quietly went and planted a bomb inside a clay sculpture of a lion's head. The sculpture was to be given to McKenzie as a present. As the private plane carrying McKenzie back to Nairobi cruised over Lake Victoria, it blew up killing all aboard. Reports, as usual, blamed the murder of McKenzie on Amin and said the bomb had been planted in the sculpture by Amin henchman, Major Bob Astles. That report was later to be proved untrue. At the same time that McKenzie was boarding his plane for the flight back to Nairobi, Major Ngarambi, another Rwandan-Ugandan Tutsi agent working for FRONASA but posing as a State Research Bureau officer, ambushed Astles near a building called Kevina House along Entebbe Road in Kampala and held him there for several hours.

 Why would Ngarambi do this to one of President Amin's leading advisors? He did that in order to hold Astles up for as long as possible and thus prevent him from rushing to Entebbe and warning the security in Entebbe of the plot to blow up the plane carrying McKenzie. Could McKenzie have come to investigate a possible role by Museveni in the death of Dora Bloch? Very likely, Kyarikunda and Ngarambi were the same Black agents who were stationed by Mossad in Kampala within two days of the Air France plane landing at Entebbe and who were mentioned in the TIME news report. There have been reports that during the 1970s, Museveni was being used by the Mossad and the United States Central Intelligence Agency in their moves against Idi Amin. Some observers have remarked at how well Museveni's FRONASA was able to carry out its activities, and yet Museveni is well know to be a

 somewhat poor administrator. Museveni, if these reports are true, might have contacted and offered his FRONASA agents within the State Research Bureau to work as double agents for Mossad during the hostage crisis at Entebbe. At the time of the Israeli attack on Entebbe, Museveni was still in Uganda three weeks after his abortive attempt to kill Amin with three hand grenades at Nsambya police barracks on June 10. He would have been on hand, secretly coordinating the subversion of Amin's government during the hostage crisis. Whatever the reason for murdering and silencing McKenzie, Kyarikunda and Ngarambi working on orders of their overall FRONASA commander Yoweri Museveni in Tanzania, might have had a hand in the death of Dora Bloch. If that story is true, these FRONASA agents were the two men who were seen dragging the terrified Bloch from Mulago hospital to her death, which was then blamed on Farouk Minawa and Nasur Odonga. However, the complicated picture hardly stops there. Kyarikunda, it turned out, was not simply a double agent working for both Amin and Museveni's

 FRONASA; he had also retained an emotional attachment to Obote and also worked as a spy for Obote. Early in 1979, before the Tanzanian-led forces overthrew Amin's regime, Kyarikunda defected from the State Research Bureau and joined the invading Tanzanian/UNLA forces when they reached Mpigi town. FRONASA leader Yoweri Museveni warmly welcomed him. The FRONASA leader, however, had an urgent assignment for Kyarikunda: he was charged with identifying State Research Bureau agents from among the prisoners of war captured by the Tanzanians. No doubt these agents were later murdered by FRONASA, not because they had committed atrocities against Ugandans but because they would have known whom it was who really ordered the killings of innocent Ugandans as a tactic of besmirching Amin. Later in 1979, the new army chief of staff, Lieutenant-Colonel David Oyite Ojok, arrested Kyarikunda over the murder of the nine businessmen in Fort Portal. Might the same Kyarikunda to whom Museveni leaked the coup plot have had a hand in the deaths of the three prominent men, Luwum, Oryema, and Oboth-Ofumbi? There is every possibility. And the Amin government, having discovered that the three men were dead before it had a chance to prosecute them in court, decided to fake the car accident involving the State Research Bureau, Major Moses Okello, since it could not explain what could have happened to them while they were under arrest. A State of Blood, Henry Kyemba, 1977: the

