F. Uganda
If international organizations such as the United Nations were ever going to intervene to stop a genocide in progress, Uganda in the 1970s would have been the ideal spot. Ugandan dictator Idi Amin was a world pariah with no powerful allies. He was generally regarded as insane (perhaps from advanced venereal disease) and his army was, by world power standards, pitiful. [78] From 1990 to 1991, the United States assembled and led a worldwide coalition which easily drove Iraqi conquerors out of Kuwait. [79] A multinational coalition conquest of Uganda would have been all the easier, since Idi Amin's army was tiny compared to Saddam Hussein's war machine. [80] Kuwait, however, was a strategic oil resource, [81] while Uganda had few resources other than the Ugandan people who were being slaughtered by their government. Although the existence of the Ugandan genocide was well-established as it was being perpetrated, the possibility of a multinational campaign to oust Idi Amin was never even a topic for serious discussion, whereas discussion about the reconquest of Kuwait began days after Iraqi tanks entered Kuwait. [82]
Not once in this century has one nation or a coalition of nations launched a military action to stop a genocide in progress. It is true that wars have sometimes led to a genocidal regime being deposed; Tanzania ousted Amin, and the Allies defeated Hitler. But Tanzania and the Allies acted only because their territory had been invaded, not because they were moved to action by reports of the murders within Uganda or within Nazi Germany.
Notably, even when the Allies were engaged in all-out war against Hitler, they refused to take military action against the extermination camps, such as by bombing the rail lines that led to them. [83] As historian Raul Hilberg writes, "The Allied nations who were at war with Germany did not come to the aid of Germany's victims. The Jews of Europe had no allies. In its gravest hour Jewry stood alone, and the realization of that desertion came as a shock to Jewish leaders all over the world." [84] The people of Uganda likewise stood alone from 1971 to 1979, when Idi Amin's dictatorship killed about 300,000 people, roughly 2.3% of the total population. [85]
The authors began their study of Ugandan gun laws with a 1955 statute promulgated by the British imperial government, although this gun control law may not have been Uganda's first. [86] Although the British/Ugandan law had the length and complexity typical of modern statutes, the essence was a provision requiring that a person could only possess a firearm if he had a permit, and the permit would be granted by the police only upon a discretionary finding regarding the applicant's "fitness" to possess a firearm. [87]
Uganda achieved independence in 1962, [88] keeping the structure of the Colonial gun laws intact. In 1966, Milton Obote assumed dictatorial powers. In 1969, Obote tightened the gun laws, imposing a nationwide ban on firearms and ammunition possession, making exceptions only for government officials and for persons granted an exemption by the government. [89] In 1970, the 1955 British gun law was recodified, with some minor changes. [90]
Idi Amin took power in 1971, and the mass murders began shortly thereafter. The nation's large Asian population was expelled (not murdered), and in the process the Ugandan government seized approximately a billion dollars' worth of the Asians' property. [91] The main targets of the Ugandan government's mass murders were members of tribes whom Amin perceived as a threat to his power. [92] Because Uganda had far less of an infrastructure than Nazi Germany, the murders were perpetrated mostly by bands of soldiers who shot their victims, rather than through extermination camps. [93]
Amin's army numbered about 25,000 and his secret police--the "State Research Bureau"--only 3,000. [94] The army was ill-disciplined and incompetent, and collapsed not long after Amin began his ill-advised war against Tanzania in late 1978. [95] How could such a small and pathetic army get away with mass murder against a nation of thirteen million people? Is it possible that a disarmed Ugandan population was easier to murder than an armed one?
Idi Amin, by the way, now lives in Saudi Arabia. [96] As far as I know, there has been no effort to extradite him and put him on trial for murder. With the exceptions of the rulers of the nations that lost World War II, none of the perpetrators of genocide in the 20th century have been prosecuted for crimes against humanity.