Establishment of military rule On 2 February 1971, one week after the coup, Amin declared himself President of Uganda,
Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, Uganda Army
Chief of Staff, and Chief of Air Staff. He suspended certain provisions of the
Ugandan constitution, and soon instituted an Advisory Defense Council composed of military officers with himself as the chairman. Amin placed
military tribunals above the system of
civil law, appointed soldiers to top posts in government and
government-owned corporations, and informed the newly inducted civilian
cabinet ministers that they would be subject to
military courtesy. Amin
ruled by decree; over the course of his rule he issued approximately 30 decrees. Amin renamed the presidential lodge in Kampala from Government House to "The Command Post". He disbanded the General Service Unit, an intelligence agency created by the previous government, and replaced it with the
State Research Bureau. The bureau headquarters in the Kampala suburb of
Nakasero became the scene of
torture and
capital punishment over the next few years. Other agencies used to persecute dissenters included the
military police and the Public Safety Unit.
Persecution of ethnic and political groups Amin retaliated against the
attempted invasion by Ugandan exiles in 1972 by purging the
Uganda Army of Obote supporters, predominantly those from the
Acholi and
Lango ethnic groups. In July 1971, Lango and Acholi soldiers had been massacred in the
Jinja and
Mbarara barracks. By early 1972, some 5,000 Acholi and Lango soldiers, and at least twice as many civilians, had disappeared. The victims soon came to include members of other
ethnic groups, religious leaders, journalists, artists, senior bureaucrats, judges, lawyers,
students and intellectuals, criminal suspects, and foreign nationals. In this atmosphere of violence, many other people were killed for criminal motives or simply at will. Bodies were often dumped into the River Nile. The killings, motivated by ethnic, political, and financial factors, continued throughout Amin's eight years in control. Among the most prominent people killed were
Benedicto Kiwanuka, a former prime minister and
chief justice;
Janani Luwum, the
Anglican archbishop; Joseph Mubiru, the former governor of
the central bank of Uganda; Frank Kalimuzo, the vice-chancellor of
Makerere University; Byron Kawadwa, a prominent playwright; and two of Amin's own cabinet ministers,
Erinayo Wilson Oryema and
Charles Oboth Ofumbi. Amin recruited his followers from his own ethnic group, the Kakwas, along with South Sudanese, and Nubians. By 1977, these three groups formed 60 per cent of the 22 top generals and 75 per cent of the cabinet. Similarly, Muslims formed 80 per cent and 87.5 per cent of these groups even though they were only 5 percent of the population. This helps explain why Amin survived eight attempted coups. The Uganda Army grew from 10,000 to 25,000 by 1978. Amin's military was largely a mercenary force. Half the soldiers were South Sudanese and 26 per cent Congolese, with only 24 per cent being Ugandan, mostly Muslim and
Kakwa. , November 1972 In August 1972, Amin declared what he called an "economic war", a set of policies that included the expropriation of properties owned by Asians and Europeans. Uganda's 80,000 Asians were mostly from the
Indian subcontinent and born in the country, their ancestors having come to Uganda in search of prosperity when India was still a British colony. Many owned businesses, including large-scale enterprises, which formed the backbone of the Ugandan economy. He referred to Asians as the "Brown Jews" because of their dominance in commerce and their perceived economic control. On 4 August 1972, Amin issued a decree
ordering the expulsion of the 50,000 Asians who were British passport holders. This was later amended to include all 60,000 Asians who were not Ugandan citizens. Amin claimed that he had a dream in which God told him he must expel all Asians for the welfare of Uganda. Furthermore, he believed that Asians were sabotaging the economy of Uganda. Additionally, the reasons articulated by Amin suggest a racial basis for the expulsion. Around 30,000 Ugandan Asians emigrated to the UK. Others went to Commonwealth countries such as
Australia,
South Africa,
Canada, and
Fiji, or to
India,
Kenya,
Pakistan,
Sweden,
Tanzania, and the
United States. Idi Amin murdered an estimated 500
Yemeni Hadrami Arab merchants. In 1975,
Emmanuel Bwayo Wakhweya, Amin's finance minister and longest-serving cabinet member at the time,
defected to
London. This prominent defection helped
Henry Kyemba, Amin's health minister and a former official of the first Obote regime, to defect in 1977 and resettle in the UK. Kyemba wrote and published
A State of Blood, the first insider exposé of Amin's rule. On 25 June 1976, the Defense Council declared Amin
president for life.
