6

The Ugandan Asian Expulsion, 1972
A Personal Memoir

MICHAEL MOLLOY

I had always wanted a job that included international travel and was delighted when I heard in April 1968 that my application to join the foreign service of the new Department of Manpower and Immigration (M&I) had been accepted and that I was to report to M&I’s national headquarters (NHQ) in Ottawa in June. We, that is, my wife Jo, our toddler Kathleen, and I, drove to Ottawa from Golden, British Columbia, in our Volkswagen Beetle. The training for our class of twenty-six new employees was extensive and included four weeks divided between two visa offices abroad, in my case Vienna and Belfast. I never got to Belfast because three days before my departure from Ottawa in August 1968, Soviet forces invaded Czechoslovakia to crush efforts by the Czechoslovakian government to introduce a more humane brand of Communism. Our Vienna office was flooded with applications from people who had managed to escape to Austria before the Soviets sealed the border. I was instructed to stay in Vienna and spent most of the next six weeks checking files and signing visas while more experienced officers interviewed the refugees. I then returned to Ottawa to complete my training and, with my wife, to complete formalities for the adoption of our new son, William.

Our family was then posted to Japan for a two-and-a-half-year assignment. The job consisted of shuttling between Tokyo and Seoul to interview people from Japan and Korea who wanted to immigrate to Canada. In family reunification cases, the purpose of the interviews was to verify family relationships. For independent immigrants, that is, those wishing to settle in Canada for economic reasons, the interviews were used to ensure that the individuals were qualified to come to Canada under the new “point system,” which came into effect in in 1967 and applied to all those seeking to immigrate to Canada regardless of their origins.

We all enjoyed our time in Japan, but I was delighted after two-and-a-half years with the news of a new assignment in Beirut, Lebanon. We arrived in Beirut in November 1971, just in time for me, as the new guy in the embassy, to play Santa Claus at the embassy Christmas party. I had joined the foreign service to see the world, and you could see a lot of it from the Beirut immigration area office, which covered thirty-eight countries that stretched from Iran to Zambia. The four Beirut-based visa officers, who now included me, were always travelling.

In late January 1972 I made my first “area visit” to countries in East Africa and to one, Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean. When I showed my travel plan to the boss, Roger St. Vincent, he told me to include Kampala, Uganda, even though we had no immigration applications from that country. Roger explained that after the recent coup that had ousted the elected president Milton Obote and had installed General Idi Amin, he was worried that things might get worse for Uganda’s small Asian community. I was to familiarize myself with the city and the airport, meet the leaders of the various Asian communities, and gather any information I could from the British and American missions there.

NEXT STOP, KAMPALA

As there were no direct flights from Beirut to East Africa at that time, the trip began with a flight to Athens to connect with an Olympic Airways flight to Kenya. I conducted two weeks’ worth of interviews in Nairobi, then continued to Lusaka for three days, after which I flew to the beautiful island of Mauritius for another two weeks. Then it was back to Nairobi, where I had more interviews waiting. As directed, I spent four days in Kampala meeting everyone that I could. From them, I learned that the community leaders thought that they would be able to work with President Amin. Heading home, I stopped for three days’ work in Addis Ababa, then transited through Cairo en route home to Beirut. The months that followed were spent doing routine immigrant interviews in Lebanon and going on a short working visit to Turkey.

By mid-June it was time for another marathon area visit to Africa, this time including a week-long stop in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, where Asian businesses were being nationalized. Canada was destination of choice for those whose livelihood was being lost. In Kampala, things were no longer looking hopeful, and I spent a disturbing hour listening to a badly shaken Asian man who had witnessed army trucks piled high with bodies heading toward Lake Victoria. Amin’s northern Ugandan soldiers were purging the army of its southern soldiers.

