Naming the months of the year after your children and forcing the people to adopt them. Re-wording the Lord's Prayer so you are the one people pray to. Dressing up as Napoleon for your coronation having declared your country no longer a republic but an empire. Delivering six hour-long speeches live on national television. Reportedly eating your political opponents and keeping their heads in a freezer. These are eccentrics who managed to wheedle their way to the top seat in their country, either by subterfuge, by election or by being in the right place at the right time. There really are or were people who did those things I mentioned earlier, and they are: Saparmurat Niyazov of Turkmenistan, François "Papa Doc" Duvalier of Haiti, Jean-Bedel Bokassa of the Central African Republic (or Central African Empire, as he renamed it), Fidel Castro of Cuba and Idi Amin of Uganda respectively. The late Colonel Gaddafi was a complete nutter; John Simpson, the BBC correspondent, in this book "Strange People, Questionable Places", said he had terrible flatulence and his mad cackling laugh and obtuse retorts each time he asked a question made a farce out of any interviews.
There are many others too. Kim Il-Sung of North Korea, who made his people perform daily T'ai Chi-style exercises at dawn in the name of the nation, while large speakers blared patriotic military songs and human speakers screamed mantras praising their Great Leader. The famously paranoid Enver Hoxha of Albania, who made it an offence for men to wear beards so they could be easily identified in criminal cases and built up such an enormous amount of one-man military bunkers (750,000, for 3 million people!) to surprise any invader. The abominable Pol Pot of Cambodia, who made people return to the countryside in a mass forced labour scheme, who wanted to dismantle urban settlements and who sanctioned the killing of 2.1 million people, about a fifth of the population of the country.
All these individuals are now no more, either forced into exile, put on trial and executed, committed suicide or died of old age. The fact that these dictators remained in office unchallenged for such a long period of time is testament to the fear they instilled in people as high up as their own right-hand men. Either that, or the population had obviously been suffering from a mass Stockholm Syndrome, brought about by the fear of change. Another thing that strikes me is that not all of them look the type to commit such heinous crimes against humanity. Look at Bashar al Assad of Syria - he doesn't look like the type of person to order brutal crackdowns on his own people. He doesn't even look like the type of person who'd throw a strop in a domestic. Enver Hoxha seemed more like the type of person who'd knock on your door offering a free clock with every Reader's Digest purchase above £100.
The only supreme rulers still left of any note are Kim Jong-Il in North Korea, Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and the opulent rulers of the Arabian peninsula. It can only be a matter of time before they get their comeuppance, but I think most of them will die of old age.
There are some oddballs about though: the absolute monarch of Swaziland, Mswati III, although not a brutal man, is pretty active on the marriage front, with 14 wives, although not as active as his father, Sobhuza II, who had produced 210 children from 70 marriages and had a reported 1000 grandchildren by his death.
The dictators around today though are pretty bland operators. Aleksandr Lukashenko of Belarus is no more than a civil servant with special powers. Hu Jintao of China is the mouthpiece of a much larger party apparatus and even Omar al Bashir keeps himself to himself, despite the Darfur humanitarian disaster.
Dictators who wish to survive in the 21st century have wised up to the notion that they need to go unnoticed or build up a huge civil, military and political staff below them to take hits when they occur so they are pretty much untouchable. That way they can remain in power for decades. Stalin realised this, and he is the undisputed pinup poster boy of the dictators. Although we all know how grisly his deeds were, how utterly intolerable a system he threw up in the twenties and thirties, he saw off all his opponents but his hands were always spotlessly clean. And look at how he died: old age. The European Council operates in a similar manner, I have noted - it lets national governments or the European Commission take the blame for utter scandals like the Lisbon Treaty or ignoring national referendums.
No article on dictatorships would be complete without mentioning the most famous one of them all, Adolf Hitler. He was quite a showboater, with his spectacular demonstrations of nationalism through symbolism and Sturm und Drang. He galvanised the people by playing on the affrontery he felt by the Versailles Treaty and building up their sense of destiny through grands projets like the construction of huge buildings of culture, the hijacking or politicising of the 1936 Olympic Games and the plan to remodel Berlin as the centre of the civilised world. He almost got away with it, except for one tiny flaw in his otherwise impenetrable Teutonic armour: he was utterly mad. He never knew when to stop. He should have consolidated what he had by 1938 before he went into other territory. But fortunately for us all, he was as mad as a bag of spiders.
So hats off to northern Africa for shedding its recent dictatorial overcoats, and stepping into the double-breasted suit of democracy. The legitimacy of their newly founded political systems will become apparent in the coming months ahead. I have high hopes for Libya, if it can quieten the tribal leaders - it stands a very good chance of being a model Islamic democracy, an example for the Islamic countries further to the east to emulate, an oil-rich beacon of stability and a new tourist destination for history lovers and sunseekers alike. The Libyans I have met in my life were all very polite, educated, civilised and well-read. The members of the NTC also seem quite serious and have a particular kind of peace about them. For that reason, I think, Libya can make it where others' attempts at democracy have failed.
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