Original subtitles

NARRATOR: Evil. Powerful.

Uncompromising.

Ruthless. Behind closed doors a private hell.

- Tyrants often deviate in their sexual behaviour.

- He fantasised about older women.

- He puts make up on.

- He had thousands of concubines.

They were this glamourous, gun toting, sex objects.

- Fire on designated targets.

NARRATOR: The psychological insights of the degenerate and deviant.

- He was obsessed with aphrodisiacs.

- It is typical of somebody who is sexually repressed.

- Power can change somebody.

- Uganda is very peaceful and Uganda does not violate

any human rights.

- Amin was brutal in his murders of thousands of people.

- The British are my best friends I have.

- He was this political clown.

NARRATOR: Idi Amin, no fiction writer could imagine this tyrant.

- Calling himself the King of Scotland,

the Black Hitler.

NARRATOR: Nor imagine the monster he became.

He used terror to rule Uganda.

Combining sex and violence in a sadistic regime

involving multiple wives and lovers.

- Chopping off heads,

putting body parts in fridges,

even rumours of cannibalism.

- I can have sex with you, kill you,

injure you, have you as a partner.

These are all merged.

- She disappeared and her

dead body turned up in the trunk of a car

chopped into pieces.

NARRATOR: He bestowed himself the title President of Uganda for

life, claiming he was a saviour to his people.

- Some people have requested me to be the Life President.

NARRATOR: But history remembers him by a very different name.

Early twentieth century a nascent, largely agrarian nation,

stunted and squeezed by imperial greed.

Feeding and enriching a distant empire.

- So to understand Idi Amin

you need to really go back and look at the history of the country

into which he was born, which pre-war wasn't a country.

It was part of the British Empire.

So while the borders of the country were prescribed by the

empire, there were autonomous tribes within that country.

And it wasn't really until

after the war that Uganda became its own country.

So it was into this environment, this post-colonial

environment that Idi Amin started his career.

NARRATOR: It was into this world of hierarchies, of race and rank

that Idi Amin Dada was born sometime

around 1925.

Details of Amin's early life are sketchy due to his later

fabrications but what is known is that his mother was a tribal

healer, conjuring witch doctor medicine.

His father, a one-time child soldier recruited by the British

army, had simply vanished.

- Amin's relationship with authority

was problematic, starting with

his relationship with his Dad who abandoned him.

- So here we have Idi Amin

who comes from an African tribal background.

And this was a time when most of Africa were colonies but

people out in the rural areas really led very simple tribal lives.

Now Amin was very poorly educated. He was barely literate.

And I think a number of people have held doubts about his

actual IQ.

NARRATOR: Idi Amin was a fine physical specimen, standing

well over six feet but lacked academic ability.

But the British didn't need scholars. They needed soldiers.

Thanks to his father's military service he was able to join

the King's African Rifles as a cook.

But he didn't stay in the kitchen for long.

- He showed himself to be

a good soldier, a good boxer, he was an athlete, he was a large

man, about six foot four, very heavy.

And he had all the marks of

a reasonable sergeant, that kind of level.

He wasn't seen to be officer material.

But he proved to be extremely ambitious.

NARRATOR: Amin was a fighter, not a baker.

The man who would one day be accused of cannibalism

developed a thirst for blood early.

During the infamous Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, which had started

in 1952, Amin led brutal raids in the name of

British Colonialism, earning a reputation for savagery.

- Idi Amin was commended by his officers as being loyal

and brutal and he played a big part in

the defeat of the Mau Maus in Kenya, uh, as part of the British army.

He actively took part in the torture of prisoners and seemed to

revel in it.

Genital mutilations, psychological pain,

forced starvation.

It seemed that his career, uh, was built on pain and discomfort

and fear.

NARRATOR: Pain, discomfort and fear later became the calling

cards for Amin's numerous wives and lovers but for now

the British Uniform gave him training and standing.

But though he revelled in the uniform he resented taking

orders from the British.

It was a master, servant relationship that Idi Amin

mocked and despised throughout his life.

- If you look at his relationship with England the constant

hyping of himself, I think, stems back to the sense of

inferiority he had when serving under the British in the army.

That and an awareness that not only were you black, not only

were you Ugandan but you were really, even amongst all of that,

somebody from a small tribe and not somebody of any particular ability.

So I think that just went on with him and this crude

determination to overcompensate.

