Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 396 - The Kagera War: Part 2

Episode Date: January 12, 2026

SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON AND GET PART 3 RIGHT NOW https://www.patreon.com/posts/early-episode-3-147978927 Uganda goes to war after a bar fight sparks an invasion led by a man so crazy his men nicknamed him after the local insane asylum. PART 2/4

Hey everyone, it's Joe. If you like what we do here on the show, consider supporting us on Patreon. Just $5 a month gets you access to our entire bonus episode catalog, as well as every regular episode, one full week early. Access to all of our side series that are currently ongoing and our back catalog of those as well. Gets you e-books, audio books, first dibs on live show tickets and merchandise when they're available, and also gets you access to our Discord, which is turned into a lovely little community. So go to patreon.com slash lions led by donkeys and join the Legion of the Old Crow today. Hello and welcome to the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast union organization meeting.

Let the records show that with me today are the elected representatives of the armed men who sleep on Edia means couch. gentlemen, would you say that Mr. Amin has provided you with the safe working environment? No. I've been advised tonight to answer this from my council. My council says there's a huge guy who's going to pummel me. So I'm pleading the whateverth. We have amendments in Uganda, right? I believe Mr. Amin has taken those away.

I believe that there has been a absolute substandard provision of, um, uh, lodgings and board by Mr. Amin. I mean, like you can't invite people into your house and provide them with a couch, but expect them to sleep without blankets or cushions. Sure, he provided us with a few sheets of a newspaper as a form of a blanketure, but I believe that his provisions are not up to scratch in comparison with his promises that he gave to us the armed couch surfers. I actually, prior to this, used Western Union Telegram couch surfing to travel

around North Africa and I had much better accommodations with MoMAGaddafi. I found that it was actually quite inviting and my needs were taken care of. I have, I'm not really sure what my politics are now. They're kind of all over the place. But I will say that I'm pretty sure Mr. Ramin is aware of the standard. And I personally was told that if I needed a blanket, I should just wait until he found someone to skin alive and I could wear their skin. And I have to be honest with you, I don't think either of those situations is pleasing. All right, let's move on to our next question here. Let me look over the paperwork.

It says here in your pay scale that you're mostly paid in raw gold and ivory. Does this include a pension program or healthcare? Are you paid any kind of dividends? Not at present. What we have been provided with is a rudimentary form of dental care. I had what I can best describe as an outchy in one of my back molars. Mr. Rameen, in his own words, generously extracted the tooth with pliers and added

to a string necklace. While it did in the immediate term, relieve the pain caused by the out of said tooth, he did not provide any sort of ivory or gold replacement. And I am at present engaging in an act as I can only describe as gum maxing.

Actually, we did receive information when we first begun our employment that we would have some provisions made for a retirement plan. But I have to be honest, I've never been to Switzerland, so I don't even know if this is a real bank account. And also, Mr. Amin said that he didn't trust the Swiss and he would only bank with Lichtenstein. And I'm not 100% sure that's legal. And how is Mr. Amin responded to your unionization efforts? I can confidently say that Mr. Amin has not been in any way, meanable to our very, very reasonable demands. We have been subject to a series of threats such as large men threatening to grind our bones for his bread and our eyeballs being stolen.

But I'll hand it off to my fellow representative, Mr. Bethay. Mr. Amin said that if we actually pushed forward with unionizing, he said, in 25 years, the Japanese will invent a game about a guy who smashes everything into a big ball and it's going to be based on you. Okay, I'll make sure I file this paperwork with the Ugandan office of Catamari Domesi. Thank you, gentlemen. I will make sure that your comments get to the right office and by that I mean Mr. Rameen's desk. Otherwise, I will also be added to the giant ball of scrap. Gentlemen, how are you doing? I'm thinking about Idi Amiens desk in that like because he was so large.

did they have a comically large desk to suit his proportions or did he have a real small desk, much like my IKEA desk in front of me that made him look exponentially larger? It's like the guy at the, that Goku meets after he dies at the giant desk and he's a tiny guy in front of it, I assume that is Edia Amin's desk. I don't know. I think Edia mean would probably have gotten a desk that was proportionate to his size, but I'm interested in what would have been on that desk. Like, what kind of fancy gift paper cutters had he received from Kim Il-sung, Muammar Gaddafi, whoever was running South Yemen, the Saudis, the Israelis,

the Israelis, like, think about what kind of weird flair he would have accrued. And also, what kind of gifts these various countries would have said to themselves, hey, I bet you, Idi Amin would like this? He got like a Newton's cradle that book, it's just made out. of like ball joints from people's legs. Well, also it's like, go figure he was such a Tiabu. If only they had Warhammer figurines, he would have loved that shit. Oh man, games workshop could have fixed him for sure.

Unfortunately, I probably know what was on his desk. And it's stacks of British newspapers because he loved reading British rags, which is kind of great. And to say that you looked at something and thought Edia mean would love this is like the newest insult we've ever developed. the show. Also, I was thinking about he's loved British newspapers and it's like, if you think about how bad they are now, imagine the spectator in the 70s. Like, we made the joke about Seth Putnam, but they were probably actually writing articles entitled Hitler was a sensitive man, but Ediamine

was reading them. Edia mean picks up the sun just for page three. We actually will have to talk about British media in a little bit. Of course. And when we left you last time, Ediamine came to power in a military coup, murdering tribal enemies allied with the outgoing president Milton Abote, and then toward the Western world looking for free weapons, only to get shot down. No pun intended. He was growing paranoid of Tanzanian invasions, all while the two countries were already shooting at one another on the contested border. Things are, in short, not going great. And this is generally the end of what could be considered the honeymoon phase between Ediamine and the UK, as well as the United States, but the U.S. isn't as entrenched in Uganda as the UK

is for obvious reasons. And Amin was quick to make things worse, which will be a trend. When two Americans traveled to the area where massacres against the Acholi and the Langi soldiers took place, which we talked about in part one, the Americans disappeared, a fate that was to befall hundreds of thousands of people over the next couple years. The weird part is Amin at first tried to tank any investigation into the two men's murder, but then just kind of shrugged, admitted that the army did it, and then paid out his family some blood money,

and thought everything was cool. The U.S. was not pleased with this. Meanwhile, things in the army were actually getting even worse somehow. Remember the numbers from our first episode, after Abate's reforms when he tried to claw control of the army back from Amin, that a full third of Ugandan military members were either Acholi or Langi, which were, of course, Amin's new enemies. Those men had at best been expelled from the military,

and at worst, murdered. Thousands of them had fled over the border knowing that, and a long enough timeline, they're eventually going to get shot. But either way, these people are no longer in the Ugandan military. And the Ugandanization of the military that we talked about on part one

had not been particularly successful because it's hard to be successful in anything when the entire institution you're attempting to reform is foundationally corrupt, but it did make gains in a lot of ways. Thousands of men had been trained in the UK, Israel, and China. Hundreds of them had received something resembling a professional military education. A lot of dudes graduated from Sandhurst. But now, the majority of those people were all gone, exiled, imprisoned, or dead thanks to the

purges. Ediam Eidiam Eid did not want to pursue Chinese warfare with Israeli characteristics. He did keep his picture of Mao Zedong up at his office. though. Hell yeah. So basically that's the one handshake between Idi Amin and the lead singer of the British New Wave Band, Japan. I'll take your word for it, sure. I'm just allowed.

