All This in 60 Minutes

Home > Other > All This in 60 Minutes > Page 2
All This in 60 Minutes Page 2

by Lee, Nicholas


  Back in the hotel reception, we decided to worry about getting rooms later—well, thanks to the unhelpful staff, we didn’t have much choice. It was 5.30 in the afternoon, time to get shots of this crazy war. We stepped out onto the street and literally bumped into Tony Joyce, the well-known and highly respected ABC journalist. Tony asked where we were going, and we explained that we were off to get some dusk shots of Kampala.

  ‘Curfews don’t worry you, then,’ said Tony.

  Allan, our producer, knew Tony from his own days at the ABC and was well aware of Tony’s sense of humour but also his good judgement. Tony was one of the last journalists to leave Saigon just before it fell, and come to think of it, so was Allan. On the other hand, I was new to all this stuff, and planned on being around for many more years. So when Tony explained that there was a curfew at 6 p.m. and anyone caught on the streets was shot, no questions asked, we immediately did a U-turn, me being the quickest, and headed straight back inside the hotel. We thanked Tony profusely as we retreated. We owed him big time.

  Not long after that meeting, Tony was shot while on assignment in Zambia. He died in hospital a few months later.

  Back inside the hotel we pleaded, threatened and tried to bribe our way into rooms. Nothing was going to work. The entire clientele of this one and only ‘operating’ hotel consisted of scores of Tanzanian soldiers, and us. But our money couldn’t compete with their assault rifles. Now trapped by the curfew, there was nothing else to do but camp in the cold marble foyer of the hotel and see what tomorrow would bring.

  And tomorrow couldn’t come fast enough. Trying to sleep on marble, surrounded by 22 cases was bad enough, but the relentless sound of rifle fire outside, plus the horrific sight of Tanzanian army thugs dragging girls into their hotel rooms to be raped, made sleep impossible. At about 3 a.m. I got up to stretch and noticed that the contents of both bathrooms had started to ooze into the foyer. ‘Great,’ I thought, ‘if we don’t get shot by Tanzanians, we’ll all die of some disease that evolved inside the toilets of Kampala’s classiest hotel.’

  When the early morning sunlight poured into our giant foyer bedroom, none of us could move. A bed of nails would have been more comfortable. We did some stretching, looked around and decided this couldn’t go on. We deftly slipped past the front desk and headed upstairs to check out the rooms. Half-naked soldiers, with rifles or machine guns slung over their shoulders, were wandering arrogantly along the corridors. We peeked into a few rooms with open doors. They were all occupied. A few more flights of stairs and—Eureka!—two unoccupied rooms. Bugger checking in. We moved in.

  Allan and Ian took one room, Peter and I took the other. Our room had two beds, one sheet and one pillow. We’d have to work out later who got what, but for now, we had somewhere to put our stuff and something softer than marble to sleep on. I went to the bathroom, turned on a tap and ... zilch. There was no water. Nothing at all. I thought, ‘Oh well, we can do without shaving, showering and brushing teeth for a week.’ After all, we had a bed.

  Sitting on my sheetless bed while preparing the camera gear, I spied a hotel worker walking past, grabbed him and asked about the lack of water.

  He explained, ‘There is water for one hour a day, but we do not know when ... and some days there is not water, so if there is water, you will fill the bath.’

  Just then I heard the distant sound of running water. I raced to the bathroom, plugged the bath and sink, and turned on all the taps. Peter and I now had enough water to last a day or two. It would soon seem like a luxury.

  •

  Our first task was to record the horrors of Kampala. We hailed a taxi and went for a slow drive. It was raining, but the locals, walking around the streets, seemed oblivious. Not so the scores of dry Tanzanians in their cars. You could bet that’s not how they arrived in Uganda. Obviously the locals’ cars had been hijacked and they couldn’t do a thing about it. To the victor go the spoils and the victors were certainly reluctant to have us film them getting in and out of their spoils, and threatened us with their weapons.