- Many people who emerge out of the colonial sphere, who become,

um, leaders in independent African

nations have a strange relationship with the home country because they

would have been raised, they'd have gone to school, uh, in classrooms

where they would've learned about their home country,

their capital, which was England and the capital is London.

And the schools that they would of learned about were Eton.

So their whole moral and imaginative universe is decentred

from the place in which they grew up and this place somewhere else.

NARRATOR: Amin's hybrid background of African tribal culture

mixed with English colonial education laid the foundations

for a leader who could charm with one hand,

maim and kill with the other.

- He drank scotch for example.

But also his whole life was about rejecting certain things as

well, a, a system that made him second class he rejected.

NARRATOR: As a young soldier Amin kept his sex life under wraps.

In this period of his life he was much more interested in power

than in passion.

- I think that for Amin, sex was simply almost a functional thing.

You just needed a woman at a particular time, you took her

and then you moved on.

I think there was absolute no subtlety about it at all and

certainly nothing like a romantic affection.

NARRATOR: For someone who was unromantic, however, he did

like the attention of a wedding.

In 1966 Amin,

by this time Commander of the Ugandan Army,

married not once but three times within a matter of months.

Three wives: Mal Yamu, Kay, and Nora,

became part of his devoted entourage,

despite them initially not knowing about one another.

Soon after they married, Idi Amin's first wife, Mal Yamu, found

him in bed with his soon-to-be second wife, Kay.

To add insult to injury Mal Yamu only learnt he had married

her after hearing about it on State Television.

- Privately he was dominating and controlling all of his wives

and lovers. They weren't his partners. They were, uh, prisoners.

They were emotionally trapped

under his manipulation

and they suffered harm at his hand.

It's likely that he also saw

that interest in having multiple families as,

uh, sort of making up for the fact that he himself

came from a broken family and was abandoned by his own father.

NARRATOR: It was yet another sign that when it suited him Amin

was entirely happy to cast off the constraints of British

traditionalism.

Polygamy, it would seem, was the preference for this dictator

in waiting.

1970. Uganda's Prime Minister,

Milton Obote, had a problem.

His handpicked and highly ambitious army commander, Idi Amin, was

gaining popularity, too much of it.

- Amin was obsessed with power.

He was grandiose in everything that he did.

NARRATOR: Knowing that Obote was planning to move against him

in January 1971, while Obote was away at a Commonwealth Summit

in Singapore, Amin struck.

- Uganda armed forces have

taken over power from Obote and

handed to our fellow soldier

Major General Idi Amin Dada.

- In 1971 Idi Amin staged a military coup,

with western support,

to set up a popularist government.

However the West badly misread him.

This man was a, a showman but behind it,

it showed a real ruthless leader.

NARRATOR: Not for the first time the British had badly miscalculated.

- The entire people of Uganda consider me I am the

conqueror of the British Empire.

It is not my intention to be a President but, uh, it is the

people who appointed me to be the President of the Republic of Uganda.

They are same people have requested me

to be the Life President of Uganda

for what I have done for the country.

NARRATOR: Military coup and contempt for the British not withstanding,

the self-appointed President was popular.

His poolside press conferences delighted the foreign press and

the young women adorning his antics helped create a playboy image.

The West was entertained by this seemingly well-meaning clown

from the Colonies.

- I do both politics and sports.

NARRATOR: Amin understood something few strongmen did: he didn't

restrict foreign press, he courted them.

- Amin was...

very astute at using publicity

in different ways to

try to project his image of a leader

in Africa who was anti-colonial,

anti-British in particular and, of course, this was seen to be

as hilarious and ridiculous

by the British but it captured the attention of,

uh, many of his loyal followers in Uganda

and these kinds of gimmicks helped him

to have a popular support base.

- President Amin leaves his imprint on everything and on such an

occasion it may seem that everything is spectacle, even of circus,

makes the serious politics almost incidental but of course it's

not so.

NARRATOR: A game of basketball against nervous looking

foreign diplomats was a photo opportunity not to be missed.

- The Chinese deciding they would play, the Russians decided

they wouldn't.

And though he missed a few President Amin made no mistake with this one.

- There was a huge need for acknowledgement and

respect and you can see this in all the titles he gave himself,

the medals he wore

and this general attitude to 'I am the king'.

In many ways you can say this goes back to an African tribal

view centuries ago that had long since gone but he was happy

to stick with it.

NARRATOR: But while the world applauded, behind closed

doors military control had quickly turned into domestic

oppression of ethnic minorities and sexual coercion.

