Tropic of Chaos_ Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence - Christian Parenti [35]
Prior to 1971, Uganda had exported reasonable amounts of cotton, copper, sugar, and various other agricultural products. All that began to decline due to the military government’s idiotic mismanagement and looting of the public sector. Soon state repression had spun out of control. In 1972 Amin attacked and expelled the country’s South Asians, in a smash-andgrab pogrom called Operation Mafuta Mingi. The soldiers at the heart of the state now owned expropriated Asian businesses but did not manage them in any formal sense.
The regime’s one concrete goal, in addition to the personal enrichment of its officialdom, was a colossal military buildup. The Soviets gave Amin generous aid toward that end, just as Western companies made money selling him weapons and training. It was a seemingly strange, but not unheard of, form of Cold War competition in which both camps courted the same client. As we shall see, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Afghanistan, to name but a few, enjoyed similarly mixed patronage.
Under Amin, Uganda’s roads, ports, warehouses, farms, and factories fell into dilapidation. As The Economist wrote, “Expenditure to maintain the social and economic infrastructure, let alone to develop it, was reduced to a trickle. Scarcity and inflation were the harvest the regime reaped in a short period.”18 Labor strikes followed and were savagely repressed. The regime became increasingly isolated and vulnerable.
Finally, a horrified US Congress moved to impose economic sanctions. The Carter administration, despite a stated commitment to human rights, opposed the idea. Congress prevailed, nonetheless, and in October 1978 the United States imposed a trade embargo on Uganda. In retaliation, Amin told American expatriates that they could not leave—essentially taking them all hostage.19 As the Ugandan economy shrank further, the officer corps, fat on economic carrion, took to squabbling among themselves. To appease his henchmen, Amin created ten militarily run provinces, but these fiefs only weakened the state further. As the provincial governors smuggled coffee and stole revenue, the vaults of the central government emptied. By summer 1978, even soldiers were going unpaid. There were coup attempts and small mutinies, in which even the defense minister was implicated.
In October 1978, Amin resorted to the lowest trick of statecraft: he went to war. His invasion of Tanzania was, however, swiftly repelled, and Amin’s army—a modern, motorized, state-of-the-art shambles—collapsed.
The Tanzanians and their anti-Amin Ugandan exile allies soon occupied Kampala.20 A New York Times correspondent described the victory: “It did not take long for Uganda’s liberators to discover that the dictator had left little behind. There was $200,000 in foreign exchange in the central bank, along with $250 million in foreign debts. There were mass graves throughout the land that held an estimated half million dead, most of them men who had been suspected of opposing Amin. It was a country of widows and orphans with no economy to speak of; a place of ruin.”21
Armories Plundered
The capital was under occupation, but in the rural northeast no one was in charge. As the army melted away, the well-stocked Moroto Garrison near the Kenyan border and a smaller one in Kotido were looted by Karamojong and Jie tribesmen, who acquired “for the first time a significant supply of automatic weapons and ammunition.” Many of these guns flowed into Kenya and on to other parts of the pastoralist corridor.22 One report described Karamojong warriors looting a military armory in 1979, stealing 20,000 assault rifles and 2 million rounds