Although I wanted to see hime at the top of the list, but the 3rd position is also not bad. He is doing his best to achieve the first position. Better luck next time dear dictator.
Special issue: The world’s top 10 dictators
NS Special Issue
Rachel Aspden
Monday 4th September 2006
Nearly 17 years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall there is still no shortage of dictators casting their shadows across the world. This special issue takes a look at 10 current despots.
“Dictator” has not always been a dirty word. In 458 BC Cincinnatus abandoned his plough to assume absolute power in Rome, briskly saved the city from invasion, and relinquished his position after three months. More recently, the office has fallen into disrepute. Since Stalin, Hitler and Mao it has competed with “terrorist” as the west’s worst political insult, and as the removal of Saddam Hussein showed, its definition is often as opportunistic.
This special report looks at the phenomenon of dictatorship in a democratising world, from the bankrupt North Korean military machine to the booming Gulf state of Dubai. Our top ten is a selection of men - there are currently no women dictators - who combine a high level of personal power with repressive practices, ranging from press censorship to fixing elections and, in the case of Equatorial Guinea’s Teodoro Obiang Nguema, allegedly cannibalising political opponents. There is plenty of kitsch excess - bouffant hairstyles, super-sized yachts and a fondness for khaki - and also plenty of suffering: despite a global fear of dictators running amok, the only people they tend to harm are their own.
Their misdemeanours, however, are often ignored. While North Korea’s Kim Jong-il, possibly the world’s cruellest autocrat, remains beyond the diplomatic pale, the west has long-standing marriages of convenience with undemocratic rulers such as Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. Oil, money and information, as these leaders know, are enough to gloss over human-rights violations - even Turkmenistan’s personality cult leader Saparmurat Niyazov has found European friends with the promise of cheap gas. But even without these sweeteners, the anti-dictator tide may be turning. With the results of democracy in both the Palestinian territories and Iraq proving increasingly unpalatable to western powers, “friendly” dictators can safely anticipate a welcome in from the political cold.