To satisfy his libido he began surrounding himself with

beauty queens, dancers and teenage girls, young, vulnerable

women who had little control over their fate.

- He used sexual relations

as a means of control.

He used rape as a means of control.

He used women

as a symbol of his own power.

Having sex with women became, for him, something that

demonstrated his power.

- Power over people's lives. Power to kill them.

Power to maim them. Power to torture them. Power to rape them.

Power to have sex with them.

I think these are very much connected and it gave the

same kind of joy to Idi Amin.

NARRATOR: Public Charm. Private domination.

As he played to the cameras little did the world suspect what

misery Dada the Dictator was about to unleash on Uganda.

- I think I will now issue my statement.

NARRATOR: August 1972, Idi Amin makes a declaration that will

send shockwaves through Uganda, and England.

- The decision of my government to ask the British Government to

take over responsibility

for the British citizens of Asian origin

living in Uganda

who are sabotaging the economy of this country.

Uganda will be independent after this, my decision, after I

want to see that the whole Kampala Street is not full of Indians.

- One of the first things he did

as part of his Uganda for the Ugandans rhetoric was to

expel all of the Asians from the country.

Now these Asians were British subjects and this became a

huge diplomatic crisis for Britain as he basically said, they're

your problem now, you need to take them and you need to deal with them.

NARRATOR: Amin gave them ninety days to leave or face imprisonment

or worse.

- Do you want to leave?

- Yeah, we have to leave. We don't want to leave it.

- Do you think you're going to be alright and safe at the end

of ninety days in another country?

- You know, there's a problem. It's a problem.

- His expelling of around 50,000 South Asians from Uganda was

a reflection of the position that South Asians had

taken in Ugandan colony, which is that they dominated the kind

of, um, urban professional sphere and that

was a position that had been supported by the British state.

So that was not something that happened kind of

coincidentally or accidentally.

NARRATOR: Most of Uganda's Asian population, around 50,000

people, were third-generation citizens.

Many had been born in the country, they ran hospitals, schools,

import-export businesses and banks.

But now, at a moment's notice, they were being ordered to leave

their homes and their livelihoods.

- You said you wanted to teach Britain a lesson President.

Why is that?

- And that is now a lesson I am now teaching the British.

I am teaching now the lesson because I am correcting them from the

mistake they had made.

If they had think before earlier that there are Africans here

who can even work and are building the railway with instruction

given to them by the British this problem would not happen.

- I will expel them. I will cut our ties with Britain.

I will make us proud to be Ugandans and all of that.

But what do you see in Africa time and time again?

African nationalism takes over and it descends into tribalism

and that really was the basis for the way Amin operated.

- London for Londoners. Scotland for the Scottish.

It is only transferring the economy

to hands of Ugandans.

NARRATOR: For anyone who dared to defy Amin and stay in the

country the threat was clear.

- What will happen to these people if they don't go by the time?

- I think they will be sitting like they are sitting on the fire.

I will tell you this. You just wait after three months.

- What will you do to them?

- Ok, you will see.

- Mother's passport, father's passport and your British

nationality document.

NARRATOR: They left with the clothes on their backs.

Factories were handed to military cronies, shops looted,

banks emptied.

And with the departure of the Asian community Uganda's

once-healthy economy and social infrastructure began to collapse.

- So effectively they exiled all their professionals, a lot of

doctors, a lot of businessmen.

Um, that was devastating to the state and to the population.

NARRATOR: The international community condemned what

became known as 'Departheid'.

Amin replied in typically bizarre fashion.

- I have written a letter

to her Majesty the Queen.

I thank her Majesty the Queen

very much for the letter she has,

uh, delivered, uh, written to me.

NARRATOR: Even though he was becoming emboldened by his

absolute power and had declared his nation independent, expelling

several of its loyal citizens, Amin began to fantasise about a

larger royal role.

Partly, it seems, out of his personal admiration for

Queen Elizabeth II.

- He wrote letters to Queen Elizabeth of England not just

once, but dozens of times declaring his undying love, offering to

marry her and even that her next baby by him, presumably,

could be delivered by his doctors in Uganda.

All really puzzling. Was he mocking her?

Was he that delusional that he thought this could be a reality?

His grasp on reality was certainly starting to slip.

NARRATOR: Faced by Amin's increasingly unpredictable

rhetoric and behaviour The British High Commissioner to Uganda

didn't know where to look.

- Had you asked the British to take them away then?