International relations , 20th
president of Liberia, in 1976 Initially, Amin was supported by Western powers such as
Israel,
West Germany, and, in particular, the United Kingdom. During the late 1960s, Obote's
move to the left, which included his
Common Man's Charter and the
nationalisation of 80 British companies, had made the West worried that he would pose a threat to Western capitalist interests in Africa and make Uganda an ally of the
Soviet Union. Amin, who had served with the King's African Rifles and taken part in Britain's suppression of the
Mau Mau uprising prior to Ugandan independence, was known by the British as "intensely loyal to Britain". This made him an obvious choice as Obote's successor. Although some have claimed that Amin was being groomed for power as early as 1966, the plotting by the British and other Western powers began in earnest in 1969, after Obote had begun his nationalization programme. Throughout the first year of his presidency, Amin received key military and financial support from the United Kingdom and Israel. In July 1971 he visited both countries and asked for advanced military equipment, but the states refused to provide hardware unless the Ugandan government paid for it. Amin decided to seek foreign support elsewhere and in February 1972 he visited
Libya. Amin denounced
Zionism, and in return Libyan leader
Muammar Gaddafi pledged Uganda an immediate $25 million loan to be followed by more lending from the Libyan–Ugandan Development Bank. Over the following months Amin successively removed Israeli military advisers from his government, expelled all other Israeli technicians, and broke diplomatic relations. Gaddafi also mediated a resolution to long-standing Ugandan–Sudanese tensions, with Amin agreeing to stop backing
Anyanya rebels in southern Sudan and instead recruit the former guerilla fighters into his army. In 1972,
Ugandan–Israeli relations dramatically worsened. To ally Uganda with Libya, Amin expelled 500 Israelis from Uganda and severed diplomatic ties with Israel. Uganda had also owed Israel between $13 million to $18 million that it could not pay. He praised the
Munich massacre, The United States responded by delaying a $3 million USD loan to Uganda. The United Kingdom and Israel ceased all trade with Uganda, but this commercial gap was quickly filled by Libya, the United States, and the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union under
Leonid Brezhnev grew increasingly interested in Uganda as a strategic counterbalance to perceived
Chinese influence in Tanzania and
Western influence in Kenya. It dispatched a military mission to Uganda in November 1973. While it could not supply the financial level available from the Western powers, the Soviet Union opted to provide Amin with military hardware in exchange for his support. The Soviet Union quickly became Amin's largest arms supplier, sending Uganda tanks, jets, artillery, missiles, and small arms. By 1975, it was estimated that the Soviets had provided Amin's government with $12 million in economic assistance and $48 million in arms. Amin also sent several thousand Ugandans to
Eastern Bloc countries for military, intelligence, and technical training, especially
Czechoslovakia.
