More of the World's Greatest Dictators

Dictators are people too--just trying to make lives for themselves in this crazy, mixed-up world. Sometimes, they too inwardly hum the Ally McBeal theme as they gas villages full of Kurds, Serbs, Hutus, and whathaveyous. They've been searching their souls, and what they found was an inky-black core of twitching, pulsing evil. That makes them sad.

Especially if their talents are also being roundly ignored. Right now, as we explored last week, Africa is holding its own in producing world-class crazed buffoons to run its countries. But what about the former Eastern Bloc? All those ex-Soviet satellites that went kaputnik in the big family breakup of the early 90s have retreated to obscurity, and now no one outside the Foreign Office can get within 1,000 miles of pinpointing Tajikistan on a map. But that doesn't mean that these nations have given up the comfort-blanket of sham elections, does it? No, autocracy remains alive and well, and their dictators deserve their moment in the sun as much as the next mustachioed man in a quasi-military uniform with 100 medals pinned to it.

Aleksandr Lukashenko
Belarus

In his 16 years at the helm of Belarus, Aleksandr Lukashenko has earned himself the enviable tag of "Europe's Last Dictator." This is despite his best efforts to prove otherwise. In 2004, he later confessed, he had deliberately instructed state radio to announce a lower share of the vote for himself--86%, rather than the 93.5% he'd actually won. Why? Because the generous autocrat had hoped to please his external trade partners by making the result look more like a conventional democratic vote-share. But it turns out you just can't win with some folks. And neither can you lose.

Likewise, his commitment to civil liberties is absolute. "I want to come from the premise that the elections in Belarus are held for ourselves," he announced just before the 2004 poll. "I am sure that it is the Belarus people who are the masters in our state." Of course, at the same time, he also announced that anyone joining an opposition protest would be automatically treated as a terrorist and would "have their necks wrung… as one might a duck."

A collective-farm manager in olden times, Lukashenko was a genuine populist leader who won the elections in 1994 by scything past the upper crust of decrepit former Soviet politburo. His campaign was run and won on an "Ordinary-Joe ticket." He was the common man. He was change. And hope. Since then, he's made mincemeat of anyone who hopes for change. Two of his cabinet colleagues have simply disappeared, never to be seen again.

Often, he fritters away what little goodwill he's built up on daft acts of personal vanity. In 1998 he decided he wanted to take control of an upmarket gated community in the capital, where he had a house. The compound, however, was already shared with 25 ambassadors, including the British and American envoys. So, he simply instructed the power company to turn off the gas and electricity to smoke them out. After that failed to shift them, he changed the locks on the gates. Despite Britain and America withdrawing their ambassadors in protest, he stuck to his guns.

But in spite of the wringer he puts his dissidents through, most Belarusians have a grudging respect for Lukashenko. Things may be bad, the feeling goes, but at least we get paid promptly--a blessing when compared to a other, more democratic nations in their region. Whatever his failings, Lukashenko makes the buses run on time. As the man himself put it: "Germany was raised from ruins thanks to firm authority and not everything connected with that well-known figure Hitler was bad." Well. Quite.

Islam Karimov
Uzbekistan

On 9 January 2000, Islam Karimov was re-elected as president of Uzbekistan with a whopping 91.9% of the vote. Perhaps it would have been closer to 91.89% had not Karimov's only opponent actually voted for him too. That opponent, Abdulhafiz Jalalov, admitted that he was, naturally enough, full-square behind the President, and that his only role had been to make the whole democracy charade seem like it had some purpose.

In Uzbekistan, the only opposition has nothing to do with elections: it comes from Islamically-orientated freedom-fighters who have sporadically taken up arms against the government. Karimov has been understandably keen to conflate these semi-legitimate rebels with Al Qaeda, in order to win US backing for further pogroms as part of the War On Terror. This he does by torturing them in droves, then supplying jumped-up evidence about Bin Laden connections, extracted at drill point, to his pals at the US State Department. The Americans, in turn, have to hear him out and smile nicely, because Uzbekistan shares a convenient border with Afghanistan--it was from there that the 2001 Afghan invasion was originally launched.

But torture isn't just a quaint pastime for Karimov; it's close to an obsession. Like the Amins and Pol Pots before him, he delights in dreaming-up new ways in which to hurt his victims. Electrocution, chlorine-filled gas masks, drowning, rape, shooting, beatings, these are a few of his favorite things--but boiling them alive is the one he really really loves. "I'm prepared to rip off the heads of 200 people in order to save the republic," he asserted after a brief uprising in 1999. And cook them as well, no doubt.

Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov
Turkmenistan

The dictating scene in Turkmenistan has been in recession since the death, in 2006, of Saparmurat Niyazov. The incomparably batshit "Turkmenbashi"'s foibles included naming the days of the week after his family, naming nearly everything else after himself, forbidding the growing of beards (allegedly because he couldn't grow one himself), closing all libraries outside the capital because he believed that Turkmens were all illiterate anyway, banning video games and car-radios, banning smoking in public (but only after he was forced to give up the coffin-nails following a heart-op), banning lip-syncing at pop concerts, demanding that a palace of ice be built at the outskirts of the capital (despite the year-round 100 degree heat), sacking his interior minister on live TV (declaring, "You've never done much to fight crime anyway"), and writing a national anthem that made repeated reference to the sun shining out of his ass. In 2006, he closed all the hospitals outside the capital. He was that kind of guy.

So when he died of heart failure, it was natural that a brainwashed nation would turn to a man who already bore an uncanny physical resemblance to their dear departed leader. It was also reasonable that Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow--whose name doesn't get any easier to spell no matter how often you look at it--would want to capitalize on his likeness. His agents soon spread a rumor that the ex-health minister was the illegitimate son of their former leader. The dynastic connection established, new President For Life Berdimuhamedow was able to start building up his own pool of wacky requests, including asserting that only he should be referred to by his first name in state press releases (others having been reduced to mere initials). While reserving the right to do bad things to anyone he doesn't like the look of, the former dentist has however made a few concessions: deleting all mentions of Niyazov in the national anthem, un-naming the days of the week, allowing news anchors to wear make-up--you know, the sort of stuff that was in the Lib Dem manifesto. And so, while they still rank third behind North Korea and Burma on the global index of press freedom, when you're working from such a high base, his modest relaxations have already earned Berdimuhamedow pats on the back and a "great reformer" tag from Western powers. Or at least from those Western powers eager to get their hands on his country's vast natural gas reserves. Everybody loves vast natural gas reserves.

GAVIN HAYNES