- The British High Commissioner is here, it is his responsibility.

I told him.

- The position of my government on that question, on the rate of

admission, uh, has clearly got to be reserved and I have now got to,

uh, report what you have decided, uh, and seek further instruction.

NARRATOR: As he laughed at the discomfort of the

British High Commissioner, there was no telling what this

increasingly erratic dictator's next move would be.

By the mid-1970s no one was safe from Idi Amin's chaos.

Uganda's President For Life announced on national radio

that he had divorced three of his five wives.

Not for infidelity nor irreconcilable differences.

The wives had simply held a party without asking for permission

from Dada.

He didn't grieve their departure.

He had plenty more wives to indulge him.

- He had five official wives and ten or more unofficial wives.

He also had between forty and sixty children, uh, by all of

these wives.

So he had amassed an extreme progeny, uh, beneath him.

As a result of these numerous sexual escapades that, that he had.

His numerous children

could be reflective of Idi Amin's desire to exercise his

power, to spread his seed as far as it can go.

And, uh, also reflective of his sexual dominance, um, his

masculinity, his virility, his ability to procreate, all

entwined with creating sort of his own little personal army of

people that ultimately he could control as well.

NARRATOR: By 1973 the tone of the regime had changed.

Amin's confidence hardened into suspicion.

He began replacing ministers regularly, continuing his

prolific and brutal purge of his predecessor's allies and his

bodyguards were rotated weekly.

Even senior military officers weren't safe, as Amin sought

to shore up his power base, exiling and executing thousands.

- Fire!

- As bombastic as he was

in public or in front of the cameras, behind the scenes he

was beginning to unravel.

He was paranoid and stories of his brutality were starting to

come out as well.

Advisors would go into meetings and never come out again.

There were rumours of him feeding body parts to crocodiles, uh,

and even having parts of his victim's body stored in freezers.

This was a man who was really starting to fall apart.

- If it has been something bad, critical of me my people will

not be happy as now.

You understand? You understand what I say?

NARRATOR: His need to control wasn't rooted in confidence.

It stemmed from paranoia and insecurity at his humble

origins and previous servitude to the British.

- Idi Amin's insecurity

manifested itself in different ways.

One of those ways was to have

those who were supposed to be in power humiliated.

In one incident he had four

white men carry him in as if

he was on a throne and they were slaves.

- The symbolism is very clear. 'I'm in charge.

I'm a black man who's in charge.

The previous colonial situation in which I was raised has been

reversed, upended.

I am a powerful black man and these white men now have to

carry me in on palanquin.'

That's a very arresting

image, uh, and probably one that those diplomats engaged in

with a certain amount of trepidation.

- Other ways in which he humiliated people

was even more bizarre, such as

keeping parts of their bodies in his fridge,

such as not only torturing them but dismembering them.

I think these are

all manifestations of his need to show control and power over

other people.

NARRATOR: Idi Amin surrounded himself with 'yes' men and

'yes' women, or at least women who wouldn't dare say 'no' for

fear of the consequences.

And all of these people he treated as his private chattels to

either promote or dispose of on a whim.

Some months after Idi Amin

announced his divorce from second wife, Kay Adroa, her

dismembered body was found in the trunk of a car.

The official line was that she had died during the abortion of a

child who was not Idi's.

The doctor who performed the abortion allegedly took his

own life.

- Her dead body

turned up in the trunk of a car, chopped into pieces.

But it gets worse because after her body was found Amin

ordered his Chief Medical Officer to

stitch her body back together and then placed on the steps of

the hospital

as a symbol of this, don't cross me or this might happen to you.

A visible indicator of his violence, of his power, of his sadistic

and bizarre tendencies.

NARRATOR: Without even breaking a sweat Idi Amin Dada moved on

to his next sexual trophy.

Nineteen year old Go-Go Dancer Sarah Kyolaba became wife number four.

With Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Amin's new best

friend, as Best Man.

Idi had abducted Sarah from another man,

who then mysteriously disappeared.

Ominously Idi's teen bride came to be known as 'Suicide Sarah'.

- Idi Amin's, um, viciousness was different than that of other,

other dictators at the time because it was personal.

And whether it's the use of cannibalism among the Kakua

tribes in the north

feeding people to crocodiles, although he's not the only

dictator to be alleged to have fed people to crocodiles.

And people understood, understood it in that way, the keeping

of body parts to be kind of fetishization.

There's enough evidence to suggest that these things did happen.

