Saving Some Bullets for the End

As the new regime mops up, Big Daddy seeks arms in Libya

Though he had skedaddled out of the country to escape an onrushing invasion, Uganda's self-anointed Field Marshal and President-for-Life Idi Amin Dada continued to cast a bloodstained shadow on his tormented land last week. U.S. officials reported that Big Daddy was in Libya seeking arms from his fellow Muslims in Tripoli for a possible counterattack against the new Ugandan government and its Tanzanian allies. Though Amin's chances of succeeding in such an effort were practically nil, at least some members of his shattered army professed to be eagerly awaiting his return. Claimed a soldier from the elite Simba Battalion, once the bulwark of Amin's forces, speaking to a Western newsman near the Kenya border: "His Excellency is on the radio every morning telling us what to do. He is trying to bring war machinery from outside. He says to lie low and wait. He says for us to save enough bullets for the end."

At the rate at which they have been expending ammunition up to now, Amin's remaining loyalists will run out of it very soon. Three weeks after Amin fled from Kampala, Uganda's capital, bands of Nubian mercenaries from southern Sudan continued to roam the countryside, looting and killing. A particularly outrageous atrocity occurred on the day after Easter. At Jinja, an industrial town 50 miles east of Kampala, pro-Amin troops seized a group of 130 Catholic parishioners arriving by bus with a black bishop from the town of Mbale. The parishioners were herded into a stockade at a nearby army barracks and mowed down by machine-gun fire; none survived.

The staff and students at the St. Theresa Mission School in Nandere, a tiny village deep in the bamboo-and-papyrus forests 30 miles north of Kampala, were more fortunate. First a band of Amin's soldiers robbed Headmaster Kibunka Peregrine of his watch and money; then, the headmaster told TIME Nairobi Bureau Chief David Wood, one of the soldiers "jammed a hand grenade in my mouth and told me to take him to the deacon." Peregrine knocked on the bullet-scarred door of the deacon's office, but no one emerged. "When Amin's boys left, he came out," says Peregrine. "I knew he was in there all the time. The soldiers came only for loot. If they had come to kill, none of us would be here now."

Innocent civilians have not been the only victims. At Busia, a village that straddles Uganda's border with Kenya, 500 Simba troops were preparing for what their commander, one of Amin's nephews, called a "noble, bloody" last stand against an advancing column of Tanzanians. The screams of Simbas who were being garroted by their comrades for counseling surrender or trying to escape across the border could clearly be heard by passers-by on the town's unpaved main street.

While the anti-Amin forces continued their mopping-up operations, the new government of President Yusufu Kironde Lule began the difficult task of rebuilding what was once East Africa's most cosmopolitan society. In Kampala, a bright yellow dump truck bearing the hand-lettered sign KAMPALA CITY BODY REMOVAL plied the rubble-filled streets, carting away the corpses of the dozens of soldiers and civilians killed in the fight for control of the capital. With gasoline once again available, tow trucks began hauling away the wrecked cars strewn around town.

Students at Makerere University, the most renowned institution of higher education in Black Africa until the semiliterate Amin appointed himself its chancellor, organized a campaign to return desks, chairs and typewriters to government offices that had been looted during the frenzied celebration that followed Kampala's liberation. The first of 60,000 Ugandan exiles from Amin's brutal rule trickled into the city, joyously embracing old friends who had remained behind.

The toughest problem facing Uganda's new leaders, however, is undoing the psychological damage spawned by eight years of Amin. So common were political executions, says Makerere Student Peter Ssebanakitta, that "if I see a dead body, I'm not shocked any more." Adds Peter Mulondo, a Kampala businessman: "Under Amin, if you learned that your brother had been taken away by the State Research Bureau death squads, you'd think, That's too bad,' and then you'd forget it."Lule's ministers fear that unless a sense of commonweal can be resurrected, the $2 billion required to reconstruct Uganda's devastated economy, schools and farms over the next two years will be wasted. Says Andrew Benedicto Adimola, Lule's Minister of National Reconstruction: "We must restore moral and spiritual values or in eight years we will be tearing up our new buildings and mended roads once again."

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