Idi Amin Dada: Hitler in Africa

Kansas City: Sheed Andrews and McMeel [Subsidiary of Universal Press Syndicate], 1977. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. cii, [1], 184 pages. Embossed stamp on half-title and title pages. Frontis illustration of Idi Amin Dada. Illustrations. Includes chapters on Diplomatic Assignment: Kampala, Uganda; The Brutal Tyrant Emerges; The Brutal Tyrant in Action; Amin: Vicious Anti-Semite; The Expulsion of the Asians; Is Amin an African Hero? The Second Persecution; An American Family in Uganda: Abroad and Divided; Amin: The African Hitler; and What Can Be Done about the New Hitler? The tragedy of Uganda is that, until now, the United Nations has remained silent about the man who regards Hitler as his hero. and who has impersonated him by liquidation of thousands of Ugandan people. While the world only watches, the Meladys call for action. . The authors had visited Uganda briefly for the first time in July 1952. Within ninety days of arriving, the author was to be in the presence of a man who had said that Hitler knew how to take care of the Jews. The Ugliness quickly became real. The authors went to Uganda expecting to find an authoritarian erratic government. The growing fear in their hearts, starting within ninety days of there arrival, was that Amin was looming on the scene of world leaders as a confirmed brutal tyrant practicing torture and murder. "As a former Ambassador to Uganda, during the very difficult and some would say dangerous times of Idi Amin, my wife and I relate in some detail the situation in Uganda while he was the dictator." -Thomas P. Melady. Thomas Patrick Melady (March 4, 1927 - January 6, 2014) was an American diplomat and author. From 2002 until his death he served as the Senior Diplomat in residence at The Institute of World Politics in Washington, DC. He served in the U.S. Army from 1945-1947, then graduated from Duquesne University in 1950 (B.A.) and The Catholic University of America in 1955 (M.A., Ph.D.). He was an adjunct professor at St. John's University and president of the Africa Service Institute in New York City, from 1959 to 1967. From 1966 to 1969 he was adjunct professor at Fordham University. A former consultant for the National Urban League in New York and chairman of Seton Hall University, he was appointed by President Richard M. Nixon as Ambassador to Burundi in 1969, Senior Advisor to the US delegation to the UN General Assembly in 1970, and Ambassador to Uganda from 1972 to 1973. In 1989 he was appointed by President George H.W. Bush as Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the United States of America to the Holy See. After completing his assignment to the Holy See during the first year of the administration of President Bill Clinton, he served as Distinguished Visiting Professor at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Melady was an authority on Afro-Asian and Central European Affairs and the author of 16 books and more than 180 articles, including Western Policy and the Third World, Uganda: The Asian Exiles, The United States and the Vatican in World Affairs, and "Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Future? Part II". Derived from a Kirkus review: When Dr. Melady's brief, harrowing tenure as US ambassador to Uganda ended in 1973 and the embassy was closed, the pretext was an Amin blast at American intervention in Vietnam. Now, in the post-Helsinki, early-Carter period, the Meladys find editors as well as officials more receptive to an indictment of the tyrant. They give a moving account of the expulsion of the Ugandan Asians--like refugee Jews and Armenians, "truly unwanted" anywhere--and depict the churches' plight at firsthand: Mrs. Melady attended the 1964 canonization of the martyrs of an earlier (1885-87) Ugandan despot's persecution--with jubilant Ugandan Catholics who were to meet their death at Amin's hands. The condemnation of the arch-tyrant takes second place to the quietly sounded plea for his victims.