Word: aminations
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...collapse of Amin's forces spread, Kampala announced that ex-servicemen, policemen and even prison officials were being thrown into the regime's defense. Amin appealed to the Organization of African Unity to persuade Tanzania's President Julius Nyerere to call off his invasion. But the OAU leaders, meeting in Kenya, made only a halfhearted attempt to do so. They seemed to agree with Milton Obote, whom Amin overthrew as Uganda's President in 1971. In Tanzania, where he has been living in exile, Obote declared, "Now is the time for Amin to pay the price...
Although many Ugandans applauded the ouster of Obote, whose feckless socialism had offended them, Amin's post-coup popularity was brief. The collapse of his regime stemmed in part from the inherent instability of his power base. A member of a small Muslim tribe in a country whose population of 9.5 million is 60% Christian, Amin channeled the government's meager economic resources into building up his military dictatorship. He ordered repeated religious and tribal purges in the army and imported numbers of mercenaries, including Nubian soldiers from the Sudan. He also recruited Palestinian guerrillas for his personal...
...Amin lavished on his forces such perks as free whisky, tape recorders and, for top officers, Mercedes cars-as well as modern Soviet-made arms. For a while, Amin could easily pay the high cost of keeping his troops happy. During the surge in world coffee prices in the mid-1970s, Uganda's exports put as much as $150 million a year into Amin's treasury. But coffee prices have since plummeted from a high of $3.18 per pound to $1.28 as of last week. In addition, increasing amounts of coffee are simply being smuggled...
Frequent purges and the faltering economy took a heavy toll on barracks morale, and last year several of Big Daddy's military units mutinied. Seeking to give his men something to cheer about, Amin decided to make good on an old boast that he would seize a patch of frontier territory in Tanzania that he insisted belonged to Uganda. By year's end, Tanzania's Nyerere had decided to pay Amin back in kind. His invasion force, small but well enough supplied with missiles that it was able to shoot down most of Uganda...
Only a few other African leaders have condemned Amin's excesses. Zambia's Kenneth Kaunda, for instance, has publicly scourged him as being "as bad as Hitler." The black African states, all of which have their own internal tribal rivalries, also share a tradition of not intervening in each other's territories. Though Nyerere and his OAU colleagues would clearly be happy to be rid of Amin, the Tanzanian President publicly maintains that any suggestion that he actually wanted to topple Amin is "a lie." That task, he said, "is the right of the people of Uganda...