Forty years after rescue mission in Uganda
Dedicated team got thousands out of Amin’s Uganda in ’72
Vancouver – Fifteen-yearold Umeeda Switlo had already surrendered her pet dogs to the police, whittled her belongings down to a single suitcase and was steeling herself to say goodbye to family and friends. As she stared out a penthouse apartment window one balmy September night, she wondered if she would ever see Kampala, her hometown, again.
There was a rumbling in the distance and a tank ground its way down the road. It fired its gun at a window in the apartment opposite hers. A man fell to the street.
Switlo remembers thinking: “Oh, my God. I gotta go.”
The year was 1972; the country was Idi Amin’s Uganda.
Switlo, an Ismaili Muslim who now lives in Vancouver, was one of about 50,000 Ugandans of South Asian origin who the dictator had ordered out of the country a month earlier.
The Asian community had initially been relieved when Amin overthrew Milton Obote’s civilian government in a 1971 military coup, Switlo recalls. Many were encouraged by Amin’s reversal of a decision by Obote to take a 60-per-cent stake in the country’s many Asian-owned businesses.
But the dark side to the new government became apparent to Switlo’s family when Amin set up a concentration camp directly opposite their home. Switlo saw mutilated corpses tied to the complex’s fence. Most were people Amin considered political opponents or members of tribes seen as disloyal to him.
It was clear to Switlo’s parents they needed to find a more stable country to live in.
Somehow, perhaps because of their economic clout, the Asian community still felt protected, she recalls.
Then on Aug. 7, 1972, as the family watched the evening news on state TV, they were shocked to see Amin push the newscaster out of the chair, sit down, and announce that anyone of Asian ancestry had 90 days to leave. The idea, he said, had come to him in a dream. But it was also a populist move designed to capitalize on the resentment the African majority felt at the higher standard of living enjoyed by the Asians, who had formed the country’s middle-class for generations.
Salim Ahmed, another Vancouver resident who had to leave Uganda in 1972, was initially unfazed by Amin’s announcement. Ahmed, also an Ismaili Muslim, was a thirdgeneration Ugandan citizen and the official line was that only Asians of foreign nationality would have to leave.
Ahmed ran a large grocery store, owned by his cousin, where government ministers and foreign diplomats shopped, as did Amin’s wives.
“They would come in and take whatever they wanted and then they would just go and you would get paid if you were lucky,” he says.
Word soon got around that the country would not be safe for anyone who looked Asian, regardless of citizenship, after the Nov. 7 deadline. When Ahmed and his wife were pulled over by army officers one night and forced to lie on the ground while soldiers searched their car, they knew they couldn’t stay.
For those preparing to flee, cash was of little use: Asians were allowed to take only a minimal amounts of money with them when they left and cash was often stolen by soldiers at military roadblocks.
Michael Molloy of Nelson, B.C., was 26 and three years into his career as a visa officer for the Canadian government when he got word he’d be part of a team sent to deal with the crisis in Uganda. Molloy was based at the Canadian Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, which was responsible for much of the Middle East and East Africa.
Britain, the former colonial power in Uganda, was bracing for an influx of as many as 50,000 British passport-holders who were soon to be without homes. They were people who had opted to keep their British citizenship when Uganda gained independence from Britain in 1962.
The government of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau initially agreed to admit 3,000 asylum seekers and had to move quickly to get a team into Uganda, where Canada had no diplomatic representation. It was the first time Canada had agreed to accept a significant number of refugees from a non-European country.
The leader of the team, Roger Saint-Vincent of the Beirut embassy, arrived in Kampala on Aug. 31. Molloy followed five days later. By that time, Saint-Vincent had set up an office and arranged for telephone and telegraph lines and a fleet of buses. Three other visa officers and three visa typists were on the ground and ready to go, though the army medical team had yet to arrive. The office opened Sept. 6. As Molloy walked to work that morning, he saw people lined up around the block in both directions, all waiting for the Canadian office to open. On the first day, staff handed out almost 2,600 visa applications for families numbering more than 7,000 people, Molloy recalls.
The team realized almost immediately they faced a major logistical challenge: how to evacuate 3,000 people in 60 days with no reliable way to communicate with the applicants in Uganda. Mail was out of the question, not everyone had a telephone and the lines that did exist were bugged, Molloy says.
As they discussed the issue that first night, a young clerk pulled a number stamping device from his pocket. Why not, he suggested, use it to give each application form a number and stamp the same number on a piece of paper for the applicant to keep?
The improvised system worked. Applicants were given a number and told to watch for it in the newspaper or on a list posted in the office window. Canada had no official refugee policy at the time, so visa officers were instructed to use the immigration points system to assess applications, Molloy says. But they were told by Ottawa to be flexible as these were exceptional circumstances.
“Right from the start, they really had this strong sense that ... we’ve also got to take people in trouble,” he says.
It soon became clear that there would be far more than 3,000 people who qualified under the Canadian points system. Cabinet bumped up the number to 5,000. In the end, close to 5,700 would come to Canada.
Two things happened in September 1972 that changed the course of the Canadian mission and ultimately determined which groups of refugees Canada would take in.
The first was that Uganda was invaded from Tanzania by supporters of the ousted Obote government. The second was Amin’s order for all Asians who were Ugandan citizens to present themselves at a government office to confirm their citizenship. Some were issued new citizenship ID cards, but on at least one occasion army officers seized the passports of everyone in line, rendering many effectively stateless. Ismaili Muslims and Goans, two groups that had largely opted to become Ugandan citizens after independence, were particularly affected. A lack of British passports made them largely ineligible to go to the U.K.