Heading home through Addis Ababa, I had a spooky unscheduled stop in Asmara, Eritrea, which was still part of Ethiopia at that point, but fighting for independence. Every time I went for a walk in the city, I was followed by squads of secret police. When I stopped for the layover in Cairo on the way home, the airport was crawling with angry Russian soldiers who had just been ordered home by President Anwar Sadat—his first move in preparation for what would become the Yom Kippur War. I arrived Beirut in time to hear that on August 4, 1972, Idi Amin had ordered the Asian community in Uganda to leave the country by November 8. My family’s plan had been to take the kids camping up the coast from Beirut, passing along the Syrian coast to Turkey, but this news, coupled with two other pieces of personal news interfered with our plans. In the third week of August the embassy doctor ruled that, that because of complications with a previous pregnancy, Jo was not to have our third child in Beirut, and that she had to depart without delay for Vancouver, where she could get better care and her mother could provide support. That same day, I received a message from the Canadian national headquarters in Ottawa that I was to be in Detroit by December to open a new visa office there. This was quite surprising, as we’d been in Beirut only eight months, and postings generally lasted longer than that. As Jo and I were absorbing these developments, Roger St. Vincent called me into his office and showed me another message from Ottawa, dated August 24:

You are not unaware of General Amin’s decree to expel 80,000 Asians from Uganda accusing them of being puppets of the British government and sabotaging the economy of his country. Your mission is to proceed to Kampala and by whatever means undertake to process without numerical limitation those Asians who meet the immigration selection criteria bearing in mind their particular plight and facilitate their departure for Canada. Your mission must be accomplished by November.¹

In many parts of Africa, including East Africa, the term “Asian” signified people originally from the Indian subcontinent. There were significant Asian communities in Kenya and Tanzania—in Uganda, these included Gujarati Hindus (50 percent) and Ismaili Muslims (30 percent), as well as smaller communities of Sikhs, Goans, Punjabi Hindus, Ithnasharis, Boas, and Parsis. Together, the Asian community owned 80 percent of the businesses in Uganda; controlled 50 percent of the industries; and constituted 50 percent of the professionals. Their relative affluence in relation to their small number (some 60,000 to 80,000), coupled with their perceived clannishness, made them a prime target for the mercurial General Amin.

Roger told me he was leaving for Kampala immediately and, since I was now, as he put it, “a seasoned officer” after my posting in Japan and eight months in Beirut, I was to accompany him. I had known Roger for four years at that point. He had served as a fighter pilot in World War II before joining the first wave of Canadian immigration officers who were sent to Europe after the war to process displaced persons from refugee camps. I’d first met Roger in 1968, when he was coordinating the transportation of Czechoslovakian refugees to Canada. I negotiated a delay in my Ugandan departure date with Roger to give me time to break our lease, pack up our belongings, and see Jo, and my two children, Kathleen and Bill, off to London, from where they would take a connecting flight to Vancouver.

SETTING UP OPERATIONS

I arrived at Entebbe Airport around noon on September 5. The driver of the white minivan with Canadian flags taped to the doors offered to take me to the Apollo International Hotel, where I was booked to stay; however, when he told me the Canadian High Commission had an office, which was news to me since there had been no office on my recent visit, I asked to go there instead. It turned out that the office was a large space in the Industrial Promotion Services Building on Kampala’s main drag, and the largest office building in town. It had been vacant when Roger arrived a few days before, but it was now a hive of activity, with specially ordered office furniture coming through the door. As I looked around, I could see a number of people from Ottawa and embassies in Europe (visa officers, doctors, visa typists, clerks), as well as two diplomats on loan from the High Commission of Canada to Kenya in Nairobi. I had barely come through the door when I heard Roger shout from across the room, “Hey Molloy! Did you come to look or to work?” I dumped my bags and walked over to him. He told me we were opening to the public the next morning, September 6. Then he handed me a hand-drawn floor plan, told me to get the office set up right away, and to meet him at the hotel at 6:00 p.m.

Besides getting the office ready for business, the critical problem we had to solve before opening our doors officially was how to establish and maintain contact with those members of the Asian community in Uganda who wanted to come to Canada. Amin’s deadline for their departure was November 8, which was just eight weeks away. Mail was too slow, telephones were unreliable; both were insecure. Ottawa-based clerk Jim McMaster offered the solution. He produced a little silver number-stamping machine, which, he explained, could be set to repeat a number up to nine times before moving on to the next one. We set it to stamp each number twice, once on each new application and once on a set of “tax clearance” instructions printed on the grey stationery that had been given to us in a neighbourly gesture by the British High Commission, which had an immigration team on the ground floor below us. These proved to be extremely useful, as Asians leaving permanently for the United Kingdom, Canada, and all other destinations, needed to know how to obtain a Ugandan tax clearance, which they needed before they could leave the country. Stamping the tax clearance instructions meant the paper could double as a receipt. We would communicate with applicants by putting advertisements in the local paper that contained lists of numbers and interview times. Applicants could check the receipts they had been given on application, and if their number appeared in the advertisement, they could come to the office at the time provided. Brilliant, simple, reliable, and most importantly, secure. Only the applicant knew his or her number. McMaster’s stamping machine was the pivot around which our communications, file control, and applicant privacy systems revolved. I doubt we could have managed without it. Within two weeks, we started receiving offers of assistance from Canada that included these numbers.

