by Al Venter
During the Uganda/Tanzanian war, I arrived in Kampala at roughly the same time as the invading forces and found myself a room in what had originally been the Kampala Intercontinental Hotel. While it was also eventually stripped by the Tanzanians – of everything from electric light switches to toilets and washbasins – it was still better than average as far as some African hotels went. We also had to watch for missiles each time we returned to the hotel, especially at night.
As part of his war effort in support of Uganda, the Libyan leader had donated tens of thousands of Holy Korans to the people of this Central African state. All were beautifully case-bound volumes in Arabic, complete with English translations on opposite pages. I still have one in my library, duly stamped on the title page with the imprint: Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Great Jamahiriya. Things were fine for a few days, at least until members of the Tanzanian Army took rooms in the hotel. Being mostly Christian, they’d make short shrift of these tomes by hurling them over the balcony without checking if there was anybody below. At more than a thousand pages each, they were pretty bulky items; taking a hit from one of them would almost certainly have floored the recipient.
As for the rest, it was a typical African conflict, with us hotel residents sitting on our balconies after dark, gin and tonic in one hand, binoculars in the other, watching the ‘fireworks’. Almost every night there were tracer patterns that arched into the sky.
Once hostilities had moved on towards the east and the north, few of these volleys were fired in anger. More likely, there would be a group of soldiers on a bender. They’d fire for effect in the air each time somebody got clever or perhaps needed another round of drinks. However, we’d quickly duck inside if the hot stuff headed our way, but in the end, our hotel was spared much of it.
For its part, the Tanzanian Army worked to a series of set plans which, we soon concluded, must have involved an awesome amount of ammunition.
Led by several hardscrabble armoured units – whose equipment included T-55 tanks, a few T-34s, Soviet half-tracks, and 122mm ‘Stalin Organ’ rocket batteries – the Tanzanian invaders would trundle into position every morning, pulverize a real or suspected concentration of Ugandan troops for an hour or two, and then spend the rest of the day consolidating new positions 10 or 20 miles up the road. The procedure would then be repeated the following day, and so it went until the Ugandans were finally routed.
In the middle of all this mayhem were the few thousand Libyan troops who, though still in Uganda, never played any real part in the war. In fact, for much of the time, armed to the teeth as they were, they were little more than bystanders.
Their leadership was equally inept because we could all see fairly early on the direction this war was heading. Instead of getting on the first planes out, the Libyans hung around until the end. When they finally did make their move, it was too late.
They headed down that same Kampala–Entebbe road to the airport that I’d used earlier and ran straight into the Tanzanian Army units that were waiting for them. Ambushes would be set at several likely spots, and once in the killing zone, the APCs the Arabs used would be the first to be destroyed. Those Libyans who managed to survive these initial onslaughts would rush into the jungle.
At that point, local people – civilians, one and all – would go into action. With their long machetes, they’d slaughter any Libyan they found hiding in the banana plantations or the long grass. Each time somebody reported an Arab presence, the old, the young, male and female would pile into Land Rovers, buses, trucks or even tractors and hunt them down. It says much that not a single Libyan prisoner was taken.
I watched one such hunt from a taxi on the main road to Entebbe out of Kampala. Word had it that there were a bunch of Libyans holed up in a building just off the main road.
Eventually, a group of local ‘head-hunters’ arrived, eager for battle. They all had long knives and were shouting, whistling and chortling, with some of the women around the periphery ululating as if there was no tomorrow. It was scary, even though I wasn’t the subject of their ire.
Gradually, the crowd got bigger and whoever was cornered in the building did the obvious and stuck a white cloth attached to the end of a stick out of a window. With that, the crowd went berserk and surged forward. There was no stopping them and while some of the youngsters tried to break through a window, the group out front managed to batter down the door.
Moments later, three or four camouflage-clad figures were hauled out to whoops of joy from the crowd. Everybody who could do so laid into them with their blades; the unfortunate Libyans were dead in minutes.
For these soldiers, a large part of the problem was that while Libya was an African nation, its troops weren’t black. Nor could many of them speak English. This meant that even though some of these poor souls tried to worm their way into the woodwork, so to speak, they were very easily spotted, especially in the kind of under-populated bush country that makes up so much of Uganda’s interior.
Consequently, their fate was sealed and almost the entire force ended up dead. The few who did get away managed to board the last flights back to Libya early on. A few of the more imaginative fugitives managed to steal a boat and slip across Lake Victoria to Kenya.
Moving around Kampala during that uncertain time of transition had its moments. There was nothing to stop us going into what was then still innocuously referred to as the Ugandan State Research Centre, the ultimate misnomer.
In reality, this relatively modern cluster of buildings, which had several deep dungeons and was surrounded by a tall concrete and razorwire fence, was equated by many Ugandans to Moscow’s old Lubiyanka Prison. It was a grim, austere sort of place; anybody taken through those iron gates on Nakasero Hill while the tyrant ruled, very rarely emerged alive.