David Silvian, Idi Amin. They probably could find something in common with one another. I feel like if you played synth wave to Ediamine, he would just start punching things, which is mostly how he showed emotions, was by murdering and punching things. They could have defeated Ediamine with a single Rowland 808. Just thinking, if you change,

the lyrics from life in Tokyo to life in Kampala, it would probably work. Life is cruel. That probably works. You know, I'm just thinking there's a lot of opportunities. I mean, back in those days, you had the Rumble in the Jungle, you know, you had Mobuto inviting people to do a big boxing match in Kinshasa. You know, he was so mad at missing out on that too. Amin would have loved to do that. Yeah. Well, can you imagine doing the Rumble in the Jungle? Like, he he'd be it mean pizza mom at all. He probably would have insisted that he got it in the ring and then someone would have to take a dive before they were murdered. Yeah, exactly.

God damn it. But if he let in, you know, synthesizers, you know, Uganda could have had their own version of like William Onyibor who's like forgotten about for decades and then just like cool, trendy people in New York will suddenly discover in 2011. Ugandan soft sell. I don't know many synth bands. I think I just say the only one that I know. I mean, I will say that the song that most people know by soft sell is tainted love. And I feel like if you sing the lyrics, sometimes I feel I need to get away. I need to run away.

That probably tracks with the experience of having Idi Amin be mad at you. That's true. So then Amin began to turn against his once allied tribes from the greater West Nile region, which is where his family's from, like the Luke Barra tribe, where his mother is a member, for example. He turned against them. He turned against the Mottie tribe. He put other people on the chopping block.

Nobody was safe at this point. Cabinet ministers from those groups were not safe from imprisonment or exile. Or in one particular case, the ambassador to the Soviet Union was recalled back to Kampala. And then they found his body floating in the canal the next day. I feel like killing ambassadors. Well, it was his ambassador. It's his ambassador, but still it's like kind of starts to feel like you're going to make people mad?

Like, you know, these are people that have jobs, they have foreign contacts. And all of a sudden, it's like, oh, yeah, everyone knows. It's like getting an invite to the Iraqi embassy in the early 80s. It's like, everyone just comes in. I was like, yeah, you're going to get made into mush. Yeah. You're not, you're not long for this position. Nobody's, no one's collecting their pension here.

Social anxiety, idiom is like, before I say anything, please don't get mad. Don't get mad. I may have killed the ambassador. The Soviet Union didn't seem to care all that much. They were... Yeah, of course the Soviet Union didn't fucking care. As we'll get into, they are Uganda's largest creditor. And murdering the guy that had a close relationship with,

didn't really seem to slow them down much. But to fill all these gaps, Amid quickly went back to work, recruiting new men. Mostly, again, from his own region and tribe. But he also began to draw tribesmen, like we said, like the Kakwa, and other tribes kind of are going over the border into Congo, but especially Sudan.

He recruits people from there as well, which piss off some Ugandans. A lot of men from Amin's own Kakwa tribe are recruited off the street and then immediately promoted to major on day one. And it's important to note that the realities of life for your average Kakwa guy has not changed a lot in the year since independence. So they are still very, very poor. there really is no infrastructure built for them

and so far as like further education a lot of these guys are functionally illiterate and have no standardized education whatsoever and they walk through the door and are just majors now. I feel as though that could be a problem for good order and discipline. Oh boy, is it? You're going to begin to see the foundation of why the actual war that we are going to talk about goes so badly for Uganda.

This seemingly overnight reform, if you want to call it a reform, had horrible effects on an already struggling military. Any hint of professionalism, which you could argue the education that the Ugandan military was getting before this was helping build? Because it wasn't really there before. It was now gone.

Replacing it was mostly just a roving gang with uniforms, guns, and the idea that since the general was also the president, and then they could do pretty much whatever they wanted. And they were right. The Ugandan military was already turning in. inwards to destroy what Ediamine considered political enemies. But they were also victimizing just about anybody they felt like it. Or if that person just happened to have something they wanted to steal.

They were a gang operating in a weird feudal type situation with commanders of a region being like, no, my gang's in control of this. And they mean like their battalion. And they're all stealing from everybody. And this was done as an official policy with the soldiers stealing. anything of worth, splitting it with their officers, who in turn split it with their officers, all the way up to a mean personally, who then used stolen money and, of course, a staggering high level of loans to buy more and more weapons, even though he had been refused more

modern stuff that he wanted, like the Harrier Jump Jets, for example. He didn't care that people were selling him what he knew were hand-me-downs. for example, he was buying World War II era surplus Sherman tanks from the United States in the 1970s. He just wanted stuff. He's just a vintage enthusiast, you know?

He's logging on to eBay, trying to find great finds, using like weird search terms to try and get the best deal. Buying my Sherman tank off of Vinted, hoping it's the right size. It still comes packaged in like a test coat. The fucking delivery driver's like, yeah, sorry, I couldn't deliver it. I'll be back

like 74 days when it comes back around. I have to send your package to the Belfast fucking Royal Mail Black site. The guy who sold him, the tank is complaining that he hasn't checked that everything is okay. So Vind will release his money. He borrowed more and more money to go on a military construction spree. I mean, famously, this is how Antebe is built by the Israelis. Hence why they had the blueprints for when they conducted the Antebbe raid because it is really construction firm built it. He builds other things as well. However, while he's doing this, virtually every other part

of the Ugandan economy, namely their main exports, cotton and coffee, completely collapse. Within the first year, Amin had borrowed so much money from the IMF that they cut him off, which is impressive for the IMF to do. But the main reason why they did it is he was not trying to pay back any loans and he was using IMF money on weapons. Which you're not allowed to do. He also wasn't paying back any loans. Anybody gave him like any states like the UK brands or the Soviets. To the point that the Soviets kind of had to keep setting letters like, hey, like, come on, man.

Like throw me an extra $5. They'll make me come over there and run your shit. He's just like the TV license protesters in the UK is like, what are you going to do? You can't come here. You can't come into my house and take my shit. What are you going to do? E. Do you mean asking if he's being. detained. That implies the existence of sovereign citizen, Edie Amin.

That is a fringed flag. This is not an admiralty court. The Ugandan economy and normal governmental administration was running out of money so fast that they literally did not have enough money to manage the day-to-day functions of the government, which honestly probably didn't hurt the functioning of the government any more than Edie Amin himself already did. The reason because of this is he was requiring virtually any government function from the smallest decision-making process by a nameless faceless civil servant in some far-flung rural region to be sent to Kampala so he could personally authorize it. He did not understand or believe in the concept of a civil service or a government. He was running it like a fiefdom.

Everything must pass through him. And he just wasn't doing that either, not that any one man could ever possibly keep up with that. So in the end, the Ugandan government functionally stopped working. And this is where the expulsion of Uganda's South Asian population comes in. As the economy craters, Amin decided to put the blame on Uganda's various problems on the South Asian population, who had already been dealing with years of government-driven racist propaganda. The expulsion of Uganda's South Asians wasn't even the first mass expulsion that Amin had on. undertaken, but it was definitely the most damaging to the country as a whole. The goal, at least according to him, was to get rid of people he saw as outsiders who were benefiting from

colonial wealth given to them as British subjects who had been brought in to oppress the native Ugandans. And now that he was getting rid of them, tens of thousands of people, their wealth, their businesses, and their careers would then all be redistributed to Black Ugandan. Of course, this didn't happen. There was no way to replace them. As oftentimes happens, there was, he did a brain drain at gunpoint, is the best way to describe it. And of course, rather than having these businesses redistributed to competent people, which certainly did exist at some capacity, it was mostly just picked apart by the military and stolen because the military is everything and controls everything. really, you know, setting yourself up for a successful country by completely dismantling any sort of administrative systems that have been left behind by, you know, at the end of colonialism, dismantling all business. And just simply asking the question, what if a country was run single-handedly by a big guy?

