The Uganda-Tanzania War, the Fall of Idi Amin, and the Failure of African Diplomacy, 1978-9

BY GEORGE ROBERT

Abstract: The Uganda-Tanzania War of 1978-9 has received little attention from historians. This article uses British diplomatic sources to explore the causes and course of the conflict. In particular, it examines how Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere sought to hide from and later justify to the rest of the world an invasion of Uganda and the overthrowing of Idi Amin, actions that contravened the Charter of the Organization of African Unity (OAU). Distinct among contemporaneous African conflicts for its noticeable lack of a Cold War context, the war demonstrated the shortcomings of the OAU in resolving African conflicts. Despite some dissenting voices, Nyerere’s own disregard for state sovereignty was largely overlooked, as the fall of Amin’s regime was quietly welcomed by the majority of Africa’s leaders.

Keywords: Uganda; Tanzania; war; Idi Amin; Julius Nyerere; OAU

Introduction The Uganda-Tanzania War of 1978-9 was a landmark event in postcolonial East African history. In response to Idi Amin’s annexation of the Kagera Salient in northwestern Tanzania in November 1978, Julius Nyerere launched a controversial counterattack that routed Amin’s forces and swept him from power in April 1979. Rooted in a deep rivalry between Amin and Nyerere, the conflict provoked bitter exchanges at the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), contributed to the failure of ujamaa in Tanzania, and brought an end to eight years of brutal dictatorship in Uganda.

However, the war remains something of a historiographical desert.i Historians seem reluctant to confront issues of international politics which resist interpretation through contemporary Africanist schools of thought that reject a supposed Eurocentric focus on high diplomacy and the nation-state. A more practical problem lies in the paucity of accessible state archive documentation relating to foreign affairs in either Tanzania or Uganda. However, this can be partly overcome by the careful use of the third-party government sources, especially in well-preserved and accessible archives outside of Africa. This article uses recently declassified British diplomatic documents produced by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) to shed light on the political dynamics surrounding the war.

The use of such sources is clearly not unproblematic. The information within them represents the prejudices and interests of a small cadre of individuals, shaped by similar backgrounds and guided by the same institutional practices.ii Yet this need not be a critical issue, as Stephen Ellis argues, provided the “cardinal rules of gathering historical evidence” are observed, just as historians of precolonial Africa have worked convincingly with the accounts of Europe missionaries and travellers.iii If the despatches of FCO diplomats reflect a narrow perspective on international affairs, the same privileged position permits the historian access to a range of actors through reports of encounters with Tanzanian, Ugandan, and other African officials and politicians. Provided due attention is paid to its provenance, material can be clipped from the documentation and triangulated with more journalistic accounts of the war to substantiate, supplement, and occasionally counter existing narratives.

After an explanation of its causes, this article traces the war’s development, in particular its diplomatic dimension and the failure of negotiations to broker a peace. It then addresses the issues underlying this diplomatic crisis, Nyerere’s attempts to justify his actions, and the reasons for the acceptance of the Tanzanian counterinvasion by other African leaders.

The origins of the conflict

The roots of the war lay in the coup d’état that brought General Amin to power in January 1971. Nyerere had enjoyed close relations with deposed President Milton Obote, having backed his socialist “Move to the Left” policies. Nyerere refused to recognise the new regime in Kampala and offered Obote and many of his supporters exile in Tanzania. Thus began a bitter rivalry between the two Presidents.

In September 1972, around 1,000 armed Obote supporters crossed into southern Uganda from northwestern Tanzania and advanced on Kampala, with the tacit support of Nyerere. Amin responded by bombing Tanzanian towns near the border. Nyerere was encouraged by his generals to respond in kind, but preferred to settle the conflict via a settlement brokered by Siad Barre, the Somali President. On 5 October Tanzania and Uganda signed the five-point Mogadishu Agreement, in which both agreed to withdraw troops to ten kilometres behind the border and cease to support forces hostile to the other’s regime.

The Agreement did little to stem the hostility between the two leaders. Nyerere refused to share a platform with Amin. In 1975, he declined to travel to an OAU Summit held Kampala and chaired by Amin. “In Uganda, several thousand people have lost their lives”, explained his Foreign Minister, John Malecela. “For African heads of state to go there to a summit is tantamount to giving a blessing to these killings.”iv Together with a long-running political dispute between Nairobi and Dar es Salaam that culminated in Tanzania closing its border with Kenya, this led to the collapse of the East African Community.v For his part, Amin made routine threats to invade Tanzania, often with the intention of distracting attention from the growing strife at home.

By a seventh year of violent and arbitrary government, Uganda faced economic collapse. Amin’s disastrous “Economic War”, in which all residents of Asian descent were expelled from Uganda and their businesses put under African ownership, ripped out the country’s commercial core. By 1978, recourse to the magendo black market was often the only means to access consumer goods. Many peasants withdrew from the marketplace altogether.vi The introduction of an American trade boycott in October 1978 on account of Amin’s human rights record cut Uganda off from the largest market for its key coffee export, a problem exacerbated by a coinciding global slump in coffee prices.

