Sun, Aug 17, 2003 page1

• End of a tyrant as Idi Amin dies

  AFRICAN BRUTE The bloody and bizarre dictator was said to have been responsible for between 100,000 to 500,000 deaths during his eight-year reign in Uganda

  • AP
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  Idi Amin called himself "a pure son of Africa," but his bizarre and murderous eight years as president of Uganda typified the worst of the continent's military dictatorships.

  Amin, who died yesterday, was 80, Ugandan officials said, though other sources had him born in 1925.

  Amin, who had lived for years in exile in the Saudi port city of Jiddah, had been hospitalized on life-support since July 18. He was in a coma and suffering from high blood pressure when he was first admitted to the King Faisal Specialist Hospital. Later, hospital staff said he suffered kidney failure.

  

  Idi Amin, whose eight years as president of Uganda were characterized by bizarre and murderous behavior, died yesterday.

  PHOTO: AP

  He died at 8:20am, the hospital official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

  A one-time heavyweight boxing champ and soldier in the British colonial army, Amin seized power on Jan. 25, 1971, overthrowing President Milton Obote while Obote was abroad.

  What followed was a reign of terror laced with buffoonery and a flirtation with Palestinian terrorism that led to the daring 1976 Israeli raid to rescue hijack hostages in his country.

  In Kampala, Uganda, Oonapito Ekonioloit, press assistant to President Yoweri Museveni, called Amin's death "good."

  "His death and burial will signal the end of our bad past," he said.

  Obote once called Amin "the greatest brute an African mother has ever brought to life."

  Ugandans initially welcomed Amin's rise to power, and his frequent taunting of Britain, former colonial ruler of much of Africa, often played well on the continent.

  But his penchant for the cruel and extravagant became evident in 1972, when he expelled tens of thousands of Asians who had controlled the country's economy. Suddenly deprived of its business class, the East African nation plummeted into economic chaos.

  Amin declared himself president-for-life of his landlocked country of 24 million, awarded himself an array of medals and ran the country with an iron fist, killing real and imagined enemies.

  Human-rights groups say from 100,000 to 500,000 people were killed during his eight-year rule. Bodies were dumped into the Nile River because graves couldn't be dug fast enough. At one point, so many bodies were fed to crocodiles that the remains occasionally clogged intake ducts at Uganda's main hydroelectric plant at Jinja.

  Amin was born into the small Kakwa tribe in Koboko, a village in northwestern Uganda. His mother was a self-proclaimed sorceress of the Lugbara tribe and he was in his 30s before he had regular contact with his peasant father.

  A semiliterate school dropout, Amin boasted that he knew "more than doctors of philosophy because as a military man I know how to act."

  "I am a man of action," he said.

  And words. He said Hitler "was right to burn 6 million Jews," and offered to be king of Scotland.

  Amin was a well-regarded officer at the time of Uganda's independence from Britain in 1962, and Obote made him military chief of staff in 1966.

  The 112kg president called himself Dada, or "Big Daddy," and in 1975 was even chosen for the one-year rotating chairmanship of the Organization of African Unity despite objections from some member states.

  But mismanagement and corruption of his entourage drove Uganda into an abyss and its economy tumbled toward subsistence levels. The US and Britain severed ties during Amin's rule. Israel went from staunch military and economic ally to hated enemy for refusing to support his aggressive military ambitions.

  Amin's overreaching designs led to his downfall after his troops failed in their attempt to annex parts of Tanzania in October, 1978. Tanzanian troops counter-invaded, routed Amin's Soviet- and Arab-equipped army and reached the Ugandan capital, Kampala, in April 1979.

  Amin, a convert to Islam, fled to Libya, then Iraq and finally Saudi Arabia.

  Amin, meanwhile, moved into a luxury house in the Red Sea port city of Jiddah, with cars, drivers, cooks and maids paid for by the Saudi government.

  A Ugandan newspaper, the independent Sunday Monitor, had reported that Nalongo Madina Amin -- "Amin's favorite wife" -- said two of his sons watched over him in the hospital during his final illness.
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