Titans of History

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  In response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979, Sakharov called for an international boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics. In January 1980 he was arrested by the KGB and transported to internal exile—and grim living conditions—in the city of Gorky. Only Bonner’s trips between Moscow and Gorky from 1980 to 1984—during which time she was harassed and publicly denounced—gave him a lifeline to the outside world. In 1984 she too was arrested, for slandering the regime, and was sentenced to five years’ exile in Gorky. Bonner joined her husband on long and painful hunger strikes in order to secure medical attention for their family.

  In 1985 a new and reforming Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, came to power, determined to end the stagnation and oppression that Sakharov had so long criticized. The following year Sakharov was released and invited back to Moscow. He returned as a hero and was elected to the Congress of People’s Deputies, the Soviet Union’s first democratically chosen body. He went on to play a prominent part in the democratic revolution that was sweeping the Soviet Union and remained in Russia until his death from a heart attack in 1989.

  Yelena Bonner was a vocal critic of Russian atrocities in Chechnya and of the return of Russia to KGB-style authoritarianism, dying in 2011. She and her husband remain beacons of the struggle against tyranny.

  NGUEMA

  1924–79

  The cottage industry Dachau of Africa.

  Robert af Klinteberg on the state of Equatorial Guinea under Nguema

  Francisco Macías Nguema, who officially called himself the Unique Miracle, was the corrupt, demented, homicidal, skull-collecting first president of Equatorial Guinea in west Africa. In a continent that has endured governance by a legion of bloodthirsty madmen, Macías Nguema stands out as one of the worst.

  For the first forty-four years of Macías Nguema’s life, Equatorial Guinea was a Spanish colony. Three times in succession Nguema failed the civil-service entrance exams, only passing on the fourth occasion because the bar was purposely lowered by the Spanish to enable him to do so. Thereafter he occupied increasingly influential positions, eventually gaining a seat in the national assembly.

  In 1968 Spain granted the country independence, and in the subsequent presidential elections Macías stood on a left-leaning populist platform. He won. Initially, Nguema appeared to promote a free and liberal society, but the honeymoon period lasted a mere 145 days. Nguema had developed an intense hatred of the Spanish (perhaps as a reaction to his earlier dependence on them) and, indeed, foreigners in general. Spanish residents became the target of state-sanctioned terror, and by March 1969 over 7000 of them had abandoned the country—many of them skilled workers. In their wake, the economy collapsed.

  Initially, some within the government, such as the foreign minister Ndongo Miyone, attempted to rein in the excesses. But they paid a high price for doing so. In the case of Miyone, he was summoned to Nguema’s presidential palace and beaten, then hauled off to prison and murdered. Similar treatment was meted out to others who dared to oppose Nguema: ten of the twelve ministers who formed the country’s first post-independence government were killed. In their place, Nguema appointed relatives or members of his clan, the Esangui. Thus one nephew was made commander of the national guard, while another was simultaneously minister of finance, minister of trade, minister of information and minister for security. The dreaded security _services were manned entirely with his placemen and he ordered them to bludgeon his victims to death in a stadium as a band played “Those were the days, my friend.”

  As Nguema tightened his grip on power (he made himself president for life in 1972), the killing became ever more capricious. On two occasions he had all former lovers of his then mistresses put to death. More broadly, two thirds of the members of the national assembly and all the country’s senior civil servants were arrested and executed. The more fortunate fled into exile. In 1976, 114 senior civil servants—all of whom had been appointed by Nguema to replace those he had previously got rid of—petitioned him for a relaxation of the persecution. Every single one of them was subsequently arrested, tortured and murdered.

  The same year also saw the closure of Equatorial Guinea’s central bank and the execution of its director, as all meaningful economic activity—other than that directed toward the benefit of Nguema—was brought to a standstill. From then on, all foreign currency that entered the country was delivered directly to the president and hoarded. When Nguema ran short of funds, his forces oversaw the kidnapping and ransoming of foreign nationals.

