Idi Amin

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Idi Amin, peckish Ugandan dictator, was a barbaric monster and also a dad. One son, Jaffar Amin, a colorful character and something of a revisionist, is profiled by Justin Rohrlich in Foreign Policy. An excerpt:

Jaffar, now 48, lives in Kampala with his wife and six kids. A prolific Facebooker, he regularly posts pictures of his family, including his father, along with anecdotes, reminiscences, and the odd complaint about the current state of Uganda.

I’ve always been interested in the private lives of dictators, and a couple of years ago, after a quick search, I landed on Jaffar’s profile. I sent him a friend request, along with a note asking if he’d be willing to share his story with me for an article. I expected a polite “No thanks.” But Jaffar responded right away, agreeing to forward along “generic” answers to questions he has either been asked over the years, or ones he assumed he would be asked.

What he sent was anything but generic. One afternoon in August 2013, I looked at my inbox to find dozens and dozens of pages littered with almost stream-of-consciousness reminiscences about life with his father. It took a while to make sense of it all — some of it seemed to be notes for a future book, some of it taken from a talk Jaffar had given, and some of it consisted of large, disjointed blocks of text pasted directly into the email.

Jaffar doesn’t come off as some sort of evil dictator’s demon spawn, but rather as an everyday guy living in the suburbs. He spent 11 years working as a manager for DHL. These days, he picks up commercial voiceover gigs when he can — his dulcet tones have urged people to visit the Kampala showroom of a South Korean furniture company called Hwansung, to tune in to 88.2 FM, and to fly Qatar Airways.

Though I wouldn’t describe the two of us as “friends,” Jaffar and I have spoken on the phone a handful of times to discuss our possible collaboration. After about a year, Jaffar’s emails started coming with signoffs like, “God bless you and your family.” He recently wrote to me, “I owe you a wealth of thanks for bringing out the human side of my parent.”

At the same time, Jaffar has also obviously grown somewhat weary of discussing the past. Early on, when I asked one too many follow-up questions, Jaffar replied, “You could be a run-of-the-mill blogger for all I [know], for I have always only given Interviews to the Established Media Houses so consider this my last correspondence with you[,] take the gift or simply trash it or bin it as we Anglophones are fond of expressing.”

It was far from our last exchange.•

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The bill's designer wisely made Amin appear slimmer than he really was.

I got my hands on a Ugandan ten-shilling note that bears a portrait of Idi Amin. There’s no date marking, but I think it’s from 1973. That was two years after the erstwhile boxer and soldier had seized power of the country while President Obote was abroad. Soon, Amin had declared himself ruler for life.

For a long time, the world either didn’t know or didn’t care to know of the atrocities that Amin was committing inside the African nation. He was considered a clown, a buffoon, but manageable. But before his reign of terror ended, as many as 500,000 Ugandans had been brutally and senselessly murdered for imagined slights.  

Beneath his remarkable hubris and deep-seated paranoia, Amin was also an undiluted sociopath. He reputedly cannibalized his enemies and shared their flesh with crocodiles. Who knows if that’s true, but the body count was very real. There are quite a number of books and films about the dictator who died in 2003 while in exile in Saudi Arabia, but this brief series of clips of Amin bragging, grinning, laughing and lecturing is chilling enough. 


  

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Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: With the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., one was just as bad as the other. Both contributed to the destruction of world values. They talked about prosperity and wealth, but they killed more than 120 million individuals in the last 120 years and made many more homeless and injured.

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Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: Today many of our cities enjoy electricity, schools, health, activities in villages that were on the verge of destruction. I do not want to offer figures and statistics; you are all aware of them.

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Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: I want to proudly announce that in the next few days we will have celebrations for electricity being transferred to all villages with more than 20 households.

Decoder: 1934, here we come!

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Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: With no doubt, the future belongs to the Iranian nation. Its enemies have no chance for victory.

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Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: Liberalism is trying to turn all nations into laborers to fill the pockets of capitalists. They want to make a modern slavery.

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Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: The Allies’ victory in WWII was due to plundering the energy resources of the Middle East.

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Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: They want us to be kept weak and under the domination of atrocious dictators.

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Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: We will never allow the West to dominate this region.

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Decoder: And when they finally do, I am so totally fucked.

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