- LONDON (Reuters) - I heard
a curious noise outside the cell, as of an egg being broken.
-
- They had just dragged away a man who'd lain on the floor.
I did not know it then but other inmates of Idi Amin's military prison
at Makindye told me later how the executioner used a sledgehammer.
-
- "You were in the condemned cell," they explained.
"They crack your skull."
-
- It was just another barracks hut in Amin's Uganda, where
three decades later his name, thankfully, belongs to history. His death
on Saturday in Saudi Arabia, after almost a quarter century of exile, erases
forever the possibility of any kind of comeback.
-
- But back in 1972 he was all-powerful. In our cell, the
grille admitted the laughter of children and the 'High Life' rhythms from
a bar across the road. Carrion crows scraped their claws on a tin roof.
-
- A few prisoners, all Africans, sat or lay, groaning,
on bare concrete that smelt of vomit. Splashes of dried blood caked the
wall. Nobody talked much.
-
- "Let them come and finish it," said one man
in Swahili.
-
- I knew enough of the language from my boyhood in colonial
Kenya. I wished now that I did not. In the prison guardroom a soldier had
struck me across the head with a truncheon.
-
- "Those two are going to cry for water tonight because
we are going to burn their hair," he said.
-
- A FLYING SAUCER
-
- My companion was Sandy Gall of Independent Television
News. We were in Uganda -- he from London and I from Reuters in Nairobi
-- to report the 1972 expulsion, on a sudden whim of Amin, of the Asian
minority of some 40,000 people.
-
- I knew the country.
-
- Often I had chatted amiably, in Swahili again, with the
tyrant himself. Amin was good copy. Fleet Street loved it. He saw a flying
saucer once. He courted reporters. He tuned in at breakfast time to see
if he was on the BBC.
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- Africa cringed.
-
- "If he were a woman I would surely marry him."
-
- He meant President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania who, in
fact, he hated for giving sanctuary to his foes.
-
- Then those dissidents invaded Uganda even as Amin expelled
the Asians. It began a terrible blood purge.
-
- The dictator's people also detained all the Western reporters
they could find until they'd butchered the insurgents and their suspected
sympathizers.
-
- Amin shrank from killing foreigners yet he feared that
Britain had colluded with Nyerere and we were spies. So now we glimpsed
the truth behind the clown's mask.
-
- POLKA DOT DRESS
-
- The three men, and a woman in a polka dot dress, who
arrested me, saw from my passport that I'd been on a news trip to Tanzania.
-
- A thug in dark glasses spat with fury. He ordered me
in the boot of the Peugeot 504. It meant you were as good as dead. Then
a police special branch officer stopped that. I suspect he was rather a
brave man who probably did not survive a lot longer.
-
- "You will be freed and maybe deported in a few days,"
he whispered.
-
- They collected Sandy from our hotel then figured there
were no other 'spies' there so we drove to Makindye.
-
- In the execution cell it got dark. The keys in the iron
door jangled. A dozen or so new African captives were led in. Sandy quietly
said the words of the Lord's Prayer. Then the sergeant-major barked an
order:
-
- "You two Europeans, come with me."
-
- In the dusk, soldiers with fixed bayonets lined a gravel
path. It led to a place where there was a light shining.
-
- This cell -- it turned out -- was for the privileged
inmates. Someone had a flask of coffee. When the long-term prisoners realized
where we'd been they gasped.
-
- "You are lucky to escape alive."
-
- I am haunted by the ghosts of those tens of thousands
who did not escape.
-
- A year or so ago, in Kampala again, I was given a carved
wooden candle holder for a gift.
-
- "Burn a candle for Uganda," my hosts said.
-
- It helped. Yet it seemed such a pitiful scrap of a thing
to do.
-
- (Veteran Reuters journalist Nick Moore was chief correspondent
in East Africa when he was sent to Kampala to cover Idi Amin and was thrown
into jail. This is his personal account of the horrors of the former Ugandan
leader's rule. Moore served in Asia and the Middle East as well as Africa
in a career spanning 36 years. He retired in 2000 but continues to train
journalists for Reuters.)
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