We brought in our biggest lad to run everything. This is just kind of like Ugandan year zero in a way. Like, we're going to start all the way over. We can't go slowly. you know? Big ladocracy, I feel like, would almost be a successful, like, political sea change in Britain. It's like, just get the biggest lad. And I think people would vote for it. It would certainly benefit me personally, I think. Instead, what happened was he further torpedoed Uganda's economy in a way that arguably it has never recovered from till this day. He created a massive brain drain, like I said, at gunpoint. And there was the bad international PR that comes with being a guy who expels tens of thousands of people from their homes. Back when that mattered, I should point out, that doesn't matter anymore, but depending on who you are. Specifically, the case of Amin status as a leader in Africa, it wasn't really helping his

relations with his neighbors either, who he desperately was trying to win over all while he was shooting at one of them. His relations with the rest of Africa as a whole were quite bad, owing to the fact of who he was when he came to power, and the fact that as a black African Muslim leader, He kept supporting South Africa and actively worked against his fellow Muslims in Sudan on behalf of Israel and his proxies. So he now was realizing he was kind of burning the candle at both ends. And the UK in general, and this turns into something of a popular narrative, likes to frame Amin as something of an idiot or is a big dumb guy. But he's really not. For the kind of guy that he is, that being a military man with very little formal education, he's quite deft at what he pulls off next.

and that is, well, I've alienated the West. What can I do now? Well, I couldn't reject them before they reject me. It's doing BPD shit. I love it. BPD, Ediam, I mean. He comes to the conclusion that, of course, he's not going to stop everything that he's doing. He never does.

And it was only a matter of time before the UK cuts off relations, the U.S. cuts relations, all this stuff. And by extension, this would eventually lead to the Israelis leaving him behind too. So he's going to beat him to the punch. He's going to reject the West. He's going to publicly disavow Israel. And not only with the shore up African support, but that of the Gulf states, the Soviet Union, and Libya, as he swigs hard for that Cold War game, you know?

It's really worth pointing out. So for those who don't know, Uganda is surrounded on all sides by Kenya, Congo, which was then called Zaire at the time, Tanzania in the south, Rwanda. This is a very tumultuous time in East Africa at this point. So he's like, look, play the fool act crazy. Maybe people won't notice that I'm killing everyone. That's kind of what it came down to.

It's like the British press wasn't really on his ass yet. That's coming. But he, I think, kind of correctly realizes the only way he's going to survive is if he throws his lot in with most of his neighbors. Not Tanzania, exactly, because that's why the Soviets want to support Uganda and would eventually become their number one creditor. Because he's not a leftist at all. He never really even pretends like Abate does and does again at some point. Instead, China is heavily involved in Tanzania.

So, of course, the Soviet Union wants to counter the growing Chinese influence there by supporting Uganda. And that does benefit Edie mean. He gets more support from the USSR than anyone else up until this point. And obviously, in February of 1972, he flies the Libya to meet with Omar Gaddafi for the first time. When he returns, he's suddenly giving vicious anti-Israeli speeches seemingly out of nowhere and begins to establish professional working relationships with the PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, then led by Yasser Arafat. Now, we've gone over Gaddafi's track record, I think quite a bit on the show. So it begs to suggest that Gaddafi offered a mean, massive economic and military support exchange for dumping Israel as an ally.

It should be pointed out that the aid that Libya was going to give Uganda and eventually does was not the aid that other countries give. It's not alone. It's just free money. He's just giving stuff away, no strings attached. Obviously, assuming that he continues to play the good Muslim leader that at the time Gaddafi was. He wasn't doing African nationalism quite yet. He was still doing like the Muslim Legion type shit.

Within weeks of returning, Amin expels Israelis from the country. He also nationalizes British properties. He kicks out Christian missionaries. And in general just begins playing up his new role that Gaddafi would give free money to. Though just because he publicly did all these things did actually mean he believed in any of it. Israeli shell companies kept freely operating in Uganda all the way up until the fall of Edie Amin, with his full knowledge. For example,

Zimex Airlines was the main supplier for the Ugandan national carrier Ugandan Airlines and a go-between for a lot of different weapons suppliers

that not only benefited Edie Amin, but various different rebel groups that the Israelis were supporting. Zymex was chaired by Han Ziegler, who had been a

Mossad agent for the better part of 20 years. There are a few other companies like it, and Amin benefited greatly from this relationship. Like, Mossad adjacent

companies were flying in and out of Entebbe Airport freely. Of course, this changes a little bit when the Intebi rate happens, but Israel is always there. I find this interesting that he, I mean, okay, we didn't have the internet yet. He wasn't getting blown up on Twitter yet. But you'd think that people, the word would get around a little bit. Maybe it did. It feels like the degree of just like public statements, but nothing actually changes. I don't know.

You'd think that he would at least make actual legitimate enemies out of some of these countries? Oh, he absolutely did. By the end, virtually all of his allies, with the exception of Israel, are actively aiding the Tanzanians. And Libya, obviously, Libya plays a huge part in trying to save Yid Amin, but like, he pisses off a lot of people. He just happens to be really useful because East Africa is a pretty important region at the time. You know, to have a guy, it's one of those situations. He's a fucking asshole, but he's our asses. asshole. Yeah, it's a, it benefits you greatly to be in a receipt of income from Africa's greatest pay pig. Jesus Christ. Idi Amid is Finn dombing, Murmar Gaddafi, more jets,

more guns. I'll send you pictures of my giant feet. And Amin and Gaddafi, like, that's a deep romance. Uh, we'll get into that more as the series goes on, but this is more of a very close personal friendship. I don't know how much got you guys know about like the personality. of Muammar Gaddafi, but if there's one thing Gaddafi really loved above like people having insane politics is he loved a big guy and he loved Idi Amin was like a fucking like commanding presence. Yeah, it's one of the reasons why Omar Gaddafi funded one of if not the largest mosques in Africa to be built in Kampala. It's still there. It's named after Gaddafi to this day. When I eventually convert, I will make my pilgrimage there. Are you going to Mecca? Kind of my own

I'm going to the colonel of Omar Gaddafi's mosque and Kampala to revert. Amin was getting more and more paranoid as well, specifically about invasion from Tanzania. Now, this could be an invasion by Tanzanians, but this flip-flop back and forth. Other times it was the British, the Americans, or the Israelis using Tanzania as a stepping off point. But either way, he was always paranoid about Tanzania in one way or another. And here's the weird part. He was kind of right. There was an invasion from Tanzania coming, but it wasn't from the Tanzanians. It wasn't from the United States, the UK, or Israel. Instead, it was by the Front for National Salvation, or Fron NASA, led by Yawari Museveni. This is a group

made up of left-wing Ugandan exiles who had been held up in Tanzania and to lesser extent, Sudan, who had been hitting at it Ugandan forces on the border for months. Tanzania did support them, pretty much openly as Nairi still did not recognize Amin as Uganda's president, though he did keep thrown ass on something of a leash for fear that if he really let them go nuts, the Israelis and the British would support Amid and Amin would straight up invade Tanzania. But things have changed because Amid was now publicly telling all of those people to fuck off. So Amin chased away the support that Nairi was worried about. So he said, fuck yeah, let's go.

and they planned a militia-based invasion of Uganda. The invasion was going to be two-pronged, an overland invasion accompanied by an airborne assault out of a civilian plane onto Anteby airfield. Now, because this series does not end at part two, this obviously does not work. The plan was to storm through Antebe and raid Kampala. The two are very close together.