Amin’s regime concentrated power in the armed forces. By 1978, 64 percent of Cabinet portfolios were held by members of the police, army, or prison service.vii Administrative reforms removed control of ten reorganised provinces from centralised District Councils and gave them to semi-autonomous Provincial Governors, entrenching chains of patronage. The spoils of the Economic War were allotted to military officers and leading politicians, who became known as the mafuta mingi – literally “dripping in cooking oil”, a rare and expensive commodity amid the economic chaos.viii

The beneficiaries of Amin’s policies also reflected his ethnic and religious background. The army recruited heavily from the President’s own West Nile region, together with large numbers of Muslim southern Sudanese and Nubian troops. Shortly after the coup, he carried out the first of several bloody purges of Acholi and Langi soldiers, who were believed to have been favoured by Obote. According to Tony Avirgan and Martha Honey, “Amin effectively turned Uganda’s predominantly Christian and Bantu society upside-down, creating a ruling elite that had no local base and owed its position and loyalty only to Amin himself.”ix

Terror became the order of the day. Opponents “disappeared” or were summarily executed, though the regime always denied responsibility. Even government office offered no security: six of the 56 Cabinet ministers under Amin were killed in office or soon after dismissal.x The number of Ugandans killed under Amin is impossible to estimate; Amnesty International claimed it was as high as 300,000.xi While the regime was not necessarily responsible for every death, the prevailing anarchic conditions provided the cover for ethnic massacres and the settlement of private scores.xii

By 1978, political tensions in Uganda were running high. Amin had become increasingly uncompromising towards any sign of dissent. In August 1976, up to 100 student protestors were shot dead at Makerere University. In February 1977, Amin caused outrage around the world when the Archbishop Luwum was murdered (the regime disguising it as a “car accident”), following allegations that he was plotting with Obote, days after the Archbishop had openly criticised the regime.xiii A feud began between Amin and his Vice President, Brigadier-General Mustafa Adrisi, who had built up his own power base within the army. In April 1978, a dispute within the government was immediately by another “car accident”, in which Adrisi was seriously injured. Several army generals were stripped of their positions. On 8 October, Amin narrowly survived a coup attempt. His support base – deliberately kept narrow in order to secure loyalty – had disintegrated in the face of an economic collapse that dried up the vital patronage channels to the military.xiv

Uganda’s occupation of the Kagera Salient

The circumstances surrounding the outbreak of war are murky, complicated at the time by the impossibility of obtaining reliable first-hand information from the front and the two antagonists’ contradictory stories. Amin made allegations of Tanzanian incursions into Ugandan territory in the weeks leading up to the war. The FCO gave such claims little credence, describing them as a “smokescreen” to deflect attention from Amin’s precarious position.xv The respected Africa Confidential reported that an invasion by anti-Amin rebels from Tanzania was intended to coincide with an army mutiny in Uganda, but this assertion finds no substantiation in the FCO documentation.xvi

Amid the confusion, two corroborating accounts were given particular credence by the FCO and shed new light on the outbreak of the fighting. On 14 December, a British diplomat in Nairobi reported a meeting with the Managing Director of Shell in Uganda, Mr Thate, whose story was considered “perhaps as reliable an assessment of the situation in Uganda as anyone could provide.”xvii His evidence tallies with that given to a diplomat in Addis Ababa on 7 December by Paul Etiang, the Ugandan Assistant Secretary General at the OAU and regarded as neither a dissenter nor “a subtle apologist for Amin”.xviii Both men described how the unexpected and resented arrival of fresh Sudanese recruits in Mbarara catalysed simmering unrest among the Simba Battalion into a barracks revolt. The new arrivals were shot. Loyalist troops were sent to put down the mutineers, who then fled over the border on 30 October. The pursuit turned into a full-scale invasion, though neither Etiang nor Thate explain how this was achieved. Nonetheless, these insights offer greater substance to the rumours that mutiny had spilled over into border war, further calling into question the arguments found in Africa Confidential and peddled by Ugandan propaganda.

On 1 November 1978, Amin announced that he had annexed the Kagera Salient, a 1,800km2 triangle of land straddling the area between the border and the Kagera River, in the corridor between Rwanda and Lake Victoria. The Salient was an anomaly of Anglo-German colonial boundary-drawing that split ethnic groups between Tanzania and Uganda. Contrary to the FCO’s understanding, the border had been subject to long-standing claims by Amin, especially as it had been used as a base for incursions by Ugandan dissident fighters from Tanzania.xix Ugandan troops proceeded to murder and rape the local population, burn property, and steal cattle. Some 40,000 civilians fled their homes and took refuge in the bush.xx Despite reports that the Tanzanians had been massing troops on the border in order to provoke Amin, Dar es Salaam was caught completely off guard.

Neither state was in any condition to fight a war. Uganda’s economy was in ruins and its army gripped by mutiny. Amin did have a significant advantage in terms of aircraft and tanks, but this was largely cancelled out by a lack of pilots, the general disorganisation of the army, and the American boycott, which reduced Uganda’s oil supplies by 40 percent. “There must be an element of madness in his act”, reflected an FCO official.xxi The situation on the Tanzanian side was little better. The Tanzanian People’s Defence Force (TPDF) was relatively small and concentrated on the southern border with Mozambique; it took several weeks for columns of troops to traverse the entire country before a counterattack was possible. Moreover, the Tanzanian economy was suffering from the negative consequences of Nyerere’s socialist policies, particularly the shortcomings of his forced villagisation campaign. To fight the war, equipment and vehicles had to be requisitioned from the civilian population.xxii On 15 November, Finance Minister Edwin Mtei announced that the war had compelled the government to raise taxes on consumer goods.xxiii

