Titans of History

As his country suffered under his depredations, Amin started to lose touch with reality, possibly suffering the insanity of tertiary syphilis. He began awarding himself various medals, including the Victoria Cross, and such titles as Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and the Fishes of the Sea and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular. He also insisted on being carried on a wooden litter, with British expatriates (organized by Major Bob Astles, his chief British henchman) serving as bearers. Equally strange was the bizarre correspondence he engaged in with other world leaders. He thus offered Ted Heath, the former British prime minister and keen amateur conductor, a job as a bandmaster after his 1974 election defeat; on another occasion, he advised Israeli prime minister Golda Meir to “tuck up her knickers” and run to the US. More sinister was his praise for the Palestinian terrorists who carried out the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, and his admiration for Hitler’s treatment of the Jews.

In June 1976 Idi Amin invited an Air France plane hijacked by Palestinian and German terrorists to land at Uganda’s Entebbe airport. Upon landing, the hijackers released all non-Jewish passengers and took the rest into the airport terminal, demanding the freedom of some forty Palestinians imprisoned in Israel and a further thirteen in Kenya, France, Switzerland and West Germany. Captain Michel Bacos—followed by the rest of the crew—refused to leave without the remaining passengers, while a French nun offered to take the place of one of the hostages but was forced to leave by Ugandan soldiers.

If their demands were not met by July 1, said the hijackers, they would begin executing the eighty-three Jewish hostages and twenty others held. On the night of July 3, after an extension to the deadline, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (later assassinated for making peace with the Palestinians) dispatched a commando unit which staged a stunning raid. The surprise was complete: no one could have expected faraway Israel to cross half of Africa to rescue its own. Despite Ugandan resistance, Operation Thunderbolt rescued almost all of the passengers. Three hostages were killed, as was one Israeli soldier, Yonatan Netanyahu—the older brother of the future Israeli premier Binyamin Netanyahu—in whose memory the operation was retrospectively renamed Operation Yonatan. All seven of the terrorists and forty-five Ugandan soldiers were killed. The whole assault lasted just thirty minutes. The raid was an astonishing achievement that symbolized Israeli military power and daring.

One of the hostages, seventy-five-year-old Dora Bloch, who had been admitted to hospital in Kampala before the Israeli raid, was not rescued. She was subsequently dragged from her bed on Idi Amin’s orders and murdered by two Ugandan army officers.

In 1979, with Uganda’s economy and society having all but collapsed and Amin deeply unpopular at home, he sought to divert domestic attention by invading Tanzania. It proved to be a fateful decision. In response, Tanzania mounted a counter-invasion. Amin’s army collapsed and he fled—eventually settling in Saudi Arabia. He would live on in exile until finally dying, peacefully in his bed, in 2003.

THATCHER

1925–

I am extraordinarily patient, provided I get my own way in the end.

Margaret Thatcher

Margaret Thatcher first entered Parliament in 1959, making her maiden speech a year later. Interviewed in 1970, by that time education secretary, she said, “It will be years before a woman either leads the Conservative Party or becomes prime minister. I don’t see it happening in my time.” Nine years later she succeeded Labour’s James Callaghan as prime minister and went on to spend 11 years and 209 days at 10 Downing Street, during which time she transformed the British political, economic and social landscape. She was the longest-serving prime minister for more than 150 years and the first woman to hold the post in Britain.

Born Margaret Roberts in 1925, daughter of a Grantham shopkeeper who was also a Methodist lay preacher and a town alderman, she was grammar-school-educated and middle class. After a scholarship to Oxford and a brief career as a research chemist (during which she helped to develop the first soft ice cream), she trained as a barrister. She took the Conservative seat of Finchley in the 1959 election, encouraged by Denis, her shrewd, wealthy businessman husband, who steadfastly supported her career. The very qualities for which the company ICI had criticized her in a post-university interview, reporting that “this woman is headstrong, obstinate and dangerously self-opinionated,” surely aided her swift ascent at Westminster.