The Secretary agreed to provide the President with a report on the state
of our relations with Uganda.2 The attached report
addresses the steps we have taken with respect to Ugandan helicopter
trainees and the provision of aircraft to Uganda. In addition, the
report describes [Page 385] the state of
Ugandan-American relations, reviews the climate of opinion in Congress
and sets out further actions which we are contemplating.
Attachment
Paper Prepared in the Department of
State4
SUBJECT
1. The Immediate
Problem: Helicopter Trainees
The following steps we have taken should help to mitigate the
embarrassment caused us by the discovery that a number of Ugandan
police officers are attending helicopter training courses in Forth
Worth, Texas, under the auspices of the Bell Helicopter Textron
company, which sold 9 civilian model helicopters to the Ugandan
police before we closed our Embassy in 1973:
—Prior to the furor over the training, the Secretary recommended to
the Department of Commerce that it deny applications for export
licenses for three new helicopters and one used Boeing 707 destined
for Uganda, since these items would be likely to be used in support
of the regime’s violations of human rights. Commerce has accepted
this recommendation and Bell has indicated it will not fight the
decision.
—We have instructed all diplomatic and consular posts to refer to the
Department for advisory opinions all visa applications by Ugandan
officials and anyone else traveling on Ugandan Government
business.5 This enables us to prevent future travel by
Ugandans to the US which we would deem to be incompatible with our
human rights policy (e.g., police helicopter pilots).
—We have denied entry into the US of two additional Ugandan
helicopter trainees who were issued visas with the rest of the group
[Page 386] but had not yet
arrived in this country when we learned of the program. We have also
revoked the visas of two other trainees who have not yet
arrived.
—We are actively considering asking Bell Helicopter and/or the
Ugandans to terminate the training before its scheduled end (which
for most of the trainees will be December 16, although for some the
training may continue until toward the end of January).
Official action to terminate the training is an option open to us: we
could revoke the visas as “prejudicial to the public interest” under
Section 212 (a) (27) of the Immigration and Nationality Act and
request the trainees to leave the country. However, if they refused
to leave, our legal grounds for expelling them would be shaky: that
section of the law has never been used to revoke a visa and expel an
alien after his admission to this country.
2. What Amin Can Do to Us
A factor we must keep constantly in mind, as we move in other ways
against Uganda, is our desire to avoid so direct and open a
confrontation between the US Government and Idi Amin that he is impelled to
retaliate against us. Despite our efforts to persuade Americans
living in Uganda to leave, and to secure the support of parent
organizations in the US in this effort, there remain some 240
Americans in Uganda whom Amin can treat as hostages in the manner he did last
February.6 The most vulnerable members of
the American community in Uganda are the Christian missionaries who
make up about one-third of the total: while most of the Americans
apparently feel secure because they are performing essential jobs,
the missionaries’ security is particularly questionable as Moslem
Amin’s wrath takes on an
increasingly anti-Christian tone.
3. Congressional
Attitudes
Congressman Pease (D., Ohio) has taken the lead in urging
Congressional action against Uganda. He has introduced three basic
bills which would, respectively, ban imports of Ugandan coffee, ban
all Ugandan imports and ban all US exports to Uganda. He is also
considering introducing a resolution calling for the closure of the
Ugandan Embassy in Washington. He has succeeded in obtaining
significant liberal and conservative co-sponsorship. Observers of
the Congressional scene report that anti-Uganda sentiment on the
Hill is so widespread that the Pease measures would pass
overwhelmingly if they were put to a vote at this moment.7
[Page 387]
In our discussions on the Hill, we have pointed out that the use of
trade sanctions against Uganda could increase pressure for their use
elsewhere, notably South Africa; that, indeed, our relations with
black African leaders, even such an outspoken critic of Amin as Nyerere, would suffer serious
damage if we were to impose trade sanctions on Uganda after having
vetoed an African Security Council resolution to impose similar
sanctions on South Africa.8 We have also noted
that such measures are of dubious effectiveness, given the
likelihood that Uganda can find other trading partners to replace
us, and that in any case such actions of ours are unlikely to
rectify the human rights situation in Uganda.
Congressman Pease acknowledges these arguments. He nonetheless sees
value in disassociating the US completely from the Amin regime and feels that its
human rights record is so unrelievedly egregious as to minimize the
possibility that actions against Uganda will be precedent-setting.
He also feels that if trade measures could be instituted to slow or
halt the flow of goods which buys the loyalty of Amin’s soldiers, this could lead
to Amin’s overthrow (though
he admits that Amin’s
immediate successor may be no improvement). In his opinion, the US
should take the lead on this and seek cooperation from Uganda’s
other trade partners. Pease accepts our view that the existence of
the Uganda Embassy in Washington was extremely useful to us for
direct access to Amin during
the February crisis and could fill this role again. However, he is
concerned that allowing the Embassy to operate confers some degree
of respectability on the Amin regime and he wonders if the need for direct
access could not be achieved through the Uganda Mission to the
UN.
4. The Current
US-Uganda Official Relationship
Aside from the specific steps we have taken in the context of the
helicopter trainees, our official treatment of Uganda has been
decidedly cool since we closed our Embassy there in 1973:
—Our interests in Uganda are protected by the FRG Embassy but we have no official
American personnel there.
—The Uganda Embassy in Washington is kept at the Charge d’Affaires
level.
—We send no congratulatory messages to Amin nor do we respond to messages from him.
[Page 388]
—We discourage all Americans from traveling to or residing in
Uganda.
—We terminated our AID program and
withdrew the Peace Corps contingent in 1973.
—US representatives to international development banks are under
instructions to oppose and vote against loans to Uganda.
—We have for the past several years maintained an informal arms
embargo against Uganda. Though unannounced, we have not approved any
applications for export licenses for items on the munitions
list.
—When approached by American business representatives interested in
doing business with Uganda, we have described the situation in
Uganda factually and have suggested that firms might wish to
consider the effect on their reputation of having an association
with Amin’s Uganda.
—Both you and Andy Young have
openly criticized Uganda’s record of human rights violations.9
5. Further US
Actions
We have, in short, maintained an officially unfriendly relationship
with Uganda. In the context of criticisms of us for leaning heavily
on South Africa for its human rights violations while ignoring
Uganda, the fact is that we have been officially much harsher toward
Uganda than toward South Africa.
Additional steps we could realistically take to underscore our
abhorrence of the Amin
regime and respond to Congressional concerns include the extension
of our de facto arms embargo to include all
items for use by the Uganda military and police (parallel to our
action with respect to South Africa) and a lobbying effort to secure
greater support from the Africans and others at the UN (and the UN Human Rights Commission) for international
condemnation of the Amin
regime. We hope that the cumulative effect of all the measures we
have instituted against Uganda will by January, when hearings on the
Pease bills are planned, have put further distance between us and
Amin. Hopefully, this
will enable us to persuade Congress that the contemplated
legislative action would have so negligible an incremental effect on
Amin as not to justify
the risk of establishing a precedent for using trade policy as a
political weapon and, in the process, forcing a confrontation with
Amin which could
jeopardize the Americans who perversely insist on remaining in
Uganda.