Clear information about the development of the war was difficult to obtain and often confused. British officials observed that Tanzanian officials often appeared themselves uncertain about the situation; on at least two occasions, Nyerere’s personal assistant, Joan Wicken (the main intermediary between the FCO and the Tanzanian government), directly asked British diplomats for fresh information.xxiv For outside observers, the confusion was exacerbated by both countries’ propaganda and news blackouts. The FCO lent Ugandan radio no credibility. The Tanzanian government maintained lengthy periods of silence about the war. The government-controlled press and radio mostly carried anti-Ugandan propaganda. Nyerere established an “Information Committee”, chaired by Minister of Information George Mhina, and including newspaper editors, the head of Radio Tanzania, the President’s press secretary, and representatives of the armed forces and security services.xxv The movement of foreign journalists was restricted: the British High Commission was told that no foreign reporters would be allowed to travel beyond Dar es Salaam.xxvi The Reuters telex at the Kilimanjaro Hotel – an oasis of independent information – was apparently disconnected by the Information Committee.xxvii “There was a war going on,” wrote Avirgan and Honey, “but from Dar as far as information went, it was as though it was being fought on another continent.”xxviii

British diplomatic reports throughout the war were therefore cautious. In the absence of reliable information and lacking diplomatic representation in Kampala, the FCO pieced together its picture of the conflict from a range of sources: other foreign missions (especially the West German embassy in Uganda),xxix aid workers, businessmen, journalists, and a sceptical sifting of the Dar es Salaam and Nairobi press.

The British response and the missing Cold War dimension

London immediately recognised the benefits of providing tacit support for the Tanzanian war effort. Although sensationalist reports that Britain directly aided Amin’s seizure of power are unfounded, it had certainly not opposed the end of Obote’s regime, which diplomats felt was veering dangerously to the left.xxx By 1978, the FCO had long been seeking to distance itself from Amin’s regime, its treatment of the Ugandan Asians, and its appalling human rights record. The disappearance of a British-Israeli civilian during the Entebbe hostage crisis of 1976 had provided an excuse to sever all diplomatic ties with Uganda. Contrary to accusations that Britain continued to actively support Amin’s regime until its fall,xxxi the government explored every means of isolating it, but found barriers at every point. The idea of imposing a US-style trade boycott floundered on Britain’s legal obligations under European Economic Community agreements; attempts to hold Amin to account before the UN Commission on Human Rights met solid opposition from the non-aligned bloc.xxxii

Although concerned about the consequences of the war for the 400-strong British expatriate community in the country, the FCO concluded that given “the likely assumption that Amin’s successor would mark an improvement, on balance a change of régime in Uganda would be to our advantage”. The FCO therefore worked to “exploit whatever openings may occur to contribute towards Amin’s downfall.” Support for Tanzania had to be discreet, however. Britain did not want to leave itself “open to the charge of foreign involvement in an African dispute; this would embarrass our friends in Africa and could facilitate Amin’s efforts to gain support.”xxxiii Although efforts to accelerate the delivery of military hardware to Tanzania fell through on logistical grounds,xxxiv Britain provided low-key diplomatic support for Tanzania throughout the war. The FCO encouraged Shell and British Petroleum to keep oil supplies to Uganda at low levels in order to bleed dry Amin’s war effort. Pressure was also put on Total and Agip via the French and Italian governments to prevent them making up the shortfalls in supply left by the withdrawal of American companies under the terms of Washington’s trade boycott, though this approach was less successful.xxxv Mahmood Mamdani’s assertion that the war was shaped by the interests of Western imperialism, however, are baseless: the role of Britain and the United States never extended beyond limited assistance to Tanzania.xxxvi

In contrast to the Ogaden War of 1977-8 between Ethiopia and Somalia, the Uganda-Tanzania War was devoid of Cold War dynamics, despite Western concerns about Soviet penetration in Uganda. Between 1971 and 1975, Uganda was the largest recipient of Soviet military aid in sub-Saharan Africa.xxxvii The West then feared that the country would be a base for subversion in the wider East Africa region,xxxviii but it soon became apparent that the circumstances of the Uganda-Tanzania war had undermined the Soviet position. As David Owen, the Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary, wrote in a brief to senior diplomats, “The Russians are in an awkward predicament. They have armed and trained Ugandan forces and will have to answer for this in African eyes, and especially to Tanzania, who they also supply with arms. They are likely to keep a low profile.”xxxix

There was no public reaction from Moscow until 12 November, when Pravda claimed that “imperialist forces were trying to make use of the conflict for their own provocative ends so as to distract and disorganise forces actively participating in the struggle for the liberation of Zimbabwe.” As a British official pointed out, this accusation smacked of a desperate attempt to mask Moscow’s embarrassment.xl The American press reacted with glee: “To supply Idi Amin with the tools of modern war is like handing a loaded pistol to a wilful child”, admonished the New York Times.xli The Washington Post blamed Moscow – “prowling for pawns to move on the African chessboard” – for pumping Amin with arms.xlii Besides rejecting Amin’s appeals for help as the war turned against him in early 1979, the extent of the Soviet reaction to the conflict was a decision to withdraw its military advisors from Uganda and a pair of private messages from Brezhnev to Amin and Nyerere calling for peace.xliii

Further, Nyerere’s own commitment to non-alignment stripped the conflict of its Cold War potential. Since independence in 1961, he had rejected superpower interference and to fall back overtly on British or American or Soviet support would have been hypocritical. From the first week of the war, British High Commissioner in Dar es Salaam, Peter Moon, gained the impression – “for reasons that one can well imagine” – that Nyerere was determined “to fight his own war”.xliv Two days later Moon added that “the last thing Nyerere would want is for the situation to take on any kind of East/West colouring.”xlv Nyerere’s non-aligned stance thus lifted the conflict out of the Cold War context that had fuelled the proxy struggles in the Horn of Africa and Angola, bucking the contemporary trend that enmeshed local wars in the superpower rivalry.

