How the 1976 Entebbe Raid radically changed wars and politics in East Africa

July 4 was 40th anniversary of the Entebbe Raid, in which Israeli commandos rescued majority Isreali hostages aboard an Air France plane they hijacked and landed in Uganda.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on his first Africa visit to Africa, attended the commemoration in Uganda on Monday.

Netanyahu’s brother, Yonatan Netanyahu, was the officer who commanded the Entebbe rescue, and the only Israeli soldier who was killed in the July 4, 1976 raid.

Though films and conversation on the Entebbe Raid tend to focus on the military heroics, it had far reaching consequences that are often missed in the region.

The Entebbe Raid came at a time when Uganda dictator Idi Amin seemed to have put down or survived all attempts to oust or assassinate him, and the long-suffering country was in despair, its economy in ruins.

The raid exposed Amin as a paper tiger, and had the effect of emboldening his enemies, including Uganda exile dissidents.

But perhaps the biggest blow geopolitically was that it put to the lie the idea, popular then, that there was deep solidarity between the Middle East Muslim states and Amin which helped keep him in power.

In that period, with the Entebbe hostages the biggest international story, it was a puzzling that a military transporter would leave Israel for East Africa and Arab intelligence services didn’t get a whiff of it. If they didn’t, then they were woefully incompetent, a fact Israel would have noted with delight. If they did, then they betrayed their ally Amin, by not tipping him off.

Even if the Israeli mission hadn’t been tracked inward, certainly from Kenya where it stopped to refuel—and Amin reputedly had his intelligence network active —it should have. It wasn’t.

It all worked to expose a then-isolated Amin regime weakness.

Aware that indeed he was now vulnerable, Amin moved to invade Kenya, which had collaborated with the Isrealis.

Kenya had always had a different position on Amin than Tanzania, where ousted Milton Obote was living in exile.

Its policy was highly influenced by the magendo (smuggling) mafia who were profiting immensely from the Ugandan trade and smuggling its coffee.

The Amin threat on Kenya, is thought to have forced influential elements in Nairobi to give more wiggle to anti-Amin exiles in the country, and to warm up to Tanzania, with which it was having a regional cold war, on the issue of Amin.

That in turn enabled Uganda exile groups in Tanzania and Kenya to collaborate in ways they couldn’t before the Entebbe raid.

That Amin was caught out revealed sharply that he and his lieutenants just didn’t have an asymmetrical security mindset. In addition the Israelis razed his airforce that, at that point, was thought to be the most formidable in the region.

After his stand-off with Kenya eventually fizzled, Amin invaded eastern Tanzania in late 1978, again to show he was no walkover after the Entebbe humiliation.

Big mistake. Amin must have expected the Tanzanians to hit back.

However, they didn’t do it the way he expected. Having learnt that Amin was a linear thinker from the Entebbe raid, they did two things differently. First, they didn’t hit back at him alone. They came with Ugandan rebel groups, making it hard for him to rally patriotic fervor against a foreign invader.

Then, secondly, the Tanzanians didn’t drive in on trucks and armoured cars. From the Tanzania-Uganda border, they actually mostly walked all the way to Kampala.

With a large part of his airforce destroyed in the 1976 raid, Amin couldn’t harass the walking Tanzanians and Ugandan dissidents much from the air.

And because they were on foot, they could veer off the highways and along the bushes, again outfoxing Amin as they left his heavily mechanised battalions—the centerpiece of his military strategy—on the roads with no one to fight.

When they did follow them off the main roads, they confronted their foes on ground they couldn’t fight on. They were hammered.

People like President Museveni and his FRONASA rebels took the lessons to heart and mastered the asymmetrical game. They later walked the war against Obote, and as an offshoot the Rwandans walked theirs too—and then did the same against Joseph Mobutu.

That’s the short of it.

The author is editor of Mail & Guardian Africa. Twitter@cobbo3