One consequence is that new green shoots of democracy pushing up spontaneously elsewhere have gone almost unnoticed. With yesterday's election in Liberia, however, some of that changed. Here were heart-warming scenes to rival those that marked the first post-apartheid election in South Africa. He tried to influence Uganda politics from afar but to most southern Ugandans he remained a worse tyrant than Idi Amin.Richard Dowden.

For months now, the spread of democracy has been equated almost exclusively with the patchy electoral experiments in Iraq and the Palestinian Authority. He now launched his own guerrilla struggle to overthrow the new Obote regime. His strategy was to gain the support of local people and launch well-targeted attacks - mainly in the Buganda area. The government responded with the slaughter of tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands of villagers in the conflict zone. Uganda now witnessed death and destruction on a scale that far outstripped Amin's crimes.In 1985 Obote was overthrown by his own army commanders, who themselves were defeated by Museveni's guerrilla force the following year. Obote fled to Zambia, where he remained in exile until shortly before his death. Israel wanted to keep the civil war going to weaken Sudan, a supporter of the Palestinians, and so put their man in power.Obote, then at a Commonwealth conference in Singapore, fled to Tanzania, where he received the support of his friend President Julius Nyerere In 1979 the Tanzania army invaded Uganda and drove Amin out.

Obote was restored as President after a fixed election but the country was traumatised and fragmented after nearly 10 years of Amin's rule.One of the losers was Yoweri Museveni, who had also fought to overthrow Amin. In January 1971, Amin, with the help of Israel and almost certainly the knowledge of MI6, deposed Obote in a coup Israel's interest was simple. Obote was trying to bring an end to the civil war in Sudan, Uganda's northern neighbour, but Amin was secretly supplying Israeli weapons to the rebels. By narrowing his powerbase and trying to rule through military power, Obote had laid the seeds of his own destruction. The army commander in the attack on the Kabaka in 1966 was Colonel Idi Amin. But, in threatening to nationalise companies, many of them British-owned, Obote lost the support of Britain.While he used draconian methods to stay in power at home, he preached the cause of a free Africa internationally.

He took the lead in denouncing the Heath government's decision to sell arms to South Africa, thus further antagonising Western powers.But Obote, unpopular as he was outside his own political and ethnic groups, was not overthrown by Uganda internal political dynamics but by international concerns. Hundreds of ordinary Baganda died trying to defend their king and there was talk of mass graves filled by truckloads of bodies.On assuming the presidency, Oboto announced a "move to the left", and established a one-party state with a strong socialist element, issuing the "Common Man's Charter". The socialist element was not motivated by any love of equality. In Uganda, as in many of Africa's new socialist experiments, the new rulers wanted to create a strong state and nationalisation was simply a way of extending the power of the ruler through the state. Immediately on becoming Prime Minister, he passed a law making it a crime punishable by life imprisonment to insult him.In 1966 Obote suspended the constitution and arrested half his cabinet.