Those Old Tyrants Who Just Won't Go Away
Eric Ellis

June 11, 1998

As British Prime Minister Tony Blair might agree, life can be just as much a headache for the reluctant hosts of fallen dictators as for the tired old tyrants themselves.

With Chilean strongman General Augusto Pinochet languishing in a London hospital awaiting the outcome of legal and diplomatic wrangling across the continents, it's an issue Asian governments might wish to consider as the regional financial crisis picks off the self-proclaimed "emperors" suddenly found lacking clothes.

What of Indonesia's Soeharto, the patriarch behind an estimated $US40 billion ($63.3 billion) fortune of allegedly ill-gotten gains? How far does his successor, B.J. Habibie, go in his campaign for transparency, and reconcile the Soeharto years to Indonesians? And what if the Anwar trial and the follow-up in Kuala Lumpur goes awry for Dr Mahathir Mohamed? Will his successors be as accommodating as Soeharto's in fashioning a legacy for the latter-day "father of the nation"? And then there's Burma's Ne Win and his anointed successor, Khin Nyunt - or the widely-hated Vietnamese communists? All were thought to be immune from retribution but, in this uncertain climate, who can tell?
Blair's Brits are the latest to be embarrassed by the sudden appearance on their doorstep of a dictator whom the world once cosseted but suddenly dropped when geo-politics went against them. France, Saudi Arabia, Panama, Brazil and Zimbabwe have been labouring under such burdens for years.

The former Ugandan tyrant Idi Amin lives in a luxurious villa with half-a-dozen wives and 30 children in the liberal Saudi city of Jeddah, with state-employed bodyguards, cooks and staff to tend his every whim.

An estimated 350,000 people were killed during Amin's eight years in power, 10 times the number claimed for Pinochet's goons.

So with a record and reputation like that, what's in it for the Saudis? Nothing except a promise that Amin will keep his large bulk and odious credo out of politics.

The former Soviet Union's Ethiopian client Joseph Mengitsu has lived in similar style in Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe since the Cold War ended in revolution for him in 1991, an embarrassment to Mugabe and also to South Africa's Nelson Mandela, who tries hard, and ultimately unsuccessfully, to embrace his reluctant northern neighbours as part of Africa's democratic family of nations. Compared with the long-time Paraguayan tyrant, Alfredo Stroessner, Chile's General Pinochet got a free ride. Pinochet was head of the Chilean army for years after he stepped down as President in 1990 and became Senator-for-life this year in a government anointed by the world's policeman of these things, the US, which backed his coup in the first place with CIA operatives.

But Stroessner wasn't welcome in his own country, let alone his country's parliament.

The old despot was recently seen wandering through the diplomatic district of Brazil's capital Brasilia, a broken old 80-something mumbling pathetically about his years in power.

And then there's the Haitian fat boy Jean-Claude Duvalier, languishing in a broken-down villa in southern France. Like his fellow tyrants, Duvalier could be taken out tomorrow by an assassin's bullet, but they are likely to be more interested in one of his successors, General Raoul Cedras, enjoying the good life of Panama City and hoping to return to Port-au-Prince when the climate gets sunnier.

Cedras, like Pinochet, is part of a long line of American hemisphere dictators who just can't seem to understand that their time is up.

As prominent Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa wrote recently in Spain's El Pais newspaper, "to know that the international community does not guarantee impunity for their crimes and they will always live on the fly, like cornered rats [these dictators] will be a powerful vaccination against the Third World plague of military pronouncements, barracks insurrections and coups d'etat".

He forgot to say a constant headache to their hosts