The Ugandan withdrawal and OAU mediation efforts

As news about the outbreak of hostilities spread across the continent, African leaders called for peace. On 31 October, Kenya urged both parties to end the conflict and offered its services for “all efforts directed towards rapid normalization of relations between the two neighbourly states.”xlvi Kenya’s offers to mediate were turned down, however. The task of negotiating a peace fell primarily to the OAU. On 5 November, a delegation led by Philip Obang (Sudanese Ambassador to the OAU) and Peter Onu (a Nigerian and OAU Assistant Secretary-General), left Addis Ababa for Kampala, under the instructions of OAU Chairman, President Gaafar Nimeiry of Sudan.xlvii Although Amin was at first unwilling to accept any compromise – the first round of negotiations lasted a mere two minutes – he eventually accepted to withdraw on the condition that Nyerere guaranteed that he would neither invade Uganda nor support subversion against its government. Flying on to Dar es Salaam, Obang and Onu found Nyerere in an even more defiant mood. He refused to consider mediation until Amin withdrew his forces from Tanzanian territory. Negotiations became deadlocked.xlviii

Nyerere showed little inclination to negotiate with the OAU emissaries. On 10 November, the press reported Nyerere’s response to “incredible messages” he had received from other African leaders calling for him to use “his abundant wisdom” to bring an end to the conflict. “There is no such thing as brotherly aggression”, he remarked, nor “a brotherly armoured personnel carrier, tank or MiG”.xlix When Obang and Onu arrived in Dar es Salaam on 11 November, Nyerere’s reaction – doubtless dramatised by the government-owned Daily News for public consumption – was to tell the delegation that he wanted “to know what the OAU will do about this. I expect condemnation from the OAU. Only after that can people talk to me about restraint.”l “How,” he asked on another occasion, “do you mediate between somebody who breaks into your house and the victim of the assault?” Even before negotiations began, the OAU Secretary-General, the Togolese Edem Kodjo, privately confessed to a British official that Nyerere had resolved to fight and mediation efforts wer

Yet returning from Dar es Salaam via Kampala, the OAU delegation claimed a sudden breakthrough. On 14 November, Amin announced an unconditional withdrawal and invited OAU observers to witness it. Tanzania immediately described the withdrawal as a “complete lie”; reports reaching the FCO, including from the West German Embassy in Kampala, presented mixed verdicts.li At a meeting of European representatives in Dar es Salaam on 20 November, views on whether there were still Ugandan troops on Tanzanian soil remained divided – a telling illustration of the lack of information about the war available to diplomats there.lii The OAU naturally claimed its mediation efforts had been successful.liii

But a West German report on the negotiations, duplicated in the FCO files, reveals the OAU’s “success” was a mirage. Compiled from interviews with Ugandan officials and Obang himself, the document suggests that Amin only accepted an unconditional withdrawal when he realised that there was little sympathy for Uganda in Africa. An unfounded fear that the Soviet Union would begin to supply Tanzania with fresh deliveries of arms also apparently hastened Amin’s decision.liv These developments were unconnected to the OAU’s intervention. Rather than being resolved, the conflict was frozen. The matter of reparations for the damage caused by Ugandan troops in the Kagera Salient became an issue. “Is Africa asking Tanzania to pay for those massacres and destruction of property?” he reportedly asked a Nigerian mediation team. “Is Africa saying to us, once you regain your land, then that is the end?”lv

Amin made claims of a Tanzanian counteroffensive on 27 November and appealed to the UN for help. Dar es Salaam refuted the allegations, but did acknowledge that fighting was continuing as Tanzania attempted to push Ugandan troops back over the border.lvi On 29 November, Obang announced that Uganda had fully removed its troops from Tanzanian territory; Nyerere pointed out that this was a forced retreat rather than a voluntary withdrawal.lvii The warring parties remained face-to-face on either side of the frontier. For the following two months, there was no progress.

The OAU’s failure to broker a peace between the warring parties reflected its widely acknowledged impotence in resolving disputes between African states. The organisation lacked any real political teeth. Its policymaking institutions were strictly intergovernmental and given the regular frictions between member states that militated against consensus, disposed to drafting vague resolutions rather than taking action. Member states had few concrete obligations to the organisation and its General Secretariat had no executive power.lviii

First-hand evidence drawn from meetings with the mediators and both belligerents contained the FCO files substantiates this view. The Sudanese Minister for Foreign Affairs confided in the British Ambassador in Khartoum that while Nimeiry “was sure enough that Uganda was in the wrong”, as a mediator “he had felt obliged to maintain a position of neutrality”, to Nyerere’s frustration.lix Benjamin Mkapa, the Tanzanian Foreign Minister, told Moon that the OAU had “no military capacity to enforce any agreement and very little moral authority.”lx Etiang told the British Ambassador to Ethiopia that when he had warned Amin that the invasion of the Kagera Salient broke the Charter, Amin had laughed: the OAU was “a woman” and could do nothing.lxi Crucially, the OAU itself declined to condemn the Ugandan invasion.

