I he most feared institution in Idi Amin's Uganda was the SRB, which was housed in a pink stucco, three-story building sandwiched between the President-for-Life's home and the Italian embassy in Kampala's tranquil diplomatic district. There the dread secret police carried out much of the torturing and killing that were a large part of Amin's style of rule. Abraham Kisuule-Minge, 27, an SRB officer for five years, fled in early April after helping a prisoner escape.
Interviewed in Nairobi by Terry Fincher, a British photojournalist, Kisuule-Minge offered a chilling account of just how Amin's terror apparatus worked.
Kisuule-Minge said that at the time he fled, the filing cabinets in the SRB were filled with the names of 50,000 "missing people," who in reality had been exterminated. The bureau, with its staff of more than 300, was run by Lieut. Colonel Farouk Minawa, one of Amin's most trusted Nubian aides. From the outside, the building looked innocuous. Inside it was literally a chamber of horrors.
The basement cells, dark, stinking holes with heavily barred doors, were reserved for political and "special category" prisoners, presumably those from whom information was to be extracted before they were killed. The most chilling area was the top floor, where most of the cells were located along with interrogation rooms. This was where most of the beating and torturing occurred.
Farouk made Saturday the cruelest day of all. In the morning he would order prisoners brought to the reception area. With a wave of his hand, he would signal which were to die that night. At 7 p.m. precisely, the cars parked in the courtyard would be started to drown out the screams to come. Each prisoner was brought down and told to kneel before an officer in the yard. He was asked to explain why he had been brought in and was told he was being released. Then guards would leap from the darkness, loop a thick rope round the victim's neck and slowly strangle him. The coup de gráce was a sledgehammer blow to the chest. It took about ten minutes to kill each prisoner. The bodies were piled in trucks and driven north for five hours to the Karuma Falls to be thrown to the crocodiles. Whenever a white was killed— Kisuule-Minge recalls about 50 such cases—Amin had the ears delivered to him on a platter. Kisuule-Minge remembers five Germans—three men and two women—being brought to the center. They were tied up, beaten and garroted and their bodies thrown into the Karuma. Once an attractive American woman was picked up from her hotel, accused of espionage and brought to the pink house. The next day, says Kisuule-Minge, she was repeatedly raped, then killed.