Kampala, 2 February
General Amin, the new ruler of Uganda, today proclaimed himself Supreme Commander and Head of State, dissolved Parliament, and appointed a purely advisory Council of Ministers. The council consists mainly of noncontroversial civilian administrators.
General Amin is also Defence Minister, with an army officer Minister for Internal Affairs. The most interesting appointments concern two men alleged to have been privy to a plot against General Amin – Mr EW Oryema, former Inspector general of police who becomes Minister for Minerals and Water Resources, and Mr FL Okwaere, former prisons commissioner, who becomes Minister of Agriculture. It is very much an interim body and signifies no political commitment by the general.
Uganda’s leading politicians, both the members of the Obote government and those of earlier days who were released from detention by the general, will have to wait for the political shape of the new Uganda to emerge. So will the people.
This afternoon I was with two former senior ministers, one of whom had been in hiding for two days after the coup. Both are free but very worried, and were experiencing a spontaneous burst of interest in agriculture. One who said he had been in politics since 1966, was thinking of retiring. “The farming life is very healthy and satisfactory. I want nothing more”.
The gloss of “instant calm” that General Amin’s public relations advisers have worked so effectively to spread over the country was chipped this morning by two and a half hours of firing in a residential area of Kampala. Troops surrounded the house said by neighbours to belong to a brother-in law of the deposed President Dr Obote. They fired thousands of rounds of small arms fire, and long bursts from the heavy machine gun of an armoured personnel carrier.
A man climbed out of a window, hands above his head, and was taken away. Finally, soldiers came from the burning house with a corpse in civilian clothes. A few shots appeared to be fired at the troops as they went in. One man inside was said to be a colonel who has not been seen since the coup.
I watched the occupation of the house from the Newfield nursery school 100 yards away. Inside the thick walls of the school, built in 1904 as barracks for Sudanese troops, the 70 children – Asians, Europeans, and Africans – were made to lie down. Parents took them away between bursts of firing. Children a block away in a flimsy hut took refuge in a church. Official sources offered no information about the house incident. Militarily the incident was irrelevant.