The OAU’s neutrality matched the public stance taken by the majority of African states. Certainly, several states sided with Nyerere and condemned the Ugandan invasion: Angola, Botswana, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Mozambique, and Zambia.lxii But these were Tanzania’s allies as fellow left-leaning governments or Front Line states. Others, including Guinea, Mali, and Senegal, merely called for the end to hostilities and underlined their commitment to the Charter.lxiii

When African leaders did condemn Uganda, they blamed external forces for the outbreak of war, invoking a non-existent deus ex machina of imperialist or superpower intervention. Addressing Tanzanian troops on 13 November, Colonel Mengistu of Ethiopia declared such “acts of aggression against Tanzania and other Front Line states deliberate attempts by imperialists to stifle the liberation struggle in southern Africa.”lxiv Similar allegations were made by the Mozambican President Samora Machel.lxv These concerns may have represented a genuine paranoia about neoimperialism in the context of the superpowers’ interventions in the Horn and Angola, and the fight against white minority rule in Rhodesia and South Africa. But they surely also indicate a closing of the ranks to mask the embarrassment induced by a war that was caused and fought by Africans alone, and which Africans seemed incapable of ending.

The Tanzanian counteroffensive and the fall of Amin

On the night of 21-22 January 1979, Tanzanian troops crossed into Uganda and attacked the border town of Mutukula. According to Avirgan and Honey, Tanzanian officers had determined that the Kagera Salient would remain under threat until Ugandan forces had been removed from the high ground overlooking the frontier at Mutukula.lxvi A mass counteroffensive began. It quickly transpired that Amin’s disorganised troops were little match for the 30-40,000-strong TPDF, which pushed north, accompanied by groups of anti-Amin exiles trained and armed in Tanzania.

Amin’s response to the invasion was to appeal to the UN Secretary-General to “prevail on Tanzania to withdraw from Uganda peacefully”.lxvii On 12 February, Amin spuriously claimed that Tanzanian forces were, with the support of mercenaries, in occupation of 900km2 of Ugandan territory and formally called for an immediate meeting of the Security Council.lxviii Tanzania simply denied the presence of its troops beyond the immediate border area. When pressed further, Tanzanian diplomats repeated Nyerere’s insistence that “Tanzania does not desire an inch of Ugandan territory”, while avoiding more specific enquiries.lxix

Nyerere originally hoped that a combination of an invasion led by the Ugandan dissident forces and a popular internal uprising would be enough to finish off the Amin regime. He recognised that a Tanzanian counterinvasion would be both diplomatically unacceptable to other African states. Nyerere therefore developed a “two war” thesis: the TPDF was fighting to ensure national security, the Ugandan dissidents to liberate Uganda.lxx Prior to the counteroffensive, on 11 January he permitted Obote to break an eight-year silence in a broadcast that called for an uprising against the Amin regime, declaring that “there should be no wishful thinking that there are foreign troops who will liberate the people of Uganda.”lxxi A week later, Obote told a press conference that the time had come for collective Ugandan action “to overthrow the regime of death.”lxxii Reports of sabotage acts in Kampala and further unrest among the Ugandan army followed, including a rumoured attempt on Amin’s life.lxxiii

However, the dissidents were too weak to fulfil the role Nyerere had envisioned for them. The original plan involved the exiles leading the advance on the southern towns of Masaka and Mbarara, but they numbered only 1,000 and the assault on the two cities was essentially the work of the TPDF, as the West Germans reported from Kampala.lxxiv However, Nyerere apparently ordered Obote to draft a statement on behalf of the local Ugandan Suicide Battalion, which declared that they had risen up against Amin and had “liberated” Masaka themselves – a myth then circulated by the Tanzanian press.lxxv This image of a Ugandan liberation front, aided by the information drought about developments in the warzone, provided a useful (if almost transparent) public smokescreen for Nyerere. Although few observers were fooled by it, the myth permitted Dar es Salaam to deflect awkward questions about Tanzania’s military presence in Uganda.

The OAU’s reaction to the resumption of hostilities was to convene an ad hoc Mediation Committee, which met from 21 February in Nairobi in advance of the scheduled Council of Ministers conference due to open two days later. The meeting was an unmitigated failure. Neither the Tanzanian nor the Ugandan delegation was prepared to compromise on their basic principles. Tanzania demanded that the OAU condemn the initial Ugandan invasion and order Amin to pay reparations for “wanton destruction” in the Kagera Salient.lxxvi “If the OAU continued to shy away from its responsibility of defending its own Charter,” Nyerere reiterated in a radio broadcast on 28 February, “Tanzania would remain with only the option of taking whatever steps she thought proper in defending herself and punishing the criminal.”lxxvii Yet even before the Mediation Committee had begun, Kodjo had emphatically told the press that the OAU would not condemn Uganda. Moreover, several African delegations present believed that it would be “incongruous” to do so given Tanzania itself had now invaded Uganda.lxxviii The situation continued to be complicated by Mkapa’s continued denial of having actually invaded Uganda, to the “total disbelief” of other delegates.lxxix

In an effort to break the deadlock, the Mediation Committee dispatched negotiation teams to Kampala and Dar es Salaam. They returned without success. While Amin accepted the Committee’s proposals, Tanzania remained resolute in its refusal to consider mediation before the OAU had condemned Uganda. The nadir in Tanzanian-OAU relations came on 1 March, when Nyerere declined to meet a delegation of mediators, who were told the President was busy with internal government affairs. The mediators refused to wait until the next day: Mkapa mockingly suggested that they had forgotten to bring their pyjamas.lxxx A British report on the OAU meeting in Nairobi observed that there was now “an evident degree of sympathy for Uganda” among Africans and that “the Tanzanians were generally castigated for what was regarded by members as their unduly intransigent attitude.”lxxxi Only the Front Line states explicitly supported Tanzania’s position. On 2 March, the Mediation Committee announced the failure of their negotiations, blaming the impasse on Tanzania. Meanwhile, Tanzanian troops continued their advance. On 24 February, they took the city of Masaka. Mbarara fell the following day.

