Idi Amin's Military Coup in Uganda
Idi Amin seized power in Uganda on 25 January 1971, while President Milton Obote was out of the country attending a Commonwealth summit in Singapore. Amin, who had risen from a poor Muslim background in the West Nile region to become a senior army officer, acted with the support of ethnic Kakwa and Nubian units in the military who feared Obote's growing favouritism toward his own Acholi and Langi groups. Israel and Britain, who had been cultivating Amin as an alternative to Obote's drift toward Palestinian and Soviet contacts, provided tacit support for the coup. Amin's eight-year rule (1971-1979) followed a pattern common to military dictatorships without institutional underpinning: initial popular support, rapidly mounting political violence to suppress actual and perceived rivals, economic mismanagement, and eventual military collapse. He expelled Uganda's approximately 60,000 Asian residents in 1972, destroyed the commercial economy, executed an estimated 100,000-500,000 people through his security apparatus, and initiated a border war with Tanzania that led to his overthrow by a Tanzanian military force in April 1979.
- Year: 1971 CE
- Category: Military
