Idi Amin, the ruthless former dictator of Uganda who slaughtered hundreds of thousands of his countrymen in one of Africa's bleakest periods, died Saturday in exile in Saudi Arabia.
The 80-year-old former heavyweight boxing champion who styled himself "Dada" and called himself "a pure son of Africa" had been on a life-support machine since slipping into a coma on July 18 in King Faisal Specialist Hospital in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
According to hospital sources, he died at 8:20am after suffering kidney failure. Amin's death brings to an end a career marked in equal measure by violence and a dark absurdity that verged on madness, and whose principal victims were his own people. As many as 500,000 died during his rule, before he was forced out in 1979 by a coalition of Ugandan exiles and Tanzanian troops.
In his eight years in power he ordered the expulsion of Uganda's Asian business class, causing economic chaos; flirted with Palestinian hijackers, leading to the Israeli raid on Entebbe; invited the Queen to come to Uganda if she "wanted a real man"; and fed his opponents to crocodiles.
Amin's death was welcomed by his former victims and adversaries. In Uganda, Oonapito Ekonioloit, press assistant to President Yoweri Museveni, called Amin's death "good."
John Sentamu, Bishop of Birmingham, fled Uganda for England in 1974 after a near-fatal attack by Amin's henchmen.Yesterday he expressed regret that the brutal dictator was never brought to justice.
"His death and burial will signal the end of our bad past," he said.
Amin was born into the small Kakwa tribe in Koboko, a village in north-west Uganda; his mother claimed to be a sorceress.
Barely literate, he dropped out of school, opting to join the King's African Rifles, where he saw action in the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya in the early 1950s. He was one of only two native Ugandans to receive a commission from the British Army during colonial rule.
British officials assessed him thus: "A splendid type and a good [rugby] player ... but ... virtually bone from the neck up, and needs things explained in words of one letter."
By 1966, he was chief of staff under Milton Obote, whom he at first supported, but then deposed in a coup in 1971, an act that met with the private satisfaction of Britain's Foreign Office.
Yet Britain's early approval of Amin quickly soured as the "splendid type" initiated a regime that violated almost every human right.
Within a year, Amin had expelled 40,000 Ugandan Asians, after announcing that God had told him to make Uganda "a black man's country."
It was only the beginning as Amin began the massacre of enemies both real and imagined. Bodies were dumped into the crocodile-infested Nile because graves couldn't be dug fast enough.
"Even Amin does not know how many people he has ordered to be executed ... The country is littered with bodies," said Henry Kyemba, Amin's longtime friend and a former health minister, when he defected to Britain in 1977.
In parallel to the bloodshed Amin was also remolding his personality. He declared himself King of Scotland, having already promoted himself to field marshal and awarded himself the VC (Victoria Cross, the highest and most prestigious award for gallantry in the face of the enemy that can be awarded to British and Commonwealth forces). In one of his more bizarre moments, he wrote to the Queen in 1975: "I would like you to arrange for me to visit Scotland, Ireland and Wales to meet the heads of revolutionary movements fighting against your imperialist oppression."
He is reported to have sent the Queen a telex that read: "Dear Liz, if you want to know a real man, come to Kampala."
But his buffoonery was a side issue to his brutality and murderous tastes. In 1976, pro-Palestinian hijackers of a French airliner landed at Entebbe airport with more than 100 hostages, mostly Jews, apparently with the collusion of Amin, instigating an Israeli commando raid to free the hostages. In response, he ordered the murder of a British Jew, Dora Bloch, a grandmother who had been released early by the hijackers for medical treatment.
Eventually, however, Amin's taste for violence was his undoing. A series of skirmishes between Uganda and Tanzania came to a head in January 1979, when Ugandan army exiles, supported by Tanzanian troops, invaded.
Amin's rule was over and he fled with his five wives and dozens of children to Libya. Later he would seek refuge in Saudi Arabia, which gave a fellow Muslim a pension.
Despite appeals by his hosts to keep a low profile, he lived well.
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