The lineup on September 6 stretched for blocks. Three visa typists from Ottawa were assigned to the reception counter. They handed out thousands of immigration forms and by the end of the day had taken in and number-stamped 2,588 applications for a total of 7,764 people. We calculated that we needed to see at least seventy-five people a day if we wanted to process the applications on time. The first lists of the file numbers of people we needed to see appeared in the Uganda Argus four days later, on September 10.

THE POLICY FRAMEWORK

The framework of an actual Canadian refugee policy had been set two years before, in 1970, with a Cabinet decision to adopt the official United Nations definition of “refugee”; to use a point-based system with a generous amount of positive discretion to select refugees; and to extend Canada’s resettlement activities beyond Europe. Most important in this case, the Cabinet decision introduced the “Oppressed Minority” policy.² By definition, refugees are people who have fled persecution and are outside their country at the time of application. The Oppressed Minority policy enabled Cabinet to authorize visa officers to apply refugee rules to oppressed people who were not technically refugees because they had not left their country. Since it was a Cabinet document, few of us at the working level of government ever saw it, but it became a key document in the evolution of Canadian refugee policy, as it opened the door to refugees from around the world. The Ugandan Asians fell into this category, since they were under an expulsion order, but still in Uganda. Roger’s original instructions put the emphasis on applying normal immigrant selection criteria as determined by the point system but, after Cabinet met on September 13, 1972, all subsequent communications emphasized humanitarian concerns first and foremost, paying particular attention to those who had nowhere to go. Prime Minister Trudeau’s announcement of the program left us in no doubt about the approach we were to take. “For our part, we are prepared to offer an honourable place in Canadian life to those Ugandan Asians who come to Canada under this program,” he said. “Asian immigrants have already added to the cultural richness and variety of our country, and I am sure that those from Uganda will, by their abilities and industry, make an equally important contribution to Canadian society.”³ On the ground in Kampala, we were unaware of any controversy surrounding the role of the Aga Khan or his representatives in the selection of refugees.

Amin’s earlier pronouncement was ambiguous enough to leave the impression that only Asians who opted to keep their British colonial documents would have to leave, but that those who had taken out Ugandan citizenship might be able to stay. From our perspective in Kampala, any ambiguity about the intent of the expulsion order was resolved toward the end of September when the Ugandan government ordered a citizenship verification process that applied only to people of Asian descent. The “process” resulted in large numbers of Asian Ugandans being arbitrarily stripped of their citizenship. Since having Ugandan citizenship clearly no longer offered them protection from Amin’s random shifts in policy, we were instructed to treat Asians who still had Ugandan citizenship as if they were stateless.

As the situation could change almost daily, we adopted a flexible selection policy that looked roughly like this: Those who qualified under the point system were accepted regardless of whether they held British, Indian, Pakistani, or Ugandan citizenship, or whether they were stateless or not. Those who did not qualify under the point system fell into two categories: If they were stateless or were Ugandan citizens who had nowhere else to go, they were given sympathetic consideration and were usually accepted using the visa officers’ discretionary authority. Those who had permission to go to the United Kingdom or who held Indian or Pakistani citizenship were not normally called for an interview unless they had a relative or offer of assistance from someone in Canada, or there was another compelling circumstance. People with physical disabilities were given priority.

By the third week, we had received so many offers of assistance from relatives and friends of Ugandan Asians in Canada that we had to establish special procedures to keep track of them, and we decided to accept them at face value when making selection decisions.