  In his determination to control all aspects of life, Nguema ordered that all libraries and all forms of media be shut down. The only form of worship permitted was of Nguema himself, with people required to acknowledge that “There is no God other than Macías” and “God created Equatorial Guinea thanks to Papa Macías.”

  Over time it became clear that Nguema was clinically insane, talking to himself and alternating between mania and depression. Drugged up on stimulants, he ordered the building of a vast new presidential palace in Bata, but then decided to retreat instead to his home town in the Mongomo region of the country. There, he kept the entire national treasury in bags, alongside a range of human skulls, fueling terrifying rumors of his supposed magical powers.

  Nguema finally fell in August 1979 in a military coup led by his nephew, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo—who continues to rule to this day—although not before setting fire to much of the country’s wealth. He tried to flee, but was locked in a cage suspended in a cinema, where he was tried for 80,000 murders and sentenced to death. The new regime had to get Moroccan mercenaries to carry out the execution—fear of his magical powers prevented local troops from doing it themselves.

  During his decade-long reign of terror, Nguema had brought Equatorial Guinea to its knees. Out of its population of over 300,000, some 100,000 had been killed and 125,000 had fled into exile as Nguema transformed his country into a hell on earth. After a reign of almost thirty years, his nephew’s tyranny remains one of the most corrupt and repressive in Africa. Torture is endemic, and local radio hails him as a god while he grooms his son to succeed him.

  POL POT

  1925–98

  Pol Pot does not believe in God, but he thinks that heaven, destiny, wants him to guide Cambodia the way he thinks it the best for Cambodia … Pol Pot is mad … like Hitler.

  Prince Norodom Sihanouk, former ruler of Cambodia

  Pol Pot, the communist Khmer Rouge leader who created the democidal hell known as Democratic Kampuchea, only ruled Cambodia for four years, but in that short time he murdered millions of innocent people—half the population—impoverished the country, killed all intellectuals, even people who wore spectacles, and tried to restart time at a diabolic Year Zero.

  Born as Saloth Sar, Pol Pot (a revolutionary name he adopted in 1963) was the son of a wealthy farmer. His family were courtiers to the Cambodian royal family and in 1931, as a child of six, he moved to the capital city, Phnom Penh, to live with his brother, an official at the royal palace, and was educated at Catholic and French schools. In 1949 he went to Paris on a scholarship to study electronics, and became involved with the French Communist Party and with other left-wing Cambodian students studying in Paris. Pol Pot was never academically inclined and was forced to return home after failing his exams.

  After a spell as a teacher, in 1963 Pol Pot began to devote all his energy to revolutionary activities. That same year he was appointed head of the Workers’ Party of Kampuchea—effectively the Cambodian communist party, also referred to as the Khmer Rouge, which strongly opposed the existing government of Prince Norodom Sihanouk. The prince—and sometime king—had led the country with irresponsible self-indulgence since independence from France in 1953. Pol Pot forged links with North Vietnam and China, which he visited in 1966. He was impressed with Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Indeed Mao was to be his main patron and hero. The following year he spent time with a hill tribe in northeastern Cambodia, and was impressed by the simpl
icity of peasant life, uncorrupted by the city.

  In 1968 the Khmer Rouge launched an insurrection, seizing the mountainous region on the border with Vietnam. The United States, embroiled in the Vietnam War and fearing that North Vietnamese troops were using Cambodia as a safe haven, began a bombing campaign, which radicalized Cambodia in Pol Pot’s favor. In 1970, Prince Sihanouk was overthrown in a right-wing coup by former defense minister Lon Nol. The Khmer Rouge’s shadowy army of guerrillas in black pajamas soon controlled the countryside.

  On April 17, 1975 the capital finally fell to the Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot—ruling with a tiny clique of comrades such as Ieng Sary and Khieu Samphan under the anonymous cover of the Organization—declared that 1975 was “Year Zero” and started to purge Cambodia of all noncommunist influences. All foreigners were expelled, newspapers were outlawed and large numbers of people with the merest taint of association with the old regime—including all religious leaders, whether Buddhist, Christian or Muslim—were executed. There were even reports of people being killed because they wore spectacles—a sign of “bourgeois intellectuals.”

