Amin's 'insurgent' son returns

2003-10-28 18:24

Kampala - Taban Amin, the eldest son of the late Ugandan dictator Idi Amin whom Kampala has accused of heading an armed rebel group, returned to the Ugandan capital this week for the first time since his father's 1979 outster, government officials said on Tuesday.

"I can confirm that Taban Amin returned yesterday (Monday)," Attorney General Francis Ayume said by telephone, declining to elaborate.

"My work was to convince him to come back and we are giving him security like any other Ugandan," said Colonel Erry Kayanja, director general of the Internal Security Organisation.

Amin had been living in the Ugandan embassy building in Kinshasa since 1998, the year Uganda sent troops into the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to back armed efforts to topple then DRC president Laurent Kabila.

Uganda's government-owned New Vision newspaper reported this week that government officials in Kinshasa had evicted Amin from the Ugandan chancery.

Military officials in Kampala have repeatedly accused him of planning attacks against Uganda from the eastern DRC's Semliki valley, which is adjacent to Uganda's western frontier.

But Kayanja said that he did not actually "fire any bullets against Uganda."

Idi Amin led a brutal regime in Uganda from January 1971, when he came to power in a coup, until 1979, when he was toppled by Tanzanian forces allied to armed Ugandan exiles.

He died on August 16 this year in Saudi Arabia.

Despite the atrocities of Amin's regime, during which hundreds of thousands of people were killed, his death prompted a surprising outpouring of sympathy from ordinary Ugandans.

- AFP