CHALLENGES

Three problems emerged in the first weeks of the operation. The first problem was that Cabinet had made no concessions on medical screening, which meant that all applicants were required to undergo a full “tropical” examination that included a blood test for syphilis, urinalysis, a stool examination for parasites, an X-ray for TB, and a full physical examination. Dr. Piché, head of the medical team, refused to allow the doctors to do the physical until all test results were in. By September 12, we had a medical backlog of 1,600 people waiting for exams. The Canadian Forces had been instructed by Cabinet to send a team of medical technicians to do the testing, but they arrived a week after the rest of the us and were not fully operational until September 20. Since we could not issue visas without medical clearance and the backlog was too large to handle without assistance, the first charter flight, optimistically scheduled for September 15, had to be cancelled—to NHQ in Ottawa’s extreme annoyance.

The second problem was that many Asians in Uganda still hoped Amin would change his mind and were therefore reluctant to make firm departure plans. The third problem was that armed followers of deposed President Obote and Amin’s opponents invaded Uganda from Tanzania. The invaders were brutally crushed within a week, but the slack Ugandan Army discipline occasioned by the fighting made travel outside Kampala dangerous, and even within the capital we heard reports of killings and terror. We got a good scare when a military convoy stopped in front of our building and all the soldiers pointed their weapons at us. We closed the office for the rest of the day and confined staff to the hotel. A belligerent Army officer appeared in the hotel dining room that night and demanded that we eat in silence.

Despite these challenges, we were able to get the first charter flight of refugees off to Canada on September 27. Our government’s initial plan was to finance the charters by giving the refugees Assisted Passage Loans. When we reported that the Ugandan government was planning to tax the loans, Trudeau responded by announcing there would be no loans and that the Canadian government would cover the costs. The 20-kilometre stretch of road from Kampala to Entebbe Airport was notoriously unsafe thanks to numerous checkpoints staffed by rapacious soldiers. Consequently, we decided to hire buses that would go directly to the terminal, previously checking in our Canada-bound passengers in the parking lot of the Apollo International Hotel, where we were all staying. We draped the buses with Canadian flags, and our High Commissioner came to Kampala from Nairobi to escort the first flight’s passengers to the airport. Subsequent bus convoys to the airport were led by the High Commissioner’s car, flag and all, with the Nairobi-based diplomats playing the role of “His Excellency,” much to the annoyance of the Ugandan foreign ministry. This was perhaps unorthodox, but it did mean that all our refugees got to the airport without being harassed or robbed.

The first flight took 30 hours, including a stopover for repairs in Paris. On arrival in Canada, the newcomers were bused to Canadian Forces Base Longue-Pointe in Montréal for rest, immigration formalities, issuance of winter clothing, and counselling regarding their destinations. On arrival, they were also served a range of Indian dishes that the Canadian Army cooks had learned to make—the food garnered rave reviews from the new arrivals. Three weeks into the program, we had received 6,355 applications, conducted 785 interviews, issued 663 visas, had 927 people in the queue for medical exams, and had scheduled 2,400 interviews for the next eleven days.

TURNING THE CORNER

On the Uganda national day weekend (October 7–9), we closed our doors and sent the junior staff and medical technicians off to Mombasa, Kenya, for a rest. At the same time, reinforcements, including more officers and visa typists, arrived from Ottawa, and over the three-day weekend we reviewed 6,000 applications, looking particularly for stateless people and those with no obvious place to go. The review identified applications we had previously passed over because the applicants were Ugandan citizens who did not qualify under the point system before we were instructed to consider them as stateless. We scheduled 1,988 for interviews at the rate of 145 a day up to the end of October, while the newly arrived typists banged out another 656 visas.

By this time, the Kampala team had evolved into four distinct but closely linked units. I supervised the selection unit comprising visa officers who screened applications and conducted selection interviews. Sergeant John Stronach led a team of seven military medical technicians who analyzed medical samples. Dr. Marcel Piché from the Department of Health and Welfare managed a unit of four or five doctors who conducted physical examinations and rendered medical decisions.⁴ Gerry Campbell, a newcomer to the immigration foreign service, was in charge of the Visa Transportation Unit , which managed the files, produced the visas, assembled passenger manifests, and saw the refugees safely to the airport and onto the chartered flights.

