Amin's Horror Chamber

I he most feared institution in Idi Amin's Uganda was the SRB, which was housed in a pink stucco, three-story building sandwiched between the President-for-Life's home and the Italian embassy in Kampala's tranquil diplomatic district. There the dread secret police carried out much of the torturing and killing that were a large part of Amin's style of rule. Abraham Kisuule-Minge, 27, an SRB officer for five years, fled in early April after helping a prisoner escape.

Interviewed in Nairobi by Terry Fincher, a British photojournalist, Kisuule-Minge offered a chilling account of just how Amin's terror apparatus worked.

Kisuule-Minge said that at the time he fled, the filing cabinets in the SRB were filled with the names of 50,000 "missing people," who in reality had been exterminated. The bureau, with its staff of more than 300, was run by Lieut. Colonel Farouk Minawa, one of Amin's most trusted Nubian aides. From the outside, the building looked innocuous. Inside it was literally a chamber of horrors.

The basement cells, dark, stinking holes with heavily barred doors, were reserved for political and "special category" prisoners, presumably those from whom information was to be extracted before they were killed. The most chilling area was the top floor, where most of the cells were located along with interrogation rooms. This was where most of the beating and torturing occurred.

Farouk made Saturday the cruelest day of all. In the morning he would order prisoners brought to the reception area. With a wave of his hand, he would signal which were to die that night. At 7 p.m. precisely, the cars parked in the courtyard would be started to drown out the screams to come. Each prisoner was brought down and told to kneel before an officer in the yard. He was asked to explain why he had been brought in and was told he was being released. Then guards would leap from the darkness, loop a thick rope round the victim's neck and slowly strangle him. The coup de grace was a sledgehammer blow to the chest. It took about ten minutes to kill each prisoner. The bodies were piled in trucks and driven north for five hours to the Karuma Falls to be thrown to the crocodiles. Whenever a white was killed-- Kisuule-Minge recalls about 50 such cases--Amin had the ears delivered to him on a platter. Kisuule-Minge remembers five Germans--three men and two women--being brought to the center. They were tied up, beaten and garroted and their bodies thrown into the Karuma. Once an attractive American woman was picked up from her hotel, accused of espionage and brought to the pink house. The next day, says Kisuule-Minge, she was repeatedly raped, then killed.

Another victim, apparently, was Dora Bloch, the Israeli grandmother who arrived at Entebbe airport on board a skyjacked Air France plane in 1976, was taken to a hospital for medical treatment, removed and never seen again. As Kisuule-Minge tells it, she was brought from the hospital to the SRB. There, Farouk made a slashing motion across his throat as she was flung to the floor. She was driven away, sobbing, to a nearby forest, where she was shot in the back. One victim, a Makerere University warden named Theresa Nanziri, was eight months pregnant when she was brought to the SRB. After a day of interrogation, claims Kisuule-Minge, she and her husband were taken down to the reception area. A Nubian private known as Simba stepped forward and plunged a knife into her stomach. As she screamed and fell back, he slashed her open while her terrified husband ran in panic for the door. He was shot.

Amin enjoyed Saturday-morning visits at the SRB, Often he ordered two or three couples under sentence of death to strip and make love before him. Says Kisuule-Minge: "Amin would lounge on the counter sipping Russian wine and roar with laughter as the couples had sex on the floor." But after a while he would tire of the show and leave. The couples, who were always promised freedom if they pleased the President, were then returned to their cells.

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