Historical & Social Contexts

Obote first proposed 3 initiations to change this issue:

1. “He moved towards a one-party state in order to neutralize a multiparty system based on ethnic and religious affiliations” (Hansen 84).

2. “He published a manifesto called ‘‘The Common Man’s Charter’’ which he characterized as ‘‘a move to the left’’. His aim was to replace ethnic consciousness with an ideology that would appeal to people outside the educated elite” (Hansen 84).

3. “He started a fight against feudalism aiming at a new constitution that categorized the country as a unitary state” (Hansen 84).

In the end Obote failed to achieve his political aspirations peacefully. Instead, he opted to use violence to attain these goals along with securing his power over Uganda. Firstly, Obote’s fight against feudalism being “mainly directed towards the southern kingdoms” have shown to be unfair, for his northern background made him an ally to the North, and therefore caused the deeper divide between the North and South (Hansen 84). Secondly, Obote’s campaign against feudalism to eliminate Buganda’s political hegemony “became an outright fight against Buganda”, as Buganda did not want to give up their historically “superior status within the republic” (Hansen 84).

Although his “suspension of the 1962 Independence Constitution and the abolition of the offices of the President and Vice President allowed Obote to consolidate his position with speed and accuracy” (Musisi et al., 22), this further aggravated his relationship with Buganda, for they had lost their official federal status under this new constitution. Hence, Obote called the military to stage a coup d'état in suppressing the southern kingdoms in Buganda for resisting his policy (Hansen 84), which later precipitated the "Battle of Mengo" in 1966. This battle became "a struggle over who would control both the UPC and the Ugandan state, as well as to subdue Buganda” (Musisi et al., 25). The battle was led by Idi Amin and the Ugandan Army who stormed the Kabaka’s Palace that resulted in more than 1500 deaths, even though the government tried to hide it and only reported 40 (Musisi et al., 25). “The Palace was set ablaze, and many centuries old cultural treasures were destroyed fortunately, though the Kabaka escaped from the Palace and was able to flee to exile” (Musisi et al., 25).

By: Casey Hua

Amin’s killings during his reign:

During Amin’s era, he soon ended his legal political activities and abused his power to arrest and kill many Ugandans, and worst of all, “he systematically killed Obote's supporters, mainly members of the Acholi and Lango ethnic groups” (Nayenga 130). The total number of people he had killed totaled to around 300,000, with many of his senseless murders being that of anonymous people including: “farmers, students, clerks and shopkeepers who were shot or forced to bludgeon one another to death by members of death squads, including the chillingly named Public Safety Unit and the State Research Bureau” (Kaufman). It is said that these death squads often murdered these victims because “they wanted their money, houses or women, or because the tribal groups the victims belonged to were marked for humiliation” (Kaufman). Some killings were also made to be public affairs, and were meant to “attract attention, terrorize the living and convey the message that it was Mr. Amin who wanted them killed” (Kaufman). These public killings mainly involved more public figures like cabinet ministers, court judges, educators, churchmen, businessmen etc. (Kaufman). Amin was also responsible of murdering foreigners, most notably Dora Bloch, who was 73 years old 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” (Kaufman).

Due to Amin's senseless murders of countless people in Uganda, many describe Amin as “deceptive” and sadistic (Nayenga 131). “He can be friendly or even give the impression of being a buffoon, but this clowning is really a mask that hides his terrible brutality” (Nayenga 131). “Harold Wilson, the leader of the British Labor Party, called him 'mentally unbalanced' " (Kaufman), while "Mr. Kaunda described him as 'a madman, a buffoon' " (Kaufman).

