(Continued from p.11)
His Excellency Field Marshal Idi Amin Dada has died peacefully in Saudi Arabia, where he had lived for decades, supported by the Saudi royal family. Even as the Shah of Iran, a decent man not to be mentioned in the same breath as Amin, deathly ill with lymphoma, was being denied sanctuary in the United States, Idi Amin was given sanctuary by the Arab world (first, by Libya) as a "convert" to Islam.
In his eight years at the helm in Uganda, Amin killed over 300,000 Ugandans. In his obituary of the monster, columnist Mark Steyn notes that "he enjoyed personally decapitating his enemies, and on one occasion he and a few family friends passed a pleasant farewell dinner with the severed heads of two opponents propped up at their places round the table." He had the second of his five wives murdered and dismembered. Amin expelled all the Asians, thereby destroying Uganda's economy. (His example would be emulated over two decades later by Robert Mugabe, who confiscated 5000 white-owned farms, within three years transforming his country from the breadbasket of Africa to one in which over five million people, half the population, depend on international food aid to survive.)
Steyn writes that "Amin was never called to account for his bloody reign because he was shrewd enough to flee to the one rogue state no Western nation ever puts any pressure on, even today." But more and more mass murderers have been receiving what Christopher Hope in the Sunday Times (August 17) calls "a perfect pension plan." Back in the 1980s there was Emperor Bokassa of the Central African Empire, who ate his enemies, and, says Hope, was "fond of kidnapping young schoolgirls and roping them, naked, to trees near the imperial kitchens." France welcomed him.
Now there is Charles Taylor, in Hope's words "dressed in virginal white," leaving office "to salutes, a gospel choir and the warm applause of fellow African heads of state." This was the man whose over-the-top election slogan was "He killed your father and he killed your mother. Vote for him or he'll kill you too." Mugabe plays host (even contributes round-the-clock guards) to Colonel Haile Mengistu, the Butcher of Addis Ababa (despite Ethiopia's efforts to extradite him). And where will Mugabe go? There seems little doubt South Africa's Thabo Mbeki, a great admirer, will offer him what Hope calls "the honorable exit caper."
And can one imagine the line-up for Arafat?
Under its most recent agreement with the PA, Israel offers immunity from prosecution and guarantees not to try to capture or harm those guilty of terror attacks if they stop their activities once the city they are hiding in is transferred to the PA's security control.
In other words, if the people who planned the murders of those on Bus# 2 in Jerusalem on August 19 go to Ramallah (where the PA is scheduled to assume security control but has not yet done so), they are home free, legally immune from Israeli response.
As Lerner points out, Israel thus saves the PA "from the effort of even operating a 'revolving door' under which terrorists may be temporarily held by the PA and then released. Instead all that is required is a periodic declaration of a renewed security arrangement and thus a new reference date giving immunity to anyone who carried out an attack before the announcement... Thanks to plans to transfer Palestinian control in many cities, it will become progressively easier for terrorists to reach a city of refuge to enjoy what may ultimately become a rolling amnesty program."
Americans For a Safe Israel
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Outpost - 12 - September 2003