by Al Venter
I have since heard that in the aftermath of that debacle, Joseph P. was assassinated outside his Beirut home.
It should be noted that when the IDF suddenly withdrew, the SLA was disbanded. Worse, it was an unconscionable last-minute decision that left the entire force both vulnerable and exposed. Without the protection of their sponsors, there were an awful lot of SLA cadres killed, quite often together with their entire families.
Several things impeded the ‘Peace Process’ in the Levant in the late 1990s. The most notable was inextricably linked to the Golan Heights, which – historically and politically – belongs to Syria. It always has. The right of conquest, even the Israelis admit these days, cannot prevail for all time.
I’d visited the Golan at the time when I had first met Hamizrachi. After many requests, the Israelis took me into one of their strongpoints on the cusp of the escarpment that overlooks a distant desert of grey stone on which Damascus was originally built. I stood outside, on the edge of a great minefield surrounded by razor wire, cold and silent. It was a grim winter and Damascus was a hazy cluster of buildings in the distance.
The inside of the fort – for that is what it was – was damp and gloomy, a warren of defensive tunnels built to keep an invading army at bay, as it did in 1973. It was manned mostly by older men who were required to give so much time each year to the defence of the nation.
When the visit was over, I wasn’t allowed to linger. As it was, everything they wished to keep hidden from my prying journo eyes was covered in canvas. They fed me a bowl of hummus and tahini with pitta, which was when my escort, an army officer from Natanya, suggested that we move on.
President Hafez Assad has said many times that there can never be peace in the region until the Syrian flag again flies over the high ground that we know today as Golan. He has repeatedly argued that Sinai, captured in the selfsame Yom Kippur War, was returned to Egypt years ago. Obviously a different case, the two issues are linked, yet who can argue so long after the Camp David Accords?
Stresses Assad: Golan should likewise have been vacated by Israeli settlers. While there is little regard to history in his thesis, to the average young Arab intellectual – be it in Damascus, Cairo, Amman or Riyadh – it makes very good sense.
For their part, the Israelis reckon that they are not the ones who are intransigent, but rather, it is President Assad who impedes the implementation of a long-term peace settlement. On the one hand, he makes conciliatory noises. Simultaneously, he arms Hizbollah with rockets to strike at Israeli towns across the border and assassinate Lebanese political leaders. If the Syrian leader chose to do so – even Assad’s enemies acknowledge – he could put a stop to it all with a single wave of his hand.
There is another, less widely known aspect to this imbroglio which, for a while, was linked to both the SLA and the future of Northern Israel: this one involves water, arguably the single most valuable asset throughout the entire Middle East. In one of his last public speeches before he was assassinated, the late President Yitzhak Rabin declared that the uninterrupted supply of water in Israel was ‘even more important than peace’. Without it, he declared, ‘the nation cannot and will not survive’.
Rabin was always of the view that since the Golan Heights supplied a large proportion of water to Israel, Syrian demands for the return of the Heights, as a quid pro quo for peace along the northern Galilean frontier with Lebanon, was incompatible with the reality of the situation. He also declared that while President Assad was of the opinion that the position of the Golan Heights was not negotiable, things were not quite so simple.
Assad only needed to look at a map to understand the ramifications surrounding this process. It goes something like this: The high ground to the east of Galilee is directly coupled to the defence of the source of water. Again, there are two factors to be considered: the first is Lake Kinneret (Lake Galilee) which is entirely in Israeli sovereign territory but is dominated by the Golan Heights above. Second, there is the flow of the Jordan River, whose headwaters and tributaries lie in the Golan and adjacent parts.
An article in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz (21 January 1996) spelt it out:
The matter of Lake Kinneret is vital since it is the largest (and only) water reservoir in the state of Israel. Israel can in no way agree to the Syrians’ returning again to the shores of Lake Kinneret.
