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FOUR

Tea with the Tyrant

I DI AMIN IS IN A COMA, a few weeks from death, in Saudi Arabia. It is August 2003, and alas his unconscious condition has come a quarter of a century too late to be of much use to Uganda. An international debate rages over whether his vast remains should be allowed to be shipped home to breathe their last. In the meantime he resides all plugged up in a Saudi clinic, as pampered in dying as he was in life. It is said he has ballooned from his presidential 250 pounds to the same number of kilos. How was this mass murderer allowed to remain unprosecuted in the poolside confines of a Saudi-government-owned villa in Jeddah for so long? To some tiny extent I suppose I had a hand in his survival, but I’ll enter that admission later.

Saudi Arabia had granted Amin – a rare Haj-making African Muslim President – safety, along with two of his wives and twenty-four children, in 1979, after he was driven out of Uganda by force. He was allowed to spend his days ‘fishing in the Red Sea, and playing his accordion, watching sports and CNN’, according to one newspaper report. He was even permitted to plot an attempted return to Uganda through Zaire, in 1989.

When I joined ITN in the spring of 1976, Amin was at his worst. With the only ill-effect being a severe reduction of my alcohol intake, I had come through hepatitis in a matter of four weeks. It was within three months of my arrival at ITN, on 27 June, that Amin made his mark as a supporter of global terrorism. An Air France Airbus with more than 150 passengers and crew aboard, originating in Tel Aviv and bound for Paris, was hijacked after a stop in Athens. Two male members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and a man and a woman from the extreme left-wing West German Baader-Meinhof gang, commandeered the plane eight minutes out of Athens, eventually forcing it to land, with just minutes of fuel left, at Entebbe Airport in Uganda. In London once again the newsroom cry went up: Anyone got any maps or photos of Entebbe Airport?’ I had both, and started to piece together the scene from the studio. My blotchy slides of the old terminal where the hostages were herded made it onto that night’s News at Ten.

Amin himself gave the orders for three more hijackers to be allowed to augment the four already in the old airport terminal. He deployed a force of Ugandan troops around the terminal buildings, and then proceeded to make a rousing speech on the runway in praise of the PFLP. To this day, this remains one of the few moments in history when a head of state has actively and publicly sought to endorse and assist an act of air piracy and terrorism. If the world ever needed a moment to draw the line internationally against a rogue state and its rogue President, this was it. But none was drawn, and Amin was either gently isolated or passively tolerated for another three years of bloodletting tyranny.

The non-Israeli passengers held at Entebbe were released onto another Air France jet on the third day of the ordeal. It was left to Israel itself to spring a daring and effective raid to free the 105 remaining hostages. At 11.03 on the night of 4 July, four Israeli Hercules transport planes landed direct from Tel Aviv on Entebbe’s tarmac. By 11.52 p.m. all the hostages were in the air, heading for the safety of Nairobi airport. Less than an hour after the first Israeli plane had touched down they had all gone, taking their three dead with them. The leader of the assault, Colonel Yoni Netenyahu (brother of the future Prime Minister), died in an exchange of fire with Ugandan forces. He was instantly projected into the Israeli pantheon of national heroes, while the assault itself consolidated Israel’s reputation for invincibility wherever it was tested. Forty-five Ugandan soldiers died in the attack. There was one other notorious death, that of one of the Jewish hostages, seventy-four-year-old Dora Bloch. She had been taken to hospital in Kampala after a choking fit aboard the plane. On Amin’s orders she was dragged from her hospital bed and murdered in a forest on the way to the airport.

We now know, thanks to British Foreign Office documents declassified in 2003, that Britain had a plan to invade Uganda in 1972 during the crisis over the Asian expulsion. But ‘Operation Zeus’, as it was code-named, was merely intended to save the seven thousand Britons still resident in Uganda.

As a failing state – failing in no small measure due to the neglect of the former colonial power – Uganda was a forerunner, a challenge, even a potential test bed for what was to come. The whole of East Africa was to be destabilised by Amin’s eccentricity and bloodlust, a destabilisation which may well have helped create the circumstances in which US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed by al Qaida nearly twenty years later. Yet Amin’s support for such groups as the PFLP, and his constant denunciation of Britain and Israel, won him enough friends in the Organisation of African Unity and the UN to ensure that he was never completely cut off from international support. Gaddafi’s Libya drip-fed him sufficient oil and money to stave off the complete disintegration of Uganda.

The Entebbe crisis and its aftermath drove Amin still madder. Public enemy number one in his eyes were the British press. In mid-July 1976 I was dispatched on my first foreign television news trip to get to grips with the East African disaster that was now Amin.

Standing on the banks of Lake Victoria just outside Kisumu, I looked north to the Kenya–Uganda crossing. Refugees were streaming out of Uganda with bundles of possessions on their heads. ‘There’s so little petrol in there,’ reported a smartly dressed businessman, ‘I’ve even seen the army pushing their own vehicles back to their bases.’ Within a month of the Entebbe raid, landlocked Uganda was running out of supplies. The economy was in ruins, and the country had run out of money to pay its bills. Any cash or food that materialised went straight to Amin’s army.

The British High Commission in Kampala decided to close. This immediately sparked a wave of actions by Amin against the few remaining British citizens. One such was Graham Clegg, a thirty-eight-year-old British businessman married to a Ugandan. He and his wife Joyce had already escaped with their two children to a farm in northern Kenya. By the time I arrived Clegg had gone back into Uganda, and was now missing, together with another Briton, sixty-nine-year-old Jack Tulley, who’d been misguided enough to ask questions about what had happened to him. It was thought that Joyce might know more. Since foreign journalists were denied access to Uganda, and she was still in radio contact with people inside the country, she suddenly became a very important source.

The BBC’s seasoned man in Nairobi was Brian Barron, and he worked with the legendary cameraman Mohamed Amin. Mo was to win every plaudit in the book for his work over the years, but he was to lose an arm in Ethiopia, and in 1996 his life in a hijacked airliner which crashed into the sea off the Comoros Islands. He, like Barron, was a charming if ruthless operator. My cameraman was the wonderful Mohinder Dhillon, a gentle, tall, de-turbanised Sikh. He was a brilliant but understated cameraman, who suffers from a very severe stammer.