NARRATOR: No one dared to challenge Amin's increasingly violent rule.

His early clowning for the cameras was replaced by a more sombre and

menacing demeanour, as he even turned his prisoners on each

other for sport.

- His centre of operations was his so-called command post.

Here inside heavily barred cells prisoners were forced to

smash each other's heads with coal hammers, their cell blocks

just four square concrete block houses.

No beds or chairs.

Absurd signs warn those who worked here to keep secrets guarded.

The bodies of tortured victims still lie nearby at Amin's dreaded

state research centre.

- He was nicknamed The Butcher Of Uganda. He relished

in the delight of not just hurting people but coming up with

creative ways to mutilate bodies.

This is a very disturbed person.

NARRATOR: Bodies just appeared from nowhere in Lake Victoria.

According to engineers at hydro plants up to forty corpses a

day were pulled from the water.

- The murder rate was extortionate. It was just so high.

The best estimates were around 300,000 people murdered and

their bodies were just dumped.

They were thrown into the rivers,

thrown into Lake Victoria, where apparently some of them even

clogged up turbines.

The rivers literally ran red with blood

and this wasn't in times of war. This was in peacetime.

NARRATOR: That same year his former chief of staff, whom he suspected

of plotting to replace him,

was beaten to death with rifle butts.

Amin had his head delivered to his residence

and kept it in a freezer.

He once brought it to a dinner party. This was ritualized terror.

- To almost anyone Amin's behaviour

was so extreme as to be

almost impossible to comprehend.

Chopping off heads, putting body parts in fridges, even

rumours of cannibalism.

In some way this was an atavistic form of tribalism.

But I think it all goes back to the fact that he was a

terribly limited man with a terribly limited intellect

and his violence and his rage simply had no stabilisers.

NARRATOR: But for Idi Amin the start of his inevitable downfall

came from an unexpected source, a country which had once

supported him but had now seen his true colours.

- In 1976 an Air France flight from Tel Aviv to Paris was stormed

by four hijackers.

At first it looked like a classic terrorist operation.

But this was very different.

NARRATOR: June 27, 1976. An Air France flight from Tel Aviv to

Paris is hijacked by four militants, two Palestinian, two German.

They divert the plane, with its 248 passengers and crew, to

Entebbe Airport, Uganda.

- We are going to execute

all the passengers.

NARRATOR: Amin steps in, welcomes the hijackers and offers

himself as a negotiator.

- Amin was looking for a way to assert himself globally.

He thought he wasn't an important global figure and, and

Entebbe, um, in, in taking the side of the Palestinian

nationalists and Palestinian terrorists and that, allowed

him to, or he believed, allowed him a certain amount of leverage

over um, western government.

NARRATOR: Over the next six days Amin demonstrates his

complete lack of understanding of international diplomacy by

spewing out a torrent of antisemitic bile via the media.

- In Britain the whole economy it has been controlled by

Britain, except there are very many jews who are also controlling

your economy in Britain.

I think you know this.

And as well as in the United State of America, the whole economy

there is controlled by Jews.

NARRATOR: By siding with the hostage taking terrorists Idi Amin

had now made an enemy of the West.

Seven days into the siege, in a remarkable covert mission

code-named Operation Thunderbolt, special commandos flew from

Israel and swooped on Entebbe under cloak of darkness.

The terrorists were killed, the hostages rescued from right

under Amin's nose.

- The Entebbe Affair ends with a daring raid, the Israelis,

um, launch a raid into Uganda, seemingly impossibly.

I don't think anyone would have, uh, imagined this was possible.

- And when the Israeli hostages were liberated by their own forces

it was a bit of an embarrassment for him.

But his relationship with the west was now well and truly

fractured and broken.

There was no credence for him anymore.

NARRATOR: The United Kingdom, still reeling from the massive

intake of expelled Asian refugees from Uganda, had also had

enough of Amin's antics.

All ties between the two nations were severed.

- Definitely after Entebbe his reputation among the West

absolutely collapses and then there's no, um, there's not

very much support for him from the global West after that point.

NARRATOR: Yet in press conferences Amin still claimed friendship

with Britain.

- The British are my best friends.

And your best friend is a friend who can tell you you're a mistake.

NARRATOR: The madness continued.

After Britain cut off Uganda, Idi Amin simply bestowed more grandiose

titles on himself including CBE,

Conqueror of the British Empire.

- 'His Excellency, President for Life,

Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada,

VC, DSO, MC,

Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea'.