It may be recalled that up to the Six Day War, the international border passed about ten meters from the north-east part of the lake. In fact, the Syrians took over the narrow strip and saw themselves as partners in the lake. They interfered with fishing activities and harmed [and killed] both civilians and security personnel. They even threatened to contaminate the water if Israel attempted to pump water from the lake without their agreement.
These two paragraphs lie at the core of the problem of the entire northern region of Israel. It also highlights ancillary security issues that relate to the country’s social, political and economic infrastructure.
Nearly all of the Golan lies within the Galilee Basin. The lake supplies roughly a third of the water that Israel needs. Two of the three main sources of the Jordan River, the Dan and the Hatzbani rivers, rise on the slopes of Mount Hebron, nearby. The mountain and the Heights are inseparably linked and they are all integral to the package claimed by President Assad.
As the Syrian leader says, there can never be peace in South Lebanon until they are all returned to Syria. A third river, the Banias, another tributary to the Jordan, also rises in the Golan Heights.
All these factors together, Jerusalem concedes, have little to do with Syrian tanks or soldiers. Here, it insists, it is necessary to look at the historical record. Ha’aretz again:
Syria talks about international law, but it already knows from its ongoing dispute with Turkey on the joint use of river water [along their boundaries] that this law is not clear. Also, if Syria were to try to divert the course of any waters emanating from territory under its control, another war will be inevitable. It has happened before. It will do so again.
For these reasons, a senior official from the Israeli Foreign Ministry told me, nobody is prepared to rush into any long-term settlement with Syria without having looked very carefully at all possible permutations.
‘Israel is not averse, at some point, to perhaps exchanging the Golan Heights for a secure South Lebanon. But in order to achieve that, he said, we must have the right guarantees.’
Mainly Christian South Lebanese soldiers gave as good as they got from Islamic radicals who were gradually replaced by Iranian-backed Pasdaran revolutionaries, who would soon call themselves Hizbollah. (Author’s collection)
The man who can provide those assurances sits in Damascus.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Uganda: Africa’s Killing Fields
In the past half century, the continent of Africa has spawned political tyrants like some modern societies produce visionaries. As we go to press, President Omar Hassan al-Bashir has been indicted by just about every international body of consequence. The man is a brutal oppressor. He has caused the deaths of possibly half-a-million people in Sudan, the majority in Darfur. Before him, there was Idi Amin Dada of Uganda.
NOR SHOULD WE FORGET PRESIDENT Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. While his tally of killings are nowhere near those of el-Bashir – who has all-but obliterated an entire people – Mugabe has managed to lay waste to a country on an almost apocalyptic scale.
Sadly, much of what has taken place at the hands of these African vulgarians was – and still is – racially motivated. In the Sudan, for a long time, it was black people who were being massacred, by a staunchly fundamentalist Islamic government. Mugabe’s campaign, by contrast, was initially aimed at getting rid of white people living in Zimbabwe, though in the process he ended up persecuting millions of his own black subjects, many of whom fled.
The pivot of Amin’s initial fervour centred on his bid to expel Uganda’s Asian community, the majority of whom, in a gesture of British magn
animity, moved to the United Kingdom. Brutal dictator that he was, he then turned on his own black people.
When this oppressor eventually died in Saudi Arabia, African journalist Makau Mutua went on record as stating that Idi Amin had ravaged Uganda as thoroughly as any leader in modern history has ravaged any country and that he almost single-handedly turned a nation’s prosperity into economic ruin plunging a peaceful society into a nightmare of chaos and terror. Mutua goes on to tell us that while ruling by decree, Amin was one of the first post-colonial dictators in Africa to unleash mass killings as a response to internal opposition and that during his eight years as president, beginning in 1971, his government was responsible for the deaths of as many as half-a-million of his countrymen. Another 100,000 fled into exile while thousands languished in prisons and underground torture chambers. Before Amin, Mutua tells us, Uganda’s economy was regarded as one of the healthiest in East Africa. Like Zimbabwe today, it was soon in utter ruin.
