Ugandan military ruler Idi Amin. PHOTO | AFP
By DANIEL K. KALINAKI
It was the morning after the night before.
Like many residents of Entebbe, the sleepy peninsula jutting
into Lake Victoria, 40km from the capital, Kampala, Chris Luvunia had
heard the gunfire and seen the explosions light up the night sky.
From the house on Nsamizi Hill that he shared with three other
young air traffic control assistants, Mr Luvunia, then 26, had a vantage
view of Entebbe International Airport, which hugged the edge of the
peninsula.
He’d only been on the job a few months after completing his
training in Dar es Salaam and his first guess was that the gunfire and
explosions were from a coup attempt.
Looking dazed
“We saw a soldier walking from the direction of the airport, looking dazed,” Mr Luvunia, now retired, recalls.
“We assumed that the government had fallen and that something had gone wrong at the airport.”
The next morning, while residents, wrapped in fear, stayed indoors, Mr Luvunia turned up for work at the airport.
The place was deserted.
The soldiers guarding the facility all seemed to be suffering from shock.
The runway
As usual, Mr Luvunia and a colleague began with an inspection of
the runway, looking out for debris and other objects that could harm
aircraft as they took off or landed.
First they found strange, portable lights along the outer edge of the runway.
As they got to the VIP section of the new terminal building they
walked straight into a large group of heavily armed soldiers, some in
civilian clothes, holding AK-47 rifles.
Walking at the front of the group was a shaken and distraught Idi Amin.
“Amin looked completely demoralised, Mr Luvunia says.
A huge man
“I felt taller than him yet he was a huge man.”
It soon became clear that the gunfire and explosions from the
night before had been an operation by the Israeli security forces to
rescue 104 hostages held at the oil airport terminal in Entebbe.
The raid on Entebbe has been mythologised in books, articles, and movies.
The heroics of the Israeli Sayaret Matkal special forces, the
death of mission commander Yonatan Netanyahu, the euphoria that
followed.
One untold story 40 years later as Yonatan’s brother Benjamin,
now Prime Minister of Israel, visits Entebbe, is that of the men and
women who worked at the airport and what they saw, the loopholes the
Israeli commandos exploited, and the long-term effects of the raid on
Uganda, the region, and Israel’s relations with Africa.
Men are dead
Part of the reason is that some of these men are dead.
While much has been written about Dora Bloch, the
British-Israeli hostage taken from her hospital bed and murdered after
she was left behind in the rescue, little has been said about the
Ugandans against whom Amin turned his fury.
Shortly after the raid, operatives of Amin’s dreaded State
Research Bureau swung into action and arrested Fabian Rwengyembe, the
newly-married officer-in-charge of navigational services, who was just
about to leave for his honeymoon.
They also arrested his deputy, Lawrence Mawanda, and Mohammed
Muhindo, the air traffic controller who had been on duty on the night of
the raid.
When their bodies were eventually discovered, relatives were
able to work out that Mawanda had been murdered by having nails driven
into his head and that the three had suffered gruesome deaths.
Wycliffe Kato, the assistant director-general of the Civil
Aviation Authority, was arrested two months later and tortured but
escaped from custody into exile.
Without credible witnesses, therefore, the commission of inquiry
into the raid that was set up by Amin became a perfunctory exercise.
Critical factors
Interviews with survivors reveal several critical factors that allowed the raid to succeed.
A few days before the raid, Major Were, the head of the
newly-formed Uganda Airlines Corporation, ordered the passenger aircraft
parked at the old terminal, where the hostages were being kept, moved
to the newly built terminal building.
“The military guys were worried that the Israelis would attempt
to rescue the hostages as they had done in other cases of hijack and
they let Amin know as much,” one retired soldier recalls, speaking on
condition of anonymity.
“He brushed it aside and it was risky to insist with the big man.”
Throughout the hostage situation, Amin had played a high-wire
act, oscillating between supporting and protecting the hostage takers,
and seeking a peaceful resolution of the matter.
For instance, while he pushed Israel to give in to the demands
of the hostage takers (the release from jail of several dozen terror
suspects), he presented himself to the hostages as their ally and while
they were held in grim conditions, they were allowed some favours; Ilan
Hartuv, Dora Bloch’s son, was allowed to speak to a doctor in Mulago
Hospital to inquire about his mother’s health.
The brutal giant
It was a dangerous gamble for the brutal giant.
Those who want peace prepare for war, noted Vegetius in the
ancient Latin text, Epitoma Rei Militaris, and while the Israelis did
exactly that – playing along with negotiations while preparing for the
raid – Amin appears to have been taken in by his own act.
