Abstract
Between 1971 and 1979, during the tyrannical regime of Idi Amin, a large number of people were killed in Uganda at the hands of state agents.1 Most estimates of the toll have ranged between 100,000 and 500,000 victims, though at least one scholar, Jan J. Jorgenson, has questioned the higher estimates and suggested the much lower range of 12,000–30,000.2 All available evidence indicates that the overwhelming majority of these deaths were caused by three organizations that were central to the survival of the regime, namely the State Research Bureau (SRB), the Public Safety Unit (PSU), and the Military Police (MP). These institutions either operated as death squads or harbored units that acted as such within their ranks.
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Notes
Henry Kyemba, A State of Blood (New York: Paddington Press, 1977); David Gwyn [pseud.], Idi Amin: Death-Light of Africa (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977); George Ivan Smith, Ghosts of Kampala (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980); A.B.K. Kasozi, The Origins ofSocial Violence in Uganda (Montreal: McGill—Queens University Press, 1994), 104–27.
See, for example, Beth S. Lyons, “Between Nuremberg and Amnesia: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa,” Monthly Review 49, no. 4 (September 1997): 5–22; “The Science of Apartheid,” Harper’s, Sept. 1998, 19–21; Horacio Verbitsky, The Flight: Confessions of an Argentine Dirty Warrior (New York: New Press, 1996).
Miles D. Wolpin, “State Terrorism and Death Squads in the New World Order,” Peace Research Reviews 12, no. 3 (July 1992).
Raymond D. Duvall and Michael Stohl, “Governance by Terror,” in Michael Stohl, ed., The Politics of Terrorism, 3rd ed. (New York: Marcel Dekker, 1988), 231–71.
Martha K. Huggins, ed., Vigilantism and the State in Modern Latin America: Essays on Extralegal Violence (New York: Praeger, 1991); Catholic Institute for International Relations, State of Terror: Death Squads or Development (London: Catholic Institute for International Relations, 1989); Human Rights Watch, Colombia’s Killer Networks (New York: Americas Human Rights Watch Arms Project, 1996); Martin Van Bruinessen, “Turkey’s Death Squads,” Middle East Report 26, no. 2 (April-June 1996): 20–23.
William Stanley, The Protection Racket State: Elite Politics, Military Extortion, and Civil War in El Salvador (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996).
Kenneth Ingham, The Making of Modern Uganda (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1958); T.V. Sathyamurty, The Political Development of Uganda: 1900–1986 (Aldershot, England: Gower, 1986).
See Anne Phillips, The Enigma of Colonialism: British Policy in West Africa (London: James Currey and Indiana University Press, 1989); Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996).
John Cartwright, PoliticalLeadership inAfrica (London: Croom Helm, 1983), 244–45. The Ugandan-Asian community numbered close to 100,000 descendants of people who had migrated from the Indian subcontinent at the beginning of British colonial rule in East Africa at the end of the nineteenth century. They expanded and modernized the country’s commercial networks and came to dominate them. At the time of their expulsion, some had become Ugandan citizens but many others held British or other foreign citizenships.
D. A. Low, “The Dislocated Polity,” in H. B. Hansen and M. Twaddle, eds., Uganda Now (London: James Curry, 1988), 45–47.
Tony Avirgan and Martha Honey, War in Uganda (Dar es Salaam: Tanzania Publishing House, 1982), 28–52.
Africa Contemporary Record, 1973–74, Colin Legum, ed. (London: Rex Collings, 1974), B299.
Richard A. Joseph, Democracy and Prebendal Politics in Nigeria: The Rise and Fall of the Second Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 63.
Samuel Decalo, Psychoses of Power: African Personal Dictatorships (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1989), 96.
Aidan Southall, “Social Disorganization in Uganda: Before, During and After Amin,” Journal of Modern African Studies 18, no. 4 (Dec. 1980): 627; Judith Listowel, Amin (Dublin: IUP Books, 1973), 175–88.
H.E. Chahabi and Juan J. Linz, eds., Sultanistic Regimes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 7. The term is drawn from what Edward Said has called “orientalist” discourse. See Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
Grace Ibingira, African Upheavals Since Independence (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1980), 271. Kiwanuka was also a major political figure. He had been the leader of the Democratic Party and the country’s first prime minister just before the attainment of independence. He was one of the political prisoners whom Amin released following the coup and later appointed the first African chief justice.
Peter J. Allen, Days of Judgment (London: William Kimber, 1987), 129.
See Yoweri Museveni, Sowing the Mustard Seed (London: Macmillan, 1997), 84–85.
R. J. Rummel, Death by Government (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1994).
Amii Omara-Otunnu, Politics and the Military in Uganda (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), 79.
Holger B. Hansen, Ethnicity and Military Rule in Uganda (Uppsala, Sweden: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1977), 86–93.
David Martin, General Amin (London: Faber & Faber, 1974), 130–57.
Avirgan and Honey, 53–70.
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© 2000 Bruce B. Campbell and Arthur D. Brenner
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Kannyo, E. (2000). State Terrorism and Death Squads in Uganda (1971–79). In: Campbell, B.B., Brenner, A.D. (eds) Death Squads in Global Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230108141_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230108141_6
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