On January 26, 1971, the day after Idi Amin seized power, the new president held his first press conference. He assured the world that the coup had been bloodless, with a single wounded soldier as its only casualty. Even as Amin spoke, people were already being killed. Within days, the violence claimed its first high-profile victim: Brig Suleiman Hussein, the Chief of Staff, the most senior professional obstacle to Amin’s control of the army. Reports indicate he was beaten to death by soldiers in front of prison warders. His head was severed and, according to multiple historical sources, delivered to Amin, who reportedly kept it in a refrigerator.
This grotesque detail was not merely an act of brutality. It was a declaration. The regime was announcing, in the most visceral terms possible, that it operated beyond all bounds of law, decency, or human dignity. It was telling the army – and through the army, the nation – exactly what it was. History books count those who were killed or disappeared during Idi Amin’s rule in tens of thousands, some estimates reach 300,000. But numbers cannot capture the particular cruelty of enforced disappearance: the way it weaponises hope, the way it turns grief into a permanent condition, the way it denies families the most basic human right – to know what happened to their loved ones.
This is a story about those who were left behind. Dr Alicia Decker, in her foundational study of gender and militarism in Amin’s Uganda, gave their suffering its name: ‘the torture of the living.’ This series is an attempt to tell it. He wrote: ‘The archive of Amin’s violence was written in water and blood, not ink. The exact number of Ugandans who vanished into the long night of the 1970s will remain one of history’s most tragic unknowns.’
From military purge to civilian terror
The first wave of violence targeted the armed forces – in particular, the Acholi and Langi ethnic groups, whom Amin viewed as inherently disloyal. Within weeks, senior officers in the army, air force, and police were dead. On March 5, 1971, thirty-two officers were massacred at Makindye Military Barracks. Three days later, survivors were killed when explosives were detonated at Malire Barracks. Joshua Wakholi, a former Minister of Public Service detained at Makindye, later testified that he had personally witnessed the murder of 37 army officers in an adjoining cell.
At Mbarara Barracks, Langi and Acholi soldiers were separated from the rest and hacked to death or shot – estimates range from 167 to 258 killed. At Jinja Barracks, fighting from 10 to 14 July 1971 claimed approximately 600 lives, mostly Acholi. Children in neighbouring villages were also killed. These were not battles. They were massacres.
September 1972
While the violence of 1971 remained largely within the military establishment, the failed September 17, 1972 invasion of Uganda by rebels (aligned with Milton Obote and Yoweri Museveni), triggered total paranoia. It turned the State’s wrath outward, unleashing a tidal wave of terror upon the civilian world. What began as a tactical move to secure a coup evolved into a self-sustaining culture of fear.
Amin interpreted the attack not merely as an external military threat but as proof of a nationwide internal conspiracy. Security agencies – especially the State Research Bureau (SRB) and military intelligence – were given unlimited latitude to arrest, detain, and eliminate suspects with no oversight whatsoever. The scale, speed, and geographic reach of disappearances increased markedly after September 1972. A regime that had been killing selectively began killing indiscriminately. What began as a coup became a culture of extermination.
The machinery of disappearance
After September 1972, disappearance became systematised. The International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), in its landmark 1974 report, documented the total absence of arrest warrants, with agents – usually from the State Research Bureau – acting with, in the ICJ’s words, ‘total immunity.’ Some victims were abducted openly by uniformed personnel, while others were seized by plainclothes agents in unmarked vehicles – from homes, workplaces, roadblocks, and police stations – reflecting the overlapping and often indistinguishable roles of the army, police, and Amin’s intelligence units.
No paperwork. No charge stated. No destination given.
Families were rarely told anything. Asking questions often led to further arrests. Sir Peter Allen, a High Court judge during the era, later recalled: ‘In the majority of cases it has been the wives, the sisters, the mothers who have tramped from the military police barracks at Makindye, to the Public Safety Unit at Naguru, to the Malire Regiment at the Lubiri, to the Air Force Detention Centre at Entebbe, searching for their men.’ Most searches ended in silence.
The sites of horror
Certain locations became synonymous with death. Their names are still spoken with dread by those who remember. Nakasero – nicknamed ‘The Butchery,’ located near the President’s Lodge. Its subterranean cells held thousands. Survivors described it as a one-way trip; bodies were removed at night in trucks. Makindye Military Barracks – and the adjoining Malire Barracks, home to Amin’s so-called elite regiment.
The Lubiri site became a major detention and torture centre. Survivor testimony documented by the ICJ describes systematic beatings, electrocution, mutilation, starvation, and psychological torture in which prisoners were forced to watch – or participate in – the execution of fellow detainees. Nile Mansions – and the notorious ‘Pink Building’ beside it – served as another hub of the regime’s terror apparatus. Few who were taken there returned.