The final assault on Kampala was delayed by two connected developments. First, after he had attempted to broker a peace earlier in the war, the Tanzanian intervention persuaded Colonel Gaddafi to back Amin, as one of his few clients in sub-Saharan Africa. On 27 March, Nyerere publicly announced that he had received an ultimatum from Gaddafi stating that Tanzania must withdraw from Uganda within 24 hours, or Libya would join the war (it was common knowledge that Libyan forces had been present in Uganda for several weeks, however).lxxxii Second, fearing that scenes of the TPDF entering Kampala in triumph would damage Tanzania’s public image, Nyerere had hoped that the anti-Amin exiles would be able to seize the capital themselves.lxxxiii The journalist David Martin, who was close to the President, told a British official in Dar es Salaam that Nyerere had originally planned to halt the Tanzanian advance at Masaka, to allow the exile forces to push on towards Kampala.lxxxiv But this proved impossible: the exiles were too weak, especially given the arrival of Libyan troops.

The TPDF eventually entered Kampala to little resistance on 10 April. Amin had fled the city days beforehand. Tanzania then hurried to establish the new Ugandan government. At the Moshi Conference in March, exiles formed the Uganda National Liberation Front (UNLF), a diverse mixture of dissidents representing a spectrum of political viewpoints and vested interests that would soon splinter once the goal of removing Amin had been accomplished. Yusuf Lule was elected as Chairman of the UNLF’s Executive Council, essentially an interim cabinet.lxxxv On 13 April, Lule arrived in Kampala and was sworn in as President. The fighting, however, continued: Amin’s forces were scattered through Uganda, and it was not until 3 June that the TPDF reached the Sudanese border and the mopping-up task was complete.

Amin versus Nyerere: a personal struggle

A feature of the war was its representation as not so much a clash between Uganda and Tanzania, as between their respective presidents. Many of the FCO despatches from Dar es Salaam focused on the decisions, movements and words of Nyerere. In part, this reflected the perception of the presidents as archetypal African “big men”, an image skewed both by their own propaganda and the stereotypical assumptions of foreign diplomats. The American ambassador to Kampala before the United States cut its ties with the Amin regime drew comparisons between Amin’s Uganda and Hitler’s Germany, as states dominated by leadership cults and their warped ideological visions.lxxxvi In June 1978, Peter Hinchcliffe, the British Deputy High Commissioner in Tanzania, mentioned that several of his colleagues among the diplomatic corps were taken in by the idea that Nyerere took all political decisions by himself.lxxxvii

Yet as the war unfolded, the prominence of Amin and particularly Nyerere as diplomats-in-chief became obvious. The FCO files show that most of the key exchanges between Western diplomats in Dar es Salaam were conducted with Nyerere. OAU mediating parties spoke directly to the presidents. While the circumstances of the fighting meant that agency was very much in the hands of military commanders on the ground, the diplomatic sphere appears to have been presided over by the heads of state themselves, reflecting a general African trend.lxxxviii

Moreover, Amin and Nyerere both framed the war as a continuation of their long-running personal spat. Nyerere’s language made it clear that his enemy was Amin, not Uganda. In a radio broadcast on 2 November 1978, he told the nation that “We only have one task. It is to hit him. We have the ability to hit him. We have reason to hit him. And we have the determination to do so.”lxxxix In reply, Amin challenged Nyerere to a boxing match to resolve the conflict.xc His response was typically outlandish, but encapsulated this personalisation of the war.

At what point did Nyerere decide that Amin had to go? Tanzanian officials remained evasive on the question. At the Mediation Committee in Nairobi, Mkapa remarked that the war would continue until a “permanent solution” was found, though declined to clarify what this might involve.xci On 28 February, Nyerere affirmed that despite his “dislike for Amin – and I really do not like him – the Government of Tanzania has no right to enter Uganda to topple Amin.”xcii Even with Tanzanian troops poised to seize Kampala, Nyerere told Western diplomats that he did not intend to overthrow Amin; rather he “intended to teach him a lesson so that he would realise that war was a serious game” – a claim that “no-one present believed” and “which was purely for the record”, according to Hinchcliffe.xciii

Instead, evidence in the FCO files suggests that Nyerere sought to topple Amin from the moment hostilities broke out. Speaking to Moon on 30 October, Nyerere “referred several times of the need to get rid of Amin”.xciv Wicken confirmed within the first week of the war that Tanzania wanted “to inflict a humiliating defeat on Amin which could lead to his fall”.xcv A combination of Nyerere’s personal vendetta against Amin and a realisation that the shared border would not be secure until he was removed from power appears to have resolved the Tanzanian government on its course of action, despite the war’s crippling economic impact. In February, Wicken frankly told Hinchcliffe that although Tanzania could not afford the war, it “would not mind if mediation attempts came to nothing” as “any mediation which ended the fighting and which left Amin intact would not be in Tanzania’s interest.”xcvi Aside from being a principled stance, Nyerere’s insistence that the OAU condemn Uganda provided a stalling tactic that allowed military operations to continue while OAU leaders sought a political solution which Tanzania had no intention of pursuing.

