Former Ugandan dictators Idi Amin and Milton Obote "should be brought to justice," Human Rights Watch (HRW) advocacy director Reed Brody told The Monitor Tuesday.

Amin, who allegedly butchered 300,000 Ugandans during his eight-year reign, has lived in exile in Saudi Arabia since he fled Uganda in 1979. Obote has lived in "humanitarian asylum" in Zambia since 1985. He was reportedly homeless last Christmas, living in the garage of his official residence.

HRW has previously approached the Saudi Arabian government about its harboring of Amin and has been rebuffed, Brody said. In 1999, Brody, on behalf of HRW, made an intervention at the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva and listed a number of former tyrants and torturers, and the countries sheltering them -- including Amin and Saudi Arabia.

"A Saudi diplomat told me I didn’t understand Bedouin hospitality," Brody said, "that when you bring somebody into your tent, you are not allowed to ask them questions."

Brody, as he later learned, had been misled. "After three days, you are allowed to ask questions," he said. "You can also throw them out." Brody added, "It’s been a lot longer than [three days]," speaking of Amin’s 22 years of refuge in Saudi Arabia.

This false representation of Bedouin hospitality as an explanation for the Saudis’ harboring of Amin has fooled others before. South Africa’s Mail & Guardian reported in 1998 that Saudi King Fahd, which was reportedly paying Amin a monthly allowance of US$1,400, was embarrassed to be harboring Amin, yet he was bound by his predecessor King Faisal’s offer of hospitality.

Brody made his case for a trial of Amin in a letter to The New York Times this May. "Idi Amin could be brought to trial in his exile in Saudi Arabia, back in Uganda or indeed anywhere else," Brody wrote. "The crimes against humanity of which he is accused are not subject to statutes of limitations or claims of immunity and may be prosecuted by any country, as in the [General Augusto Pinochet of Chile] case. What is lacking is the political will."

In a Sept. 30 column in The Observer (UK), Andrew Anthony, reviewing an episode of the British documentary television series "The Most Evil Men in History" focusing on Amin, wrote, "During the 1970s Amin was responsible for some 300,000 Ugandan deaths. If he was not a terrorist, then who is? Yet he lives in peaceful exile in Saudi Arabia, and no one, least of all the Saudis, seems to care."

Representatives of the Saudi Arabian embassy to the U.S. in Washington, D.C. told The Monitor they had no comment on Amin.

While continuing to harbor Amin, the Saudi government has been making a great show out of renouncing the Taliban for its support of terrorism. On Sept. 25, a Saudi government statement announced the severing of diplomatic ties with the Taliban. The statement criticized the Taliban for using Afghanistan "to harbor, arm and encourage those criminals who carry out terrorist attacks which frighten the innocent and spread horror and destruction in the world." It added that the attacks "defame Islam and defame the reputation of Muslims in the world."

Saudi Arabia has in recent weeks pledged its support for the United States’ efforts against terrorism, and U.S. government officials have, in turn, praised the Saudis’ commitment to fighting terrorists.

Brody said the U.S. has often supported bringing tyrants to justice, "when it’s not somebody the U.S. is trying to protect." He said the U.S. has supported tribunals to try alleged perpetrators of crimes against humanity in Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, Sierra Leone, and Cambodia.

While Brody supports the international court of justice, he sees it as a last resort. "The best place to have a trial is where the crimes were committed, where the victims are, and where justice would be most meaningful," he said. "International justice is really the backstop when national courts are either unwilling or unable to give someone a fair trial."

With Idi Amin reportedly poised to return to Uganda, it would seem likely that the accused mass murderer will be brought to justice at the scene of his crimes. However, one government official told The Monitor last week "it’s very unlikely the government would prosecute [Amin] should he return." The Daily Telegraph (UK), which on Oct. 13 first reported Amin’s plans to return home, cited speculation that the Ugandan parliament could debate the issue of granting Amin immunity to return, possibly as soon as next month.

Kivumbi Amule, Amin’s younger brother, told the Telegraph he learned of his brother’s plans during a telephone conversation. The 79-year-old former dictator, a Muslim, has 48 children, and as members of his family have gradually returned to Uganda in recent years, they have faced little hostility. Idi Amin told Amule to start rebuilding the family home in Arua to bring together all his children under one roof, and the plan was approved without hesitation, according to the Telegraph.

Edith Ssempala, Ugandan ambassador to the U.S., would not directly say Amin would not be tried should he return. "If he came to Uganda, it would be up to the law to decide if he should be tried," she told The Monitor. However, she added, "The Ugandan government has never gone after Idi Amin. Basically because that is not really a priority.

"We have wonderful relations with Saudi Arabia and with Zambia, so really going after Amin and Obote is not our preoccupation."

When asked if she believed in justice, Ssempala replied, "Justice should be done, but we can get so preoccupied with injustice sometimes. I think you have to look into the future.... By focusing on the future, we have been able to heal the wounds and give hope to our people." She said that in 1985, when Obote was overthrown and fled to Zambia, people had lost hope, and therefore since then, President Yoweri Museveni and the Movement government "have been focusing on recovering and developing and moving forward."

She continued, "That really requires that you put your priorities right and maybe even focus on the future as opposed to the past. Obviously if [Amin and Obote] were disrupting our programs, we would be disturbed, but if we are able to continue to grow, that’s OK, really. Maybe that is even the religious thing to do, to forgive and not forget."

In the first years of Museveni’s government, however, the stated goal was to not forget and to not forgive. In March 1986, the government announced on official radio that it would set up an international commission to investigate atrocities committed by past administrations. President Museveni vowed to seek the extradition of Obote and Amin.

Over the next few years, the Uganda Human Rights Commission met each Wednesday to hear testimony and to investigate and chronicle abuses committed by government security forces between 1962 and the 1986. The hearings were videotaped and shown each Monday night; the broadcasts were the most popular on Ugandan television.

"The purpose is educational. I think we are revealing how bad the past really was, while showing the public that it’s right to speak up so these abuses don’t happen again," Edward K. Sekandi, the panel’s chief legal counsel, told The Washington Post in 1989. "Nothing is censored here."
However, unlike South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Uganda’s commission was not merely charged with bringing abuses to light. The national Criminal Investigation Division was responsible for following up the commission’s evidence and bringing formal charges. This effort suffered from a decade of official neglect of the CID and a lack of training facilities. During the first three years of the panel, not a single indictment was made.

The Human Rights Commission still exists; in recent years it has addressed the rights of smokers and the disabled. But recent reports suggest it may not investigate Amin, should he return.

Not all Ugandans are likely to accept an Amin return without a trial. "Anybody coming [home] should answer for what was done during their regimes because that is what justice demands," Reverend Jackson Turyagenda, spokesman for the Anglican Church of Uganda, told The Australian last month. Amin killed Uganda’s former Anglican archbishop Janan Luwum barbarically in 1976.

Others would not wait for a trial that may never come. "If he comes back to this country there are many who would be unprepared to wait for conventional justice," one man whose father was killed by Amin told the Telegraph. "They would do to him what he did to others."