Every time and place has its shorthand. For those of us who lived through the 70s in the United States, “Idi Amin” was shorthand for “really bad powerful guy who killed his citizens”.
Shorthand can be very effective when you want to get a robust point across quickly (“This guy’s on his way to becoming another Idi Amin“). But it can also tend to lull a populace. If you’ve got a blockbuster shorthand statement like “Idi Amin” to toss around, you tend to not search for other, similar statements. Why bother?
That can be dangerous. Today, “Al Qaeda” has been proposed as shorthand for “occupy Iraq and fundamentally change the Oil Power equation of the world”. I reject the connection. Words matter.
Idi Amin is dead. He died peacefully in Jeddah, the birthplace of Usama bin Laden. He died in Saudi Arabia, where many of our enemies came from– the ones who killed us and knocked our buildings down. Maybe we should start rethinking the shorthand of the 00s.
Uganda Dictator Amin Dies at Saudi Hospital-Source Reuters
Saturday, August 16, 2003; 3:18 AM
By John R. Bradley
JEDDAH (Reuters) – Former dictator Idi Amin, blamed for the murder of tens of thousands of Ugandans in the 1970s, died on Saturday in a Saudi hospital where he had been critically ill for weeks, a senior medical source said.
“We can confirm that Mr Idi Amin has died from complications due to multiple organ failure,” the source at King Faisal Specialist Hospital in the Red Sea city of Jeddah.
The Ugandan embassy in the kingdom would not comment on Amin’s death, referring all queries to his family.
Amin, one of the bloodiest despots in Africa, has been living in exile, chiefly in Saudi Arabia, since being ousted from Uganda in 1979. He was in his late 70s.
It was not immediately clear what would happen to Amin’s body. Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni had said that if Amin died abroad, his body could be taken home for burial.
Amin, who was in near-death condition for weeks, had received death threats by telephone, prompting the hospital management to post guards at his bed in the intensive care unit.
A man who expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler, Amin was denounced inside and outside Africa for massacring tens of thousands of people — some estimates say more than 100,000 — under his despotic 1971-79 rule.
A former boxing champion, he came to power in a 1971 coup and his rule was characterized by eccentric behavior and violent purges.
Amin was a ruthless dictator who, the International Commission of Jurists said in 1977, had violated every fundamental human right during a “reign of terror.”
Exiles accused him of having kept severed heads in the fridge, feeding corpses to crocodiles and having one of his wives dismembered. Some said he practiced cannibalism.
He was driven from Uganda in 1979 by forces from neighboring Tanzania and Ugandan exiles, and was given sanctuary by Saudi Arabia in the name of Islamic charity.
A Muslim, Amin had lived quietly in Jeddah on a government stipend with four wives.
He was born in 1925, according to most sources, to a peasant family of the small, predominantly Muslim Kakwa tribe at Arua, in Uganda’s remote West Nile district.
© 2003 Reuters
