Painted black

Praful Patel

Genera) Amin David Martin (Faber and Faber £3.50) To many Britons, General Idi Amin is a funny fellow, a bit of a character whose crazy public utterances about the Queen, or his plans to save Britain from financial disaster, are evidence of a droll sense of humour. It is this kind of image, reinforced by Punch jokes, which makes it difficult to separate fact from fiction. It distracted attention, for example, from the Olormity of Amin's expulsion of the Asians and impounding of their assets.

Many Britons already nurse a sense of resentment over the Asians' influx, yet somehow cannot quite equate the sheer enormity of depriving thousands of people of homes and livelihood with this bulky African clown. This book is a timely corrective. It reveals that behind the image of a genial buffoon is a ruthless and perverted killer who has established a reign of terror from the moment he seized power from Dr Milton Obote.

The author recounts in horrifying detail how Amin established a bloody dictatorship in which the major victims are the Africans in their own land, terrorised by Amin's murder squads. One cannot doubt the evidence. Many of the author's statements are confirmed by ministers and other former Uganda officals, who have sought to eniist the support of other African states to relieve the plight of a nation ruled by a man suffering from inferiority feelings and delusions of grandeur.

Some of the methods of torture and execution detailed in this carefully researched book are revolting in the extreme, and it is clear that Amin's pathological insecurity and fear of political rivals had established a terror that will continue so long as he and his henchmen remain in power: they are in a minority, but they have the guns.

The problem is compounded by the unwillingness of neighbouring African States openly to admit horrors which are damaging to African prestige. Yet the record of this illiterate mass murderer who has defiled a once-proud African State cannot be kept hidden, and all who have kept silent, as well as those nations which have shamefully supplied weapons for this nightmare Dictator and his accomplices, cannot prevent the dreadful truth from emerging.

The horrifying catalogue of slaughters inevitably numbs the reader's senses. Even the fact that the crocodiles grew tired of eating human bodies thrown into the river somehow failed to bring home to one the sheer scale of the liquidations. These pages run with 'blood.

However, the open murder of the Chief Jus

tice Ben Kiwanuka shocks the reader back into realisation of the barbarous conditions prevailing in Uganda. There is an especially dreadful account of the dismemberment and the sexual mutilation of a courageous jurist who tried to uphold the rule of law.

It is plain that Amin does not consider himself bound by any civilised restraints. He assumes the proportions of a monster King Kong trampling over the normal standards of behaviour observed in all civilised countries.

One is tempted to think that his assassination is as inevitable as the elimination of any rampaging mad dog.

There is one serious omission. There is scarcely any mention in an otherwise meticulous record of the 'disappearance' of many influential Asians, such as Anil Clarke, a prominent lawyer close to both Obote and Amin. One suspects that the scale of liquidations authorised by Amin will never be known. However, the atrocities are not the full story of his infamy: a crime against humanity was his arbitrary expulsion of thousands of Uganda Asians who had contributed more to Uganda's economy than Amin's imported desperadoes from the Sudan, Libya and the chuck-outs of the Palestine liberation movements.

This lovely East African country is today under the heel of thugs if anything worse than the Tontons Macoutes of Haiti. Winston Churchill once described Uganda as "the pearl of Africa": it is evident that this pearl has been cast before the swine, who will one day lead his Gadarene herd to the abyss.

One is left with the feeling that the author, while presenting a damning indictment of Amin, does not perhaps go deeply enough into the strains created by Dr Obote during his long years in office, during which, as Prime Minister, he ousted King Freddie of Buganda, the former President of Uganda. It is because, one su' spects, that Martin was the Western reporter closest to the ex-president in exile in Dar es Salaam, and on whom he clearly depended for much of his information, that the book, if not exactly biased, is inclined to project Obote as Africa's democratic ideal. In fact, he was moving to extreme authoritarianism before his overthrow.

Uganda has suffered longfrom many evil men since independence in 1962, and the author is reluctant to weary us with all the details, for example, of the Congo gold and ivory scandal, in which Amin was not the only one to profit. The day will come when all Uganda's secrets are revealed. It may then become apparent that Amin's motives for murder are not simplY bloodlust, but also for his own survival.

If he had not struck first in 1971, he himself. would have been removed as Army commander on Obote's return from the Commonwealth conference in Singapore.

Amin's loyalest supporters cannot forgive his economic disruption of the country. Without imports from Kenya of even everyday essentials, landlocked Uganda would simply col" lapse. But there is a limit to President JoM0 Kenyatta's patience, and lately Amin has sorelY tried it. However, sanity can never co-exist with madness. It is in the interests of the black people throughout the world that the plight Of their brothers in Uganda should be widelY known. The sudden expulsion of the Israelis' the Asians, and a handful of Britons was all economic disaster.

This interim judgement by David martin serves as a reminder that the Hitlerian doctrine of racial purity can only end in disaster' whether it is black, brown or white racialism' The tragedy of it is that what is happening ill Uganda can so easily take root elsewhere; What we have here is a fearful display °I Africans' inhumanity to Africans.

Mr Patel, a Ugandan Asian, is Hon. Secretary ofd the All-Party Committee on UK Citizenship on , a former member of the Ugandan Resettlemem Board