The end of the twentieth-century tyrants, and the dawn of the multinational giants



He called himself the King of Kings, but now he is dead. For anyone with a sense of justice, a world without Colonel Muammar Gaddafi is something to savour.

As the patron of the Provisional IRA, the Red Brigades and the Baader-Meinhof Group, the Libyan despot was sponsoring massacres before many of his recent opponents were even born. And no one who remembers the appalling murder of Wpc Yvonne Fletcher, the bombing of a Berlin nightclub or the terrible slaughter at Lockerbie will shed a tear for this mad Libyan dictator.

Gaddafi’s regime lasted a staggering 42 years. When he first came to power, toppling Libya’s King Idris in a military coup, Harold Wilson was in Downing Street, The Beatles were still a going concern and England were football’s world champions.But after four decades of the colonel’s rule, the ordinary people of Libya have little to show for it but their scars.



Eccentric: Gaddafi was one of the last of a dying breed of bloodthirsty, albeit wierdly-costumed, dictators

In the history books, his name will go down alongside those of tyrants like Chairman Mao, Idi Amin and Saddam Hussein — men who claimed to be leading their downtrodden people to peace and prosperity, but would be remembered as bloodthirsty butchers.

History will also record that the eccentric colonel was one of the last members of a dying breed. With his exit, the weirdly costumed dictators who strutted across the world stage in the Sixties and Seventies are close to extinction.

In Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe’s horrendous regime clings on to power; in North Korea, the bizarre Kim Jong-Il is somehow still in charge; even in forgotten Belarus, Europe’s last dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, suppresses dissent with an iron fist.

But although the world still has plenty of oppressive regimes, it has moved on from the days when an obscure military officer might dream of toppling his sovereign, donning dark glasses and ruling for the next half-century.



For much of the 20th century it was dictatorship, not democracy, that seemed the model for the future.

During the Twenties, for example, it was the strutting, posturing Benito Mussolini, the fascist darling of the Italian mob, who seemed the dynamic man of the future. A decade later, a generation of British intellectuals were drawn to Stalin, the ‘Man of Steel’ whose demented policies killed at least ten million people.

Idolised: Stalin and Mao attracted legions of followers

And as late as the Sixties, Left-wing students even idolised the deeply unpleasant Chairman Mao, whose tyrannical regime killed an estimated 70 million of his fellow countrymen, more than Britain’s entire population today.

Dictatorship was the norm in the communist world. Despite the rhetorical bluster about ‘People’s Democracies’, some communist leaders, like Romania’s Nicolae Ceausescu and Albania’s Enver Hoxha, clung on to power for decades.

Although most Eastern European dictators were faceless bureaucrats, some were more colourful. The paranoid Hoxha, for example, sealed his country off from foreign influence and built hundreds of thousands of concrete bunkers along the coast to deter invasion — although, in truth, most Westerners had forgotten Albania was ever there.

But to find the really bizarre dictators, you had to visit the newly-independent countries of the third world, where the withdrawal of the European empires had left a yawning power vacuum. With their political institutions half-formed and no history of democracy, many developing countries, such as Libya, fell victim to military coups.

Some of the new military dictators, for example Egypt’s charismatic ruler Colonel Nasser, were relatively sane, providing much-needed social improvements for their downtrodden people. Unfortunately, Nasser was the exception, not the rule.

Most third world dictators in the Sixties and Seventies were like refugees from some chamber of horrors. Desperate to emulate Napoleon and Hitler, they strutted the world stage in absurd uniforms, awarded themselves hundreds of medals and stole millions from their own people.

In Haiti, for example, Francois Duvalier, ‘Papa Doc’, subjected his people to a reign of terror that almost defies belief. Rewriting the Lord’s Prayer so that it began: ‘Our Doc, who art in the National Palace for life,’ he used to dress up as Baron Samedi, the voodoo spirit of the dead, wearing a dark suit, top hat and dark glasses.



The great dictator? The days of the gold-braided despot are over

In some ways he cut a ludicrous figure. But there was nothing funny about his regime, for outside the palace walls, his Tontons Macoutes militia raped, tortured and murdered with impunity.

Then there was Jean-Bedel Bokassa, a military officer who seized power in the Central African Republic in 1966 and ruled for the next 13 years, thanks partly to aid from Colonel Gaddafi.

Bokassa at first seemed reasonably rational. But in December 1976 he abruptly announced that he was renaming his country — one of the very poorest on the planet — the Central African Empire.

Crowning himself Emperor Bokassa I, he spent a third of the national budget on a lavish coronation, where he appeared to have dressed up as Napoleon. Schoolchildren even had to wear uniforms displaying images of his face, while hundreds of dissidents were tortured and murdered.

The gold medal for chilling antics, though, went to the buffoonish Idi Amin, who misruled Uganda for eight years after 1971. Embarrassingly, Amin was a British creation, having held the highest possible rank for a black officer in the colonial British Army in those days.

Away from the parade ground, Amin had a taste for rugby union. One British officer described him as ‘a splendid type and a good player, but virtually bone from the neck up, and needs things explained in words of one letter.’



To inspire him before big games, his Scottish officers used to hit him on the head with a hammer. At first, Amin’s coup against Uganda’s authoritarian leader Milton Obote was widely welcomed. But soon he yielded to the same tyrannical impulses that infected so many other dictators.



Tyrannical: The gold medal for chilling antics goes to Ugandan dictator Idi Amin

After kicking out the Ugandan Asian middle classes, who promptly fled to Britain, Amin declared himself King of Scotland and took to wearing full Highland dress in the sweltering African weather.