Over the next few weeks, the rate of charter departures increased from three a week to at least one a day. At one point, a Canadian professor from Makerere University in Kampala asked if we could do anything for twenty Asian medical students who had been dismissed from the university. Recalling how Canada had taken in the entire faculty and staff of Hungary’s Sophoron Forestry School in 1956–57, I suggested he contact the head of the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC) to see whether they could help. Two days later, he reappeared with a telegram from the AUCC president that said essentially, “You send them, we’ll place them.” There was no space for them on our interview schedule, so Roger St. Vincent agreed that I could see them the coming weekend. I deputized the professor to assist me and interviewed the students five at a time that Sunday. All but one, who went to the UK, proceeded to Canada and careers in the medical field.

THE MAN, THE GUN, AND THE CHAIN

An incident that sticks with me took place the second or third week of October. I was on my fourth or fifth interview of the morning when Maurice (“Mo”) Benoit, our front-counter man, suddenly interrupted, telling me there was someone I needed to see right away. He was back within seconds with an application form and accompanied by a large Ugandan police sergeant. I was surprised to see the sergeant and shocked to see that he had a submachine gun in one hand and a chain in the other with a smallish, dishevelled Asian man handcuffed to the end of the chain. The man croaked “You called my number” and handed me a battered piece of grey British High Commission stationery with a number that matched the one on the application Mo had just handed me. The sergeant declined to remove the cuffs, so I put his chair behind the man’s so we could have a whispered conversation.

He explained that the previous week Amin had ordered Asians with Kenyan, Tanzanian, and Zambian passports to leave the country. His wife had a Kenyan passport, so they decided she would join her parents in Kenya and await the outcome of his Canadian application. At the border, the Ugandan authorities seized her jewellery, expelled her to Kenya, charged him with smuggling, and sent him to the notorious Kampala jail. His family was unsuccessful in getting him released until his number appeared in the Uganda Argus and they persuaded the warden to let him attend his interview. He was clearly an “oppressed minority,” and his application revealed that he was a mechanic (maximum points) with an aunt in BC (more points), so I did not even have to use my discretionary authority to approve his application.

Next stop was the medical section, where the normally prickly Dr. Piché greeted us with a smile and disappeared with the man, chain still attached, behind the curtain while the sergeant and I compared his World War II service in Burma with my Dad’s in the North Atlantic. Dr. Piché reappeared and announced the man with the chain had passed the medical examination (clearly without any of the prerequisite X-ray, or blood, urine, or stool tests). Then Roger St. Vincent appeared out of nowhere in his usual military-cut safari suit, planted himself in front of the sergeant, and informed him, with his authoritative RCAF flight lieutenant voice, that the man was to be delivered to Entebbe Airport the next morning at precisely 7:00 a.m. It was a solid rendition of the “Was that understood? Yes sir. Very good, make it so. Yes sir” routine. Then Dr. Piché, clearly still oozing good will, told the sergeant that if all went well, he could bring his family to the office the following day for a free medical examination.

The next morning at 7:00, several police cars drove across the tarmac to where an Air Canada passenger jet was waiting. Roger was waiting at the top of the stairs. The sergeant, minus machine gun but with man and chain, came up the stairs. Roger ordered the handcuffs removed before shoving the man through the door. The sergeant asked if he could look inside the plane. Roger politely declined but told him he was looking forward to meeting him and his family the following day.

The following morning, the sergeant, accompanied by his wife and six children, appeared at the counter at our Kampala headquarters. Dr. Piché, our volunteer nurses, and the other doctors ensured that they were treated like royalty, fed them tea and biscuits, and after a thorough medical examination, sent them on their way with a bag of medical supplies and a certificate of good health.

THE FINAL PHASE

As the deadline for expulsion grew near, fewer people appeared for interview: on the last interview day, October 31, we interviewed 59 people even though we had invited 132. Between October 28 and November 8, we sent twelve charter flights to Canada and quietly dismantled our facility, donated the furniture to a UN operation that was starting up next door, and sent team members home in small groups. In the end, we had issued visas for 6,292 persons (2,115 cases). Of these visas, 117 were never claimed, leaving an effective total of 6,175 people, of whom 4,420 travelled on the thirty-one charter flights we had arranged and another 1,725 made their own way to Canada. A surprising number of people, mainly from smaller remote towns, made no attempt to apply for resettlement and ended up in refugee camps in Europe. Canada accepted approximately two thousand of these over the next two years.

