Commando squads continue to search for Amin

Press, 16 April 1979, Page 1

Commando squads continue to search for Amin

NZPA-Reuter Kampal Special commando squads of the new Ugandan Government yesterday stepped up their search for Idi Amin after reports that he was in a village close to the Zaire border.

Two executives of a construction firm who crossed into Kenya on Saturday said that some of their workers had reported seeing Amin in his northwest tribal homeland, at the village of Nebbi. The workers were quoted as saying that a man resembling the fugitive dictator was seen in Nebbi driving a car loaded with radio equipment. Professor Yusufu Lule, the country’s new president, told reporters yesterday: “Amin is very fast. Every time we get to where he is he shows us his heels.” He said Amin would go on trial, accused of mass murder, if captured. The commandos have orders to take him alive. “You have a legal government in office and Amin is now the rebel,” President Lule told thousands gathered for his inauguration. President Lule and his Cabinet stood in the hot sun on the steps of the long-disused Parliament Building, where scarletrobed. white-wigged Chief Justice Sam Wambuzi swore the new president into office. Uganda was a British protectorate from the end of the nineteenth century until after World War 11, then became a member of the Commonwealth. Members of the crowd waved banana fronds, beat drums, and cheered as President Lule spoke to them after taking the oath. Ugandans danced in the streets, hugging and kissing one another in jubilation. “There is no more jungle law.” a poster said. In neighbouring Kenya, President Daniel Arap Moi appealed to the United Nations for help in coping with thousands of refugees pouring into Kenya from Uganda. The Kenyan news agency said President Moi told an audience at Nakuru, west of the capital city of Nairobi, that there had been a steady flow of refugees into Kenya since 1971, the year Amin seized power in a coup. But President Moi added that thousands more had arrived in recent days and that the strain in Kenya’s economy was more than it could bear. Refugees have been lining up to cress the border since Wednesday when Kampala fell to an army of Tanzanian troops and re-

turned Ugandan exiles. The fugitives reported a collapse of order in parts of Uganda. Telecommunications with Kampala from other East African countries were cut on Saturday night and it remained impossible to get telephone or telex calls to the Ugandan capital from Nairobi early yesterday. Kenyan Post Office engineers said that the trouble was on the Ugandan side. The story of Amin’s regime is told at the headquarters of his State Research Bureau, where invading soldiers found a handful of emaciated prisoners who had survived

for more than a month by gnawing on the corpses around them. The triangular, threestorey building stands next to Amin’s lodge on Nakasero Hill, an area of flowering trees and stately buildings. The Tanzanians reached it on Wednesday morning. Outside were a dozen rotting bodies, badly mutilated. There was a drain caked with dried blood. That was where prisoners stood to be shot. The next prisoner would remove the body in front of him and wait for his end. The blood poured neatly through the drain. In one dungeon-like cell, the soldiers found 15 or 20 bodies, badly mutilated and

decomposed. A few prisoners, barely alive, said they had staved off death by cannibalising the corpses. In front of the building, scores of people were sifting through thousands of identity cards and files scattered on the grounds, hoping to find confirmation of a friend or relative who had disappeared. The Nakasero headquarters was only one of many such buildings and prisons across Uganda where agents of the State Research Bureau — 2000 to 3000 men who favoured flowered shirts and oneway sunglasses — detained, tortured, and killed to sus-

tain the reign of terror that kept Amin in power. No-one will ever know how many people disappeared or how gruesome was their end. Estimates of those killed in the course of Amin’s eight years in power range from 90,000 to 300,000; and stories are legion about tribal genocides, corpses fed to crocodiles, and families being slain for daring to inquire about the fate of missing relatives. The State Research Bureau extended everywhere. Its agents came from all tribes and spied on every level, from the lowly district commissioner to ranking diplomats and Ministers. Whenever. a delegation

of Ugandans went abroad a Research Bureau man went along. Files found on Nakasero Hill included detailed reports on officials of every rank, with “reliability ratings” estimating what was the chance the man would defect if allowed abroad. When the Tanzanian invaders drew near, people said, agents began bringing out about 200 bodies a day, chained and wired together by the neck, presumably for disposal elsewhere. Residents in the neighbourhood also knew when the agents began burning records. The colour and smell of the smoke changed, they said, from the smoke of burning flesh. The last of the bureau men left by noon on Tuesday, the day before the Tanzanians arrived. Robert Astles, the British-born aide of Amin, is still alive and in prison in Nairobi, the “Sunday Express” newspaper reported yesterday. The report said Mr Astles had been arrested three days ago by the Kenyan police at Kusuma on Lake Victoria. He was now being interrogated in Nairobi about the May, 1978, murder of a white Kenyan citizen who died when his plane blew up at Entebbe Airport. The “Sunday Express” report contradicted reports that Mr Astles’s body had been found in Uganda. Earlier, Tanzanian officers were reported to have said that Mr Astles, who was once described as “the second most hated man in Uganda,” was believed dead. They said that “Major Bob” and an unidentified white woman were killed by Tanzanian soldiers on Tuesday night as Mr Astles tried to flee towards Jinja. A middle-aged, short, balding Briton with a thick salt-and-pepper moustache, Mr Astles served Amin for eight years as an ingratiating aide, foreign policy adviser, and chief spy. At least twice in his career, Mr Astles came near death. Both times he fled for his life in a speedboat, just ahead of soldiers sent to kill him. Working largely out of the limelight, “Major Bob” helped set up the State ' Research Bureau that killed tens of thousands of Amin’s real or imagined foes.