Idi Amin can be buried in Uganda, no state funeral

KAMPALA, Uganda: A senior official said yesterday the body of the man who brutalised Uganda and its people for eight years could be returned for burial, but Idi Amin would not be recognised as a former head of state.

“If they (Amin’s family) request for the body to be brought back, we shall give them permission. If they need assistance in any form, we shall assist them, but as a government we are not going to recognise Amin as a former head of state nor offer him a state burial,” Ali Kirunda Kizejinja, the minister for the presidency, told The Associated Press following Amin’s death yesterday. Amin died from kidney failure in Saudi Arabia where he had lived in exile since his ouster in 1979. Although the front pages of early editions of Sunday papers were splashed with headlines proclaiming “Idi Amin is Dead,” reaction in Uganda to the death of the man who seized power in a 1971 coup was generally low-key.

It was not clear when and where Amin would be buried; his wife Madina Amin called a local radio station at 1.30 p.m. (1030 GMT) and said burial arrangements were still under discussion.  “Let him die because he killed so many people. He killed my uncle who was supporting our family,” said Michael Mademaga, 41, an office messenger who said Amin’s agents killed his uncle in 1974 and dumped him in the Nile River east of Kampala. “His body should be brought back to Uganda and put on display for people to view somebody who killed so many people.”  Although there are no official records of how many people were killed after Amin seized power, it is believed his victims numbered more than 100,000; some reports say as many as 300,000.  The Rev Alfred Ocur, an Anglican priest in the central town of Lira — an area targetted by Amin because it is the homeland of Milton Obote, the man he ousted and who eventually replaced him in 1979 — expressed regret that Amin had died unrepentant. “He should have lived longer to repent. He’s now gone, he’s dead, and it’s beyond our human control; but he’s going to face eternal judgment,” he said of the former non-commissioned officer in the British colonial army who was a convert to Islam.

Shaban Mubajje, the mufti or leader of Uganda’s Muslim community, told the private Central Broadcasting Service that Amin had “made mistakes, but he was not a bad man.”  He called on all Muslims to gather in mosques to pray for Amin’s soul.  A saying in many languages in eastern Africa holds that even though a person has done bad things in life, he or she will be properly mourned in death. Reed Brody, legal counsel for New York-based Human Rights Watch, said Saturday it was “a shame that death caught up with Idi Amin before justice did. Idi Amin was a brutal tyrant, but he has died the peaceful death that he denied to so many Ugandans.”  Jiza Patel was four years old when Idi Amin expelled his grandfather and tens of thousands of other residents of Indian origin from Uganda in 1972 in a move to “Africanise” the economy of the East African nation. The move was initially popular among Ugandans who resented the power and the influence of those they called “the Asians” who controlled most of the country’s retail business and manufacturing. But the poorly organised nationalisation destroyed the Ugandan economy. “Amin did very bad things to my people and to the people of Uganda,” said Patel, 35, who first came to Uganda in 1992. “We have better things to do now than to think about a man who destroyed this country.” Dalal Murtaza, the 44-year-old chairman of Uganda’s 15,000-member Indian Association, said the Asian community was happy in Uganda under the government of President Yoweri Museveni, who invited Asians back to reclaim their property and help rebuild the economy. “We have no grudges against Amin because his era has ended. The expulsion of the Asians was a very sad event ... the country was ruined, and many lives were lost. Now it’s history because he is dead, and there’s no point having grudges against a dead man.”