  We tried interviewing a couple of old local blokes and they weren’t keen to talk. But the young were eager to tell of the atrocities. Their stories sounded so horrific they were hard to believe, but more and more stories came out, each one more frightening than the last, and nearly all were about the State Research Bureau at Nakasero prison, the home of Amin’s secret police. We were told of around-the-clock torture and murder to eradicate all enemies and, sometimes, ‘just for a bit of fun’, the torture was spread over many days. Very few people came out alive.

  The State Research Bureau was a three-storey brick building of unimaginative architecture, the type that houses public servants worldwide. There were signs everywhere stating ‘no photography’, but no sign of people, so Allan and Ian went inside. I was still in the cab, preparing the camera, when the driver quietly whispered, ‘I was in there, I was dragged in there.’

  I looked up. He was staring straight ahead, as if he hadn’t spoken.

  ‘How long were you there for?’ I asked.

  ‘Three weeks.’

  Hoping he would tell me more, I stayed silent, but so did he. He just kept staring ahead. So then I introduced myself and asked his name.

  ‘Isaac Sowanga.’

  ‘Isaac, you were in this place for three weeks? It must have been terrifying.’

  ‘Yes.’

  I think that’s why I’m a cameraman. This would be one hell of an interview, but not with me asking the questions. I left him staring as I ran inside to tell the others about him.

  Half an hour later we were walking through the State Research Bureau with Ian asking the questions, Isaac answering in his soft, gentle African accent, and me following with a camera on my shoulder. The place had been totally ransacked. Every window was broken, and scattered all over the place were the once well-kept files on all the unfortunate ‘political prisoners’. Isaac led us through a narrow door into a four- by three-metre cell. He told us there were 60 men in this room.

  ‘How did you lie down? Presumably you slept?’ asked Ian.

  ‘We couldn’t lie down,’ said Isaac. ‘We spent the whole night standing.’ He walked to the wall and leant against it with his hands near his ears. ‘You put your hands on the wall and you sleep.’

  ‘What are these marks on the wall?’

  ‘Blood. When you are brought here, you are beaten, and the hands are full of the blood, so when you touch the wall to sleep the marks are on the wall.’

  We were horrified but it was just the beginning. The next room, larger than the first, was freezing cold and had a horrendously disturbing feel to it. Isaac told us that in this room four or five prisoners were put in a line then ordered to run and knock their heads against the walls.

  ‘They count one, two, three, and run.’ Isaac ran to the wall to show us. ‘They go back and the one, two, three again.’

  ‘Did men actually do that?’

  ‘Yes. You can kill yourself by doing it. By knocking your head against the wall.’

  ‘Why do it? Why not refuse?’

  ‘If you refuse you are shoot to death.’

  ‘But surely it would be better to be shot to death quickly than to kill yourself like that?’

  Isaac explained that the prisoners thought they had a chance if they did what they were told. ‘Sometimes you might have the thought of having someone save you from this place, you could fall down and see someone who could help.’

  ‘There was still a hope that you might survive?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Isaac then took us into a third room. Nestled in the corner was a large metal bucket with a rag hanging out of it. Ian asked Isaac what it was.

  ‘It is blood.’

  ‘That is human blood, in that bucket?’

  ‘Yes. That is human blood. When they saw you dying, they put a knife on your neck and cut your neck.’ Isaac pointed to the bucket. ‘Then they put the blood here for some prisoners to drink. If you
ask for water they give you human blood.’

  Ian leant over to remove the rag from the bucket. I went down on my knees to get the close-up of his hand pulling the rag out. Suddenly he stood up and ran outside. I was still filming and thinking, What’s wrong with him? It wasn’t until I took my eye from the viewfinder that I noticed the stench. It was overwhelming. More than a smell, it was a sudden kick in the head. I felt giddy, the room was spinning and I knew I was about to pass out. I put the camera down, sat on the floor and leant against the wall desperately trying to catch my breath. I felt as if I was totally enveloped in filth, permeating not only my clothes, but my skin as well. Ian was outside throwing up. (Later Gerald Stone, the show’s executive producer, would have a go at him for not being able to control his emotions.) Isaac was unmoved. I felt such a wimp. Just the leftover smell knocked me crazy and I’d been whingeing about sleeping on marble. I sat there gasping for breath and as I looked at Isaac I couldn’t help but wonder at life’s lottery.

