TALK OF THE DEVIL

Italian journalist Orizio (Lost White Tribes, 2001) calls on seven of the world’s leading monsters and reports their various comeuppances.

Opening up files amassed during 18 years as a foreign correspondent, the author profiles formerly newsmaking despots now largely forgotten. Idi Amin, the former dictator of Uganda, is the most fortunate of Orizio’s subjects: having converted to Islam in the final days of his rule, when he indeed ate a few of his compatriots (complaining all the while that human meat was too salty), Amin skedaddled to Saudi Arabia, where he spends his days in well-appointed gyms and shopping malls. (An Indian shopkeeper in Jeddah describes him as “one of my best customers. A delightful man.”) But Amin, Orizio reports, appears to be restless, and lately he has been masterminding a guerrilla insurrection in northern Uganda in the hope of one day returning to power. Less ambitious is Wojciech Jaruzelski, the general who ruled Poland with an iron hand during the Solidarity uprising; he is content to live out his days, by Orizio’s account, with a small state pension, attending parties at the Russian embassy in Warsaw and occasionally protesting that had he not cracked down on dissidents, the Soviets surely would have done so. Neither Baby Doc Duvalier, the onetime supreme boss of Haiti, nor Jean-Bedel Bokassa, the deposed self-styled emperor of what is now the Central African Republic, harbor much hope of returning to power—living in comfort in France, they don’t have much reason to. Others, however, long for the day when they can exercise their inhuman skills in terror; notable among them is Mira Markovic, who with husband Slobodan Milosevic pushed Yugoslavia toward a decade of wars while “they chirruped between themselves like the lovers on a Valentine card.”

Readers will take deserved pleasure in these tyrants’ falls, and in Orizio’s sharp, literate prose.