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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
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