  With our lungs full of fresh air and the dizziness gone, we went down into the bowels of the building. The final hellhole. Once a prisoner was brought down here, there was no chance of escaping alive. Night after night prisoners were slaughtered with sledgehammers and iron bars, and there was no shortage of volunteers for the guards’ nightshift, all of them spaced out on dope, and all coming from Amin’s Kakwa tribe. When Amin’s apprentice butchers got so exhausted they couldn’t carry on, they would line up a dozen men, hand the sledgehammer to the second man from the front, and order him to bash in the head of the man in front of him. Then he would hand the hammer to the man behind him to have his head pulverised. The slaughter would continue all the way down the line. What sort of human beings are capable of coming up with stuff like that? In total 300,000 Ugandans—or one in 60—were murdered by decree of Amin.

  •

  We kept Isaac on as our driver, picking his brain for as much information as he was willing to give. He told more horrific stories, all the while remaining seemingly unaffected. His attitude was more like, these things happen, you survive, you get on with life.

  Where was his anger? Where was his hatred? It never ceases to amaze me what people can endure.

  The longest anyone spent in Nakasero, and survived to tell the tale, was six and a half months. Six and a half months! This extraordinary man was Apollo Lowoko. Isaac arranged for us to meet him. We expected a babbling idiot locked away in a psych hospital, but we found a well-spoken successful lawyer, immaculately dressed, sitting at his desk calmly describing the atrocities he’d experienced and witnessed.

  Apollo told us everyone knew that to be taken downstairs at the State Research Bureau meant you would never be seen again. When Ian asked him what he would have done had he been hauled down those stairs to face the hammers, he gently answered, ‘Just prayed to die quickly.’

  But worse, Apollo told us, many of his cellmates were taken from their cell and told they were to be put on trial or released the next day. There was never a trial or a release. Often the cellmate would never be seen again. But his best friend did return, with a lip removed.

  ‘We knew then that they had decided to kill him by slow system, where they would be dismantling him slowly by slowly, tomorrow another torture, his other lip is removed, and then his nose is removed, his ears are removed, then eyes. And the final day they cut his throat.’

  Apollo also told us that Amin himself would often come to Nakasero and more than once he had seen Amin kill people.

  Next door to Nakasero, neatly nestled behind rows of manicured bushes, was the French embassy. When asked if the screams of the victims could have been heard at the embassy, Apollo replied, ‘The torturers would use engines to drown the sound, they would run engines all night until the killings stopped. But to me, I think the embassy next door knew everything that was going on.’

  On our way back to the Intercontinental Hotel after the Apollo interview, we didn’t say much to each other, or to Isaac. What could we say? I certainly wasn’t going to mention our lack of food and water or bathrooms full of shit, for fear of being full of it myself. What these people had been through was unbelievably difficult to comprehend. Spending time with people who have experienced such horrors is far more confronting than just watching it on television. It’s impossible to get across to an audience how we feel, and worse, how victims of these grotesque atrocities really feel. It’s certainly not for lack of trying. But it never translates. Hopefully, reporting on the lives of people like Isaac and Apollo helps somehow.

  Life is a lottery. It doesn’t get any easier than my life. White, male, fully employed, post–World War II Australian who also managed to win the conscription lottery by not being called up for National Service and therefore gaining two years’ work experience ahead of friends whose number came out of the hat. It’s an unfair world, and the more I saw of it and the more time I spent with the Isaacs and Apollos of this world, the more I was aware of that unfairness.

  •

  Back at the Intercontinental we cleaned up in our twelve inches of bathwater that now appeared to be real luxury, then questioned the meaning of life and the world. We decided there is no fucking answer and there never will be. So we started drinking.