It has been alleged Nyerere’s decision to bring down the Amin regime had a more subversive motive: Obote’s return to power. The evidence here is ambiguous. Nyerere sought Obote’s support in forming an anti-Amin exile force after recalling him from a holiday in Lusaka in November 1978. Obote’s public statements in January were also conceived as a means of provoking disorder inside Uganda. Yet Nyerere advised Obote not to attend the Moshi Conference, fearing his presence might disrupt attempts by the assembled dissident factions to form a united front.xcvii He was also conscious of international opposition to Obote. In particular, Kenya remained suspicious of Nyerere’s relationship with Obote, despite Tanzanian assurances that were communicated through British diplomatic channels (and which British diplomats generally believed).xcviii Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi relayed to Sir Stanley Fingland, the British High Commissioner in Nairobi, his concern at the potential emergence of a Tanzanian-sponsored government in Kampala which could lead to Kenya being surrounded by left-leaning regimes.xcix Regardless of his personal relationship with Obote, Nyerere realised that both the legitimacy of the invasion and the stability of a new government in Kampala were dependent on maintaining a safe distance from Obote until the dust had settled.

The OAU, the UN, and the triumph of African Realpolitik

The diplomatic turbulence whipped up by the war cast a cloud over the OAU Heads of State Summit held in Monrovia in July 1979. By then, Lule had been forced from power and replaced as President by Godfrey Binaisa. Opening the summit in his capacity as its Chairman, Nimeiry described the conflict as a “regrettable dispute between two fraternal countries” that had set a “serious precedent” in Africa. “I believe we are called on to abide by our Organization’s Charter”, he said, “which prohibits interference in other people’s internal affairs and invasion of their territory by armed force.” Nyerere’s reply from the floor was bitter. “I want to congratulate my brother, President Nimeiry, in that he now wants this matter to be discussed”, he said. “My only criticism is that he would like to see in the dock not the aggressor but the victim.” General Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria joined Nimeiry, suggesting that Tanzania, rather than Uganda, was actually to blame for the outbreak of hostilities in October, either by making the first incursion or by acts of provocation.c Both Nimeiry and Obasanjo had been frustrated by Nyerere’s mulish rebuttal of their personal negotiation attempts.

The complaints made about Tanzania’s violation of the OAU Charter were not simply based on matters of principle. Many African leaders feared that an acceptance of the Tanzanian invasion would set a dangerous precedent. Acknowledging that acquiescence to Tanzania’s intervention among African governments rested largely on the embarrassment caused by Amin’s behaviour, Moi pointed out to Fingland that Uganda was no exception in this respect. The records of Jean-Bédel Bokassa in the Central African Empire or Macias Nguema in Equatorial Guinea were little better. Were they to be attacked as well?ci Even leaders without blood on their hands might now feel at threat. “Security may be endangered by this act”, warned Obasanjo in Monrovia, “for the weaker and smaller nations of Africa will have to look over their shoulders at their powerful neighbours whenever they have to act.”cii

There was therefore a series of staunch defences of the Charter’s integrity. The Liberian President William Tolbert stressed the need for aggrieved parties to seek mediation through OAU channels and reaffirmed that the “violation of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of a member-state, for whatever reason, violates the Charter of the OAU.”ciii The Kenyan Sunday Nation rejected the verdict that the OAU was a “useless organization” and argued that its faults lay less in the Charter than in the member-states’ lack of political will to uphold its provisions.civ

Others retorted that the war had demonstrated the inflexibility of the Charter and called for its reform. According to the editor of the New African, too many member-states had simply brandished their “OAU handbooks to invoke the clause on non-interference in the affairs of a neighbouring state with the careless ease with which tourists would be expected to show off well-known information gleaned from guidebooks.” “How cosy it must be”, he remarked, “to be able to quote international law when your own people have not been bombed.”cv Nyerere himself described the OAU as being a “trade union” for African leaders, ringfencing them from criticism.cvi He had previously pointed out that Amin had killed more Africans than Smith’s regime in Rhodesia or Vorster’s in South Africa. “Had Amin been white”, he said in his Independence Day speech of 9 December 1978, “free Africa would have passed many resolutions condemning him. Being black is now becoming a certificate to kill fellow Africans.”cvii In turning the same accusations levelled against racist white African leaders against the organisation that was supposedly the embodiment of African unity, Nyerere – the defiant pan-Africanist – implicitly called into question the credibility of the OAU’s authority to mediate between the belligerents.

The war was particularly embarrassing for the OAU and its members because it threatened to display on a global stage disunity among African states and the organisation’s impotence in resolving conflict.cviii Reporting on the February 1979 Council of Ministers meeting in Nairobi, a British diplomat observed that “there was obvious embarrassment at the OAU’s manifest inability to effect [sic] the course of events.”cix One of the reasons offered by Fingland for the reluctance of African states to condemn Uganda at the Nairobi conference was an unwillingness to publicly rebuke another member-state.cx At Monrovia, Binaisa praised Tanzanian’s intervention, made a damning attack on Amin, and condemned the regimes of Nguema and Bokassa. In turn, Obasanjo questioned his credentials to act as President of Uganda – an implicit reference to the reported Tanzanian involvement in Lule’s fall from power. Both Binaisa’s and Obasanjo’s comments were ordered to be erased from the official record: antagonistic exchanges among African states were not to be preserved for wider circulation.cxi

