Big Daddy's Big Trouble

Tanzania's drive against "that fool"nears Idi Amin 's capital

The scene at Uganda's Entebbe airport told it all. Abandoning their efforts to save the embattled regime of Dictator Idi Amin Dada, Soviet and Iraqi advisers lined up to board Russian transports that had been hurriedly dispatched to evacuate them. After fleeing southern Uganda, where Amin's army was crumbling in the face of a Tanzanian invasion force, nervous Libyan soldiers camped beside the runway pleading for planes to come and get them. Big Daddy himself had pulled out of his tree-lined capital, Kampala, to a command post somewhere near the Kenyan border. At week's end about the only sign of Amin's outsize presence in the city where he had held brutal sway for eight years was on television screens: rather than dwell on the perils facing Big Daddy, 55, TV stations ran long documentaries celebrating the past exploits of the country's self-proclaimed President-for-Life.

Predicted a Western diplomat in Kenya: "It's the end." Indeed, Amin was facing his worst crisis yet. His Soviet-supplied military machine, which once boasted 20,000 troops and a flock of MiG fighters, was falling apart under a plodding but determined advance by a mere 4,000 Tanzanian troops and a miscellaneous collection of Ugandan exiles. Since early February, this force had been moving north from the border that Amin barged across last fall in an effort to buck up his tough-guy image by seizing a piece of Tanzanian territory. For weeks Amin's regime had been pinpricked by guerrilla attacks around the country and more seriously hurt by a near total shutdown of fuel supplies from Kenya. Oil truck drivers have refused to drive into Uganda while the fighting continues.

The rapid collapse of Amin's rule began a week ago when long-range Tanzanian artillery pounded Mbarara and Masaka, garrison towns held by what were supposed to be Amin's elite forces, the Suicide Regiment and the Simba (Lion) Battalion. These troops not only surrendered; some even joined the anti-Amin forces. Late last week Tanzanian units and various anti-Amin groups began pushing north of Masaka toward Kampala, 80 miles away. But a Ugandan tank force managed to retake the garrison town of Tororo, near the Kenyan border, which had briefly fallen to the rebels.

As the collapse of Amin's forces spread, Kampala announced that ex-servicemen, policemen and even prison officials were being thrown into the regime's defense. Amin appealed to the Organization of African Unity to persuade Tanzania's President Julius Nyerere to call off his invasion. But the OAU leaders, meeting in Kenya, made only a halfhearted attempt to do so. They seemed to agree with Milton Obote, whom Amin overthrew as Uganda's President in 1971. In Tanzania, where he has been living in exile, Obote declared, "Now is the time for Amin to pay the price of tyranny."

Although many Ugandans applauded the ouster of Obote, whose feckless socialism had offended them, Amin's post-coup popularity was brief. The collapse of his regime stemmed in part from the inherent instability of his power base. A member of a small Muslim tribe in a country whose population of 9.5 million is 60% Christian, Amin channeled the government's meager economic resources into building up his military dictatorship. He ordered repeated religious and tribal purges in the army and imported numbers of mercenaries, including Nubian soldiers from the Sudan. He also recruited Palestinian guerrillas for his personal bodyguard.

Amin lavished on his forces such perks as free whisky, tape recorders and, for top officers, Mercedes cars--as well as modern Soviet-made arms. For a while, Amin could easily pay the high cost of keeping his troops happy. During the surge in world coffee prices in the mid-1970s, Uganda's exports put as much as $150 million a year into Amin's treasury. But coffee prices have since plummeted from a high of $3.18 per pound to $1.28 as of last week. In addition, increasing amounts of coffee are simply being smuggled out of the country. Official figures on Uganda's coffee income do not exist, but some analysts reckon that the country may have earned as little as $7 million in recent years.

Frequent purges and the faltering economy took a heavy toll on barracks morale, and last year several of Big Daddy's military units mutinied. Seeking to give his men something to cheer about, Amin decided to make good on an old boast that he would seize a patch of frontier territory in Tanzania that he insisted belonged to Uganda. By year's end, Tanzania's Nyerere had decided to pay Amin back in kind. His invasion force, small but well enough supplied with missiles that it was able to shoot down most of Uganda's air force in a matter of weeks, found Uganda's army surprisingly weak. When Amin ordered a counteroffensive late in January, it failed so ignominiously that even the usually resourceful Radio Uganda could find little to praise. When the poorly supplied Ugandans ran out of ammunition, one spirited broadcast reported, Amin's troops eagerly engaged in "boxing and wrestling" with the Tanzanians.

Only a few other African leaders have condemned Amin's excesses. Zambia's Kenneth Kaunda, for instance, has publicly scourged him as being "as bad as Hitler." The black African states, all of which have their own internal tribal rivalries, also share a tradition of not intervening in each other's territories. Though Nyerere and his OAU colleagues would clearly be happy to be rid of Amin, the Tanzanian President publicly maintains that any suggestion that he actually wanted to topple Amin is "a lie." That task, he said, "is the right of the people of Uganda alone." So why did his forces pursue Big Daddy so long and hard? In a speech at Dar es Salaam last week, Nyerere blandly observed that he had merely ordered his men to "give him a beating," because "that fool kept threatening us." Amin's threatening days may be ending.sb

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.