WHEN UGANDA WAS GIVING FOREIGN AID TO DUBAI

Highlights:

Today in History.

WHEN UGANDA WAS GIVING FOREIGN AID TO DUBAI.

His Excellency Al Hajji Field Marshal President Idi Amin Dada seated next to UAE founding President His Highness the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan during the OIC Summit. (Seated behind Amin is the now retired Hon. Moses Ali, Deputy Prime Minister in Uganda's NRM government. He was Finance Minister when this picture was taken).

Amin and Sheikh Zayed had both become leaders of their respective countries the same year in 1971. And this meeting is when the Amin government contributed foreign aid so as to assist in the development of the United Arab Emirates. At the time the gulf country was mainly a desert. Their economy was based on a traditional fishing industry, the spice trade, and deep sea diving for pearls.

It is therefore quite astounding that under Amin, approximately just 45 years ago, the people of Uganda were giving development assistance to Dubai. Look where they have reached today compared to where Uganda is as we speak.

#theuntoldstory

Idi Amin never knew the date of his birth. According to his army documents, he was born around 1925 in a remote northwestern region near the borders of Sudan and Congo, while Uganda was under British control. His father was a farmer of the small Kakwa tribe and his mother was from the linked Lugbara people. The region is ethnically distinct from the rest of Uganda, with many people, like the Amin family, having close ties to tribesmen in Sudan. Ugandans referred to these northern tribes collectively as Nubians, and it was upon such Nubians that Mr. Amin would later rely for his security forces.

Soon after his birth, his parents separated, and his mother took her child to live in Nubian settlements in Ugandan cities. At one point she worked as a cane cutter on a plantation that her son would, as president, appropriate from its Asian owners.

As a young soldier he rose steadily through the ranks, spending the mid-1950's fighting in colonial Kenya against Mau Mau guerrillas who used terror tactics to spread dread among white settlers in hopes of ending British rule. In 1957 he was promoted to sergeant major and two years later was singled out for the rank of ''effendi,'' a new position for native noncommissioned officers judged to have leadership potential.

There were a few blots in his record book. He was charged with failing to obtain treatment for venereal disease. This might have been the basis of allegations that his erratic behavior reflected the mental degeneration of untreated syphilis. More serious were allegations that a unit under his command had killed desert tribesmen. Still, when Uganda became independent in 1962, Mr. Amin held the highest rank of any African in the Ugandan military.

He was on very good terms with Milton Obote, the country's first prime minister, who in 1963 approved his promotion to major. Mr. Amin was sent for special training to Britain and Israel, where he gained his paratrooper wings. In 1964 he was promoted to colonel and appointed deputy commander of Uganda's army and air force.

In February 1966, charges were raised in Uganda's Parliament that two years earlier Mr. Amin, carrying out Mr. Obote's orders, had misappropriated $350,000 in gold and ivory from guerrillas in Congo who he was supposed to have supplied with arms. Mr. Amin's forces arrested the five ministers who raised the issue and Mr. Obote suspended the Constitution. Two days later Mr. Amin was put in full charge of all the military and the police.

Two months later, Mr. Obote annulled Uganda's basic political formulation under which power was shared between himself and Mutesa II, the king of the Baganda, long the country's most powerful tribe. Mr. Amin sent tanks to shell the palace of the king, who escaped and fled to London.

In 1967, Mr. Amin was promoted to brigadier general and the next year to major general. As Mr. Obote declared a turning to the left and sought to remove influential Bagandas and replace them with his own ethnic kin from the Acholi and Langi tribes, he and Mr. Amin worked closely together.

But in 1971, Mr. Obote, believing that his top general had been plotting behind his back, sought to rein him in. As he left for a conference in Singapore, Mr. Obote ordered Mr. Amin to prepare an accounting of several million dollars in defense spending. Mr. Obote never returned to his presidential residence. On Jan. 25, while he was flying back from Singapore, Mr. Amin seized power. Mr. Obote eventually made his way to Tanzania, where he would later denounce his former ally as ''the greatest brute an African mother has ever brought to life.

These are some of wicked act Idi Amin of Uganda has unleashed on people during his time as a President of Uganda:

1. He forced white residents of Kampala to carry him on a throne and kneel before him as photographers captured the moment for the world to see.

2. At the time of economy deteriorated as Mr. Amin ordered more money printed to cover expenditures. In 1972 he asked the Israelis for more money and jet fighters, saying he needed them to deal with Tanzania, where Mr. Obote was living.

When the Israelis dismissed his request.

He then ordered 500 Israelis out of the country and began his fulminations against Zionism and Jews.

3. He also ejected Peace Corps volunteers and the United States marines who had guarded the American Embassy in Kampala.

4. A special vocabulary of killing and torture was developed and used by Mr. Amin, which is ''Giving the V.I.P. treatment'' to someone meant to kill, as did the instruction ''Go with him to where he sleeps.'' ''Giving tea'' meant whipping and dismemberment.

5. He said he expected Queen Elizabeth to send him '' her 25-year-old knickers'' in celebration of the silver anniversary of her coronation.

6. He called Kenneth Kaunda, then the president of Zambia, an ''imperialist puppet and bootlicker'' and Henry A. Kissinger ''a murderer and a spy.

7. He ordered the killing of Dora Bloch, a 73-year-old woman, an Israeli woman. She was dragged from a Kampala hospital and killed in 1976 after Israeli commandoes raided Entebbe Airport to rescue 100 other Israelis who along with her had been taken as hostages from a hijacked Air France plane.

8. The number of people he caused to be killed has been tabulated by exiles and international human rights groups as close to 300,000 out of a total population of 12 million.

9. He declared that Hitler had been right to kill six million Jews.

10. On June 27, 1976, Idi Ami planned with seven terrorists, two of them, members of the German Baader-Meinhof gang, hijacked Air France Flight 139 after it left Tel Aviv for Paris. The plane landed first in Benghazi, Libya, and then continued on to Entebbe in Uganda, where it arrived early on June 28.

11. In 1978, Mr. Idi Amin sent troops into Tanzania in an effort to annex the Kagera salient, a desolate spur to the west of Lake Victoria.

12. On Aug. 5, 1972, with the economy continuing to falter, Mr. Amin announced that all Ugandans of Asian origin holding British passports, 40,000 people in all, would have to leave the country within 90 days.

13. He offered to become king of Scotland and lead his Celtic subjects to independence from Britain.

14. Idi Amin called Julius Nyerere, then the president of Tanzania, a coward, an old woman and a prostitute, he announced that he loved Mr. Nyerere and ''would have married him if he had been a woman.

Source:  Kampala Mail