Idi Amin's 1971 Coup Against Milton Obote

On January 25, 1971, Uganda’s army commander, Major General Idi Amin Dada, seized power while President Milton Obote was attending a Commonwealth summit in Singapore. Troops and military police loyal to Amin secured key positions in Kampala and sealed Entebbe International Airport to block Obote’s return. Amin announced over the radio that the armed forces had taken over “guardianship of the nation,” and within hours the coup was complete.

Amin and Obote had once been close allies. Amin rose quickly through the ranks of the Ugandan army after independence in 1962, becoming its commander by 1966 under Obote’s patronage. By 1971, though, Obote’s government, increasingly authoritarian and unpopular after a shift toward one-party socialist rule, had turned on Amin. He had been demoted and learned he faced imminent arrest on charges of misappropriating army funds, giving him a direct personal motive to strike first. The takeover was initially welcomed by many Ugandans and by Britain, which saw the more pliable Amin as preferable to the increasingly leftist Obote.

That relief did not last. Amin’s eight years in power, from 1971 until his overthrow in 1979, became known for mass killings, expulsions, and erratic brutality, including the 1972 expulsion of roughly 70,000 South Asian residents that gutted the economy. Estimates of the total number of Ugandans killed under his rule vary considerably between sources, from roughly 100,000 to as many as 500,000, and no single figure is considered definitive.

Millions of pages of U.S. government records, including State Department and CIA material, have since been declassified covering this period, and they are often cited, including in the original tweet this article expands on, as evidence of American involvement. What they actually show is more limited: American officials monitored Amin closely and expressed private uncertainty about how to handle him. A State Department Uganda desk officer at the time later recalled that diplomats spent months trying to determine “whether he was as crazy as he appeared to be,” concluding that he was. A 1971 memo from National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger to President Nixon, declassified years later, advised against receiving Amin at the White House after American citizens were killed by his troops. The documents demonstrate close American awareness of Amin’s brutality rather than proof that Washington orchestrated his rise.

Amin’s rule ended in April 1979, after a failed invasion of Tanzania prompted a Tanzanian counter-offensive that drove him from Kampala. He fled first to Libya, then to Saudi Arabia, where he lived in exile until his death in 2003.