The entire mission would only include about 1,300. men, which is not that many, but it was hope that this whole thing would be such a surprise that the Ugandan military would just collapse. You'd really hate to be the guy who works at like subway at Antebe Airport. Like, it's just like, man, I'm just trying to heat up this like hardy Italian bread and I keep getting shot. I went to my day job at the Antebe duty free shop and con RPGs straight through the window. I'm just trying to sell Konyak and it's fucking, I keep getting RPGs through the display

They'd have to sweep up the glass. Now, this plan did not work, mostly because someone, we don't know who, leaked the plans to Amin. It's thought it could be anyone at play here. From Kenyan intelligence, southerners in Uganda, who saw something suspicious and hated Abate. So they're like, oh, we have to run and tell Amin because this is obviously a Boet trying to come back to power.

It could have been the UK. It could have been anybody. Some say it was even the Soviet Union to try to keep the two sides, like, out of a war, that hey, if we leak the shit, they'll both calm down. Then if that wasn't bad enough, the rebels themselves worked hard to fuck this up all on their own. For starters, the plan about grabbing a civilian plane and invading? Well, they did get one. But enter Abote, who insisted that he play a role in the invasion, despite the fact that he and Yowri Museveni are not exactly political allies. Nayyere kind of forces this role because he still

sees Abate as the future leader of any Amin free Uganda. Museveni listens because obviously he needs Tanzania in support and Abote selects a friend's son to be the plane's pilot. He was a pilot. However, he had zero experience flying

at DC-9, which is the kind of plane that Tanzania supplied him with. So, the plane takes off from Daras Salam Airport in route to Kilimanjaro Airport to pick up this commando team that's meant to be landing at Antebe Airport. He flies the whole way with the landing gear down.

And he's unsure as to why he has a hard time controlling the plane and almost crashing. But he doesn't crash the plane. At least not until he tries the land. He lands way too hard and way too fast blowing at all the tires on the landing gear, grounding the plane and ending the airport invasion before it even began.

Fucking hell. The ground invasion continues anyway, but it's so rushed that the Tanzanians didn't even even have enough time to supply all the rebels with guns. So there's just a bunch of lads packed into civilian cars and trucks trying to get over the border. They create a traffic jam, which then turns into like a 50 car pile up on the road.

So their military campaign turns into a cluster fuck. That scene from Blues Brothers with all the police cars. Yeah, all of the exiles driving the cars have the same AI driving as the guy's GTA. just flying through the air on a thousand speed this completely boggs down the invasion gives him mean enough time to move his men into place and kill hundreds of rebels

because he sends tanks because he has a lot of them and the rebels are not outfitted at all to fight tanks despite the fact that everybody knew Edia mean had a lot of tanks big oversight invasion fails Edia mean one everyone else zero

Idiot means accidentally putting up dubs. Like, people have to help him, and then he takes all the credit for it. I mean, this would it have worked if Abate's kid's friend actually do how to fly a plane? Maybe. Hard to say. I mean, they did try to take over Uganda with less than a division, which seems that why. Also, no heavy weapons or anti-arbor or artillery, which seems not like a great plan. I don't know.

As a result of the failure, Amin once again begins purging a boat. a loyalist from the government and military, who at this point are mostly imaginary. He's killed or exiled most of them already. Nayyere, pretty embarrassed by this whole thing, agrees to sit down for a treaty meeting between him and Ediamine chaired by Syed Baer, the dictator of Somalia, and noted Hitler mustache haver. Also, weirdly enough, Julius Neyere at this point, also Hitler mustache. So they have a majority at the table at this point.

very obviously not a political mustache in this context, but it's weird that there's two of them. Now, they eventually agreed to the Mogadishu Accords, which creates something of a DMZ along the Tanzania and Ugandan border. Though only Tanzania holds to the agreement and pulls their soldiers several miles back. The agreement doesn't really solve any of the underlying issues at play here. Naire still supports Abate as both head of state and an insurgent leader. He also obviously supports every other. militia group floating ground in Tanzania at this point. And Amin still wants to take over the Kigara Salient. And he also occasionally talks about toppling Nairai in general. It depends on what day

you catch Amin on what his war against Tanzania really means. The shooting didn't even really stop at the border, though this time it's almost entirely exile militias rather than the Tanzanian military doing the shooting. And this is where we get to the period of, I guess you could consider it, Ediamine doing all the shit people have heard of. For example, in 1973, the UK is going through a pretty bad recession, famously so. So as like a sarcastic fuck you to the UK for blowing him off, he creates the Save Britain Fund. This is a fake aid organization which Ediamine solicits Ugandan donations to give to the British in need. He steals all the money. He doesn't actually give any of it away.

I mean, that is a very, very funny troll because, yeah, this is right around the time post-oil crisis, the three-day work week and stuff like that in the UK. Like, yeah, stuff's not great economically. Yeah, he does all sorts of shit like this. Like, everybody's seen the picture of the white people kneeling in front of him. I getting carried around in a sedan chair. This is where Amin is really fucking with the British. He calls himself the last king of Scotland, things of that nature. Sometimes, look, you got to respect game.

Like that is top level posting, but you know, unfortunately it is Ede Amin. Yeah, I don't want to hand it to Eid Amin, but he was a top level troll to the British. Game recognized game. And he did this to spite the British government specifically to make them look bad. But what he really does is actually piss off the British media, which he consumes daily. Remember how I talked about he was getting those whiskey runs from Stansted Airport to Kampala full of whiskey and shit? He's also getting British newspapers with it. So he's reading everything they're saying about him,

which at this point went from being very pro-Amin to being kind of sort of starting to talk about the fucked up shit he was doing. And then he creates the Save Britain Fund and all of the British newspapers rapidly turned against him. They start talking about all the terror and violence he was doing, which make him even matter. Yeah, stuff like that. The only man that I know who hates Britain as much as Edia mean is

you night. I mean, fine, you know what? Like you said, game recognized game. Edie Amin also started off as a Tiavo. Well, I mean, I had the slight excuse of the fact that my mom is from the United Kingdom, but having lived there as an adult, I realize

that the easiest way to disabuse yourself of being an anglophile is to live in Britain and experience what it's like. Yeah, Amin only had to go there once. But also I would imagine, too, it's like we're talking about the early 70s. You piss off the British media. They'll start, they'll get their best political cartoonists on it. Can you imagine how racist those cartoons must have been?

You can Google it. They're real bad. Yeah. They look an awful lot like the shit that you showed me at the live show. Fucking A Wyatt Man and stuff like that. Like the white nationalist cartoons. I mean like also your mom may have been British. Eid mean technically born in the empire. So. Yeah, there you have it. And he was the last king of Scotland. Yeah. Yeah, we recognize this claim weirdly enough. I guess I'm the first king of Switzerland then. Well, he claims Scotland, which means technically you can claim Wales or England. Oh, it's the worst part.