Anyone who tried to call the air control tower at Entebbe in the
days just before the raid would have noticed that the call was answered
by a voice in Jerusalem, the Israeli capital, Luvunia says.
This should have been a clear warning sign, as was evidence from
the 1973 Yom Kippur war that Israel had radar-jamming capabilities that
could be deployed at Entebbe.
In fact, while the Uganda Air Force pilots knew a thing or two
about flying jets (a skill some of them had learnt from the Israelis),
their radar operators were poorly trained and not as good as the
civilian operators.
Despite this, there was very poor co-ordination between the
civilian and military radar operators and the former continued to go
about their duties without the latter taking any interest.
This was an expensive mistake.
Civilian air traffic
For instance, according to Steven Carol in From Jerusalem to the
Lion of Judah and Beyond, a book on Israel’s foreign policy in Africa,
on July 2, a Mossad agent flew from London to Nairobi, rented a plane,
feigned an in-flight emergency on the flight to Entebbe, photographed
the old terminal building and sent the photographs back to Israel from
Nairobi.
While the civilian air traffic control officers would have
offered guidance to this supposedly stricken aircraft, trained military
intelligence would have forced it to land for further investigations.
In the aftermath of the raid, and in an attempt to close this
loophole, the Amin regime imposed a requirement for all non-scheduled
flights into Ugandan airspace to obtain prior written approval – a
requirement that stands to this day.
Amin’s junta also paid scant attention to another important fact
– that an Israeli firm, Solel Boneh, had built the terminal building at
Entebbe and still possessed the blueprints, which it promptly handed
over to the raid planners.
“Looking back now, it was clear that a raid was coming,” the
retired soldier says, “and we did not do enough to protect the
facilities”.
The poolside
One of the first accounts of the raid went out by Willy
Lützenkirchen, the Die Welt Africa correspondent who was celebrating his
28th birthday at the poolside of the Lake Victoria Hotel in Entebbe,
with the Safari Sixth band playing, when the explosions broke out.
“They watched in despair throughout the whole coup (sic),” he
wrote, capturing the haplessness of the Ugandan soldiers after they were
taken completely by surprise.
It was the same shock and despair Luvunia found at the airport
the next morning, but the raid would bring at least two long-term
consequences.
The first was in relations with Kenya, which tried,
unsuccessfully, to deny having had a hand in aiding the operation, but
which then responded to attacks on its citizens (one report in the Daily
Nation a few days after the raid spoke of 245 Kenyans killed in Uganda)
by severely restricting the flow of fuel trucks across the border,
forcing an immediate fuel rationing in the neighbouring country.
On July 9, the Daily Nation
quoted John Mollo, the secretary general of the Kenyan chapter of the
Railways and Harbour Union, asking whether “it is in order, and indeed
sensible, for the railways management in Kenya to continue operating
services through the border of Kenya to Uganda”.
|Eventual demise
Amin was tempted to attack Kenya in retaliation but with his
fleet of fighter jets destroyed in the raid and his army suffering from
low morale, he thought against it; but the raid – and Kenya’s role in it
– had put the East African Community, already wobbly at that point, on
the road to its eventual demise the following year.
The wider impact was on Israeli relations with the rest of
Africa, which, too, were already troubled at that point over the
Palestinian question, and over Israel’s dealings with apartheid South
Africa.
The indignant condemnation of the attack by the Organisation of
African Union (OAU) meeting at the time in Mauritius, and which Amin had
been chair of in the preceding year, was followed by a clash at the UN
between African and Arab states calling for a resolution condemning the
attack on the one hand, and on the other, by Israel and its allies, in
particular the United States and Britain, pushing for a resolution
condemning international terrorism and Amin’s role in the Air France
flight 139 hijacking.
Four decades later, the world has changed a lot.
Electronics market
Concorde, entered service, cut transatlantic flights to three-and-a-half hours, and then went up in smoke.
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak formed Apple, which now dominates the consumer electronics market.
The apartheid regime in South Africa collapsed; Nelson Mandela came, saw, conquered, retired, then rested.
The Israel-Palestine conflict remains, as do the chasms revealed by the events of 1973 and 1976 but the world is also changing.
Idi Amin lies in a grave in Saudi Arabia.
Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who described the raid as
“Israel’s contribution to the fight against terrorism, was assassinated
by one of his own for considering peace with the Palestinians.
Throughout the ebb and flow of the tides of history, the events
in Entebbe in July 1976 ensured that Uganda, East Africa and Israel
would never be the same again.
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