Editor's Pick

ON 13 APRIL 1979, soldiers and civilians dance in the streets of the Ugandan capital, Kampala, after Yusuf Lule is sworn in as president, ending the eight-year dictatorship of Idi Amin. Lule chaired the Uganda National Liberation Front, a political group formed by exiles in neighbouring Tanzania who helped resist Amin’s invasion of the country, in October 1978, before joining a counterattack that eventually led to the fall of Kampala.

Amin, who had been put in charge of Uganda’s military during the 1960s, seized power in a 1971 coup, overthrowing President Milton Obote. He centralised power, dissolving parliament and refusing to hold elections, and unleashed wanton violence, with his secret police estimated to have killed up to half a million people and tortured countless others. The Tanzanian president at the time, Julius Nyerere, refused to recognise his government. Nyerere gave Obote asylum and let him set up a guerrilla force under Tito Okello, a senior military official who had also fled the coup. In 1972, rebels loyal to Obote and Yoweri Museveni, who had established a leftist militant group while studying at the University of Dar es Salam, tried to start an insurgency in Uganda. They were defeated by Amin’s army, which was reinforced by Libya and the Palestine Liberation Organisation.

When Amin invaded Tanzania, six years later, demanding that nearly two thousand square kilometres of land between the border and the Kagera River be ceded to Uganda, Nyerere called upon the exiles as part of a national mobilisation. They repulsed the invasion and pursued the retreating Ugandan army, which, having already been depleted by Amin’s purges, collapsed after a series of defeats. Amin fled to Libya and eventually settled in Saudi Arabia. Obote won the 1980 presidential election but was deposed by Okello in 1985. Museveni took power a year later and has been president ever since.