Uganda would prosecute Amin if it could

Published on 23/07/2003 01:00

AS UGANDA’S brutal former dictator Idi Amin lay in a coma in a Saudi hospital yesterday, the current president of his homeland said he would be prosecuted if he survived and tried to return from exile.

"If Amin comes back alive, he will be prosecuted for the crimes he committed against the people of Uganda," Ugandan president, Yoweri Museveni, told a public gathering in his capital, Kampala. The New York-based Human Rights Watch issued a statement yesterday calling Amin "one of the bloodiest tyrants in a bloody century".

"We regret that Idi Amin is dying without meeting justice for his crimes," Reed Brody, director of special prosecutions at Human Rights Watch, said in the statement.

"It’s increasingly possible to prosecute dictators outside their home countries. Unfortunately, the trend didn’t catch up with Amin in time."

Human Rights Watch said it had asked a Saudi diplomat in 1999 about the possibility of Amin’s extradition or prosecution.

It was told that "according to Bedouin hospitality, once someone was welcomed as a guest in your tent, you did not turn him out".

A Saudi foreign ministry official contacted by the Associated Press news agency yesterday had no comment on the issue.

Amin has been in a coma since he was admitted on Friday to the King Faisal Hospital in the Saudi port city of Jiddah , where he has lived in exile for years. Yesterday a hospital official said his condition was stable.

Amin’s sons, who have been at his bedside in the intensive care unit, have asked for privacy, saying they do not want any details about their father’s condition released.

Amin, believed to be 80 years old, had reportedly been suffering from high blood pressure.

It is estimated that more than 200,000 Ugandans were tortured and murdered during Amin’s regime, which lasted from 1971 until 1979, when he was ousted by Ugandan exiles and the Tanzanian army.

Human rights groups say as many as 500,000 people were killed during Amin’s rule.

After he was ousted, Amin, a Muslim and member of the small Kakwa tribe from north-west Uganda, went into exile in Libya. He then moved to Iraq before finally settling in Saudi Arabia on the condition that he stay out of politics.

Amin was famed for having an unpredictable personality. In 1972 he ordered the expulsion of Uganda’s Asians.