Posted on 07/21/2003 12:44:13 PM PDT by yonif
Long before the intifada, Oslo, the Sinai Accords and the nation's political upset in the late 1970s, there was Entebbe. The legendary heroic raid, code-named Operation Thunderbolt, when Israeli commandos rescued hostages being held by hijackers who had diverted their plane to Uganda.
The commander of the IDF operation, Yonatan Netanyahu, was killed during the rescue, and the name of the operation was changed to Operation Yonatan in his memory.
It was Sunday, June 27, 1976, when armed terrorists from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, together with some German accomplices, hijacked Air France flight 139, diverting it first to Libya and then to dictator Idi Amin's Uganda.
It was Idi Amin who warmly welcomed international terrorists to land their hijacked Air France jet at Uganda's Entebbe airport. It was Idi Amin, who consented to have his airport turned into a terror base and serve as a home for the hostages. In fact, Idi Amin arrived at the airport shortly after the hijacked plane landed and gave a speech in support of the PFLP to the hostages. Amin supplied the hijackers with extra troops and weapons.
With the world looking on under the direction of Amin, the terrorists separated the Jewish and Israeli passengers from the others, threatening to kill them all if their Palestinian comrades in Israeli jails were not quickly released.
Today, an ailing Idi Amin, whose eight-year presidency of Uganda is remembered for the torture and killing of more than 200,000 of his own people and for his hosting of the Entebbe terror operation, lays in a coma in a Saudi hospital.
It is fitting that Idi Amin spends his last days in Saudi Arabia. For it is Saudi Arabia which provides over fifty percent of the funding for Hamas terror operations in Israel.
Amin, believed to be 80, was in critical condition and on a respirator at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital in the Red Sea port city of Jiddah, staff members said on condition of anonymity. He was admitted to the hospital Friday.
A hospital official said late Sunday that the former Ugandan dictator's condition had stabilized.
Amin, who is in exile in Saudi Arabia, had been suffering from high blood pressure, medical staff said.
Amin has been in a coma since his admission to the hospital and was in the intensive care unit. Three of his sons were by their father's bedside Sunday.
In Uganda, the independent Sunday Monitor reported that Amin, who seized power in 1971 and was ousted in 1979, had been undergoing treatment for the past three months for hypertension and "general fatigue." The newspaper quoted Nalongo Madina Amin "Amin's favorite wife" as saying she had approached Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni some time ago and asked that her husband be allowed to return to the east African nation to die but was told the former dictator would have to "answer for his sins."
In Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, where Museveni was attending a meeting on Burundi, his press assistant, Oonapito Ekonioloit, said Amin, who once described himself as "a pure son of Africa," was in Saudi Arabia on his own accord and that his relatives "are free to bring him back to Uganda."
"Everyone knows he has a past. If he has any case to answer, it will be dealt with according to the law," Ekonioloit said. "He's a free citizen. It's a private matter between Amin and his family whether they want to bring him back alive or dead."
Amin, who served in the British colonial King's African Rifles and saw action in World War II in Burma, was a well-regarded officer at the time of Uganda's independence from Britain in 1962. He rose to chief of staff of Uganda's army and air force in 1966.
He fell out with Ugandan leader Milton Obote and ousted him on Jan. 25, 1971, when Obote was attending an African summit.
Amin was hailed a hero and the 250-pound leader was nicknamed Dada, or "Big Daddy." He even was chosen as the head of the Organization of African Unity in 1975 despite some members' objections. Ugandans initially welcomed Amin, but his popularity plummeted after the East African nation descended into economic chaos and he declared himself president-for-life.
Amin grew increasingly authoritarian, violent and subject to mood swings. It is estimated that more than 200,000 Ugandans were tortured and murdered during his regime, which ended April 11, 1979, when he was ousted by a combined force of Ugandan exiles including Museveni and the Tanzanian army.
Human rights groups say as many as 500,000 people were killed during Amin's rule. Bodies were dumped into the Nile River after it became impossible to dig graves fast enough. At one point, so many bodies were fed to crocodiles that the remains occasionally clogged intake ducts at Uganda's main hydroelectric plant at Jinja.
Amin, a Muslim and member of the small Kakwa tribe from northwestern Uganda, went into exile first in Libya, then Iraq before finally settling in Saudi Arabia on the condition that he stay out of politics.
But the politics of Idi Amin's Entebbe will never be forgotten. Israel's defeat of this small tyrant and the heroic rescue of Jews from a band of terrorists in this far away African nation will remain a powerful symbol for the entire free world. It showed that with a little courage and determination, the scourge of international terror could be fought and even defeated.
Idi Amin's passing will not be missed in Israel. Not by the Bloch and Netanyahu families who lost relatives in the Entebbe terror mission. Not by the Israeli nation, which watched in horror as Idi Amin smiled, as Jews were separated from non-Jews by Palestinian terrorists in the African nation for which Amin once ruled.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Good read here.
Yet another reason they should go to Canada.
Yet I've heard nothing about the Saudi religious police giving him a hard time.
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