I mean, Wales less so. Tom obviously gets Northern Ireland. Yeah. Can I work for Mara Gdafi instead, please? Well, you're a little late to that party. So biographers and historians generally think Amin's response to British media that being trolling them

had less to do with geopolitics and more to do with Amin being legitimately upset that the British didn't like. like him. Like, people have equated this to being a kind of jilted lover because he was still very much in love with the British. He wore his British uniform constantly. He still wanted to form his military, like how he was trained. He wanted to be friends with the British without changing what he's doing, of course, and stopping pissing them off in various ways. But yeah, he kind of reacts as, I don't know, someone who's like really obsessed with a place and go, like,

those people, have you ever heard of Paris syndrome? They're like obsessed with Paris. They finally go there, realize it sucks. So they get really, really like depressed. Well, yeah, it's basically that Paris isn't this postcard paradise. It's a city of like 10 million people. Yeah. And the, the postcard attraction stuff is there, but also like, it's a big. So we're the French that's crowded. And yeah, I mean, whatever, you know, I Paris is nice, but Paris is like, if you're If you haven't been to New York, for example, like, you're not necessarily prepared for a place. I'm what's better now, but it's like as just old and beat up and dirty and just graffiti everywhere. And like, yeah, it's not, it's not as, it's like, I don't know if you ever, I've never been to Greece, but if you do Google Street View Athens, if you've never been to Athens, I've never been.

Do a Google Street View and square what Athens looks like in real life with your mental concept of what you think Greece is like. Someone should show this to Lord Byron. I know exactly. It's like, Lord Byron, I hate to break it to you, but not only do you, Do they not speak ancient Greek? They have this thing called a ductless mini split air conditioner. They put it on every building. So, like, that's kind of why Amin reacts. He doesn't really get depressed because he's a very angry man.

He reacts by getting very, very angry. And he finally pisses off the British government through trolling the press to the point that they cut his whiskey runs to Stansett Airport. So he doesn't get his palate full of booze anymore. God damn. But at the same time. time, Amin finally finds his real supporters as the Soviet Union and allied countries

begin to lavish him with all of the shit he previously wanted from the Israelis and the Brits. The Soviets dumped unending military and economic support at him without really worrying about him paying him back. Like, yeah, it would have been nice if he paid off some of his loans, but they weren't too upset what he just

constantly threw them in the trash. And East Germany helped him reform the intelligence services from the pro-Aboate GSU of old to create effectively the Ugandan Stasi. Previous to this, Amin had dissolved the GSU

and created something called the State Research Bureau or SRB. They had little to do with intelligence and everything to do with widespread murder and torture. And not to defend East Germany here or anything, but they were already doing that a long time before they started getting training. They just got better at it.

After the training, their murder spree went into overdrive, earning them the local nickname, the state research butchers. They planted a wide array of spies at everyday life, creating a system of, of narcs in case that sounds familiar

to any East German heads out there and use that information to turn other people on their side and more often not start killing them. And unlike virtually any other branch of the Amin government, they kept detailed notes of all the torture, murder, and

so-called disappearances that they were involved in. They were so good at keeping up with this. They even used a computer to help track it all. And that's pretty remarkable when you remember this is happening between 1971 and The computer was also donated by East Germany, but you know what I mean? Like they got really, really good at being awful.

And you're probably wondering, because I know I was, mental picture, what do these SRB guys look like? Well, they dress at a very specific manner, sunglasses, floral paneled shirts, and bell bottoms, all while smoking a massive quantity of weed. So the East German-trained Ugandan hippie death squads. Oh, dude, that's killed dissidents, man. So it's basically like the Ugandan version of like what dudes in the Bronx looked like, like getting beaten up by guys whose idol is Tony Danza

except they're Central African. More than beaten up and getting killed. It's sort of like the dark energy uncle. Like just floral shirts. I bet their sandals were fucking fly as hell. Actually, hold that thought about sandals. It's weirdly that's going to come up. I don't, it's best you don't try to wonder why.

I imagine these guys did disco stew platform shoes with goldfish inside, just punching some guy in the face. It's like, I'm not laughing at the horrible crimes they did, but the whiplash of what they look like to what they're doing is insane. I hate getting murdered by the evil version of the Mac.

Well, it's kind of like rock star games always doing their conceptions of what America's like as viewed by a bunch of Scottish guys making a video game. And this sounds like the Scots making a version of Grand Theft Auto except like what they think like Haitian gangsters would look like. It's the Ugandan version of the Taunton Makuts,

you mean? Yeah, in the 70s. I mean, kind of. They kind of are. Well, I mean, at the end of the day, I think that there's a pretty big overlap in a state-sponsored Death Squad that beats your ass across the world, you know? And at this time, it's like, well, you know, they dressed the part. Bell bottoms were in. Yeah, I think the only ones I can think of that were dressing somewhat differently is like the Khmer Rouge and the KGB.

Like, they have very strict dress codes. Everybody else is just kind of dressing like hippie trash. The SRB headquarters became an industrialized underground torture and murder facility. People had their eyes ripped out with screwdrivers, their genitals brutalized with electricity, and their skin flayed open all before being murdered and having their corpses dumped in the woods outside of Kampala. They really made no attempt to hide these bodies either. They just chucked them out in the open in the woods. So, of course, after describing that, it should come.

as no surprise as the Gulf states embraced Amin as a brother. This included the Saudi king, gifting him a new private jet, making sure it was a much nicer and newer private jet than the Israelis had given him just a year before. Habibi come to Jeddah. Amin probably wishes he lived long enough to see Dubai in its current form. He would love it.

Born too soon to experience Labubu Dubai chocolate matchalatics. Yeah, exactly. For the first time since a meat had taken over, other African states had begun to accept him somewhat. Of course, this does not mean Tanzania or Kenya. They still fucking hate him. That being said, even with all of this help, Uganda was in ruins. All of Uganda's exports were down in the best case scenario, 75%, all while the cost of living for your regular Uganda had gone up by 50.

To try to fix this, Amin set fixed prices for goods, which is good. in theory, but this is Ediamine we're talking about. The cost of everything went up and he set prices so people could afford them as far as he understood it, but Edianemine does not understand economics in any capacity, communist or capitalist

really does not matter. So he forced people to sell goods at such a low price that they could not afford to restock their shelves once they sold out. What year are we kind of talking about now? It's like 75. Fair.

And shop Godkeepers were forced to obey these fixed prices or the SRB would disappear them, so shops were rapidly emptied out and they couldn't be refilled. It was benefiting nobody, so people did what people always do, and that has created a parallel economy system that could actually work for them so they didn't starve to death. This is known as the Megendo, best understood as a black market for everyday life, normally based on smuggling into and out of Kenya or Tanzania. Of course, for a desperately poor country. This meant that while it benefited people who just wanted to live, it hamstring the state even further because obviously nobody's paying any taxes on this shit.

Also, not that that matters, because Edie Amin would just steal the money. It's not like he was doing any projects for anybody's life to get better. This informal parallel smuggling-based economy became a point of obsession for Amin. He wanted to crush it and unleashed the SRB with the main goal of destroying it. Anyone even remotely suspected of smuggling vanished, leading to them killing people who had nothing to do with any of it other than just having food, which was inherently suspicious at this point. But the SRB didn't do a good enough job for a means pleasing, so he hired a close personal friend. Former British Army officer and mercenary Bob Asty's to run a anti-smuggling death squad. Astley's nickname amongst Ugandans was the white rat, in case you're

wondering how much they hated him. Gotta get a bars in there at some point. Astley's is an interesting character. He pops up in the Amin story constantly. A lot of this is Asle's just really likes to lie about his life, but he was involved in a lot of horrible shit. It kind of sounds like he basically was

Jonathan Adema, Avant LaLatra kind of thing. ADM, he was like, that's the kind of person I need in my inner circle. Yeah, Bob Astley's is what would happen if Jonathan and edema actually was legitimate. We talked about the British guy that was acting as a go-between for his smuggling in the last episode. That was also Bob Astley's. Like, he is the one British guy. He is on speed dial at all times. After this, Amin empowered the defense counsel.

