The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (86 page)

IDI AMIN

Death toll:
300,000
¹

Rank:
96

Type:
despot

Broad dividing line:
Idi Amin vs. everyone

Time frame:
1971–79

Location and major state participant:
Uganda

Minor state participants:
Tanzania, Libya

Who usually gets the most blame:
Idi Amin

I
DI AMIN WAS AN ENORMOUS MAN, SIX FEET FOUR INCHES TALL, WEIGHING
270 pounds, but was barely able to read or write. A champion boxer and a professional soldier down to the bone, Amin worked his way up in the British colonial army to become the army chief of staff for Uganda’s first elected president, Milton Obote. Amin was widely considered a jovial brute, far too unimaginative to be much of a threat. Because he came from an insignificant Sudanic tribe, he just didn’t have the connections necessary to cause much trouble.

In January 1971, Amin seized power by coup d’etat just as President Obote was thinking of getting rid of him.

Almost immediately, Amin purged the army of the Acholi and Langi tribesmen who had formed the core of Obote’s support, killing some 10,000 of them in an army that wasn’t very big to begin with. At the same time, he replaced them with Sudanic tribesmen recruited from north Uganda and beyond the border, in Muslim territories more akin to his own people.

In 1972 Amin expelled 70,000 Ugandans of Asian (mostly Indian) descent and confiscated their property. Although this was popular and temporarily profitable, it destroyed the economy. Their ancestors had been brought to Africa by the British to staff the civil service, and they formed the backbone of the nation’s middle class.
²

Idi Amin shifted Uganda’s alignment away from British and Israeli military advisers, toward Muslim solidarity instead, and soon Libyan troops arrived to help prop up his regime. When Palestinians hijacked an Israeli airliner in 1976, they found a safe place to park at Uganda’s Entebbe airport. While Amin was basking in the attention at the center of a crisis, Israeli commandos swooped in and rescued the hostages.

Of course, none of this is the reason why Idi Amin has become the most recognized name in Third World thuggery. We all know Idi Amin because he hogged the spotlight by playing the clown. During any international crisis of the 1970s, the world press could always count on outrageous commentary coming out of Uganda. Amin advised Arab states to send kamikaze pilots against Israel and offered President Richard Nixon his sincere wishes for “a speedy recovery” from the Watergate scandal. He challenged a neighboring president to a boxing match to settle a border dispute. He awarded himself Britain’s Victoria Cross and volunteered to be the king of Scotland. Even Amin’s rumored cannibalism was treated more as a fascinating quirk than as a human rights violation. Among the titles he awarded himself were “Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea” and “Conqueror of the British Empire,” but his favorite was Dada, “Big Daddy.”
³

All the while, Idi Amin maintained a tyrannical regime, among the most brutal in history. Bodies were dumped into the Nile River because graves couldn’t be dug fast enough to hold his victims. At one point, disposal proved too much for even the Nile crocodiles, and bloated floating bodies clogged the intake to the nation’s principal hydroelectric dam, interrupting the power supply. His inner circle never stabilized, and he elevated and purged advisers and wives with erratic rapidity. Prisoners were forced to eat each other in order to stay alive.

Finally, as Uganda became too poor to plunder, Amin sent his army into Tanzania to loot disputed borderlands. The Tanzanian army replied in force, overrunning Uganda and exposing the truth about his regime. Next to Amin’s favorite palace, in the headquarters of the State Research Bureau (Uganda’s secret police) they found “20 to 30 bodies scattered around the room in varying states of decay and mutilation. Almost all showed signs of torture and the floors were covered with bloodstains.” Ragged, broken prisoners were released from jails. Mass graves were excavated, turning up skulls bashed open by rifle butts, arms and legs bound, children impaled on stakes.
⁴

Amin meanwhile escaped to Libya, then moved to Saudi Arabia, where he lived in comfortable retirement until his death in 2003.
⁵

MENGISTU HAILE

Death toll:
2 million
¹

Rank:
37

Type:
ethnic civil war, Communist regime

Broad dividing line:
Ethiopia vs. its minorities

Time frame:
1974–91

Location and major state participant:
Ethiopia

Minor state participants:
Somalia, Cuba

Quantum state participants:
Eritrea, Tigre

Major non-state participants:
Afar Liberation Front, Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front, Eritrean Liberation Front, Eritrean People’s Liberation Front, Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party, Oromo Liberation Front, Somali Abo Liberation Front

Who usually gets the most blame:
Mengistu Haile Mariam

Another damn:
African civil war

A
FTER WORLD WAR II, THE ITALIAN COLONY OF ERITREA ALONG THE RED
Sea coast was attached to Ethiopia as both an outlet to the sea and compensation for all of the trouble Italy had caused the Ethiopians. Because the Eritrean people are nothing at all like the Ethiopians, this union was supposed to be a loose federation with a wide measure of Eritrean autonomy, but the Ethiopians got greedy and began running their new province like they owned the place.

When Emperor Haile Selassie (see “Italo-Ethiopian War”) unilaterally annexed Eritrea in 1962, the locals rose in rebellion. For the next thirty years, the Ethiopian coast was a war zone. Compounding the chronic warfare, a famine settled over Ethiopia in 1973–74, killing 100,000 to 200,000 in the northern province of Tigre, as the country descended further into chaos.

Red Terror

In September 1974, a cabal of army officers called the Derg (the “Committee”) took power in the capital, Addis Ababa, and imprisoned Emperor Haile Selassie. The first leader of the provisional government, General Aman Andom, was Eritrean and mistrusted and therefore was assassinated within a couple of months. His replacement was Teferi Benti, who declared Ethiopia a socialist state.