The failure of Amin’s attempts to bring the conflict before the UN Security Council highlighted this unease. Following the Ugandan request for a Security Council meeting on 15 February 1979, the British Ambassador to the UN was told by the President of the Security Council that African states were “most concerned” at the prospect.cxii When Uganda repeated its calls for a meeting in late March, it faced blanket opposition among the so-called African Group. At informal consultations among Security Council members on 30 March, the Gabonese representative argued that it was not the correct moment to bring the issue before a formal meeting, since African mediation was still ongoing, despite the OAU’s negotiations having completely stalled after the failure of the Nairobi meeting in late February. He added that the African Group “did not want to wash their dirty linen in public.”cxiii Nigeria, chairing the Council, demonstrated the same feeling when it tried to delay the formal talks until 1 April, when it would pass the chair on to Norway.cxiv The Nigerian representative told a British official that Amin was an “embarrassment to African aspirations”. Other African members of the Council felt that “a debate could not but show up the disarray among the African Group.” Uganda dropped its request, to much relief.cxv

Several commentators have suggested that the Tanzania invasion of Uganda provides an early case of a war justified by humanitarian intervention.cxvi Appealing though it may be, this interpretation runs counter to the evidence. Among African leaders Nyerere had a strong track-record of at least rhetorical support for human rights.cxvii But while he made references during the war to atrocities committed by Amin’s regime, Nyerere never linked them to the intervention: to do so would have been an admission of breaking the OAU Charter, which he himself had invoked in his condemnation of Amin.cxviii When he privately invoked humanitarian concerns to justify the invasion to the FCO, he did so with reference to the need to protect the population of southern Uganda which had greeted the Tanzanians as “liberators”, rather than in a more general manner to the Ugandan population which had been terrorised by Amin over the previous eight years. Nyerere feared that a Tanzanian withdrawal would lead to both violent reprisals and a flood of refugees into Tanzania.cxix But this seems an ex post facto justification for Tanzania’s actions, designed especially to appeal to Western outrage about human rights violations in Uganda. After all, it was the Tanzanian counterinvasion which had brought about this situation.

Rather, respect for international law gave way to a sense among most African leaders that the ends justified the means, illegal as they may have been. Despite divisions of opinion at Monrovia, the overwhelming reaction was a tacit acceptance of the Tanzanian invasion. Nyerere did not have to justify his counterinvasion in terms of the international legal framework. The discomfort they felt at the violation of the Charter paled in comparison with the embarrassment caused by Amin’s appalling disregard for human life. In this light, Nyerere’s presentation of the war as a personal conflict with Amin paid dividends. A pamphlet circulated by Tanzania at Monrovia concluded that

Amin was an abominable murderer of the people of Uganda; a turbulent menace to the peace and security of East Africa; a standing scandal and displace to the honour of Africa; a blatant and bragging aggressor against Tanzania. We are not sorry to be rid of him.cxx

The prevailing African view was implicitly endorsed by Britain and United States. Both states had given low-key but significant support to Tanzania; both had condemned the Ugandan invasion; both then remained silent over the Tanzanian counterinvasion, but quickly recognised the Lule government.cxxi

Conclusion

Amin and his henchmen fled into exile. The deposed President first went to Tripoli, but after falling out with Gaddafi he took up residence in Saudi Arabia, where he died in 2003. Precise figures of the numbers of Ugandan war casualties are impossible to ascertain: Avirgan and Honey estimate around 1,000 Ugandans died, in addition to 600 Libyans.cxxii The situation in Uganda scarcely improved. Kampala collapsed into a state of near anarchy and internecine squabbling brought down the Lule government after just 68 days in office. His successor, Binaisa, was deposed in May 1980 by a military coup. Obote returned as President in elections held in December 1980. The use of force to overthrow Amin did nothing to reinforce the rule of law and the spiral of violence continued throughout Obote’s five-year second term.cxxiii

Nyerere basked in the glory of victory, embarking on a public tour of Tanzania. The official Tanzanian cost in human life was relatively small at just 373 soldiers killed, of whom only 96 died as a result of enemy fire, the remainder being killed in accidents.cxxiv However, the damage to a faltering economy was critical. The final bill for the intervention and occupation of Uganda came to around £250 million, bleeding dry Tanzania’s already depleted foreign exchange reserves. Together with the disastrous consequences of Nyerere’s ujamaa policy, the long-term impact of the war was to render Tanzania dependent on external aid to keep the economy afloat. By the late 1980s, the country was surviving on a drip of World Bank and IMF support.

Shorn largely as a function of Nyerere’s nonaligned stance of superpower involvement, the conflict’s absence of a Cold War dimension left exposed the shortcomings of African diplomatic practice. The OAU was incapable of ending a dispute that was fuelled by Nyerere’s bitter animosity towards his bête noir, Amin. The organisation’s adherence to the strict principles of neutrality towards the belligerents and the inviolability of existing borders left it open to charges from Nyerere that it was permitting Amin’s reckless disregard for Tanzania’s state sovereignty. African states resisted Ugandan attempts to bring the issue before the UN: they did not wish the failure of their diplomacy and the splits within their ranks. Ultimately, the embarrassment caused by Amin’s behaviour led to pragmatism prevailing over international law. Despite the discontent evident at Nairobi and Monrovia with Nyerere’s refusal to negotiate, African leaders were content to see the fall of a tyrant.