 FRONASA connection On September 13, 1977 in London, Obote's former Principal Private Secretary and Amin's former Minister of Health, Henry Kyemba, published a book titled A State of Blood, in which he catalogued the many atrocities of the Amin regime. It is the book that was responsible, more than any other, of causing Amin to be labeled with the evil reputation that is now a matter of record. A State of Blood estimated the number of people killed by the Amin regime at between 150,000 and 180,000. Another book, Lust to Kill - the Rise and Fall of Idi Amin, by Andrew Cameron and Joseph Kamau, published in 1979, also reported the same death figures. However, in a 170-page report published on May 18, 1977, the International Commission of Jurists had declared that between 80,000 and 90,000 people had perished under the military government. The question is, why were all figures being published about the victims of the regime so glaringly contradictory? In 1972 FRONASA had

 claimed the figure stood at 83,000, the International Commission of Jurists put it at between 80,000 and 90,000, and now Kyemba had it as between 150,000 and 180,000. FRONASA estimated the number of people dead by late 1972 at 83,000. How did this new rebel group get to this estimate? Were there records? It is worth noting that FRONASA became the first group, organisation, or agency anywhere in the world to give a specific figure for the number of people killed by Amin's regime. If records of such a large number of dead existed, FRONASA would presumably have wished for that to be known and so would have published as many names as possible. It might, for instance, have attached an appendix to its manifesto listing hundreds of the names of people who had been killed. It is strange that a guerrilla group that claimed to know that 83,000 people had been killed by the Amin regime could only list a handful of names in their manifesto. Why did they not publish and distribute the names of these unfortunate victims over the next few years, in order to help Ugandans understand the brutality that was their fate under

 Amin? How come even after Amin was ousted in April 1979, these lists of Amin's victims were never published? It would have been in FRONASA's interest to let as many Ugandans see as many names of Amin's victims as possible in order to whip up the anti-government mood and perhaps get more men to enlist with FRONASA. None of this happened and the full or even partial list of Amin's murder victims has never been seen or published. In one of the proofs that the western news media was being supplied with news from Uganda intended to malign the military leader, TIME magazine in reporting on the Israeli raid on Entebbe in its July 19, 1976 edition, said: "Survivors of Amin's jails tell horror stories of prisoners sledgehammered to death by fellow inmates who were then forced to eat the flesh of those they had just killed. There are reports that whole villages have been machine-gunned, and the bodies fed to crocodiles." None of those survivors of Amin's jails has ever come out and named prisoners who had

 been killed in that gory way and if indeed it is true that they were made to eat human flesh. In its March 7, 1977 edition, TIME wrote: "In one particularly vengeful operation, Amin's marines were said to have killed every civilian they could find in Akoroko, the native village of Milton Obote." That we know, of course, is not true. Obote's village remained populated all through Amin's time in office as it is today. In an interesting sidebar in the same March 7 issue, TIME failed to notice the contradiction in its own story. John Osman, the East Africa correspondent of the British Broadcasting Corporation and other British journalists spent a day in the company of Amin. Osman filed this story for TIME on this encounter, which was published on pages 20 and 21: "It was a quiet Friday afternoon at Entebbe airport, near

 Kampala. President Amin...took us in his Range Rover for a personally conducted tour of the still bullet- and bazooka-shattered section of Entebbe airport, where Israeli troops last July staged their stunningly successful raid to rescue hijack hostages from pro-Palestinian kidnappers...My guided tour began when I was being driven from Kampala to Entebbe in [Amin's aide Major Bob Astles'] car. The President passed by on the other side of the road in his Range Rover, stopped, turned round and joined us as we also stopped. He ordered out of his vehicle his bodyguard, an Acholi, from the tribe that, it is alleged, is being massacred in northern Uganda." The BBC's John Osman tells us that Amin was being guarded by "his bodyguard, an Acholi." It is vital that we take note of the setting. Here was Amin at the wheel of his car. John Osman's report gives the impression that there was no heavy security presence around the President or else in Uganda's militarised atmosphere he would have mentioned the presence of menacing

 bodyguards wearing dark glasses. Amin was, therefore, traveling alone accompanied by a bodyguard from one of the two tribes that Amin was supposed to have spent six years persecuting. Amin was at the wheel of the vehicle and as such, the bodyguard was more in control than Amin. There had been 13 assassination attempts on Amin between January 1971 and February 1977. Two prominent Acholi, Uganda's Anglican Archbishop Janani Luwum and the minister for water and mineral resources,

 Lt. Colonel Wilson Erinayo Oryema, had just been implicated in a coup attempt against Amin and died. And yet Amin still casually drove himself about, caring little for security. He could have been shot dead by this bodyguard to avenge the murder of his tribesmen. But he was not. Does this not say something about Amin and how much Uganda's history has been distorted? How did Kyemba and the other compile

Post a Comment. Email Address is required but will not be revealed when posting to the public.
Your Name
Your Email
Comment
	Enter Security Code