After a year under house arrest, Haile Selassie was strangled in his bed and buried under a toilet in the palace. In addition, fifty-seven former high officials, including two former prime ministers and seventeen generals, were executed without trial in the first year of Derg rule. Altogether, some 10,000 suspected opponents of the new regime were killed in the first purges.

In 1977, during a cabinet meeting, Vice President Lieutenant Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam and his associates quietly excused themselves and left the room. A moment later, Mengistu burst in with some gunmen and began shooting everyone who remained. This turned into a running gunfight down the halls of the palace in which Benti and his supporters were killed.
²

Mengistu then continued to purge rival factions of Marxists. In a May 1977 speech, Mengistu declared the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party an outlawed organization: “Death to the rebels! Death to the EPRP!” Mobs of government and factory workers were organized to go door to door, dragging suspects out to be shot or strangled with wire. During the Red Terror, bodies were dumped in the gutters with placards tied around their necks: “This will happen to you if you support the EPRP.” Over the course of his reign, Mengistu had some 80,000 political enemies and prisoners killed in cold blood.
³

War and More War

For most of modern history, Ethiopia always seems to have a couple of wars going at any given time. Some are civil wars; others are border wars. During the era of Derg rule, wars raged at two ends of the country. In addition to the Eritrean War, the Somalis in the Ogaden Desert to the east were in revolt, and hard-line Communists revolted in Tigre. In total, these wars killed 400,000 to 600,000 people by one means or another.
⁴

Somalis are one of the most distinctive and numerous ethnicities in all of Africa, but during the colonial era, they were split among five different jurisdictions (hence the five-pointed star that dominates the Somalian flag). Independence brought three of these together—Italian and British Somalilands, plus the northeast corner of Kenya. This left the French enclave at the port of Djibouti and the Ogaden Desert of Ethiopia as Somali lands outside the Somali nation. With Ethiopia straining under civil war, famine, and factional infighting, the dictator of Somalia, Mohamed Siad Barre, figured that now would be a good time for a land grab. In July 1977, Somalian troops crossed into Ethiopia and occupied the Ogaden in support of local Somali rebels.

The war sent shockwaves around the world. Because the Horn of Africa could be used to choke off the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf to the Suez Canal, every superpower wanted military bases in the neighborhood. The West had befriended Haile Selassie’s monarchy, while the Soviets had cultivated the radical dictatorship in Somalia.

Now, however, with Communists in charge in Addis Ababa, the Russians controlled the whole Horn, but the Ogaden War put the Soviet Union in the awkward position of supplying both sides in a war between allies. When the Soviets tried to choke off the invasion by cutting aid to Somalia, Siad Barre kicked out his Soviet advisers and became a friend of the West. By 1980, the Americans had been granted use of the air and naval facilities the Soviets had built in the Somalian capital of Mogadishu.

Meanwhile, 24,000 Cuban troops arrived to fight alongside the Ethiopians. Cuban soldiers fought as proxies for the Soviets in several African civil wars. For one thing, Cubans were more Third Worldy (that is, darker, scruffier) than the Russians and many were of African descent so there were fewer unpleasant colonial overtones. For another, deploying Soviet troops directly would have raised the stakes and elevated the conflict to a great-power war.

With Cuban help, the last Somalian invaders were driven out in March 1978.

Famine

It almost goes without saying that the Communist takeover of Ethiopia led to another famine. If we’ve learned anything from previous chapters, it’s that previous Communist regimes learned nothing from their predecessors. As soon as Communists start fiddling with agriculture, people starve. Mengistu’s government collectivized agriculture with the traditional brutality and stubbornness of Communists everywhere, and food production crashed.

It began with drought in Tigre and Eritrea, which became mass starvation in 1984–85. Of course, no one can be sure, but the famine killed anywhere from 0.5 million to 2 million.
⁵
Mengistu tried to conceal the extent of the famine, which kept outside help from reaching Ethiopia.

Ideology alone didn’t intensify the famine. The wars stirred up thousands of refugees, while Mengistu forcibly moved hundreds of thousands of peasants from the war-torn northern provinces to the west in order to starve the rebels. It worked too well, starving both rebels and peasants and spreading the famine.

Finally the West took notice and began to send food. The most visible response was the Live Aid concert, which gathered dozens of bands and raised millions in hard cash for famine relief. This wasn’t the first international rock-and-roll charity—George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh predates it—but in many ways it was the largest.

When food finally did arrive from the outside world, Mengistu tried to distribute it according to the people’s loyalty to the regime. Most Western aid agencies had seen this trick before and refused to allow it, but this still caused delays, disputes, and cancellations that a starving population could not afford.

Fall

As the Soviet Union began to back away from strict Communism in the mid-1980s, the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev cut off aid to Ethiopia. Without this crutch, Mengistu’s regime began to stumble. By 1988, most of Eritrea had fallen into rebel hands. Tigre followed shortly. As the rebel groups coalesced around the capital at Addis Ababa in May 1991, Mengistu fled to Zimbabwe, where he remains today in comfortable exile.

In the early afterglow of victory, all of the various factions assembled into a broad-based provisional government in Addis Ababa and held elections that were almost honest. This democratic interlude didn’t last long before one faction took over, but at least they tried.

The new regime found Emperor Haile Selassie’s skeleton and gave it a proper church burial.

Within a year of Mengistu’s defeat, a UN-sponsored referendum finally offered Eritrea its independence, an opportunity the Eritreans overwhelmingly seized. This was the first time a secession movement actually succeeded in post-colonial Africa, making Eritrea the first second-generation African nation.