Where the bodies went
Because the rate of killing exceeded the regime’s capacity to conceal the dead, bodies were disposed of with shocking casualness. The Nile River at Jinja became a dumping ground. Bodies were thrown into the water above the dam. On several occasions, human remains reportedly clogged the intake pipes of the hydroelectric plant, causing power outages across Kampala. Namanve Forest, on the outskirts of the city, was so notorious that for years after Amin’s fall locals avoided it entirely – because of the smell, and because human remains continued to surface. The SRB drove truckloads of prisoners into its eucalyptus groves for execution.
Kabaka’s Lake, on the Mengo Palace grounds, yielded confirmation after Amin’s fall in 1979: when it was dredged, significant quantities of human remains were found in the silt – consistent with survivor accounts of SRB trucks arriving under cover of darkness. The Rwizi River in Mbarara served as the primary disposal site for victims in western Uganda. Karuma Falls were used for bodies from the north: soldiers would bayonet or shoot prisoners and throw them into the churning water to ensure they were swept away.
Public executions
In February 1973, the regime staged its most elaborate spectacle of state terror. On February 10, twelve men were executed by firing squad in their home districts – Mbarara, Kabale, Gulu, Mbale, Fort Portal, and Kampala – simultaneously. Prior to the killings, Radio Uganda broadcast an official announcement: the public were to attend. Businesses were closed. Transport was organised to ensure maximum witnesses. The families of the condemned were commanded to stand in the front rows. The shootings were filmed and later broadcast on Uganda Television (UTV).
In Kabale, nearly 3,000 people stood in what Bishop Festo Kivengere – who had prayed with the men before they were shot – described as ‘a deathly, silent terror.’ The crowd was forbidden from crying. The shootings were filmed and broadcast on Uganda Television. A military spokesman declared the footage a ‘real lesson’ for the people of Uganda. One of the 12 was James Karambuzi, shot at Kabale Municipal Stadium. His wife and ten children were commanded to attend. In a rare and haunting act of defiance, Karambuzi and his colleagues reportedly smiled and waved to the crowd with their handcuffed hands before the shots were fired.
The bodies were not returned to families. They were removed in prison trucks to unknown locations. ‘Perhaps the most tragic case was Sebastino Namirundu, a 20-year-old from Mbale who tried to run when soldiers arrived. His panic was interpreted as guilt. He was executed half-naked in front of thousands, looking, witnesses said, incredibly young and bewildered.’ In a chilling repeat of the 1973 public executions, twelve men were executed at Kampala’s Clock Tower, by firing squad on September 9, 1977, in front of a massive, silent crowd that had been ordered to witness the final moments of those accused in the Operation Mafuta Mingi coup plot.
Government’s response
By late 1972, foreign governments and international organisations were raising alarms. The Amin government’s response was denial, deflection, and performative legality. On 9 January 1973, the government issued a statement attempting to account for the disappearance of 85 prominent people. The ICJ later found it wholly unsatisfactory, noting it failed to address eyewitness accounts of military involvement in nearly every case.
In 1974, under continued international pressure, the government established a Judicial Commission of Inquiry. Its findings were tightly constrained by political reality – it acknowledged abuses in general terms but refused to confront the central question of state responsibility. The ICJ’s independent study, published in Geneva on 4 June 1974, was more direct. It documented the systematic destruction of the rule of law: habeas corpus suspended in practice, military interference in judicial processes, the routine disappearance of persons last seen in state custody. The ICJ instituted its study, it explained, because domestic legal remedies had effectively ceased to function. Courts were intimidated. Lawyers and judges themselves became targets.
The numbers we will never know
The 1974 ICJ report estimated between 25,000 and 50,000 deaths in the first few years alone. The 1977 Amnesty International report placed the total at 300,000. The 1994 Justice Arthur Oder Commission gathered testimony for years but acknowledged that the scale of unrecorded village-level killings made any final tally impossible. The true measure of Uganda’s tragedy is not found in these competing figures. It is found in the silence of thousands of unmarked graves, in names never recorded, in families never told.
Because the regime specialised in the total erasure of its victims – destroying records, silencing witnesses, disposing of bodies in rivers and forests – the exact number of Ugandans who vanished into the long night of the 1970s will remain one of history’s most tragic unknowns. In Part Two tomorrow, read about what the machinery of disappearance did to the families it left behind – the women trapped between wife and widow, the children raised in the shadow of fathers who lived in a place called exile, and a grief that has never been allowed to end.