[BITList] Ugandan Asians ... our forgotten history

[John Feltham]

> 
> 
> This is interesting. Although the news is old, there are a lot of
> things that I didn't know about. For instance, MHI (Aga Khan), through
> his representatives, gave an undisclosed sum to Idi Amin & asked him
> not to harm the Ismailis. Also, the editor of 'The Nation' was called
> to Aiglemont and was asked not to write horror stories from Uganda
> presumably because that would cause a backlash against the Ismailis
> because The Nation is owned by MHI). Incidentally he is the same
> editor who wrote the article below for the Daily Telegraph 30 years
> later. There are other very interesting details. Read thru to the end.
>      Mehrun
> 
> The Daily Telegraph: If only the Queen had asked him to teaThirty
> years ago, Idi Amin announced the expulsion of 80,000 Ugandan Asians.
> Trevor Grundy remembers those fevered days and explains how a better
> understanding of the erratic dictator's flawed character might have
> prevented [incomplete text at source]
> 
> August 2, 2002 4:05am
> 
> During the early hours of Saturday August 5, 1972, General Idi Amin,
> Life President of Uganda , Conqueror of the British Empire and the
> Last King of Scotland, had a dream. Still in his pyjamas, the six-foot
> three-inch former British Army sergeant called some of his senior
> military advisers into the State House in Kampala and told them that
> God had ordered him to expel the Indian/Asian community.
> 
> That morning in Nairobi , I and other editors of the tabloid newspaper
> The Nation read the first news agency reports describing how The
> Almighty had also ordered Amin to take over Asian-owned hotels, mills,
> breweries, sugar refineries and cotton factories.
> 
> In Amin's dream, God told the general to nationalise all of the houses
> and flats owned by Uganda 's 80,000-strong Indian community, made up
> of Hindis, Muslims and members of the Aga Khan's small but wealthy
> sect, the Ismailis. The Ugandan Life President gave non-citizens just
> 90 days to leave the country.
> 
> That same day, 18 leaders of the Indian community - wealthy, usually
> optimistic men - were summoned into Amin's awe-inspiring presence.
> They shook their heads in disbelief when they heard what he had to
> say.
> 
> They had all 'milked the Ugandan cow without feeding it', and had
> ripped off the economy by sending millions of Ugandan shillings to
> relatives in Britain . They should make plans to get all the members
> of their universally detested community out of the country by November
> 9.
> 
> 'If you don't go by then,' Amin told them, 'I will make you feel as if
> you are sitting on fire.'
> 
> In Nairobi , the mood among Kenya 's much larger and even more
> powerful Indian community was of good-humoured incredulity. Weren't
> Ugandan Asians Idi Amin's best friends? He had said so dozens of times
> since
> overthrowing the quasi-Marxist President Milton Obote the year before.
>  In January 1971, Ugandan Asians had joined hands with blacks and
> whites and danced in the streets of Kampala when they heard that the
> 'Redeemer' Amin had ended the corrupt and always menacing rule of
> Obote.
> 
> The day after Amin's thunderbolt announcement, I joined a close
> Ismaili friend, who worked as an accountant at The Nation, a paper
> owned by the Aga Khan, for a family picnic. Mansoor told me that Idi
> Amin was so erratic, he would probably retract his expulsion order
> within a few days. 'He has probably had a row with the British High
> Commissioner, Richard Slater,' he suggested.
> 
> 'He was probably rejected by some Indian beauty and wants his own
> back,' said Mansoor's wife, as we laughed and enjoyed our picnic.
> 
> But Idi Amin was in no mood to retract a single word. On August 9, he
> appeared on television to tell the Asian community that even Indians
> with British passports must leave within 90 days. They included
> teachers, doctors, nurses, business leaders, lawyers, building
> contractors and the men and women who ran the twin pillars of the
> Ugandan economy - agriculture and tourism.
> 
> 'Asians,' he said, in front of a sea of beaming black Ugandans, most
> of whom wore military uniforms, 'have kept themselves to themselves
> and as a community have refused to integrate with Africans. Their main
> interest has been to exploit the economy. They have been milking our
> economy for years and now I say to them all - Go!'
> 
> At the start of October, I was called in to see one of the Aga Khan's
> advisers. He lived in Paris and helped oversee the spiritual leader of
> the Ismaili community's vast fortune. I was told that, for the next
> few weeks, he did not want to see hostile features in The Nation about
> Idi Amin. I should choose 'light, bright' articles and avoid horror
> stories from Uganda.
> 
> Mansoor took me aside and said that the Aga Khan had sent his
> diplomats to Uganda , where they had reached an agreement with Amin.
> He would receive an undisclosed sum if the Ismailis left unharmed.
> Diplomats working for the Aga Khan had also made arrangements with
> Pierre Trudeau, the Canadian Prime Minister, to 'ease the way' for
> Ismailis. Large sums were invested in that country's embryonic tourism industry.
