The world's worst dictators & me

Hi everyone, I am Martha Heinemann Bixby and I'm here to introduce myself with my first post. My focus for this blog will be the North Caucuses, but I'll probably pop in with my opinions on all kinds of things, from Darfur to dictators, Bosnia to the movies Blood Diamond or Babel.

Of course, despite the title to this post I am not one of the world's worst dictators - although I would enjoy a larger-than-life rotating gold statue of myself in my hometown. What I want to talk about here, in my first post, is Parade Magazine's annual list of the world's 20 worst dictators, released last weekend. This list has a number of implications in the world of genocide studies, especially in activism and genocide prevention.

Topping the list for the 3rd year in a row is Omar al-Bashir, President of Sudan. According to Parade, "Omar al-Bashir retains his position as the worst dictator because of his ongoing deadly human-rights abuses in the Darfur region of Sudan. Over the last four years, at least 200,000 people there have been killed by pro-Bashir forces. Nationwide, 5.3 million have been driven from their homes, and more than 700,000 have fled the country. But at the UN last September, Bashir blamed international aid groups for exaggerating the problems as a ploy to raise money for their organizations. And in November, he argued that war-related deaths in Darfur were less than 9,000. Despite agreeing to a 60-day ceasefire last month, he has been accused by his people of ordering troops to continue their attacks." In 2005 when Parade first named Al-Bashir the #1 worst dictator I remember feeling so pleased that they actually recognized how awful he was, and the impunity with which he was killing his own people. However, I'm sure it was quite nearly a tie between him and Kim Jong Ill, #2 that year, it's just that al-Bashir tried a little harder to be an incredibly brutal ideologue.

Even beyond al-Bashir this year’s list of the world’s worst dictators is of interest to the genocide-prevention community. Number 3, Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei, is the man behind “all decisions regarding Iran’s relations, its nuclear program and domestic freedoms” according to Parade. That presumably includes President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s threats of genocide against Jews, Iran’s fueling of the ethnic civil war in Iraq and the Holocaust cartoon conference last year.

Parade’s commentary on dictator #4, China’s Hu Jintao, focuses on the human rights situation within China. Equally important, however, is China’s repeated involvement in ethnic conflicts around the globe – especially Darfur – to undermine human rights and reinforce the power of brutal regimes. This policy is in effect, many believe, so that China can have exclusive economic relations with these countries because the United States and other “Western” powers won’t deal with them. And yet, we’ll all watch the ’08 Olympics there… reminders of the ’36 Olympics, anyone? At least we have Olympian Joey Cheek on our side – too bad he’s a skater and so couldn’t boycott Beijing.

The final dictator I’ll discuss today squeezed in at #20, Vladimir Putin, his first year on the list (I guess with Saparmurad Niyazov gone and Fidel Castro rendered virtually powerless, there’s more room this year). Parade does not mention the situation in Chechnya in it’s profile of Putin, probably because there’ve been plenty of news-making human rights abuses in Russia beyond Chechnya in the past 12 months. Chechnya, one of the many regions that make-up the North Caucuses, remains an area of “Genocide Alert” for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Committee on Conscience due to the “Past persecution of Chechens as a people, The demonization of Chechens as a group within Russian society and The level of violence directed against Chechen civilians by Russian forces”. It is up to the world community to continue to monitor the situation in Chechnya so that Putin does not rise to replace al-Bashir as a genocidal world’s worst dictator.

(* the cartoon is from here)