With Idi Amin out of the way, the security system so assiduously cultivated over the years simply fell apart. Those who had previously been in charge became the hunted and families settled old scores with a vengeance that almost equalled some of the earlier violence.
An immediate consequence was that there was nobody around either willing or able to shred many of the documents that implicated thousands. There were piles of files and papers lying scattered about on the floor of every room in the State Research Centre, some two feet deep. Many were marked ‘Top Secret’ and I grabbed some that looked interesting because they dealt with serious cross-border security issues with the Sudan and other neighboring states.
Early on, I was also able to make my way through several dark corridors to the dungeons in the basement. It was an appalling experience. They were still removing the dead from below during my first visit and the stench was awful. It took me a little while to do the rounds and it was obvious that there wasn’t a cell where there hadn’t been inmates shackled to the walls, many naked, each one of them emaciated.
Entrance to Uganda’s notorious State Research Centre, the innocuously named headquarters of both Idi Amin’s and Milton Obote’s secret police which contained torture chambers. We were to witness some horrible realities once we got into the building. (Author’s collection)
While males predominated, there were women inmates as well. Who will ever know to what abuses those poor creatures were subjected; the walls of all the chambers were caked in dried blood. We didn’t need to be told what it was. A water main had broken somewhere in the building and the lower floors were lightly flooded. Where the water reached up onto the walls, the black mucous that was scattered in irregular patches everywhere reverted to its original crimson.
What came next surprised even a few of the hardened correspondents who had observed human rights abuses in other parts of the world. There was a large room at the end of the deepest tunnel that had obviously been used for torture. What appeared to be a home-made wooden chair stood in one corner, complete with canvas buckles on the arm rests and still more to clamp the feet of the victim. All around were wires that protruded both from the walls and from a device that looked like
a small generator.
We were already aware that Amin liked to be present when some of his victims had electrodes clamped onto their heads, ears, nose and testicles. Whether they talked or not was irrelevant, all were dead within days.
Long before he had been deposed by the Tanzanians, we were aware that Idi Amin had taken over the day-to-day procedures involved with running his government, much like Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe in more recent times. This monster consolidated his power under three security groups: the military police, his so-called Public Safety Unit, as well as the dreaded State Research Centre. All enforced his decisions with the kind of terror that had Amin still been alive, would have probably led to his standing trial at the International Court of Justice at The Hague. Indeed, the State Research Centre conducted some of its ‘public executions’ at its headquarters, in the heart of the capital.
The diplomatic corps in Kampala was, without doubt, aware of what was going on. Nakasero Hill was the suburb of choice of many diplomats, as well as some of the well-heeled businessmen who had decided to stay. In fact, the residence of the French Ambassador was only across the way and the screams of prisoners were so bad that his wife had to be flown out for treatment at a clinic in France.
But this, it was argued at the time, was Africa. The country was newly independent and in the main Europe and America, much to their discredit, tended to turn a blind eye to such horrors. While South Africa was being castigated about its apartheid policies, hardly a word about Uganda was whispered in the corridors of power at UN Headquarters in New York.
Black people, the apologists would say, didn’t do such things. In fact, they were only emulating some of the excesses that Europe had experienced in its recent past at the hands of Hitler. History went on to repeat itself in the Congo, then in Liberia and, finally, in Zimbabwe.
In Uganda, meanwhile, Idi Amin’s systematic intimidation of his people continued and he ended up murdering many Ugandans. Quite a few foreigners were also killed, including a couple of Scandinavian journalists who tried to enter the country illegally, by boat from Kenya. They were arrested, tortured, put up against a wall and shot.
Then his ‘killer squads’ murdered two Americans, Nicholas Stroh, a journalist and heir to the Stroh Brewery in Detroit, and Robert Siedle, a sociologist who had been studying the care of the elderly in Africa while teaching at Makerere University in Kampala. Years later, Siedle’s son – who was 16 when Amin came to power – reported that he had been living with his father in Uganda at the time. He also disclosed that his dad had come to know Amin before the general took total control of the country and was initially impressed with him.
Everything that happened to young Siedle appears in his book, A Tree Has Fallen In Africa. As Siedle tells it, rumours of unspeakable cruelty such as murder, torture and rape, committed by Amin and his poorly disciplined army, began to circulate in the months that followed Idi Amin’s putsch. About then his father and Stroh became suspicious of the thunderingly gregarious general:
When rumors that hundreds of soldiers at the army’s Mbarara Barracks, some 250 kilometers outside of Kampala, had been slaughtered on June 22, 1971, filtered through to Kampala… [they] set out into the African bush to seek confirmation of the atrocity.
So on July 7, 1971, the two men cranked up a battered paleblue Volkswagen station wagon with a hand-written ‘Press’ sign attached to the windshield and drove off into the tangled heartland of Uganda, never to be seen again.
Their disappearance alerted the world for the first time of the policy of mass murder of the Amin government that came to be referred to by the International Commission of Jurists as Amin’s ‘reign of terror’.
