in style, accompanied by his many wives and children and supported by a state pension from his hosts.
What virtue was the Saudi government answering when it gave harbour and support to a non-citizen who had wrecked a country, killed hundreds of thousands of his own people and defiled every universal canon of civilized behaviour? Merely parroting that he was a “guest” won’t do.
But let us leave what it takes to be tossed out of the Hotel Saudi Arabia and visit an even more substantial question. General Amin left the Uganda he brought to tears and tatters in 1979—so, for something close to twenty-four years since then, this blot upon the human race passed his days in untroubled serenity, supplied with the all the requisites of the good life, to the apparent disinterest of those we have fashionably come to call the world community.
Why was Idi Amin given the bye?
More recent tyrants of comparably splendid depravity absorb the world’s liveliest attention, call forth the alert jurists of the International Criminal Court and stir lonely judges in Spain to extraordinary reaches of indictment.
Slobodan Milosevic, once the ethnic cleanser du jour, was hauled before the UN International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague while some of his victims were yet warm. The name of Augusto Pinochet could stir the streets of any number of capitals years after his rule and torture were history. Killers who keep their count low—the Carlos the Jackal type—remain newsworthy till the moment of their death or capture.
But here was Amin, truly a Caligula of our day, whose name and practices were a perfect synonym for all that is gruesome, wanton and cruel, wandering the rich streets of Jeddah and browsing the meat departments of its better supermarkets (perhaps nostalgic for the days when the selection was more mobile), not so much forgotten as disregarded.
How did he earn this right of disregard? Was it, I wonder, because there was a cast of ridiculousness in his public demeanour? Does a brute cease to horrify because he contains an admixture of the clown? One report tells the story that when he came to New York in 1975 to address the United Nations, he showed up at the Waldorf-Astoria with his own personal dancers, as well as live chickens. (These categories were possibly discrete.)
It is true that a taint of the ludicrous, or the simply lunatic, can put judgment at bay? But surely the fact, which I think is incontestable, that Mr. Amin was a buffoon does not erase his grander, more malign character as a butcher. Was it that he was one of a chain of reckless tyrants who have playedon the stage of Africa since its emergence from colonialism, the kleptocrats and dictators who have sown misery so wide and deep in that sad land, that he “merged” with a too-common phenomenon? That in a continent that housed so many tyrants, even one so
outré
and brutal didn’t stand out?
I don’t think so—yet the very recent careers of Robert Mugabe and Charles Taylor are evidence that atrocious stewardship, if out of Africa, doesn’t summon the moral revulsion that attaches to like behaviour almost anywhere else in the world.
What we can say is that some filter is at work, something that separates some tyrants from others and exempts them from the zeal to see them face some kind of justice that attaches to others.
That Mr. Amin should have gone quietly and unmolested to his grave, after the nightmare he visited upon Uganda, should be a scar upon the conscience of the world.
BECAUSE THEY WERE JEWS | April 6, 2004
Commenting on the bombing of a Jewish school library in Montreal yesterday, the prime minister said, “The assault was not directed against the Jewish community of Montreal, but against all Canadians.”
I know what the prime minister meant by saying that. It’s a noble thought, that we’re all diminished by violenceand hate, that an attack on any group of Canadians for whatever reason is an attack on the civil and moral code
What virtue was the Saudi government answering when it gave harbour and support to a non-citizen who had wrecked a country, killed hundreds of thousands of his own people and defiled every universal canon of civilized behaviour? Merely parroting that he was a “guest” won’t do.
But let us leave what it takes to be tossed out of the Hotel Saudi Arabia and visit an even more substantial question. General Amin left the Uganda he brought to tears and tatters in 1979—so, for something close to twenty-four years since then, this blot upon the human race passed his days in untroubled serenity, supplied with the all the requisites of the good life, to the apparent disinterest of those we have fashionably come to call the world community.
Why was Idi Amin given the bye?
More recent tyrants of comparably splendid depravity absorb the world’s liveliest attention, call forth the alert jurists of the International Criminal Court and stir lonely judges in Spain to extraordinary reaches of indictment.
Slobodan Milosevic, once the ethnic cleanser du jour, was hauled before the UN International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague while some of his victims were yet warm. The name of Augusto Pinochet could stir the streets of any number of capitals years after his rule and torture were history. Killers who keep their count low—the Carlos the Jackal type—remain newsworthy till the moment of their death or capture.
But here was Amin, truly a Caligula of our day, whose name and practices were a perfect synonym for all that is gruesome, wanton and cruel, wandering the rich streets of Jeddah and browsing the meat departments of its better supermarkets (perhaps nostalgic for the days when the selection was more mobile), not so much forgotten as disregarded.
How did he earn this right of disregard? Was it, I wonder, because there was a cast of ridiculousness in his public demeanour? Does a brute cease to horrify because he contains an admixture of the clown? One report tells the story that when he came to New York in 1975 to address the United Nations, he showed up at the Waldorf-Astoria with his own personal dancers, as well as live chickens. (These categories were possibly discrete.)
It is true that a taint of the ludicrous, or the simply lunatic, can put judgment at bay? But surely the fact, which I think is incontestable, that Mr. Amin was a buffoon does not erase his grander, more malign character as a butcher. Was it that he was one of a chain of reckless tyrants who have playedon the stage of Africa since its emergence from colonialism, the kleptocrats and dictators who have sown misery so wide and deep in that sad land, that he “merged” with a too-common phenomenon? That in a continent that housed so many tyrants, even one so
outré
and brutal didn’t stand out?
I don’t think so—yet the very recent careers of Robert Mugabe and Charles Taylor are evidence that atrocious stewardship, if out of Africa, doesn’t summon the moral revulsion that attaches to like behaviour almost anywhere else in the world.
What we can say is that some filter is at work, something that separates some tyrants from others and exempts them from the zeal to see them face some kind of justice that attaches to others.
That Mr. Amin should have gone quietly and unmolested to his grave, after the nightmare he visited upon Uganda, should be a scar upon the conscience of the world.
BECAUSE THEY WERE JEWS | April 6, 2004
Commenting on the bombing of a Jewish school library in Montreal yesterday, the prime minister said, “The assault was not directed against the Jewish community of Montreal, but against all Canadians.”
I know what the prime minister meant by saying that. It’s a noble thought, that we’re all diminished by violenceand hate, that an attack on any group of Canadians for whatever reason is an attack on the civil and moral code
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