By: Casey Hua

Idi Amin’s overthrow and Milton Obote’s second period of rule:

What led to the eventual overthrow of Idi Amin was the Tanzania-Uganda War which began in the November of 1978 with Amin’s occupation of the Kageria Salient, a region of north-western Tanzania, and lasted until the April of 1979, when Julius Nyerere, the former president of Tanzania, counter-attacked with such force that it disrupted Amin’s rule altogether, bringing an end to his dictatorship (Roberts 692). While Nyerere had been on very positive terms with Obote, even backing his socialist political movement, he disapproved of Amin’s rise to power in 1971 by way of a coup d’état and offered Obote and his supporters refuge in Tanzania, an invitation which sparked a rivalry between the neighbouring presidents (Roberts 693). When, in 1972, an army of Obote supporters marched into southern Uganda with the aim of invading Kampala, Amin initiated a bomb strike on a number of Tanzanian towns near the border (Roberts 693). Rather than responding with violence, Nyerere instead proposed an agreement to settle the conflict, entitled the Mogadishu Agreement, which forced them to keep their armies away from the borders by at least 10 km, and prohibited them from fostering local dissent of the other’s regime (Roberts 693). As of 1978, teetering on economic collapse, Amin had shifted its power into its armed forces with 64% of its Cabinet being made up by members of the army, police, and prison services (Roberts 693). Despite a standstill in conflict between the two countries, Amin continued to enact violence against his own state, with as many as 300,000 Ugandans being killed under his rule (Roberts 694).

Amin made claims that Uganda had been invaded by Tanzania which remain invalidated, and could be described “as a ‘smokescreen’ to deflect attention from Amin’s precarious position” (Roberts 694). Nevertheless, he declared his annex of the Kageria Salient, a region of land between the border and the Kagera river in Tanzania and, “an anomaly of AngloGerman colonial boundary-drawing that split ethnic groups between Tanzania and Uganda” (Roberts 695). The area was populated with Ugandan dissident fighters from Tanzania, and troops proceeded in a war against the population, causing 40,000 civilians to flee their homes for the bush (Roberts 695). The Tanzanian army was not prepared but still better equipped than the Ugandan army which was “gripped by mutiny” (Roberts 695). The Tanzanian People’s Defense Force was relatively small and located at the southern border in Mozambique (Roberts 695). They had to march for several weeks before they could reach the Ugandan border and initiate their counter-attack (Roberts 695). There was little media coverage of the war on either country’s end, however the British, “seeking to distance itself from Amin’s regime” (Roberts 696), worked to discreetly support Tanzania in overthrowing Amin, and as news of the war spread across the continent, neighbouring countries offered to mediate, but Nyerere “had resolved to fight” (Roberts 697-98). The mediation did freeze the conflict when Amin, realizing “there was little sympathy for Uganda in Africa” (Roberts 698), accepted an unconditional withdrawal. Tanzania claimed this was a lie, and in January of 1979, Tanzanian troops invaded Uganda, attacking the town Mutukula (Roberts 699). The Tanzanian People’s Defense Force (TPDF) pushed North, and paired with internal uprising, proved to be a tough match for Amin’s disorganized military (Roberts 699). On January 11th, Nyerere “permitted Obote to break an eight-year silence in a broadcast that called for an uprising against the Amin regime” and later to hold a press conference calling for collective action against Amin (Roberts 699).

The TPDF eventually succeeded in in invading Kampala on April 10th, where Amin had fled, and began establishing a new government (Roberts 700). Yusuf Lule, elected chairman of the Uganda National Liberation Front arrived in Kampala 3 days later and was sworn in as president. After 68 days in power, Lule’s Government was brought down as “Kampala collapsed into a state of near anarchy” under his rule, and his successor was brought down in 1980 by way of a military coup (Roberts 705). Fraudulent elections that same year saw Obote rise to power and rule for five years in a new “spiral of violence” (Roberts 705). In the South of Uganda, dissidence about his “seizure of power” arose from the National Resistance Army and in this period began recruiting youth to fight as guerillas (Schubert 91-92). Obote’s army resisted against civilians living in the Luwero triangle, just north of Kampala, where Museveni's National Resistance Army guerrillas were operating” (Marshall). This conflict “flower[ed] into full-blown revolt and victory for the guerrilla leader Museveni” in 1985 and by July of that year Obote was forced into exile in Kenya, and then to Zambia (Marshall).

By Sarah Burns