Mo Benoit and I were the last of the team to leave Kampala. Roger had asked me to remain in Nairobi for an extra week to deal with any Ugandans stranded there, which I did. I made it back to Beirut by mid-November, where I received instructions to proceed to Ottawa for my new assignment in Buffalo (not Detroit). After a month on the equator, Ottawa seemed very cold. Once there, I learned I was to open a visa office in Minneapolis (not Buffalo) on December 4, after which I was free to go to Vancouver. I arrived in Vancouver in time to take Jo to the hospital for the birth of our daughter, Tara (mother and beautiful daughter were fine), and stayed long enough to bring her to our temporary home there before returning to Minneapolis. It was another six weeks before we were back together.

IMPACT

Following the 1970 Cabinet decision to extend Canada’s resettlement program beyond Europe, there had been efforts to move small numbers of Tibetan and Chinese refugees from Hong Kong, but the Ugandan Asian exercise was the first real test of the new policy. The Prime Minister’s prediction that “those from Uganda will, by their abilities and industry, make an equally important contribution to Canadian society” turned out to be an understatement. The original Ugandans and their children can be found across the country and in all walks of life, in business, public service, education, the justice system, the media, the arts, and politics. The values of public service and volunteerism they brought with them have made them a particularly valuable component of our society.

Four years later (1976), I was back in Ottawa as the director of refugee policy, leading a small team responsible for implementing the many refugee provisions of the 1976 Immigration Act. The Uganda experience drove home the reality that not everyone who needs resettlement is a refugee as defined by the UN Refugee Convention. It convinced me of the usefulness of tailoring our refugee resettlement definitions to the characteristics of the people we were trying to help. This, in turn, informed the decisions we made in crafting the various designated classes—such as Indochinese, Political Prisoners, Oppressed Persons, and Self-Exiled—that shaped our resettlement program for the next two decades. When it came time to instruct the team that designed the sponsorship program, I told them about the psychological relief I felt when I opened an application in the midst of the Kampala pressure cooker to find a message from someone in Canada who cared for the person who was sitting in front of me. That simple message had eased the decision-making process immeasurably. As we completed the design of the sponsorship system in the spring of 1978, a young man stomped into my office and demanded to know why we didn’t have a program for refugee students. I told him it was because no one had asked for one, and then told him about the medical students in Kampala. A couple of months later, we signed a refugee student sponsorship agreement with World University Service of Canada. Though we could not know it at the time, the Uganda operation in 1972 served as a dress rehearsal for the massive Indochinese refugee program that brought sixty thousand Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian refugees to Canada in 1979–80. By that time, the lessons learned in Kampala had been absorbed into the legislative (1976) and regulatory (1978) frameworks, and line officers who learned their business under St. Vincent in Kampala played leadership roles in both Southeast Asia and at immigration headquarters.

1 Roger St. Vincent, Seven Crested Cranes (Ottawa: Canadian Immigration Historical Society, 2012), p. viii. “Seven Crested Cranes” was the title St. Vincent gave to a detailed account of the expulsion compiled from notes he kept in a journal while he was in Kampala. His account was published by the Canadian Immigration Historical Society, but St. Vincent also included it as chapter 10 of his autobiography, “A Very Fortunate Life,” a privately circulated manuscript. Both the autobiography as a whole and the “Seven Crested Cranes” chapter (pp. 195–252) are available as PDFs at https://carleton.ca/uganda-collection/seven-crested-cranes-roger-st-vincent/. (In that version, this message is reproduced on p. 204.) In what follows, I have drawn on his account as the most reliable source of statistical information.

2 Memorandum to the Cabinet, “Selection of Refugees for Resettlement in Canada,” July 27, 1970, RG 2, vol. 6373, file 1032-70, Library and Archives Canada. The content of the Cabinet decision was communicated to immigration staff in Operation Memorandum no. 17, January 2, 1971.

3 Pierre Trudeau, “Statement from the Prime Minister,” quoted in St. Vincent, Seven Crested Cranes, 6. (In the PDF version, see p. 205.)

4 The number of staff on the ground varied daily as people arrived and left to return to Canada as their availability allowed. As a result, it is difficult to pin down exact numbers for any of these teams.