This was a body of military men that were unelected, obviously. And he put them over the parliament. And he empowered them to be the new group of people to give Ediamen legal cover for what he was doing. For starters, when you look up Eidiamine, you're going to see a whole bunch of initials after his name, like in the British custom of when you get medals, that most people probably assume those were given to him by the British. They were not.

And those initials and placements were on purpose. Because the defense counsel on Amin's urging gave him all kinds of medals. All of them modeled on British tradition, like the Victory Cross rather than the Victoria Cross. So it could still be abbreviated as VC. See what I mean? he did this at like the military cross, the distinguished military order, all of these things. So when you add those initials to the end of Edemian's name, which he did in his official title,

you could assume that they would be British military orders, which does make sense when you remember that he's completely made up the vast majority of his actual British military record, namely his mysterious non-service during World War II that he liked to talk about all the time. Yeah, I actually got the DSC, the dangerous soup cauldron. Like I said, this is the era of Ediamine doing the shit that people have heard of. Like he bans women from wearing pants or wigs in public. He divorces all of his Christian-born wives and marries do Muslim ones. Shit like that.

Several members of his own cabinet defected run to the UK. Something that will continue as the years go on as he promotes new people to replace his old ones. Because being close to Ediamine ends up being very, very dangerous. The defense council then made him president for life. And then Ediamine created what is on the list of crazy dictator things that he ends up doing is, in my opinion, the wildest. And that is the Keep Uganda Clean Program. The Keep Uganda Clean Program was based on Amin's own personal obsession with hygiene and cleanliness, but also on his own fuck-ups. For example, he expelled the South Asians from the country, and wouldn't you have guessed it, this had several consequences that Ediamine could never see coming.

One of those is getting rid of virtually every qualified mechanic in Uganda. This torpedoed the nation's military, something we will definitely talk about much more in-depth later, but it also meant that every garbage truck in Uganda was non-functioning at this point. This in turn led to trash just piling up everywhere. You'd think that a man so obsessed with British culture would understand the centrality of the bins. He not only expelled the guys who fixed the bins, but also the bin-men. The binmen aren't even hard anymore. They're not bare.

There's no more bin men. People in the UK should think their tradition of strong bin men to edie Amin for sending them all your way. So Amin taking a suggestion from Mabuto Sessi Seco of all people began what was effectively a corvay, forcing the nation's populations to take to the street

and clean up everything by hand. This is also done under threat of violence. So it's like great leap forward but for picking up the trash. Yeah, they're not killing birds or anything, but they have to go pick up all the shit that Ediamine broke. Like, patch up all the drywall he's punched through. You know, you name it. But it went further than that.

This program covered everything, including personal hygiene and how clean you kept your own home. So, of course, a Stasi-like network of informers was formed, all ratting each other out. So, like, hey, Tom, Nate over there, fucking stinks. House isn't clean. and then you're probably wondering what would happen if you get reported to the garbage stasi like this they would bulldoze your home can't have roaches in your crib

if you ain't got a crib I mean I just love this idea it's just like yeah sorry getting your ass beat by the Tontan macoutes because you didn't make your bed it's kind of like what you're described like wow he made the 82nd Airborne imagine if you were like the SRB guy

not the psychos and the torture basement. Like a dude is like a true believer in carrying out these orders. And then like, oh, you have a new assignment. You have to go to every third person, just give of a strong width and see if they've cleaned themselves today. And if not, you got to destroy their house. Oh, and then, of course, after you bulldoze the house, you got to pick it up, which people would then be forced to pick up the wreckage by hand. So it's basically reverse catamary domichy. You have to basically break the house into smaller, smaller pieces instead of putting getting one big ball.

Make big house and delittler house until there's no house anymore. The governor of Kampala went so far on this program as it declared sandals to be naturally unhygienic and then ban them from the city. Now, this is a problem because this is the most common footwear in all of Uganda, namely because it's very cheap and people are obviously quite poor, thanks to Edia Mead and Milton the Bote. It's also hot there. Also, it's hot as fun.

Shit. You might be wondering, again, if they bulldoze your house for not vacuuming. that day or whatever. What do they do if you get caught wearing sandals? Well, you'd get arrested and get the shit kicked out of you and sometimes be forced to literally eat your sandals as punishment.

What? Yep. How do you? Got to eat the motherfucking sandals. You got to eat your kicks, dude. And mind you that the specific type of sandals that they're wearing are mostly made out of like discarded tires.

Oh, man. Yeah. This is disgusting. Like it's, it had that thin, layer of darkly comic, but now it's just disgusting. This is what you hit it with that Udoverse card. They force you to eat your sandals. So you reach into your backpack.

You pull out a nice plate, a fork, a knife, and a bib. You tuck it in. And you just start slicing away sandal steak and eating it and commenting on it. And it's going to fuck them up. Like, they're not going to expect this. Like, you're supposed to hate eating your sandal. Like, jokes on you. I've been standing in terriaki sauce all day.

Jokes on you. My sandals are actually houses that haven't been swept. now you have to clean them up, bitch. But the campaign also covered personal behaviors and status that Ediamine's found as personally disgusting, like being a single woman or unemployed or a sex worker or an alcoholic, despite the fact that Ediamine was an alcoholic himself. I'm just slowly coming to the conclusion that Pierce Morgan should have been born a couple of decades earlier so he could have like co-hosted a show with Ediamine because they just

have the exact same point of view. Nobody should envision a podcast hosted by Pierce Morgan and Ediamine in their head like I'm doing right now. Anyone caught, I don't know, just existing like that, would normally be beaten up by the SRB and the police and then effectively exiled to work on rural farms, most of which were failing, and ironically accidentally inflating the smuggling economy because now they're on the border region and they can just smuggle more stuff into compil. But like there's a problem here is like the reason there's no jobs is because of EDME.

Yes, that is a huge part of the problem. Ediamine is a foundational problem and everything we're talking about. Like this is a cyclical make work program where he's destroying the economy, making people unemployed, then employing people to kidnap the unemployed to then employ them on farms. Yes. I guess it's good if you're a bulldozer operator. The only people who are fucking employed. According to British foreign minister David Owen, it was around this time that the killings began to ramp up, as you can obviously see why. And no amount of British pressure that they put on Amin would stop them. So the British government began openly contemplating murdering Edia mean.

According to Owen, the main thing stopping them was MI6 saying there's probably no way they could do it. Yeah, I mean, to be honest with you, Britain's capacity to do this would have been a bit of a challenge. it would have been a huge embarrassment if they had gotten caught. Chances are good that if they sent British agents and it failed, they'd all be killed publicly. I could see why they'd say that. And also it's like everything you've described about idiot. I mean so far makes him sound incredibly paranoid. And I imagine he had a...

Oh, yeah. I mean, considered like he's, you know, he created a secret police to make you fucking dry your hands with a hand towel if you wash them. I assume that the people who actually protect him are like formed of many dudes in floral print shirts. who can stomp your ass. Like, it's basically two of those guys on each other's shoulders guarding him at all times. And since they got rid of all the binmen, there's no way for MI6 to blend in naturally? Well, yeah, I was like, basically, like, Idi Amin basically, he's like, we already have a security force that can deal, dole out punishments in public. But I have to be extra protected.