There is no question that Amin, who in 1951 won the Ugandan heavyweight boxing championship while serving as an NCO in the then still British-dominated East African Army, was certifiably mad. It was also one of the reasons why those of us who reported from Uganda at the time believed he was suffering from an advanced form of syphilis. What made his rise to the top that much more astonishing was that he would never have achieved power had his British mentors, of all people, not encouraged him to oust his equally demented predecessor, Milton Obote.
That equally contemptible ogre, it should be noted, ended his years in exile in Zimbabwe and enjoyed both the protection and the patronage of his host, Robert Mugabe. It says much that Westminster was also responsible for bringing Robert Mugabe to power.
Of all Africa’s dictators, Idi Amin was arguably the most unhinged. While in power, he awarded himself the Victoria Cross and announced that he was adding to his list of titles – which included ‘Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea’ – that of ‘Conqueror of the British Empire’.
Perhaps then, and not altogether surprisingly, it was Amin the buffoon, not Amin the butcher, who first caught the world’s attention. He raced around Kampala in a red sports car, watched Tom and Jerry cartoons, plunged into swimming pools in full military uniform during diplomatic functions and boasted that he had fathered 35 children.
A cruel, ruthless man, Amin presented himself to the world as a ridiculously absurd figure. He volunteered himself as King of Scotland, so that the Scots, as he liked to say, ‘could be free of British rule’ – a theme which resulted in a brilliant film that went on to win an Oscar. Then he would send telegrams to the Queen of England, insulting and taunting her and he once challenged the President of Tanzania to a boxing match.
When the capital, Kampala, fell on 10 April 1979, Amin, along with his wives, mistresses and a very substantial quota of children, had already boarded a plane for Libya. From there the entourage was quickly dispatched to Saudi Arabia. Muammar Gadaffi, another African delinquent very much in the spotlight, really did not need Amin’s presence to tarnish further his dubious reputation.
Some of the soldiers in the army of future Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, when he ousted Idi Amin, were barely into their teens. These were the forerunners of the ‘child soldiers’ we were to see much of in later years in Sierra Leone, Liberia and the Ivory Coast. (Author’s collection)
Uganda was an interesting place to visit in the old days and as others discovered, it could also be perilous.
My old rafiki Mohammed Amin, Idi’s namesake but certainly no relative, ran his illustrious news agency, which he called CameraPix, out of Nairobi. He would regularly tell me that his latest source of news or photos in Kampala had ‘copped it’. There were six or eight of these stringers murdered by the general’s goons. A couple disappeared without trace.
As a journalist, Uganda was part of my unofficial news-gathering brief, which suited me because you never came away from Kampala without something to write about. I went there with my wife once and the pair of us were probably among about only a score of tourists to have booked a visit to the Murchison National Park that year. Despite the risks, it was a memorable trip, with boating on the Upper Nile and taking pictures of crocodiles. Amin, we were to learn later, fed many of his victims to these beasts.
What disturbed me most about this visit was that we were under surveillance by the Ugandan secret police from the moment we stepped off the plane at Entebbe. Even at Murchison, where we slept in a tented camp – there were obviously no doors to lock – I was aware that Amin’s men were on the periphery. My wife was the proverbial innocent in paradise, so I said nothing, though I got very little sleep.
Using Nairobi as a base, I went back to Uganda repeatedly over the years, both before and after Amin’s rule. Sometimes we media types would score pay dirt, perhaps by being invited to State House, where we were expected to grovel before this uncouth idiot. Most of the European scribes would cower and smile, usually sublimating their fears in booze, of which there was always plenty. I never did, which might have been why Amin remained reasonably civil towards me during the few times we did make contact, one such time being at his home on Nakasero Hill which overlooks some of the better parts of Kampala, including the diplomatic quarter. Towards the end, he even sent me the Muslim equivalent of a Christmas card during Eid, which I still have.
