Word: amins
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Ancient Kingdoms. But even if the Americans emerge unharmed, the fact remains that Amin is an outrage to the world and a scourge to his own country. The tales of refugees escaping across the border into Kenya and Tanzania varied widely in details but hewed to a common theme: the Moslem Amin had ordered the killing of hundreds if not thousands of Ugandan Christians, who number about 7 million in a country of 11.6 million. His action was painfully reminiscent of the stories of the "Uganda martyrs," a group of about 200 Christian converts who were persecuted...
More specifically, according to refugees, Amin was determined to annihilate two tribes, the Acholi and the Langi, both of which are predominantly Christian. These tribes formed the power base of President Apolo Milton Obote, whom Amin ousted in a military coup in 1971, and Amin regards them as his mortal enemies...
...evidence of Amin's frenzied campaign was painfully clear. For 30 minutes one night last week, the sound of machine-gun fire reverberated from the fetid confines of Mugire prison, one of three sites in Kampala to which Amin's troops had herded members of the opposing tribes. One refugee who arrived in Kenya last week reported that "hundreds of soldiers and civilians" were murdered in the prison while he was there. He saw truckloads of troops, presumably Acholi and Langi, being brought into the prison and being stuffed into cells. He said that he heard no shots...
Some estimates placed the week's death toll as high as 3,000, including 2,000 officers and men from Amin's 21,000-man army and 700 from the national police. In one particularly vengeful operation, Amin's marines were said to have killed every civilian they could find in Akoroko, the native village of Milton Obote...
...Amin claimed that he was responding to an attempted coup hatched by Obote, who lives in exile in Tanzania. A week earlier, as Amin tells the story, his suppression of the coup had led to the arrests of Archbishop Luwum and the former Cabinet ministers. Amin still insisted that the three men had died in a traffic accident while trying to escape arrest, but refugees told a far different story. They charged that the victims had been taken to an army barracks, where they were bullied, beaten and finally shot. Some reports even had it that Amin himself had pulled...