Like many third world dictators, Amin was obsessed with his former colonial masters. By 1977 he had adopted the title ‘His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular.’

Foreigners often saw him as a comic figure: one American observer called him a ‘killer and clown, big-hearted buffoon and strutting martinet.’ But the Ugandan people were not laughing.

By the time Amin was kicked out in 1979, he had killed an estimated half a million people, while his resource-rich country was poorer than ever.



And although it is probably a myth that he dealt with dissidents by eating them or kept his opponents’ severed heads in his freezer, he certainly deserves his place in his continent’s hall of infamy.



How on earth, you may wonder, did all these monsters win and wield power for so long?

The truth is that they were a product of their times. With the collapse of the European colonial empires, huge swathes of the world were left without political institutions and democratic legitimacy.

Militaristic: Many dictators believed they were leading their nations to glory

Often the only institution people respected was the army. Once upon a time, before they had earned their reputations for barbarism, men like Gaddafi, Amin and even Saddam Hussein were merely ambitious young officers who dreamed of leading their nations to glory.

What kept them in power was the superpower rivalry of the Cold War. As the U.S. and Soviet Union scrambled to line up client states across the planet, dictators knew there would always be somebody to sponsor them.

Most of the real monsters were backed by the Kremlin, but not all of them. Shamefully, American support kept Papa Doc in power, while the image of Donald Rumsfeld — later to become President George W. Bush’s defence secretary — shaking hands with Saddam Hussein in 1983 has become justly notorious.

In this climate, all restraints were off. Again and again, the experience of wielding supreme power turned relatively normal husbands and fathers into raving lunatics. If nothing else, the great dictators proved the truth of Lord Acton’s famous maxim: ‘All power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.’

At their peak, men like Gaddafi and Amin were often described as being inhuman. But perhaps the really chilling thing is how human, mundane and ordinary they were.

Their passions and obsessions, their lusts and hatreds, were merely the basest human emotions run riot. They were like Roman emperors, cocooned in their palaces and driven slowly mad.

And although they were desperate to be taken seriously, there was something pathetic, almost adolescent, about their ridiculous medals and showy outfits, their aggressive promiscuity, their greed for money and their intolerance of criticism.

Compensating? There was something pathetic about the showiness and pomp of the 'great' despots

But although a few Cold War relics, like the contemptible Robert Mugabe, still cling on, the days of the gold-braided dictator seem to be over.

For many tyrants, the disappearance of the Soviet Union marked the beginning of the end. And as recent events in Libya, Egypt and Tunisia have shown, it is much harder to quell dissent when your people are using Twitter and Facebook to keep in touch with the outside world.

No doubt the 21st century will throw up its fair share of villains. But it is worth noting that these days, most authoritarian regimes, such as Omar al Bashir’s Sudan, Thein Sein’s Burma or even Hu Jintao’s China, are led by relatively faceless, even bland figures.

The days when a dictator renamed the months of the year after his members of his family, as Turkmenistan’s leader Saparmurat Niyazov did a few years ago, or kept an opponent’s head in his wardrobe, as Papa Doc notoriously did, are over.



Today, most authoritarian rulers prefer to keep a low profile. In any case, real power no longer belongs with the medal-wearing figure strutting in front of the crowd, but with the grey men watching from their corporate boardrooms.

To multinational giants such as Glencore, the world’s biggest commodity trader, which controls 50 per cent of the global copper market, 60 per cent of zinc and a quarter of the world’s barley, sunflower and rape seed, most of these dictators must look like pygmies.

Globalisation: Real power today lies with multinational corporate giants such as commodities trader Glencore

Glencore’s reclusive boss, Ivan Glasenberg, a billionaire who controls tin mines in Bolivia, copper mines in Zambia, Russian wheat farms and Kazakh zinc producers, makes the bombastic Libyan martinet cut a relatively feeble figure.

In today’s globalised world, real influence over people’s lives often comes down to food prices and massive stock-market gambles.

In New York, a futures trader — who makes a huge bet on what the price of wheat, for example, might be in a year’s time — picks up the phone; in Africa, thousands of people are either thrown out of work or face a famine. Why would you want to be a tinpot dictator when you could be a copper-bottomed, gold-plated plutocrat instead?



Demise: Anybody hoping to follow in the great dictators¿ footsteps would be well advised to consider their fate

Moreover, anybody hoping to follow in the great dictators’ footsteps would be well advised to consider the fate of the men who once wielded supreme power.

Bokassa was put on trial and sent to prison, while Amin died in exile in a Saudi Arabian hotel. And they were relatively lucky. Saddam Hussein ended up skulking beneath the floorboards before a date with the hangman, while this week Colonel Gaddafi died a coward’s death after a Nato air strike.

Of course, democracy is far from perfect. With its endless compromises and petty hypocrisies, it sometimes seems incapable of inspiring grand visions and noble dreams.



But grand visions are best left to third world dictators and idealistic teenagers. And much as we might complain about our own political system, Winston Churchill had it right. ‘Democracy,’ he once remarked, ‘is the worst form of government — except all the others that have been tried.’

If there is any justice, then the long-suffering Libyan people, along with their counterparts in Egypt and Tunisia, will soon taste democracy for themselves. No doubt it will fall short of their expectations — but that is the price you pay for political maturity. Better that than another dictator any day.

In the meantime, none of us should shed a tear for the death of Colonel Gaddafi. He was a cruel, arrogant and cold-hearted killer. He squandered his nation’s oil riches, his hands were stained with British blood and he does not deserve a scrap of pity.