  Over the next few days the hotel began to function. There was still no water, but the restaurant re-opened with big smiles and big menus. We now knew the reason for the smiles. When we opened the menu we were told, ‘Tonight there is no choice, tonight there is chicken.’ So, chicken it was. We embraced it fully with a few bottles of our Kenyan red, discussing yet again the big question with no answer. So we reduced the question down to how can one true madman, a total buffoon, be capable of causing a whole nation to live in abject misery? I guess if you’re a megalomaniacal, totally ruthless President for Life with your own killer squads at your disposal, it’s easy. The gentleness and sincerity of the Apollos and Isaacs had no chance.

  At night, apart from relentless sounds of gunfire, Peter and I slept reasonably well. Not so Ian and Allan, who had visitors at midnight on one occasion. Two Tanzanian soldiers barged into their room, aimed their rifles at them and demanded they leave the room immediately. Allan told us he thought it prudent to oblige, though deep inside he just wanted to tell them to fuck off. But that was very deep indeed. There was no point complaining to anyone, so Ian and Allan wandered through the hotel looking for another unoccupied room, which they found, and claimed, while wondering why the Tanzanians could not have done the same. It wasn’t like Ian and Allan had bagged the presidential suite. But this was war, there was no logic, and to argue the point with men with guns would have been utterly futile, not to mention stupid.

  Eventually, we managed to con our way inside one of the madman’s many palaces. The highlight of the place was his twelve-seat, 35-mm movie theatre, beautifully appointed with velvet curtains and comfy chairs. We found a pile of 35-mm film cans, all from Europe. Wow, I thought, maybe even a psycho knows how to appreciate quality cinema.

  The first few cans consisted of European pornography and Tom and Jerry cartoons. The next dozen or so consisted of European pornography and Tom and Jerry cartoons. No wonder Amin found it easy to kill, we knew he had no conscience, but obviously no brain as well in that oversized head.

  Next day was Ian’s birthday. We headed down to the chicken-only restaurant and asked if they had champagne. We figured we had a better chance of being served pheasant under glass but there was no harm in asking. The friendly waiter said he’d check. Half an hour later he returned with a bottle of Asti Spumante and said, ‘This is all we have.’

  ‘We’ll take it.’

  None of us had had a $6 bottle of Asti Spumante since we were seventeen, but our stash of vino was all gone and, after all, this was a celebration.

  ‘That will be two hundred and fifty American dollars,’ said our smiling waiter.

  ‘We’ll take it.’

  Asti Spumante never tasted so good, I think it was the price. I love expensive wi
ne.

  Whether the money went to the hotel or the smiling waiter, we’ll never know. I hoped the waiter got it. So many people in the world live in such frightful and frightening circumstances, it’s impossible to know how and why some survive. The lucky ones. Then again, maybe they’re not so lucky. The dead don’t have to fear anything anymore, or live miserable lives. But even today the world’s Isaacs and Apollos, with their miseries and memories, remain hopeful that one day their homelands will again be places of peace and freedom.

  It struck me that these men were the essence of what 60 Minutes hoped to show Australia every Sunday night at 7.30 p.m. Gerald Stone, the founding executive producer, often said Noah is a far better story than the Flood. And he was right. 60 Minutes shone a light on the worst and the best of humanity and that trip to Uganda brought out both. For 30 years I was part of this unique TV show about extraordinary events but mainly extraordinary people.

  The world remains hopeful that there will never be another Idi Amin, but as history is full of them, I’m not holding my breath.

  2

  The Packers and Me (and Phil)

  I was a cameraman for 30 years with 60 Minutes, but I was at Channel 9 for a total of 39 years.

  I had started working at Channel 9 way back in 1969 as an assistant cameraman on a ‘police drama’ called The Link Men. After the huge success of the Melbourne cop show Homicide on Channel 7, Sir Frank Packer and his son Clyde—owners of Channel 9—decided it would be a good thing to have a similar show made in Sydney.

 

‹ Prev