  Pol Pot—now known as Brother Number One—then embarked on an insane and doomed attempt to turn Cambodia into an agrarian utopia. The cities were cleared of their inhabitants, who were forced to live in agricultural communes in the countryside. In terrible conditions, with food shortages and crippling hard labor, these communes soon became known as the Killing Fields, where several million innocent Cambodians were executed. Despite a massive shortfall in the harvest of 1977 and rising famine, the regime arrogantly rejected the offer of outside aid.

  The capital, Phnom Penh, once a vibrant city of 2 million people, became a ghost town. Following Chairman Mao’s dictum that the peasant was the true proletarian, Pol Pot believed that the city was a corrupting entity, a haven for the bourgeoisie, capitalists and foreign influences.

  City dwellers were marched at gunpoint to the countryside as part of the plans of the new regime to abolish cash payments and turn Cambodia into a self-sufficient communist society, where everyone worked the soil. The regime made a distinction between those with “full rights” (who had originally lived off the land) and “depositees” taken from the city, many of whom were massacred outright. Those depositees—capitalists, intellectuals and people who had regular contact with the outside world—who could not be “re-educated” in the ways of the revolution, were tortured and killed at a number of concentration camps, such as the S-21 prison camp (also known as Strychnine Hill), or taken straight to the Killing Fields, where their rations were so small that they could not survive. Thousands were forced to dig their own graves before Khmer Rouge soldiers beat their weary bodies with iron bars, axes and hammers until they died. The soldiers had been instructed not to waste bullets.

  Those who were spared immediate execution became slave laborers in the program of agrarian collectivization. Hundreds of thousands of civilians—often uprooted and separated from their families—were worked to death, or starved because of a lack of rations. Many more were executed in the fields for the most minor indiscretions—such as engaging in sexual relations, complaining about conditions, stealing food or espousing religious beliefs.

  Some of the Killing Fields containing mass graves have now been preserved as a testimony to the genocide perpetrated by Pol Pot and his followers. The most infamous of them is Choeung Ek, where 8895 bodies were discovered after the fall of the regime.

  The country was now riddled with spies and informers, and even children were encouraged to inform on their parents. Pol Pot went on to conduct purges within the Khmer Rouge itself, leading to the execution of more than 200,000 members.

  External enemies proved more difficult to suppress, however. With only China maintaining support for the regime, Cambodia become embroiled in a conflict with Vietnam, whose forces invaded and captured Phnom Penh on January 7, 1979, forcing Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge to flee to the western regions and over the border into Thailand. The new Vietnamese-controlled regime tried Pol Pot in absentia for genocide and sentenced him to death. Undeterred, Pol Pot directed an aggressive guerrilla war against the new regime, and kept an iron grip on the Khmer Rouge. As late as 1997 he ordered the execution of his colleague Song Sen, along with his family, on suspicion of collaborating with Cambodian government forces. Shortly afterward he himself was arrested by another senior Khmer Rouge figure, and sentenced to life imprisonment, dying in April 1998 of heart failure.

  In his murderous, almost psychotic, schemes for a communist utopia, Pol Pot, Brother Number One, outran anything in George Orwell’s imagination. During a reign of just under four years, he oversaw the deaths of between two and five million men, women and children—over a third of the entire population of Cambodia.

  IDI AMIN

  1925–2003

  Hitler and all German people knew that the Israelis are not people who are working in the interest of the people of the world, and that is why they burned the Israelis alive with gas.

