Word: amins
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Uganda's military dictator, General Idi ("BigDaddy") Amin Dada, had carefully arranged that each of the twelve men he wanted to execute should be shot in his own home town. The reason: so that "everyone, including his parents, can see." Last week, in seven separate ceremonies before crowds of coerced and sullen spectators, alleged guerrillas were dragged from police Land Rovers, tied to trees or stakes in stadiums, city parks or mere clearings and then shot to death with bursts of automatic rifle fire. At Mbale, where 3,000 people showed up for the event, an army captain...
...warning to all of Big Daddy's enemies, guerrilla or otherwise. But they were also a way of distracting attention from the growing lawlessness of his army, which has murdered hundreds, perhaps thousands, of government officials, civil servants and other influential Ugandans in recent months. Encouraged by Amin, the army has become a collective "big brother" that metes out justice and injustice without reference to civil courts, explains government policy and allocates the shops and other businesses that the government expropriated from the expelled Asians last fall...
Many of the stores have been given to utter incompetents-particularly to Amin's favored fellow Moslems-with the result that Uganda is suffering from a shortage of staples and skyrocketing prices. Soldiers make a practice of seizing private cars if drivers fail to produce operators' licenses on the spot. In more than one case, drivers have been arrested, locked in the trunk of their cars and never seen again...
...fate of 780 Britons-including 565 teachers, 77 university instructors and 45 doctors-who are in Uganda under a British-aid program. The British government, which pays 40% of their salaries, had announced that these subsidies would be phased out over a two-year period. In his broadcast Amin appeared to say that British-aid employees would have to decide by Dec. 31 whether to stay on at "local salaries" -that is, by taking a 40% pay cut-or leave the country. Later he softened the blow a bit, however, by announcing that some aid employees could stay on until...
...London British Foreign Secretary Sir Alec Douglas-Home attacked Amin's latest moves as "contemptuous by any standards of civilized behavior" and "incompatible with the behavior expected within the Commonwealth partnership." He demanded guarantees of "prompt, adequate and effective compensation" for all British property affected and implied that Britain would take whatever legal action it could against Amin's government. In an interview he was asked why the British government did not retaliate by attaching Uganda's sterling reserves in London. "Because they haven't any," he replied...