A new film, The Last King of Scotland, is about the relationship between former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin and his Scottish doctor, and has brought new interest into the history of this former African dictator.

Richard Dowden is the director of the Royal African Society, and "like the young British doctor in 'The Last King of Scotland', Richard Dowden was living in Uganda when Idi Amin seized power. But he says the film is wrong to blame the UK for the coup that brought the tyrant to power".

He details little known facts about the coup that brought Idi Amin into power in his recent article published in the Independent, African tyrant: The truth about Amin.

Excerpts:

My challenges to the film are factual. The first concerns who put Amin in power. There is a moment when he confides in Garrigan: "Who put me here? - It was British." The assertion is repeated by Stone, a British diplomat, who says: "Given we were so intimately involved in him coming to power..."

Most Brits in Uganda believed their government organised the coup in 1971. Amin had been a loyal sergeant in the King's African Rifles, doing Britain's dirty work against the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya in the 1950s. It was assumed he was still "their boy". I too believed it was the British, until I read papers concerning the coup at the Public Record Office at Kew in London.

And most Americans assume that it is (solely) the US government that organized the coup against Saddam, not to mention the whole invasion of Iraq. But I digress, reading on:

If the British did have a hand in the events of 25 January 1971, the plotters neglected to tell the British high commissioner in Kampala, Richard Slater. Foreign Office telegrams reveal a man shocked and confused at reports of shooting in the streets. As the day rolls on, Slater reports that the man who knows all about the coup is Colonel Bar-Lev, the Israeli defence attaché - the ambassador was away. Quoting Bar-Lev as the source, Slater reports: "In the course of last night, General Amin caused to be arrested all officers in the armed forces sympathetic to Obote ... Amin is now firmly in control of all elements of [the] army ... the Israeli defence attaché discounts any possibility of moves against Amin."

In the following days, the Israelis take the lead. Bar-Lev is in constant contact with Amin. Slater tells London that Bar-Lev has explained to him "in considerable detail [how] ... all potential foci of resistance, both up-country and in Kampala, had been eliminated." How does he know this? The Uganda military radio network had been provided by the Israelis. Soon afterwards, Amin made his first trip as president - to Israel. [Getting his orders from his benefactors?]

At the time of the coup, Slater had recently declared that Amin had "just enough intelligence to realise he couldn't run the country". He also said that he was fed up with the president, Milton Obote, who had taken a strong stand against British arms sales to South Africa, and was threatening to nationalise British companies in Uganda.

The suspicion at the time was that the British prime minister, Edward Heath, wanted Obote out of the way at the Commonwealth Conference then taking place in Singapore, where arms sales to South Africa would be a hot topic. But elsewhere in Africa, Britain tolerated critics. In Tanzania, President Julius Nyerere had nationalised British companies and was even more anti-apartheid than Obote. But when he had been threatened by a coup, the British sent in the Marines to keep him to power. The British never tried to remove President Kenneth Kaunda in Zambia, despite his critical stance on South Africa.

But why would Israel meddle with an African nation? Other than supporting Apartheid South Africa, tricking the US into bombing Libya, invading the Sinai, etc, what do they have to gain from adding a coup in Uganda to their list of adventures in Africa? Dowden goes on:

But why should Israel be interested in Uganda? Slater never directly accused Israel of being behind the coup, but he did explain why they might have been. In the Six-Day War, Sudan had backed the Arab cause, and Israel wanted to take the fight to its enemies. They were supporting rebellion in southern Sudan, supplying the Anya-Nya fighters with weapons. As Slater said: "They do not want the rebels to win. They want to keep them fighting."

Obote had been trying to make peace in Sudan, but, unknown to him, Amin, then head of his army, had been secretly supplying the Israeli weapons to the rebels. Amin had good friends in Israel, and suddenly the Israelis had the opportunity to remove the man who was trying to broker peace, and put their man in power.

So it's not just Uganda to be added to the list, but meddling with the Sudan as well! I personally didn't know that the civil strife in Sudan, which Zionist apologists have been calling attention to while deflecting scrutiny away from the plight of the Palestinians, was itself aggravated by Israel, which is working to fragment its Arab enemies. It's doing it in Lebanon, it's doing it in Iraq, and it seems its doing it in Sudan as well.

Dowden goes on to show how the British then went to work at trying to take advantage of the new leader:

But if the British did not organise the coup, they were quick to take advantage of it. Bruce McKenzie, MI6's senior Africa operator, was also the Kenyan president's foreign affairs adviser.... McKenzie urged London to support Amin. His first trip after the coup was also to Israel, where he met the prime minister, Golda Meir. [Was McKenzie also an Israeli agent trying to get Britain to support the coup?]

Amin would initially get praised and treated like a respected head of state, despite his crimes and massacres against his own people. Dowden documents how Idi Amin was praised in the press, was hosted by the Queen of England, and enjoyed good relations with the West. That's until 1971:

Around the end of 1971, Amin visited Libya and came away a changed man - not in character but in political direction. Perhaps they gave him nicer weapons, or did not charge him. Maybe he felt patronised by the British, as he had been all his life. Not even now he was president did they really respect him. Perhaps he was persuaded that Africans should stand with the Palestinians. He was not alone. Arab countries did a deal with Africa: support the Palestinians, and we will support you against apartheid in South Africa. So Amin turned on his British supporters, and on the British in Uganda. In 1972, he expelled Uganda's Asians and took hostages. Life became difficult for whites even out in the villages, and when Amin declared that we were all British spies, I decided it was time to leave.

After that Amin was denounced as the mass-murdering tyrant that he was. Israel and Britain's roles in placing him in power and supporting him would be ignored, while the monster of Africa was vilified. After his death, he is still remembered in opinion pieces, films, and documentaries. Yet his British-backed successors, who were much more ruthless and tyrannical than Amin ever was, are not mentioned for their crimes:

Amin had killed anyone who threatened him, and purged the army with massacres of ethnic groups that he thought did not support him, but on the whole he left the little people alone. His successor was very different. Between 1980 and 1985 in the Luwero triangle around Kampala, the number of civilians murdered by Obote's British-trained soldiers approached genocidal levels, as whole villages were exterminated.

And that war has, in a way, continued until today in the north. In Acholi district the Lord's Resistance Army, which never accepted President Yoweri Museveni's rule, has killed tens of thousands, but many more have died in disease-ridden camps they have been forced to live in. That war is hopefully coming to an end with peace talks in Sudan, and this could heal the rift between the northern and southern peoples of Uganda that politicians have kept open since colonial times.

It seems that Idi Amin's crime that earned him the vitriol and vilification of today's critics is not his mass-murders, but his turning against the masters that put him in power. One never hears the same amount of attack (I personally never heard any) against Amin's British backed successors, who have caused much greater loss of life and hardship on the Ugandan nation than Amin ever did, to this day. The double standards are glaring.

So Idi Amin was put in place to prevent his predecessor from attempting to bring peace to the Sudan. He is then discarded and defamed when he started to side with African and Arab causes, only to allow the strife in Sudan (and Uganda) to continue to this day. Just how deeply are Israel and Britain involved in Sudan's civil conflict?

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