  Idi Amin, telegram to Kurt Waldheim, secretary general of the United Nations, 1972

  Idi Amin represents the disastrous tendency of post-colonial African states to fall into the hands of murderous, long-serving, corrupt and inept dictators—from Doctor Hastings Banda of Malawi and President Mobutu of Zaire to the Emperor Bokassa of the Central African Empire and President Mugabe of Zimbabwe. Amin was one of the worst. Illiterate, garrulous and burly, as terrifying as he was ridiculous, Field Marshal Idi Amin Dada was a buffoonish bully and sadistic mass murderer who earned the soubriquet the Butcher of Uganda. The soi-disant Last King of Scotland impoverished Uganda, once the jewel of Africa, a megalomaniacal cannibalistic loon who killed so many of his countrymen that the crocodiles of Lake Victoria could not consume them fast enough.

  As a boy, Amin was abandoned by his father, and received little in the way of formal education. In 1946 he enlisted in the King’s African Rifles, and went on to distinguish himself by his marksmanship and sporting abilities—he was nine times heavyweight boxing champion of Uganda. In the 1950s he participated in the suppression of the anti-British Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya, serving with distinction but attracting suspicion for using excessive brutality. Nevertheless, he was promoted to warrant officer, and in 1961 became only the second native Ugandan to receive a commission.

  After Uganda gained its independence from Britain in 1962, Amin emerged as a high-ranking military officer under Prime Minister Milton Obote, becoming deputy commander of the army in 1964. This was a period of economic boom and an era in which the new federal constitution balanced the desire for regional autonomy with the centralizing impulses of national government. Yet all of this was destroyed by Obote, who in 1966 arrested several government ministers and suspended Parliament and the constitution. In their place Obote installed himself as executive president with vast powers; Amin was made overall commander of the army and played a leading role in suppressing the opposition to Obote’s coup, resulting in hundreds of deaths.

  In January 1971, when the president was out of the country, Amin seized power, encouraged by his patron Britain. Initially he was welcomed by many who had grown resentful of Obote’s growing tyranny. Such supporters were further encouraged by Amin’s early acts of reconciliation: political prisoners were released, the emergency laws relaxed, the secret police disbanded. Amin also promised free elections.

  However, the killing soon started. An abortive invasion from Tanzania by Obote supporters in 1972 prompted Amin to create Special Squads to hunt down suspected opponents. He created an all-powerful secret police, the Public Safety Unit, dominated by Muslim Nubian and southern Sudanese tribesmen who delighted in killing. As he gradually killed more and more ministers, lawyers and anyone of any prominence, he created a further special murder corps called the State Research Unit under Major Farouk Minaura, a Nubian sadist. Massacres followed—targeted initially against Obote’s Langi tribe and the neighboring Acholi clan. But anyone suspected of harboring dissent was deemed a
legitimate target. Amin’s victims included Chief Justice Benedicto Kiwanuka, Joseph Mubiru, the former governor of the Ugandan central bank, Anglican archbishop Janani Luwum and two of his own cabinet ministers. Rumors began to emerge that Amin practiced blood rituals over the bodies of his victims, even indulging in cannibalism. Many of the bodies, dumped in the Nile or on the streets or found hooded and tied to trees, were sliced open with organs missing, clearly the victims of tribal rites. Amin himself often asked to be left alone with bodies in the morgues, which he visited frequently, and it was clear he tampered with the cadavers. “I have eaten human flesh,” he boasted. “It is saltier than leopard flesh.” The terror extended to his own wives: the beautiful Kay died during an abortion, but Amin had her body dismembered and then sewn together again. Lesser women suspected of disloyalty were simply murdered.

  Increasingly, Amin ruled by autocratic whim. In addition, huge amounts of money were diverted to secure the support of the Ugandan military. As money ran short, Amin simply ordered the central bank to print more. Inflation soared, economic life entered on a downward spiral and consumer goods ran short.

  With his popularity plummeting, Amin sought a scapegoat and settled on Uganda’s wealthy Asian community, who controlled much of country’s trade and industry. In August 1972 he ordered Asians with British nationality to leave the country within three months. As some 50,000 fled, including much of the country’s skilled workforce, the economy began to collapse.