Abstract: On January 25, 1971, Colonel Idi Amin Dada, backed by Israel and Kenya, led a coup against
Ugandan President Apollo Milton Obote, and reversed the Obote’s government’s mass
nationalization of foreign companies. This paper argues that despite Amin’s apparent
neocolonial military dictatorship, the Yugoslav government implicitly recognized the new
government, due to global economic conditions and the presence of lucrative contracts for
Yugoslav companies in Uganda. The Yugoslav government had increasingly privileged its
economic interests over its ideological interests in solidarity, eschewing a balance it tried to
maintain in evaluating its relations with Obote’s government. This partnership was gladly
accepted by Amin as the new government’s initial diplomatic goals were to acquire international
recognition and legitimacy on the rhetoric of Non-Alignment and pan-Africanism. This rhetoric
allowed the Yugoslav government to accept Idi Amin as a new partner, keeping a socialist
veneer to justify its implicit recognition and ending the goals of cooperation based in socialist
solidarity.
Derrik Rivet is a Ph.D. student in Modern Eastern European and African history with a focus on the history of diplomacy and the environment, health, technology, and science. Their research focuses primarily on the relations between Eastern European socialist nations and African nations during the Cold War, specifically the relations between Yugoslavia and Tanzania. They are particularly interested in how ideas of socialism, race, Non-Alignment, and development translate into the political, cultural, and technical cooperation between these two nations.