Posted on 10/28/2005 2:58:00 AM PDT by HAL9000
Former president Richard Nixon considered Ugandan dictator Idi Amin an "ape" and mistrusted his own State Department as "always on the side of the blacks," according to documents made public this week.The once-classified documents show Nixon and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger in raw form in dealing with African crises in 1972, including Uganda's mass expulsion of Asians and genocide in Burundi.
But for all of the rough language, the transcripts of phone conversations and other texts highlight the US reluctance to take a stand on atrocities committed by Amin's regime until US citizens were threatened.
And Kissinger made clear Washington's refusal to respond to the plight of tens of thousands of Asians expelled by Amin until after the November 7, 1972 US election that gave Nixon a second term.
In private, both Nixon and Kissinger showed unvarnished contempt for many of the players in Africa, from Amin to US State Department diplomats.
"Isn't it awful though... that this goddamn guy at the head of Uganda, Henry, is an ape," Nixon told Kissinger by telephone from his retreat at Camp David on September 24, 1972.
"He's an ape without education," Kissinger replied.
"He's a prehistoric monster," Nixon later chimed in.
Nixon thought little more of Kwame Nkrumah, the late father of Ghanaian independence and champion of the pan-African movement whom he dismissed as "that asshole."
The Republican leader went apoplectic when he learned his State Department was balking at providing assistance for thousands of Britons stranded and fearing massacre in Uganda.
"Screw State!" Nixon bellowed. "State's always on the side of the blacks. The hell with them!"
But 10 days earlier, in a meeting at the White House, Kissinger had little to say to a senior British delegation looking for help to resettle some of the Indians and Pakistanis brutally chased out of Amin's country.
"I believe we are looking to see if we can take any (action) but I am confident that we cannot take enough to help your problem," he said. "We are eager to avoid this issue before November 7."
A November 1, 1972 memorandum from Kissinger to Nixon stated bluntly that US interests in Uganda were limited to protecting American citizens and barring the Russians from having a free hand.
The pair were also left fulminating and frustrated by the 1972 slaughter of an estimated 150,000-200,000 Hutus in an outbreak of tribal violence in Burundi.
"I'm getting tired of this business of letting these Africans eat a hundred thousand people and do nothing about it," Nixon fumed in the September 24 phone call.
Kissinger, who was to win a Nobel Peace Prize the next year for negotiating a ceasefire in the Vietnam War, endorsed the show of compassion that confounded "these bleeding hearts in this country who like to say we kill yellow people."
In the end, the United States did not do much more in Burundi than try to whip up international pressure to stop the killing, recall the US ambassador for consultations and provide 150,000 dollars in relief aid.
Nixon resigned the presidency in 1974 amid the Watergate scandal and died in 1994.
"He's a prehistoric monster," Nixon later chimed in.
Forget the ape reference if it offends but can we agree on "prehistoric monster"?
I think the interesing part of this is the references to the State Department. Conservatives have known for a long time that State has been more or less, an enemy of the people of the United States.
This is the same State Department that was complicit in the escape of terrorists from Tora Bora, when they were surrounded by our military. Wasn't the Powell (movement) in charge of State at that time?
Where's the UN in all this?
"The once-classified documents show Nixon and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger in raw form in dealing with African crises in 1972, including Uganda's mass expulsion of Asians and genocide in Burundi.
But for all of the rough language, the transcripts of phone conversations and other texts highlight the US reluctance to take a stand on atrocities committed by Amin's regime until US citizens were threatened."
I can't wait til we get to read bjclinton's conservations with Sandy the Burglar. Sadly, the real action will never see the light of day, Hillry was truly the stealth president.
Good point.
It's also good to see President Nixon taking his place in history with those other dead white men, our Founding Fathers and Howard Cosell, etc. etc..
Elitist!
Nixon was brilliant on foreign policy. And had he had the conservative support net that now exists with talk radio and the internet, he would have served out his second term. As he should have. And South Vietnam would today be the equal of South Korea.
God bless you Richard Nixon.
We can certainly agree that this was well over thirty years ago and is manifestly irrelevant.
The North Vietnamese government knew that if they launched their final offensive on Saigon when Nixon was in office, Nixon would have sent back the B-52's and flattened Hanoi and Haiphong.
Sounds about right to me.
It sound about right to me too and I might add Mugabe isnt much better. Things havent changed that much in Africa, In fact they might have gotten worse.
But, but every day thousands of US citizens are clammering about leaving this cesspool and heading back to wonderful Mother Africa.
Oh no, what an insensitive way to put it! Nixon must've hated black people! Damn those racist Americans! ~ < /sarcasm off>
OK, so he shouldn't have taken so much license with the facts. They weren't necessarily eating each other, they were just hacking each other to death with pangas.
Saying that they were eating each other just makes them look bad. So it's racist.... ;)
The above quoted from the article at the following link.
http://www.news24.com/News24/Africa/News/0,,2-11-1447_1403332,00.html
Sounds to me like Richard Nixon was spot on.
Oh, and Idi Amin was a convert to Islam.
They were being eaten but crocodiles were doing most of the eating.
"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."
http://www.news24.com/News24/Africa/News/0,,2-11-1447_1403332,00.html
I agree with your assessment that things in Africa have not improved.
It may sound harsh to say this, but South Africa was better off under Apartheid.
Another thing that struck me recently was watching the movie Amistad and then reading about goings-on in Sierra Leone in the present, and realizing that nothing has changed.
She told me they had to stop eating perch out of Lake Victoria because the fish were feeding on all the decaying floating corpses.
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