In a house adjacent to that of President Idi Amin on Nakasero Hill, we were to find the local headquarters of the PLO. There we discovered drums of explosives in the basement that caused powerful fumes to permeate the entire house. In another part of the building, I found a number of timing clocks intended for use in pipe bombs, one of which had already destroyed the plane of Kenyan Minister Bruce Mackenzie in mid-air after he had displeased President Amin. Elsewhere on the premises were details, clearly from a Western source, that indicated what to look for when there was a threat of letter bombs: these explosive devices were also being ‘manufactured’ at the PLO house. (Author’s collection)
On June 22, 1971, I had celebrated my 17th birthday in Africa without my father. A few days later, I returned to the United States alone. Neither my father’s body nor Stroh’s was ever found. Pleas by the US State Department to the Ugandan Government to have my father declared dead so his estate could be settled and life insurance benefits paid were met with denials by Idi Amin that my father was dead.
My father and Stroh, the hefty general said, had simply left the country, gone on holiday.
Twenty-six years later, in May, 1997, I returned to Uganda as a guest of General Muntu, commanding officer of the Ugandan People’s Armed Forces, to interview the soldiers who murdered my father and dig for my father’s body…
I went often into Uganda’s interior, both before and after the Idi Amin epoch. It was usually a dangerous exercise, all the more so because the roads were always treacherous. Of the three drivers that I regularly used off and on with my hire cars over a three-year period, two were killed in road accidents.
This was also a time when AIDS first became an issue and we could see that there were people dying in numbers throughout the country. All of East Africa was being increasingly affected by the disease, but for some reason, Uganda suffered the worst, in part, it was said in Nairobi, because it actually originated somewhere along the border with the Congo.
True or not, I ended up making a television documentary called Aids: The African Connection and spent months in and out of Uganda doing research and filming, the first time with Dr Jack van Niftrik who ended up writing a book on the subject. My film eventually ended on the documentary award shortlist at the Shanghai Film Festival. I didn’t make it to the awards table, but the film was seen throughout China for a month.
For the week while working on that film, I ate breakfast every morning at the Hellenic, the same little hotel on the outskirts of Kampala that had ABC’s ‘World News’ anchor Diane Sawyer seated at the table next to mine. Though she had not yet risen to her subsequent giddy heights in the hierarchy, she was working on a network production on the virus at the time and barely spared us a glance.
In 1994, I went in again. I declared afterwards that I didn’t think I’d be going back any time soon and I was right. There were two reasons. The first was the Ugandan Army. the second was a rebel group that called itself the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). At the time it was run by a lunatic called Kony and, after Amin, one couldn’t help thinking that Uganda certainly spawned these types. This ogre’s specialism was abducting children from local schools. Some, not yet into their teens, were ‘moulded’ into what he termed his ‘Volunteer Army’. Almost all ended up sporting automatic weapons and murdering innocents.
Kony has obviously been successful in his efforts to dispense mayhem because the LRA is just as active throughout Central Africa now as it was then. Not only does this revolutionary movement wish to unseat the existing government, but it would like to take over power throughout a region that includes parts of Uganda, Northern Kenya, the Congo, Southern Sudan and the Central African Republic.
We would often be shown mass graves, left behind by Ugandan President Idi Amin’s goons. These skeletons were in an abandoned house and many were children. (Author’s collection)
The rebel movement had an attention-grabbing background. Kony took over the LRA from where his equally demented aunt and mentor Alice Lakwena left off. Her specialism was dousing her soldiers with ‘holy water’, which she claimed would make the opposition’s bullets bounce off their chests. The fact that they didn’t was of no consequence; enough of her soldiers survived the occasional battle because of bad marksmanship on the part of the other side to credit her with some remarkable
successes.
Prior to Khartoum’s assistance, Kony was operating from a headquarters deep in Uganda’s Kidepo Valley National Park. This he shared with Karamoja cattle rustlers who regularly exchanged fire with the Ugandan military and the occasional Kenyan Army patrol that came across the border to retrieve stolen livestock.
Not everything went his way. At one stage Kony’s force was down to about 500, including child warriors. Then he, too, started ‘anointing’ his troops with various concoctions to make them ‘invisible’.
The effect was that it made Kony’s warriors fearless; to frightened and inexperienced government soldiers, the enemy’s crazy disregard for death sometimes caused them to break ranks and run. A Ugandan editor, Charles Obbo, described the LRA as ‘a few hundred rebels [who] are giving a division of 10,000 Ugandan soldiers a right run around.’
It got worse – thanks to Khartoum. Having slipped into the Sudan and befriended the Khartoum government – who saw the rebel as a useful pawn in their fight with Kampala – Kony returned to Uganda with what Western intelligence agencies at the time estimated were 6,000 guerrillas. In their first encounter with the Uganda People’s Defence Force (UPDF) in the north of the country, the LRA killed between 250 and 500 UPDF soldiers. That was a year or two before I got there.
In addition to carrying modern Kalashnikov assault rifles, LRA guerrillas were also planting mines along roads and paths used by UPDF forces (with Sudan supplying the wherewithal). Kony’s fighters would haul light artillery pieces and RPG-7s into some of the better coordinated attacks.