NAIROBI, 17 August 2003 — A son of former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin based in Congo is plotting a rebellion in his late father’s home region in the latest of many attempts to topple the Kampala government, a Ugandan Army officer said yesterday.
Brigadier Kale Kayihura, a military adviser to President Yoweri Museveni, said Taban Amin was recruiting fighters in an area near the junction of the borders of Uganda, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
“Their ambition is to try to topple the government. It’s a dream they keep dreaming,” he told Reuters from northern Uganda after the announcement of Idi Amin’s death in a Saudi hospital.
“They are definitely not a big threat or any military threat. But they can be a security threat, by destabilizing security in a given area and causing problems so that the country never settles down,” he said by telephone.
“The information we have is so persistent that we have reason to believe that he (Taban) could be up to some mischief.”
Kayihura was the commander of Ugandan troops in eastern Congo until earlier this year, when Ugandan forces withdrew under a plan to end a many-sided war in the big central African country.
Kayihura said Taban, believed to be in his 40s, was trying to set up bases at the villages of Getti, Bado and Nyacucu just over the border from Idi Amin’s home village of Arua.
Kayihura said Taban had recruited hundreds of fighters drawn from the remnants of a defunct Ugandan rebel group he once helped lead known as the West Nile Bank Front. Unconfirmed Uganda media reports have said Taban has up to 6,000 followers.
Taban’s following has its origins in a community of former Ugandan military officers loyal to Idi Amin who fled to the Congolese city of Kisangani after Amin’s overthrow in 1979. Some settled down and went into business, but others harbored dreams of fighting their way back to power, ambitions encouraged by Mobutu Sese Seko, then leader of the former Zaire who had been close to Idi Amin and his family.
Mobutu’s habit of patronizing the would-be rebels was eventually adopted by his successor Laurent Kabila. Uganda accused Kabila of allowing Taban to live in its embassy in the Congolese capital Kinshasa in the late 1990s.
“Kabila tried to use Taban against Uganda. But we neutralized that threat at the time,” Kayihura said, referring to Uganda’s 1998 invasion of the Democratic Republic of Congo. “If we have not gone into Congo they (Ugandan rebels in Congo) would have had a field day.”
“It is not clear to us that Kabila the younger has dissociated himself from Taban,” Kayihura, added, referring to the assassinated Kabila’s son and successor, Joseph Kabila. “What will ultimately cure such rebellions is the success of the Congo peace process and the ability of the (Congolese) transitional government to extend its authority over all its territory.”
Kayihura said he had unhappy memories of meeting Taban in the 1970s when both studied at Uganda’s Makerere University.
“His father had forced the campus to give Taban a place even through he had hardly a primary school education. We demonstrated against this decision. So Taban brought military police to campus and they beat us up.”
Asked about his reaction to Idi Amin’s death, Kayihura said: “Time has a way of healing wounds. When I left university in the 1970s I was very bitter and angry about him. But now, I don’t feel anything.”