NARRATOR: And then without any irony at all...

- 'The Last King of Scotland.'

- His bearing just seemed to get more and more ridiculous.

Turning up for TV interviews in pyjamas.

And making the rather bold and somewhat daft claim that he

was the Last King of Scotland.

NARRATOR: And as his madness grew so did his ever-expanding family.

It's conservatively estimated that he fathered as many as

sixty children.

To Idi Amin love and control were one and the same.

- Even the diplomats were left waiting uncomfortably for the

president to arrive.

With only a smile from Uganda's roving ambassador, the former

Princess Elizabeth of Toro to brighten what must have been

for them a painful situation.

NARRATOR: Princess Elizabeth of Toro was a talented young lawyer

who resisted Idi Amin's advances.

She managed to flee Uganda before Amin could harm her.

But she still paid a price for not sleeping with her President.

She escaped, then her brother was murdered.

In her memoirs she wrote that Amin taunted her with the words...

- You missed your chance. You could have been my Queen.

- It's here that, at the deeper level,

the joy of sex and the

joy of violence become one.

And it comes through the control and power over others.

That is, I can have sex with you,

kill you, injure you,

have you as a partner.

These are all merged.

NARRATOR: Meanwhile as Amin retreated into

self-aggrandizement and sexual conquest

Uganda's economy was in freefall. Hospitals were empty.

Food prices had tripled.

Foreign journalists were expelled.

Inside Amin's compound rooms filled with dismembered bodies,

freezers holding human remains, heads kept as trophies.

- He turned Entebbe State House, built grandly by the British,

into something of a drunk's paradise with parties in the gardens

or by the swimming pool.

NARRATOR: By early 1979, Amin's hold on power was rotting from the

inside out and that's the moment the tyrant decided he had no

choice but to go to war.

- With his people

and his country starting to turn against him, there was hunger

and unemployment and financial difficulties.

Amin engaged the age-old tactic of diverting attention by

starting a war. So he invaded Tanzania.

- When he invades Tanzania it is absolutely to shore up his

domestic legitimacy.

And that's a tool that dictators often use.

If your domestic prestige seems low, if you win a war you might

bolster your reputation.

And certainly that aligns with his desire to have politics

centre around him. But his efforts are ultimately a failure.

NARRATOR: In April 1979, Tanzanian troops and Ugandan exiles

reached Kampala.

Amin was nowhere to be found.

- His invasion of Tanzania was his final mistake.

He tried to invade Tanzania

and he was repulsed by a combination of the Tanzanian

armed forces and Ugandan exiles in Tanzania from tribes that

he'd persecuted.

They repulse them, they move into Uganda where they're able to

seize the capital and that's what causes the fall of Amin and

his flight into exile.

NARRATOR: There would be no final speech, no last stand.

April 11, 1979.

The streets of Kampala echo with relief.

Idi Amin has fled.

First to Libya, welcomed by Colonel Gaddafi, a fellow tyrant whose

public flamboyance also concealed a private brutality

and sexual sadism.

Then on to Saudi Arabia, where he would live out the rest of

his life in quiet exile.

With just his last two wives, Suicide Sarah and

Mama A Chumaru, to comfort him.

- He does disappear in the sense that he leaves, he flees

understanding quite rightly that his time is, is up and that was

preferable to him evidently to, to death.

NARRATOR: In his wake the silent screams of 300,000 victims,

prisons, torture chambers, a broken economy.

- Swarms of people carrying away huge bags of sugar from a

warehouse in downtown Kampala.

Here 300,000 sacks were stored by Amin whilst sugar ceased to

be available on the streets.

NARRATOR: Uganda's nightmare wasn't over but its architect had

disappeared.

Once safely out of harm's way one of his personal physicians would reveal

that he had treated the dictator with conditions ranging from

hypomania, schizophrenia and tertiary syphilis.

In the end Amin's mindlessness and sybaritic lifestyle did the

job for him.

He died from kidney failure in July 2003.

- What you see throughout history with tyrants, in the modern

term, dictators, is always the same thing.

Unchallenged. And how, what does this mean?

They either don't allow anyone to talk to them or they surround

themselves with yes men.

And that means they never have any real idea of what is going on.

Idi Amin was a personally and intellectually limited person,

who through opportunism,

craftiness and manipulation became a terrible

dictator and always lacked the internal ability to monitor

what he was doing and

brought about his own downfall inevitably.

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