Inside the minds of old tyrants

EVER wondered what happened to the tyrants who once terrorised their people and held the world at bay, then disappeared into disgrace and exile? Riccardo Orizio, the London correspondent for La Repubblica in Italy, had the idea of trying to track down some of them, to find out how they saw their past glories and how they have survived without courtiers, flatterers or a fortune.

Orizio (through his translator, Avril Bardoni) writes in a poetic, reflective style reminiscent of the Polish reporter Ryszard Kapuscinski, which has no real Anglo-Saxon parallel. He describes the horrors of these past dictatorships with a kind of weary detachment and sad curiosity, without any sense of imperial or post-war guilt, or any ideological message.

He is more interested in the psychology than the politics of his villains.

He tries, with some success, to get inside the minds of people whose brutality, callousness and greed seem incomprehensible.

He offers a mixed batch of seven interviews and case histories, which do not really fit together. Two of the seven are not the real dictators but their wives - Mrs Milosevic in Serbia and Mrs Hoxha in Albania.

One of them, Bokassa, "Emperor" of the Central African Republic - who gives the most surreal interview - died six years ago.

His first subject, Idi Amin - exdictator of Uganda, now in exile in Saudi Arabia - is the most fascinating to many English readers.

The author gives an entertaining account of trying to track him down in Jeddah; when he finds him, the old murderer has little to say, as he shows off his huge new TV satellite screen: "I follow all the news. I'm still a man of the world".

The most revealing encounters are with three men from very different situations. The first is General Jaruzelski, the rigid Polish communist president who imposed order on Poland in 1981 before the victory of Solidarity and Lech Walesa. Today, he can still stay in his country, with some dignity: he has a small office in Warsaw, a secretary, two bodyguards and a country dacha.

He maintains a military self-respect, and quietly justifies his past repressions as essential to avoiding chaos. But he makes one interesting confession: he blames himself for not trying to prevent the wave of anti-Semitism that spread through Poland in the late Sixties, when he was joint chief-of-staff.

The most preposterous encounter is with Jean Claude-Duvalier, the former ruler of Haiti who inherited his position as "Life President" from his father at the age of 19, then fled to exile in France.

He talks to the author at the Metropole Hotel in Paris, apparently impenitent: he defends the practice of voodoo and the actions of the Tontons Macoute, the murderous militia who terrorised the Haitian people. He regrets that he was not given enough time to create a true democracy in Haiti.

But the most bloodcurdling interview is with Mengistu, the ex- dictator of Ethiopia who now lives in a suburb of Harare, in Zimbabwe, protected by his ally, Robert Mugabe.

Mengistu arranged to kill off the aged emperor of Ethiopia: "The people asked us to get rid of him, so I and my fellow-officers did just that.

We couldn't have saved him". And he presided over the "Red Terror" which killed half a million people; he, too, shows no repentance. "It was a battle.

All I did was fight it."

What do we find out from these weird conversations with old tyrants?

The author is non-judgmental. "We can only study them. Perhaps the exercise will help us to reach a greater understanding of ourselves."

He quotes Jaruzelski with apparent sympathy. "I had my ideals. I believed in socialism. If I am guilty, so is a whole generation. Anyone in my position would have done the same."

We certainly learn something about their self-confidence and resilience in the face of their setbacks. But we can't accept that they had no choice, at a time when the world is at last trying to enforce international courts to prosecute war criminals.

. Anthony Sampson's Mandela: The Authorised Biography is published by HarperCollins.

Copyright 2003
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