The World's Most Notorious Men [antikvár]

The World's Most Notorious MenIdi AminThe diiriming of the street Ughts on the warm, tropical nights in Kampala was always an accurate barometer of the morale of the people in Uganda.Privileged visitors, arms salesmen and foreign diplomats in the two showpiece hotels would grimible loudly when the cocktail bars were plimged into darkness and the elevators jammed between floors.But the imcomplaining residents of Kampala would leave the imlit cinemas and cheap little coffee shops in fearful silence to go home and spend a sleepless night behind barricaded doors.Fitful blackouts in the power supply were a sign that Uganda's President Idi Amin had just completed another busy day of butchery. The drop in the voltage usually meant only one thing . . .That the hydro-electric generators at Owens Falls Dam, 40 miles west of Kampala, were once again clogged with rotting corpses.Despite the constant boat patrols on Lake Victoria, the source of the waters of the Nile, the maintenance engineers couldn't hope to spot every dead body swept by the currents towards their filter grids. They had aUies helping them to scavenge the lake clear of the harvest of murder victims: the teeming colonies of crocodiles. But even these voracious reptiles became bloated and lazy. The pickings were too rich for them.Time after time the generators had to be shut down and the water inlets cleared of that day's toll of death, usually 40 or 50 bodies in a 24-hour period.In eight years of ruling his cotmtry ui a torrent of blood and terror, Idi Amin had 500,000 of his fellow Ugandans ruthlessly and systematically butchered. He ordered the grisly mutilation of one of his own wives. He kiUed