DAWN had not yet crept over the papyrus swamps along the Tanzanian shores of Lake Victoria when a force of 800 men calling themselves the Uganda People's Militia assembled in the darkness. As invasion forces go, it was small, but it was well-armed and the men were in high spirits. Most of them were former Ugandan soldiers and paramilitary police who had fled the country after the ouster of President Milton Obote, himself in exile in Tanzania. They had spent several months in secret training in Tanzania guerrilla camps, preparing to overthrow the military regime of Uganda's increasingly erratic dictator, General Idi Amin Dada.
Promptly at 5 a.m. the soldiers moved off. The first column, on foot, made its way up a little-used Land Rover track through the swamps, waded across the Kagera River, and overwhelmed a company-sized Ugandan garrison near the village of Kyebe. Then, climbing aboard the garrison's trucks and Jeeps, it cut northwest to the town of Sanje. The second column, with a few vehicles of its own, easily swept through the small frontier post of Mutukula, and joined forces with the first at Sanje. Together, they raced northward to Masaka, 80 miles from the capital of Kampala.
Fifty miles to the west, a third column, its men dressed in civilian clothes, crossed the border in chartered buses. After a stiff fight at the border town of Kikagati, they headed on to Mbarara, where they stormed the garrison of Uganda's 1,000-man Simba Battalion and, aided by some dissidents who switched allegiances, succeeded in driving the loyalist troops out—but only for the moment.
The Ugandans, who had taken their weapons with them, quickly regrouped. Outnumbering the rebels by 5 to 1, they blasted them out of the garrison in less than an hour, reportedly killing most of the insurgents. The invaders in Masaka did not fare much better. By late afternoon, Amin's armor and air force (which also bombed the Tanzanian city of Bukoba on Lake Victoria, killing ten persons) had forced the militia to retreat to a position a few miles from the border. Thus, within less than 24 hours last week, the exiles' best hopes of ousting Amin had been effectively dashed.
The invasion in retrospect was both futile and foolhardy—in effect, an African Bay of Pigs. The pilot of an East African Airways DC-9, for example, was to have dropped a company of paracommandos into the northern Ugandan town of Gulu. Apparently he got lost during the night and was forced to land at the Kilimanjaro Airport. The plane was found the next morning, tires flat, fuel tank empty; the pilot and his troops had disappeared into the bush, unharmed but also unsuccessful. The rebels had also counted on large numbers of soldiers from Uganda's well-armed 12,000-man army joining in the rebellion. They were wrong.
The invasion threatened to touch off a bloodbath in Uganda. It could not only engulf the Asians, who have lived in fear since Amin ordered 50,000 of their number holding British citizenship to leave, but could also revive tribal warfare and turn into a protracted border war with Tanzania as well.