'This is the monster of my childhood': How a Canadian nurse came face to face with Idi Amin in his dying days

EXTENDED: Nurse's encounter with Idi Amin A Montreal-area nurse tells her story of coming face to face with the dictator who destroyed her family's life.

*This article includes material that may trigger some readers

Imagine confronting the dictator who brutalized and destroyed your family’s life – and hearing his desperate pleas to save him.

That was the traumatic and surprising scenario Vasanti Makwana was faced with. The Canadian nurse wanted a change of pace and decided to pursue short-term work in Saudi Arabia for a professional adventure.

“It seemed like a very interesting place to go and spread my wings….And it was a year contract. So it was quite feasible for me to do,” she told CTV News.

But one night in 2003, while she was on call, her past suddenly clashed with her present when she was forced to deal with the most jarring experiences of her life.

“At around 2:00 [am], I got the phone call from the supervisors at the hospital there is a VIP coming in to be treated for dialysis.”

A driver picked her up from her compound – in those days Saudi women were not allowed to drive – and when she got to work, she found out the patient’s name was “Amin.”

But she never expected it to be the Idi Amin.

“When I did see him being wheeled in my unit, that’s when it sank in that ‘Oh, my God. This is the Idi Amin Dada,” she said. “ I was very frightened. It was like everything coming back in a rush…I was so scared. My heart was pumping.”

“And I said: Oh my God…This is the monster of my childhood.”

She remembers that he looked “very sick” and that she needed to “pull four litres of fluids from him to stabilize his condition. And that’s what we did.”

Before ICU personnel took him away, Makwana had a few moments alone with Amin who pleaded with her.

“Please help me. I’m a very sick man,” she remembers him telling her. “And I said, ‘Yes, sir, we will help you’.”

But she also felt she needed to confront him.

“I was able to have just a few moments, very few – maybe not even a couple of minutes – to be able to tell him that I’m one of those Ugandan Asians he had kicked out.

“He looked at me with very big eyes and I said, ‘Don’t worry. I will not harm you. I will help you get better’,” she said. “There was no question in my mind that I would not help him.”

But she did feel compelled to relay a burden she had been carrying for decades.

“The little girl in me needed to tell him that my father never forgave you for doing this to us because my father loved Uganda. I mean – that was his home. That was our home”

Makwana’s father did not only experience the horrors of the expulsion; he saw horrific acts unfold in front of his eyes in the months leading up to the exodus – acts that made it clear to him he needed to urgently get his family out.

One day, his car was stopped by Amin’s men and he saw a bus load of people, including a group of young girls around the same age as his daughter, Vasanti, who was 14 at the time.

“What those goons did to those young girls, my father saw with his eyes.”

“They were raped and sodomized in plain daylight. And I think one of them even died. It was gruesome,” Makwana said. “When he came home, he was ashen.”

Decades later, Makwana says the ability to speak with Amin lifted a weight.

“The way he looked at me, there was like a sense of acknowledgement,” she said.

“Honestly, after I had said what I needed him to know, everything just was gone and I had the most compassion or him. I really did feel sorry for him.”

With a report from producer Shelley Ayres

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WATCH the full network special 'Expelled: My Roots in Uganda' airing Friday, Nov. 4 at 9 p.m. on CTV