Word came immediately from Ottawa that those with nowhere else to go were to be given priority, Molloy says.
“If you were in that category and you didn’t meet the points system, it didn’t matter, we normally saw you anyway. If you had some place to go, if you clearly had a British passport and you didn’t qualify, the answer was: Go to Britain. We’re busy here. If you have no place to go, come and see us.”
Most of the Ugandans who eventually settled in Canada were Ismaili.
The evacuation mission faced other problems. The Canadian Army’s medical technicians arrived 10 days late and no visas could be issued without medical exams. Once the medical team got set up, they were highly efficient, Molloy says. The first Canada-bound charter plane left Uganda on Sept. 27.
Shortly after Ahmed and his wife decided to flee Uganda, he heard Canada was accepting applications. He applied, saw his number in the newspaper and was interviewed by Molloy, who approved the application and suggested Vancouver might be a good city for them.
Switlo remembers being treated kindly by Canadian officials as her family went through the screening process. “The way that Canadians treated us was like human beings and with such dignity. I’ll never forget that,” she recalls. “I felt like ... this was going to be a safe place that we were going to.”
As the situation in Uganda deteriorated, an American friend of the family — who turned out to be an undercover CIA agent — arranged student visas to the U.S. for Switlo and her sister, as well as accommodation with his own relatives.
Switlo recalls vividly the day her parents took her to the airport. There, guards stripsearched Switlo, made her remove her jewelry, squeezed out her tube of toothpaste and even sliced open a toy dog, looking for items of value. A British girl was being strip-searched at the same time, and when guards found a gemstone they took it away.
“She started screaming. Her father was outside the security (area and) came running in, because he heard his daughter screaming, and they shot him,” she recalls.
“While they were looking at him and her, I was standing naked and I put on my clothes and I see my jewelry is on the table, unguarded. I pick it up, I hear the announcement for the flight. I walk out of there and I yell to my mom, who’s on the (observation) deck, ‘I got the jewelry.’ She said ‘Shh, be quiet, get on the plane.’ ”
Gerry Campbell of North Vancouver, 21 at the time and six months into his foreignservice career, was put in charge of producing the visas and getting the refugees safely on board charter flights bound for Canada.
Campbell insisted Canadian officials transport the refugees from central Kampala to the airport in Entebbe, a 40-kilometre route riddled with army roadblocks.
Campbell arranged for the Canadian refugees to board buses in central Kampala flying the Maple Leaf flag and be accompanied by political escorts, Molloy says.
“All sorts of people got ripped off going to other countries and I’m sure some of our people got ripped off, too. But we had some very tough people out there at the airport with our Canada-bound refugees and our people stayed with them until they were on the plane.”
The Canadian team had evacuated 4,420 refugees by November 1972. A further 1,278 followed on commercial flights after stopovers to visit family in other countries, according to Citizenship and Immigration Canada. Canada’s number was second only to Britain, which took in about 30,000 of its own nationals, Molloy says. India took in about 4,500, the U.S. took 1,200 and various European countries accepted small numbers of claimants.
“We did it the Canadian way,” Molloy says, who recalls that one former refugee told him later: “The British had to take us. You wanted to take us.”
The lessons learned in Uganda shaped how Canada dealt with later refugee crises in places such as Chile and Vietnam. Some of the same officials were involved, says Molloy, who had a long career in the foreign service, which included serving as Canada’s ambassador to Jordan.
Ahmed and his wife arrived in Vancouver after a stopover in Edmonton, where they saw snowflakes out the airplane window. It was then that the reality of the situation hit his wife, who turned to him and asked: “What are we going to do?”
Soon after they arrived, Ahmed found a job selling clothes at the Fields store and his wife found work as a filing clerk. Within a week, they were able to move into an apartment.
Toiling as a sales clerk was a humbling experience for Ahmed, who was used to having 30 to 40 people working for him. A couple of weeks after he arrived, his supervisor asked him to go outside and shovel the snow. “That’s when it really hit me that two weeks ago I was ordering people around ... and suddenly now I had to shovel snow.”
That experience was common for Ismailis arriving at the time, says Baljit Sethi, who helped settle the 40 to 50 families sent by the government to Prince George, B.C.
These were business people who were used to having servants and drivers, Sethi recalls. They were more interested in office work than manual labour. But they were enterprising and wanted to embrace their new country, to learn outdoor sports unheard of in Uganda, such as cross-country skiing and fishing.
About half the families that arrived in Prince George migrated to the Lower Mainland or Okanagan, where they could start businesses more easily, Sethi recalls.
For the African Ugandans who ran afoul of Amin, the story had no happy ending. Reliable figures are impossible to come by because so many simply disappeared without a trace, but it’s estimated that 100,000 to 300,000 people were killed between 1971 and 1979, when Amin’s regime was toppled.
“They suffered a lot more than we did,” says Ahmed, who is now a co-owner of an organic food store chain.
Switlo says Canadian efforts saved many lives.
“This is a country that we will never stop giving back to for what they gave us.”
She returned to Uganda for the first time four years ago with her daughter, while working for the aid organization CU SO. She had mixed feelings when the plane touched down at Entebbe airport.
The Ugandan customs officer told her she would need to pay $50 for a visa.
“I said: ‘I was born here and you kicked me out and you took my house and my dogs and I’m coming home.’ And the lady looked shocked and she brought her supervisor. They had guns and they took me to another office,” Switlo says.
“And they told me: ‘Madam, Uganda is not the same anymore. Welcome home. We are so sorry.’
“To be able to be there and have somebody apologize meant the world to me.