The Independent Uganda: You get the Truth we Pay the Price
The two religious leaders reportedly asked to meet Dr Aliker privately. “I invited them to my surgery after working hours. They came straight to the point. Recognizing that Amin’s regime was unlikely to survive much longer, they asked me to consider becoming the next president,” writes Aliker on page 119.
The prelates, according to Aliker, saw him as the best person to heal ethnic wounds, build consensus and rebuild the run-down country.
“I listened attentively, but they did not convince me. One of the archbishops asked me to say after him: “Lord, if this be the cup from which I must drink, then Lord, let it be so, Amen.”
Little-known plans to remove Amin
On page 120 of his book, “The Bell is Ringing”, Aliker mentions taking part in or being aware of, two secretive plans in 1977 to remove General Amin by force. In one of the plans, hatched in early 1977, Aliker’s friend named Carl Ziegler, a banker from Chicago, the United States at the time, introduced him to another man identified as Peter Sprague.
Aliker quotes Sprague as telling him: “I cannot sleep at night while Amin is alive.” Aliker says Sprague provided 30,000 US dollars for an assassination attempt codenamed “Luzira”.
“Although the planning was thorough and careful, two attempts failed,” Aliker says without giving details of where and when the two attempts were made.
On June 18, 1977 officers and men of the Uganda Air Force staged a coup plot against Idi Amin code named ‘operation mafuta mingi’. The plot, which eventually failed, was headed by Major Patrick Balati Kimumwe. The officers hoped to assassinate General Amin at Abayita Ababiri along Entebbe road, after he chaired a cabinet meeting at State House, Entebbe.
Under unclear circumstances, however, the plan leaked to the operatives of the notorious State Research Bureau (SRB) and some of the plotters were arrested. It is not clear if this is one of the two failed attempts Aliker alludes to in his book.
International media reported at the time that Amin had gone into hiding for over a week after the June 18, 1977 incident, only to resurface and say he had been on a belated honeymoon with his youngest wife, Sarah. However, while attending the 14th Organisation of African Unity (OAU) summit in July 1977 in Libreville, Gabon, Amin confirmed there had been an attempted coup in Uganda. As had become his custom, Amin accused the West of complicity.
Amin was quoted by the Desert Sun newspaper of July 4, 1977, saying: “I captured some of the people who tried to assassinate me. I have got them, and that will be debated later at the present meeting. The whole Western press knew what was going to happen to me. They were sending people to Uganda to kill me, to Angola to kill President Agostinho Neto, to Benin to kill President Mathieu Kerekou and to Guinea to kill President Sekou Toure.”
Meeting former Governor Sir Walter Coutts
Aliker mentions another plan to remove Amin in early 1978 by force of arms. He says he was approached by Bruce Mackenzie, a former minister of agriculture in Kenya, who asked him to fly to London urgently for an important meeting, “the purpose of which was undisclosed.”
“On arrival at Berkeley Hotel, Knightsbridge, the former governor-general of Uganda, Sir Walter Coutts, phoned and told me to take a taxi to an address just behind Piccadilly Circus,” he writes on page 120.
