Idi Amin, the dictator who torture and eat the parts of his
victims, was reported to have died in exile in Jeddah.
News update from CNN -
Ugandan dictator Idi Amin
dies
Saturday, August 16, 2003 Posted: 0822 GMT (
4:22 PM HKT)
(CNN) -- Former Ugandan military ruler Idi Amin, blamed for tens of
thousands of murders in the 1970s, has died in a Saudi Arabia
hospital, according to medical officials.
Ugandan officials say Amin was 80, although his birth year is also
listed as 1925. Amin, who had lived for years in exile in the port
city of Jeddah, had been on a life-support machine since July 18
after slipping into a coma.
Amin was overweight and suffered from hypertension and fatigue in
recent years, said David Kibirige, a senior reporter for the
Ugandan newspaper The Monitor. Later, hospital staff said he
suffered kidney failure.
He died at 8:20 a.m. on Saturday at King Faisal Specialist
Hospital, The Associated Press quoted one unnamed official as
saying.
A one-time heavyweight boxing champ and soldier in the British
colonial army, Amin seized power in a military coup on January 25,
1971, overthrowing President Milton Obote while he was
abroad.
Amin's rule was marked by extreme nationalism. He ordered the
persecution of several Ugandan tribal groups and kicked out all
Asians from Uganda in 1972, an action blamed for the collapse of
the country's economy.
The dictator was also personally involved in the 1976 Palestinian
hijacking of a French airliner to Entebbe.
According to the CIA World Factbook during his eight years in power
Amin's "dictatorial regime" was "responsible for the deaths of some
300,000 opponents."
Human rights groups say that figure is much higher, arguing that as
many as 500,000 people were killed or simply disappeared under his
rule.
Exiles said he kept severed heads
in the fridge, fed corpses to crocodiles and had one of his wives
dismembered. He was also accused of
cannibalism.
Amin was forced from power in 1979 by a combined force of Ugandan
exiles and the Tanzanian army. He fled to Libya, then Iraq and
finally Saudi Arabia, where he was allowed to settle provided he
stayed out of politics.
His family had asked Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni to allow him
to return home to Uganda to die, David Kibirige of Ugandan
newspaper The Monitor told CNN.
However, the Ugandan government said he would still face arrest and
would have to answer for his crimes. Officials also rebuffed his
family's request to allow him to be buried in his homeland,
according to his relatives.
A convert to Islam, Amin had spent the past decade living with his
four wives in Saudi Arabia. The Saudi authorities granted him
asylum and a government stipend.
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a Ugandan-Asian newspaper columnist whose
family was among those Amin expelled, said the Saudis should have
brought him to justice.
"I think it is a disgrace that Saudi Arabia gave him the kind of
life they did and the excuse is he was a Muslim. They should have
delivered him into the hands of international justice and they
never did," she told Sky News television.
"And for the families of all those victims, black African families,
this is going to be something they'll never forgive."
http://edition.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/africa/08/16/saudi.amin/index.html
Profile of a
Dictator
http://edition.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/africa/08/16/amin.obituary/index.html