So every one of my guards is going to be Vincent Adult Man of three of those guys in a coat and they're going to guard me. And if you're keeping track of the years, you probably know it's coming next. because we've already covered it before on a bonus episode, and that is the raid on Intebe. If you remember from that episode, Kenya actively assisted the Israelis in raiding Entebe Airport to rescue hostages taken by the PFLP. And the lead up to that,

Amin had begun to make random claims over Kenyan territory, similar to what he was doing to Tanzania, which in turn led to Kenya to just shut off Ugandan access to the port of Mombasa, the only real route of Ugandan export to the world at large. Kenya eventually reopened Mombasa to Uganda from other pressure, mainly the British, in exchange for a regular payment that was quite large in Uganda could not afford. But the relations were obviously getting really, really, really bad. And so, therefore, Kenya gives a hand to the Israelis to fuck up Amin shit.

Somewhat ironically, despite Amin hating Kenya, Kenya was benefiting massively from his mistakes. Due to Amin pretty much failing every attempt at Baby's First economics, Kenyan businesses were making a killing off of the Ugandans. This is because you might be wondering where most of the black market stuff came from. Some of it came from Tanzania, but the vast, vast majority of it came from Kenyan businesses. Who could sell shit to Ugandans without paying taxes and have them smuggle it over the border?

They were making out like bandits. It literally benefited everyone in Kenya and fucked up everyone in Uganda. So by being so bad at his job, Edie Amin only benefited all the people he hated. He's become the waiter for his haters at the table of success. That's exactly where my mind went. Imagine you decide that you're going to go spit in the soup to piss off your haters. But unfortunately, your haters are your waiters and they're serving you that same soup.

In the aftermath of the Intebe raid, Ugandan security forces murdered one of the hijacking victims that had been taken to a local hospital. We talked about this on the bonus episode a bit more. They claimed that she was a spy, despite the fact she was just some poor old woman and a British citizen. The British government in turn cut off diplomatic relations with Uganda. But as the years went on, the Brits would hardly be the only Western government that Amin pushed a bit too far. We already talked about how Amin was centralizing religious authority in the country around one specific Islamic organization. He had banned missionaries.

but he hadn't banned the practice of Christianity, though he only did recognize two Christian churches, the Catholics and the Anglicans. They were free to practice as long as they kept to the Bible and didn't say shit about the government, at least for a while, because remember he's very paranoid. As the years went on, that paranoia would only grow. He saw plots against him pretty much anywhere he went,

both real and imagined, because there were some real plots as well. He eventually saw the churches as a breeding ground for rebellion, And so the SRB raided the home of Anglican Archbishop, Janani Luam, arrested him and accused him of working with pro-abote exiles, or just Tanzania. They weren't entirely sure. This led to the rest of the country's bishops to pen an open letter of protest to Amin for the man's treatment, as well as a general complaint about this shit state of Uganda at large. Amin responded in the way Amin responds to pretty much anything like this by murdering the archbishop. But don't worry. he frames it as a car accident.

This frame job was quite shoddy due to the fact that he was killed by being shot several times and then just having his body shoved into a car, yeah. I was about to say, it's like, damn, the bullets that I had installed in my windshield and seemed to kill me. I don't know what happened. I was thinking more on the lines of like,

yeah, it's really tragic what a car can do to a human, especially when the car is parked and stationary in the human just keeps hitting it with their body until they die. I hate accidentally putting a bullet in my mouth instead of a cigarette and then going to light it with the cigarette lighter and shooting myself in the throat. I knew I shouldn't have filled my airbag container

full of 9mm bullets. So in response, Amin bans virtually all Christian activity for being in league with the rebels despite there being zero evidence that any of this was happening. And along with Lewam, Amin ordered the arrest of a couple

of cabinet ministers who happened to be from the same region as him for good measure. This kind of thing, the arresting and vanishing of those close to him. Had been happening ever since he took power, but now it was becoming so commonplace that being in Amin's inner circle was quite possibly the most dangerous position

for a civil servant in Uganda to have. This is the case for one general, Mustafa Adresi. Commissioned as an officer back in 1967, trained by the Israelis and deeply involved with the coup that brought Amin to power. He helped suppress various mutinies against the mean. He actively took part of the general military terror

over the country. He climbed the ranks of the post of Minister of Defense, at which point he courted the loyalty of Ugandan soldiers by paying them bonuses and giving them gifts, which was possible thanks to Adreisi's cartoonish levels of corruption, which was commonplace, of course, for anybody of his rank in Uganda at the time. He also advocated for dismissing the Sudanese that Amin brought in to fill the ranks and advocating they be filled with Ugandans instead. This brought him into conflict with multiple other people that were also loyal to Amin, namely the commander of the Ugandan Marine Corps, which is an interesting branch of the military to have in a landlocked country.

The feud between the two got so heated that at one point they just began fucking shooting at each other. They hit nothing, mind you, but they did have a shootout in the street one day. Adrisi was eventually appointed vice president of Uganda, a kind of promotion that is also a demotion. Because Amin didn't need a vice president. He hadn't had one in six years. But by giving him one, he kind of promoted him up and out of the way.

Upon giving him the position, he has Adresi. to resign as Minister of Defense, which he refused to do. A few months later, while Adrisi was driving with the security detachment, a station wagon slammed into his car and several people piled out of him and began shooting at him. Somehow he survived this. Clearly, Amin was trying to take him out and failed, and Adriacy never publicly blamed him and recovered from his wounds in Egypt, all while Amin denounced him,

stripped him of all of his titles, and blamed him for plotting a coup, which he wasn't. and the aftermath of the assassination attempt, a regiment of soldiers loyal to a Dresi mutinied, fought off all the soldiers sent to crush them, and then fled over the border of Tanzania. So of course, I mean then blamed Tanzania for doing all of this. He loves trying to assassinate people in car accidents.

That was another thing that was happening more and more frequently by 1978. I mean constantly claiming that invasions were going to come from Tanzania, like we said. The Abote loyalists, the Tanzanine themselves, the U.S., the Israelis, none of which was true, no matter how many people he had executed for spying. Amin's best homie Gaddafi got closer and closer to him, and Libya was effectively propping up Uganda as much of any of it could be propped up.

But that didn't mean Uganda was improving. Instead, Amin just kept dismissing ministers while others simply ran for their lives, normally all going to the UK. By this point, Amin was officially or unofficially, President for Life, Minister of Defense, Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Minister of Finance. all while most of the world was finally turning against him as the UN began investigating him for various human rights violations

something that was so obvious at this point that not even the Soviet Union tried to get the UN to leave them alone like yeah we're lending him a ton of money but yeah you're right he's he's a real piece of shit countries slapped them with sanctions mostly targeting coffee exports and stopped oil shipment so Uganda is in really bad fucking shape

and that brings us back to the Uganda Tansanian border. The border was long and porous. Smuggling and cattle rustling were commonplace, as was the activity of pro-a-bote, or at the very least, anti-amine rebel groups. Attacks across the border were, if not a daily occurrence, were at minimum a weekly one. And there is no real difference at this point between rebel groups and the Ugandan military. We talked about this before. The Ugandan military is a little more than a roving gang of bandits in uniform. The best way to describe the border region is one of pure, violent chaos at all times. And if you haven't picked up on it quite yet, despite a mean being a military strong man,

the man who derived all of his power from the barrel of a gun, a man obsessed with military-style discipline and cleanliness. As a broad organization, the Ugandan military was horribly factionalized. That is because a military dictatorship is actually very bad for the military, for things like basic soldiering in general. When a soldier becomes a politician, it inherently turns the military from a body with a job of defending a country hypothetically. to a political body with the job of running it.

