di Amin, whose eight year reign of terror in Uganda encompassed widescale killing, torture and dispossession of multitudes and left the country pauperized, died today at a hospital here. He was believed to be 80.
Mr. Amin died at King Faisal Specialist hospital, where he had been hospitalized on life-support systems since July 18, a hospital official said this morning. He was in a coma and suffering from high blood pressure when he was admitted to the hospital. Later, hospital staff said, he suffered kidney failure.
For much of the 1970's, the beefy, sadistic and telegenic despot had revelled in the spotlight of world attention as he flaunted his tyranical powers, hurled outlandish insults at world leaders, and staged pompous displays of majesty.
By contrast, his last 24 years were spent in enforced isolation as Saudi Arabian authorities made sure he maintained a low profile after he, his four wives and more than 30 children, fled to their country just ahead of an invading force of Ugandan exiles and Tanzanian troops that overthrew his regime. Mr. Amin, a convert to Islam, had first fled to Libya, then Iraq, before finding haven in Saudi Arabia in 1979. From time to time foreign visitors would see him shopping in supermarkets here, incongruously keeping his thoughts to himself.
By the time he had escaped with his life, the devastation he had wreaked lay fully exposed in the scarred ruins of Uganda, a rich and lush land that Winston Churchill once had called the pearl of Africa. If the exact numbers of those killed at his behest and instigation remained elusive, the toll tabulated by by exiles and international human rights groups is usually cited in encyclopedias as close to 300,000 victims out of a total population of 12 million.
Those murdered were mostly anonymous people, farmers, students, clerks, and shopkeepers who were shot or forced to bludgeon each other to death by members of the three death squads that included the chillingly and hypocritically named Public Safety Unit and the State Research Bureau. Along with the third organ of terror, the military police, these forces numbering some 18,000 men largely recruited from Mr. Amin's home region, often targetted their victims because they wanted their money, cars, houses or women - or because the tribal groups they belonged to were designated for humiliation.
There were also many hundreds among the dead, whose names were very well known, prominent men and women whose killings were public affairs carried out in ways that were meant to attract attention, to cow and terrorize the living and to convey the message that it was, in fact, Mr. Amin who wanted them killed. They included former and serving cabinet ministers, supreme court judges, diplomats, university rectors, educators, prominent Roman Catholic and Anglican clergy, hospital directors, surgeons, bankers, tribal leaders and business executives. In addition to Ugandans, the dead also included some foreigners, among them, Dora Bloch, a 73-year-old Israeli woman who was dragged from a Kampala hospital and killed in 1976 after Israeli commandoes raided Entebbe Airport to rescue 100 other Israelis who along with her had been taken as hostages from a hijacked Air France plane.
Before the killings reached their frenzied peak, Mr. Amin had already attained an international reputation for impulsive and draconian rule by his expulsion in 1972 of 40,000 Ugandan residents of Asian origin. These people, most of them third-generation descendents of workers brought by the British from the Indian subcontinent to build a railroad, had played a dominent role in the country's commercial and industrial life.
``If they do not leave they will find themselves sitting on the fire,'' Mr.Amin warned, setting a three-month deadline by which Britain was forced to accept the so-called Ugandan Asians. They fled leaving behind businesses, homes and personal possessions that were then doled out to the president's favorites.