> 
> It was at that time that the first reports came through that Idi Amin
> had started to turn against his black countrymen. Anyone who
> criticised his anti-Asian policy was picked up, murdered and fed to
> the crocodiles.
> 
> No one was sure what Amin was up to. Rumours flew around Kampala,
> Nairobi and Dar es Salaam that he was having trouble holding together
> the army and needed the wealth of departing Asians to placate powerful
> officers from tribes other than his own.
> 
> In state-controlled newspapers and on radio and television, black
> Ugandans were being whipped into a frenzy about the way Asians had
> ruined the economy. Almost overnight, Kampala became a city of queues
> - for injections, for passports, for the tiny amounts of currency they
> were allowed to take with them: less than pounds 50 per family. In
> addition, no family could take more than two suitcases of possessions.
> 
> Houses were abandoned, furniture was left in derelict buildings. The
> cost of secondhand cars dropped dramatically, while the price of
> unworked gold rose from pounds 50 to pounds 125 an ounce.
> 
> By September, with the November deadline for expulsions approaching,
> rumours swept Uganda, and reached Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. The
> British would be the next to go, it was said, then the Americans and
> finally all Europeans would be slung out of Africa. Amin had set a
> stunning racial precedent which Africa's poor and downtrodden might
> applaud and copy.
> 
> Terrified fathers heard stories of Indian girls being raped by out of
> control soldiers. In their hundreds, they packed into trains, known as
> Kampala Specials, and fled to the East African coastal cities of
> Mombasa and Dar es Salaam.
> 
> By the end of October, as many as 30 flights a week were leaving
> Kampala for London. On the way to the airport, police put up
> roadblocks and stole the few possessions that Indian families were
> trying to take out with them. More than once, the giant Amin appeared
> at the airport, his massively decorated chest puffed up, to laugh at
> the Indians who had once seen him as their protector. 'This is
> wonderful,' he told his cronies. 'Wonderful.'
> 
> The Old Etonian British High Commissioner wondered what to do next.
> Unknown to him, and the confused diplomats in Kampala, a young social
> psychologist, Mallory Wober, could have offered some sound advice.
> 
> Wober had entered Uganda at the end of the 1960s, under the auspices
> of Edinburgh University, to study the impact of rapid
> industrialisation on rural Africans. But as the expulsion crisis
> continued, he decided he wanted to psychoanalyse Amin. Courageously,
> Wober wrote an article in the Ugandan magazine Transition in which he
> suggested that, despite his great bluster, strength and determination,
> Amin was a dependent type who was desperate to be told what to do by
> someone in authority. Good at receiving orders, he craved the approval
> of the Queen, of organisations such as the British Government and Army
> and, above all, of hugely respected new African leaders, Julius
> Nyerere of Tanzania in particular.
> 
> Nyerere had won international approval in 1967 after launching his
> Fabian-style blueprint for socialism, the widely acclaimed but
> disastrously unpractical Arusha Declaration, which effectively stole
> all Asian wealth in Tanzania. Wober said that Amin thought he would
> gain the respect of Nyerere by kicking out the Indians, but Nyerere
> continued to ridicule Amin, referring to him privately - and later, in
> public - as an idiot.
> 
> Throughout his dangerously erratic military career, Amin kept a
> picture of King George VI wearing a kilt over his bed and always
> referred to the English king as 'my old commander in chief'. Just
> before his downfall in 1979 (at the hands of his old idol Nyerere) he
> wrote to Prince Charles and told him not to marry Diana, because she
> came from a different station in life. 'You will live to regret this,'
> he warned.
> 
> As well as analysing the dictator's character, Wober pointed out the
> part that Libya's Colonel Gadaffi had played in this African tragedy.
> Soon after Amin came to power, he visited Libya, where Gadaffi was in
> the process of booting his small but economically powerful Italian
> community out of the country. Gadaffi urged Amin to do the same to the
> Israelis who lived and worked in Uganda and, upon his return home, to
> declare Uganda a Muslim state, despite the fact that only six per cent
> of the population was Muslim.
> 
> 'Idi Amin always needed someone powerful to give him orders,' said
> Wober. 'First, it was the British Army, then it was Milton Obote. Next
> came Gadaffi and finally, God.
> 
> 'Amin both loved and hated Britain and used the Asians in Uganda as a
> weapon to try to punish people for not taking sufficient notice of
> him. Perhaps if the Queen had invited him to Buckingham Palace for a
> cup of tea and a sandwich in August 1972, the whole East African
> tragedy might never have taken place.'
> 
> Copyright (c) 2002 The Daily Telegraph. Source: Financial Times
> Information Limited - Europe Intelligence Wire.
> 
> 
> 
> 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.bcn.mythic-beasts.com/pipermail/bitlist/attachments/20110527/115cd588/attachment-0001.shtml