Americans of advanced middle age will remember the late ’60s and ’70s as a time of worldwide social upheaval. Airplane highjackings and bombings were beginning to seem as commonplace as coffee in the morning. You embarked for Paris in the morning and, before you could say toute-de-suite, you’d land in Libya or some other terrorist destination a few hours later. A favored target of fanatical left-wing terrorists was the commercial jet.
Highjackings had reached epidemic proportions as airline security organizations shored up their ranks and tightened their procedures. But just as electricity follows the path of least resistance, so did the highjacking establishment when lax security in Athens Greece permitted terrorists to seize Air France flight 139. The plane, its crew, and full compliment of passengers was forced to fly first to Libya and then to Entebbe Airport which, as nobody now or then knew, was in Uganda.
If people had not heard of Entebbe, they would certainly have heard of Idi Amin (Dada), the surrealistic, maladroit dictator of Uganda, who assisted the terrorists. Idi Amin’s exploits had captivated the press and the public imagination in a way that few people could. Idi was said to have a taste for human flesh. Idi bought his nine year old son a real airplane and would let the kid fly it around the palace. Idi craved attention and was desperate for acclaim and it didn’t matter to him a whit how he got it.
His litany of self-bestowed titles wouldn’t fit on a hundred gravestones. Amin’s official title was ‘His Excellency President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea, and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular’.
The terrorist highjackers of Air France Flight 139 were left-wing Germans and Palestinian Arabs working together for a “free Palestinian state”. The terrorists had a record of previous kidnappings and murder, and were anxious to focus world wide attentions upon themselves and “the cause”. With the assistance of the Ugandan army, the highjackers released all hostages except for a chosen one hundred, all the Jewish passengers.
In one of the most daring rescue missions in history, the Israeli government sent several teams of commandoes two thousand miles to an African country and an airfield where the terrorists held the hostages at gunpoint and were themselves protected by Ugandan soldiers ringing the airport. The Israeli commando raid on Entebbe was successful, though it involved some loss of life.
As a commando raid, it has few parallels in history. Most of the terrorists were killed, and twenty soldiers of Idi Amin’s Army met their end. Only one of the commandos was killed, that man the brother of former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In retaliation for the deaths of his soldiers, Amin ordered the murder of Dora Bloch, a 75 year old hostage who had been taken to a Ugandan hospital by Amin’s people. There were five hostages struck by flying bullets, two of whom died.
Currently, there is a film about Idi Amin and it’s called The Last King of Scotland. There are problems with seeing it, and one of them is distribution. A Wall Street Journal story a few days ago revealed the difficulties the film was having in distribution, partly due to its intentionally slow ‘rollout’. Because the film was a project of Fox Searchlight, a smaller division within a huge conglomerate of film production and marketing, it won’t be until January of 2007 that most audiences will be able to see the film. It’s playing only in the major markets like New York and LA.
There’s no need for the denizens of small towns to be incensed-it’s purely a marketing decision, and the ‘re-release’ in early 2007 is hoping to take advantage of word-of-mouth, of buzz, and spin and perhaps the nomination of Forrest Whittaker for an Oscar. Just about everyone who has seen or reviewed the film agrees that Whittaker’s performance was mercurial and as unpredictable as Amin himself. Whittaker’s a major figure in film but it’s mostly due to smaller roles than the one he landed with this portrayal of the pathological Idi Amin. His short early performance of a British soldier about to be murdered by IRA terrorists in the film The Crying Game was convincing enough for me of Whittaker’s emotional depth and range.
A second and more difficult problem is that the storyline is revealed through the eyes of a young Scottish doctor, a naïf, who lands in the turmoil of Uganda out of a craving for adventure. That is a movie device, a literary license, to make the film more palatable to the mass media fans who flock to homogenized entertainment content, drained of historical accuracy. The sensitivities of the European doctor loom large in the film, making the horrors of a virulent and morbid dictator more palatable (read ‘marketable) to mass audiences drenched in a torrent of jubilant but mindless holiday films.
Amin’s climb to power was as abundant in double cross and treachery as was Saddam Hussein’s, and the death toll of his regime was said to be from 300,000 to 500,000 variously. The prodigious rate at which he tortured and killed his enemies while engaged in a comic public charade showed he was a droll fellow even while engaged in mass murder. He was one of the first African leaders to turn away from the West to embrace the political and Islamist fanatics who lent sympathetic approval to anti-Semitic and anti-Christian elements in the former British colony. Newspapers widely reported Amin’s praise of Adolph Hitler and his extermination plans for the Jews in WWII.
Without seeing The Last King of Scotland, it’s hard to say what image of Idi Amin will emerge, but audiences seeking a truer Amin might wish to view the 1974 documentary by filmmaker Barbet Schroeder. Though Schroeder was obliged to grant final editorial control to the menacing dictator, he was clever and artistic enough to construct an image of Amin which has endured for several decades.