It turns soldiers into politicians, bureaucrats, businessmen, everything a country is supposed to need to run, while simultaneously making it impossible to have a functioning military. Promotions become political tools. Base locations become political tools. Everything becomes a political tool to show up support and loyalty because the same group of people you empowered can also kill you whenever they want. And without the basic rules of law, human rights,

or really any other kind of guiding. principles involved, things fly off the track at breakneck speed. When the military becomes involved in politics, it makes officers have to court their own men, which in turn makes those officers more warlords than military officers. It's kind of like whenever we talk about the Roman Empire, when Roman legions would declare their commander emperor because they liked them a lot, and then they would invade Rome, just kind of doing whatever the hell you want with no oversight, hoping to enrich them in and in turn enriches. yourselves. And it's for all of those reasons that when war finally breaks out between Uganda and

Tanzania and October of 1978, we don't actually know how or why it kicks off. Not entirely. There is kind of sort of a mostly accepted story of what happened, though. What I'm telling you guys is I have to tell you a story of how a bar fight led to the fall of Edia mean. Yes. On the evening of October 9th, 1978, a young Ugandan officer stationed the Mutukula Garrison near the Tanzania border decided, you know what, I want to drink. It was really not uncommon for Ugandans across the border into Tanzania for whatever reason from time to time.

99% of the time nothing would come from this. Most of the time it just result in Ugandans having a couple of drinks and smuggling shit back and forth with their Tanzania and counterparts, military and civilian alike. However, this time for whatever reason,

the officer got this shit kicked out of him at the bar. So he retreats from the ass beating, goes back across the border, grabs his AK, goes back, and shoots up the bar. He doesn't hit anybody, but, you know, it's a principle of the matter. At this point, after burning off 30 rounds into the local pub, he decides he might need to go tell his commander, Lieutenant Beyonce, about what happened. Beyonce, in turn, gets on the phone

and calls his battalion commander, Colonel Juma Rikoni. Rikoni is a man that requires a bit of an explanation. He was, by all accounts, an illiterate crazy person. But because he came from the Kakwa tribe, he was brought into the army as an officer, having never received a single day of training, even education, but earned his keep being deathly loyal to Edie Amin. Personally killing or ordering people killed that Amin didn't like, disappearing people, whatever Amin needed, he knew he could ask Rokoni to do it. By the time Amin came to power in the coup, Rikoni helped him with. He was well known for being very unstable mentally. Even by his fellow officers, according to those officers, he thought that he was a kind of

demigod, a reincarnation of some kind of deity. Though he could never really tell you which one exactly. Something biblical, but it would change on the day. But, I mean, love this guy, even though all of his peers had given him the nickname Butubika, which was the name of a

large psych ward in Kampala. Yeah, he's, he's everything I read about him is absolutely insane. He was continuously promoted, eventually leading the military tribunal, a legal body that Amin created so he could just ignore civilian judges. Almost every single case, Rekoni oversaw, ended in a death sentence. A sentence he liked to personally watch be carried out.

During all of those times, Amin threatened to invade Tanzania, virtually the only senior officer in Uganda that agreed with Amin was Rikoni. Whereas the others, even if they were largely promoted with limited knowledge of military matters, we're pretty open telling Amin that, like, look, I don't know shit about the military, even though I'm a colonel. but we are not prepared to fucking invade Tanzania. Rikoni, nah, uh-uh. He was like, no, I'm just here for the violence.

The guy who started the bar fight in Tanzania, well, that was Rikoni's brother-in-law. So Rikoni immediately ordered Bionzi to invade what was known as the Kigara salient. At this point, to this day, there is no evidence that anybody has told Eidiamine about any of this. So, Beyonce follows orders quickly.

I mean, look at who his commander is. He better fucking do what he's told or he's going to get put into a literal wood chipper. And Ugandan soldiers invade Tanzania. And the Tanzanian side of the border is left virtually undefended, thanks to following the rules laid out by the Mogadishu agreement. Ugandan soldiers pull into a town, set a couple houses on fire, start stealing shit. A Tanzanian outpost, about, I think it was like 35 kilometers away, notice what's happening?

they alert their commander, Colonel Morris Singano, who orders his artillery to open fire. Now, it should be noted here that neither the Ugandan artillery nor the Tanzan artillery has any kind of forward controllers. Nobody is really aiming this shit. They have no scouting aircraft at all, really. More of a kind of spray and prey. But the Tanzanian guns managed to hit a Ugandan APC, which was a Polish-built vehicle, and it completely explodes, killing two soldiers.

Ugandan artillery then responds, but bomb some random hillside because they aren't entirely sure how to aim. And this kind of turns into an artillery duel back and forth over the border, and the Ugandan soldiers on the ground turn around drive back into Uganda at this point because they just saw two of their friends

get ethered by the most lucky shot than artillery crew has ever pulled off. What nobody knows is that this border spat another one of what could probably be hundreds at this point was about to spiral wildly out of control. Draw on several world and regional powers and end with the overthrow of Ediamine. And that is where we'll pick up next time on part three.

Oh, this is not going to go. It might be the most consequential bar fight in at least African history. I don't know about world history, but this shit's gonna go places. This just sounds very grim. Like, it just sounds like a endless, curion of dumb guys doing dumber shit, but violently and cruelly. And then it just gets bigger and

bigger. It is actually Katamari Damashi, but for being a big dumb asshole. Like, none of this ever had to happen. I mean, certainly Edie Amin never had to come to power either, but like, it's often framed as Ediamine invaded Tanzania, which is true. He's the head of state. He's the dictator. He's in charge of the military, which means the responsibility falls on him. However, there's no evidence that Rokote even fucking called him. Otherwise, as we'll find out in part three, that Edie Amin jumps on the bandwagon and immediately gets involved in the war and he's making public statements immediately. Like, so if he knew right from the get-go, he would almost certainly say, fuck yeah, let's party. Because he's wanted to do this for so long.

But it is very funny that the military strongman has effectively lost control of his military, which is always what happens eventually. But that's the Kigara War part two. Boys, thank you for joining me. everybody listening. Thank you for joining us as well. Consider supporting the show on Patreon. $5 a month gets you absolutely everything from every regular episode early. Almost eight years of bonus content at this point. Side series Discord access. First bibs on live show tickets and merch. It'll get you one Polish-made APC blown up by Tanzanian artillery. And, you know, leave us for review and wherever you listen to podcasts. Fellas, you host other shows. Plug those shows.

I am the co-hosts producer somewhat involved in a number of shows What a Hell of Waste Dad, Trash Shooter, Kill James Bond, No Gods, No Mayors. Beneath skin, show about the history of everything told us with history of tattooing and blood work, a show about the economy of violence. As always, thank you again,

and until next time, don't have your military kind of sort of commanded by a guy whose nickname is named after the local psych ward. Or do. Don't eat your sandals. Don't eat your shoes. Don't eat your sandals. Yeah, that's better. Or at least saute them. I don't know.

Eat your sandals correctly. Shoes aren't food. They're for feed.