East Germany was involved in the General Service Unit and the State Research Bureau, the two agencies that were most notorious for terror. During the Ugandan invasion of Tanzania in 1979, East Germany attempted to remove evidence of its involvement with these agencies. In 1974, he offered to host and mediate negotiations to end the
conflict in Northern Ireland, believing that Uganda's position as a former British colony made it apt to do so. dictator
Mobutu during the
Shaba I conflict in 1977. In June 1976, Amin allowed an
Air France airliner that had been scheduled to fly from
Tel Aviv to
Paris but had been hijacked by two members of the
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – External Operations and two members of the German
Revolutionäre Zellen to land at Entebbe Airport. The hijackers were joined there by three more. Soon after, 156 non-Jewish hostages who did not hold Israeli passports were released and flown to safety, while 83 Jews and Israeli citizens, as well as 20 others who refused to abandon them (among whom were the captain and crew of the hijacked jet), continued to be held hostage. In the subsequent Israeli rescue operation, codenamed Operation Thunderbolt (popularly known as
Operation Entebbe), on the night of 3–4 July 1976, a group of Israeli commandos flew in from Israel and seized control of Entebbe Airport, freeing nearly all the hostages. Three hostages died during the operation and 10 were wounded; seven hijackers, about 45 Ugandan soldiers, and one Israeli soldier,
Yoni Netanyahu (the commander of the unit), were killed. A fourth hostage, 75-year-old
Dora Bloch, an elderly Jewish Englishwoman who had been taken to
Mulago Hospital in Kampala before the rescue operation, was subsequently murdered in reprisal. The incident further soured Uganda's international relations, leading the United Kingdom to close its
High Commission in Uganda. Uganda under Amin embarked on a large military build-up, which raised concerns in Kenya. Early in June 1975, Kenyan officials impounded a large convoy of Soviet-made arms
en route to Uganda at the port of
Mombasa. Tension between Uganda and Kenya reached its climax in February 1976, when Amin announced that he would investigate the possibility that parts of southern Sudan and western and central Kenya, up to within of
Nairobi, were historically a part of colonial Uganda. The
Kenyan Government responded with a stern statement that Kenya would not part with "a single inch of territory". Amin backed down after the Kenyan army deployed troops and
armoured personnel carriers along the Kenya–Uganda border. Amin's relations with
Rwanda were tense, and during his tenure he repeatedly jeopardized its economy by denying its commercial vehicles transit to Mombasa and made multiple threats to bomb
Kigali.
War with Tanzania and deposition In January 1977 Amin appointed General
Mustafa Adrisi Vice President of Uganda. That year, a split in the Uganda Army developed between supporters of Amin and soldiers loyal to Adrisi, who held significant power in the government and wanted to purge foreigners, particularly Sudanese, from the military. The growing dissatisfaction in the Uganda Army was reflected by frequent coup attempts; Amin was even wounded during one of them, namely
Operation Mafuta Mingi in June 1977. By 1978, the number of Amin's supporters and close associates had shrunk significantly, and he faced increasing dissent from the populace within Uganda as the economy and infrastructure collapsed as a result of the years of neglect and abuse. After the killings of Bishop Luwum and ministers Oryema and Oboth Ofumbi in 1977, several of Amin's ministers defected or fled into exile. In early 1978, Adrisi was severely injured in a car accident and flown to Cairo for treatment. While he was there, Amin stripped him of his positions as Minister of Defense and Minister of Home Affairs and denounced him for retiring senior prison officials without his knowledge. Amin then proceeded to purge several high-ranking officials from his government and took personal control of several ministerial portfolios. The shakeup caused political unrest and especially angered Adrisi's followers, who believed that the car accident was a failed assassination attempt. In November 1978, troops loyal to Adrisi mutinied. Amin sent troops against the mutineers, some of whom had fled across the Tanzanian border. Other accounts suggest, however, that Amin had lost control of parts of the Uganda Army, so Amin's sanction for the invasion was a
post-facto action to save face regarding troops who had acted without his orders. In any case, Amin accused Tanzanian President
Julius Nyerere of initiating the war against Uganda after the hostilities had erupted, and proclaimed the
annexation of a section of
Kagera when the Ugandan invasion initially proved to be successful. He made few public appearances in the final months of his rule, but spoke frequently on radio and television. Following a major defeat in the March 1979
Battle of Lukaya, parts of the Uganda Army command reportedly urged Amin to step down. He angrily refused and declared: "If you don't want to fight, I'll do it myself." He consequently fired chief of staff
Yusuf Gowon. Amin personally oversaw the
defense of Kampala's environs, and reportedly came close to being killed by the Tanzanians. However, Amin was forced to flee the Ugandan capital by helicopter on 11 April 1979, when
Kampala was captured. which reportedly included Amin proclaiming the city of
Jinja his country's new capital, he fled into exile. By the time of his removal from power, Amin had become deeply unpopular in Uganda. The symbols of his rule, his pictures, and buildings associated with him were subject to vandalism during and after the war. == Bounty ==