Getting into Uganda during Amin’s rule was, at best, problematic. Everybody who arrived from abroad – and even from Nairobi – was watched. This meant that I preferred using alternative routes, such as overland through Rwanda and several times by ferry across Lake Victoria.
Going in by lake steamer was always a delightful voyage, but only if you travelled first class. I’d customarily board at Kisumu in Kenya – usually at the end of Kendu Road, in a harbour affectionately named Port Florence in the colonial epoch. There were stops a-plenty en route, some in Tanzania further south. Throughout, we’d keep a sharp eye out for lake flies, which could descend on the ship in dark, noxious clouds, often a third of a mile wide. People have been suffocated by these dense, slow-moving swarms.
Once berthed at Entebbe, I’d join the rabble and try to get through customs and immigration without fuss. Usually, I’d latch on to some backpackers, who were always around, and most times I’d succeed. Then I’d take what might have passed for a cab along one of the most dangerous roads on the continent of Africa, to Kampala, though that would usually begin with a ten-minute haggle over fares.
Whenever I used local transport in East Africa, there was always a strict routine that needed to be observed, like holding on to my baggage and first checking both tyres and brakes. Quite often the intended car would be faulted on both counts: the treads on an astonishing number of vehicles on Uganda’s roads were down to their canvas underlays and blow-outs were as commonplace as fuel stops.
During the dozens of times that I made this hazardous journey, there were often accidents along the way. The bodies of victims would be carefully laid out on the verge for the families to collect and if there was no family, or the word hadn’t yet got out, the cadavers would be buried somewhere nearby a day or so later. Because putrefaction sets in within hours in that heat, it was the sensible thing to do, not that anybody concerned themselves unduly with graveyards…
Then followed the invasion of Uganda by the Tanzanian Army in 1978, which led to an abrupt change of government.
There were several events that led up to that debacle and while it went on to be labelled a ‘glorious military victory’ by Dar es Salaam, it was a disaster for the entire region. It bankrupted Tanzania, then being ruled by President Nyerere and, ultimately, the war led to his unpopularity as a leader, even though the Tanzanian Army methodically stripped Uganda of just about every piece of machinery, equipment and furniture that hadn’t been bolted down.
If it could be pillaged it was. The booty was then hauled back to Tanzania, as it was euphemistically phrased in local papers, ‘to help pay for the war’. On
ly massive efforts on the part of the West got the economy on its feet again, this time with a new man at the helm, former guerrilla leader, Yoweri Museveni.
What eventually caused Idi Amin’s downfall was the murder, at his command, in February 1977 of Uganda’s Anglican Archbishop Janani Luwum, together with two senior cabinet ministers. They all died in what was described as a car accident, but there was evidence that the Archbishop was clinically butchered. In fact, I was told by several former members of Amin’s cabinet that parts of this eminent ecclesiastic were later fed to guests at a banquet held for members of the diplomatic corps in Kampala.
By then, world opinion had turned against Amin and for the first time, several African nations broke their silence about the excesses of a fellow African leader. In fact, they were far more outspoken about Idi Amin then than they’ve subsequently been about Zimbabwe’s Mugabe.
Also, matters weren’t helped the previous year when Israel launched a spectacular operation at Uganda’s Entebbe International Airport to rescue passengers of an Air France jet that had been hijacked by pro-Palestinian guerrillas. Amin, and the rest of Africa, was deeply embarrassed at this so-called foreign intrusion onto ‘sacred’ African soil.
Finally, in October 1978, this bumptious executioner, who was inordinately cunning, capricious and also a consummate liar, made his biggest blunder. He invited almost 3,000 Libyan troops to Uganda to enlarge his army and facilitate a national switch towards Islam. At the same time, he dispatched his rag-tag army into Tanzania. By all accounts, Idi Amin hoped that a regional war would divert the attention of the international community from a succession of domestic problems, but then Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere did the unthinkable. He retaliated by ordering his own so-called People’s Militia into action. Within months it was all over and Idi Amin was accorded refugee status in Saudi Arabia.