September 12, 2004

WHILE not equalling Clinton’s great stack of notebooks for his memoirs, Orizio was nonetheless stuffing newspaper clippings into bulging folders for years before fleeing from the boredom and frustration of his newspaper job to interview fallen tyrants. The resulting book is amazingly well researched, with his dry wit and enthusiasm running a tour de force on well-oiled wheels throughout, along with his remarkable eye for the ridiculous detail.

The actor Sir Ian McKellan tells him, “...I have learned from studying people who do terrible things... that they are all too human’” And indeed humanity appears in his chapter on Idi Amin, who, despite his grandiose title, admits like Bokassa and Mengistu to joining the army to escape hunger, and to nostalgia for the days when everyone respected him.

All three deny their heinous crimes, faithfully described — “the reeking trail of blood”, the decapitated heads in Amin’s refrigerator, the corpses in Bokassa’s deep freezer and the rumour that he served “fillet of opposition leader” to guests, the Red Terror campaign of Mengistu, who apparently strangled and buried his emperor “under a toilet”. But regarding Amin and Bokassa, what stands out otherwise is their huge eccentricity. Chief among “the carnival antics of ‘Big Daddy’ Amin” are his crazy telegrams to world leaders, and his promise of ‘a nice surprise’ during Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee procession — a promise that had the RAF watching the skies in case he parachuted down upon Her Majesty’s dignified show.

Both Amin and Jean-Bedel Bokassa (the “Ogre of Berengo”) evidently embraced Islam to receive Gadafi’s petro-dollars, yet the author finds the latter wallowing in delusions of sainthood and imperial glory, rather than in blood, claiming that “Pope Paul VI had secretly baptized him the thirteenth apostle of Holy Mother Church”! And read with relish of his coronation — not a sellout — with its “catalogue of preposterous European luxuries... jetted into Bagui... a town still permeated with the smell of an African village... on the banks of a river heaving with hippopotamus”. But while Giscard of France ‘lent’ 22 million dollars for this, he also had him arrested and tried, gifts of diamonds, mistresses etc. notwithstanding.

Yes, betrayal looms large on the despot’s horizon, and Mengistu here typifies the usurper’s paranoia. But his parting words to Orizio are noteworthy. “The world,” he says, “will see wars in Africa that have never been seen before... Terrible tribal wars... The world gives us fine new shoes... (but) instead of adapting your shoes to fit our feet, the West (has) demanded the opposite.”

Now meet the logical, cultured, monogamous Wojiciech Jaruzelski of Poland, who is now pitied by the people as an old man on whom events forced impossible choices, all wrong. When questioned about his traumatizing the nation with strong-arm policies, “he answers like a wily barrister... ‘Let’s be honest: the pathology of the system and of the people are two different things... had to deal with the real, not the ideal Poland. Ask yourself what you would have done...’”

Then concerning deities, the telling chapter on the grandly defiant Lady Macbeth, i.e. Nexhmije Hoxha, who ruled Albania with a Maoist rod of iron for 50 years, describes how she was visited in Tirana’s maximum security prison by many Kosovo Albanians, travelling overnight, through mountain passes to see her. “To them,” observes Orizio, “she was a living goddess.”

But the aspiring Voodoo deity, the impecunieux Baby Doc Duvalier, “sensibly elected to live abroad”, like many of his former machete-wielding, terrorizing Tontons Macoute, after Haiti’s revolution. His elegant wife hastily describes these marauders as “social mediators”, and of course the Duvaliers deny all guilt. Baby Doc also disallows Voodoo’s links with black magic, though a Harvard graduate infiltrator found many of its accoutrements, and evidence of human sacrifices in its temples.

Finally the quintessential Lady Macbeth, la femme fatale Professor Mira Milosevic arrives, “her high heels tapping a regular tic-toc tic-toc on the marble ... While I was staring mesmerized at her hairdo”, says Orizio, “the ... mobile phone rang”. It was her beloved ‘Sloba’, calling from the Orange Hotel, i.e. from prison. Concerning their famous penchant for baby-talk, the author declares, “Even while pushing Yugoslavia towards a decade of wars, ruined cities ... corpses thrown into mass graves, they chirruped between themselves like lovebirds on a Valentine card.”

Madame Milosevic utters indirectly the ultimate denial of guilt. Shown a famous photograph of Sarajevo people running “while bullets and shells fired by the Serbs rain down upon them,” she demands, “What photograph is this? What does this show?” She affirms, “My husband will be seen as the hero of all the... victims of the arrogance of great powers.”

Simo Zaric, policeman-cum-violinist (alias ‘paganini’) enjoys equally wilful self-deception. Incarcerated along with Milosevic, he claims that all his unit’s raids, massacres, rapes, illegal displacement of persons, were led by another, nicknamed Monstrum. But his Muslim wife insists otherwise, while he stares silently at his pear juice.

“They say I’m a murderer,” says Jaruzelski. “But I was a politician. I had my ideals... If I am guilty then so is a whole generation. Anyone in my position would have done the same.” Orizio concludes, “I do not know whether it is true. I do not even know whether we can forgive them. We can only study them. And perhaps the exercise will help us to reach a greater understanding of ourselves.”

 

Talk of the Devil: Encounters with Seven Dictators

By Riccardo Orizio

Vintage. Available with Royal Book Company BG-5, Rex Centre Basement, Zaibunnisa Street, Karachi-74400. Tel: 021-565 3418, 567 0628.

Email: royalbook@hotmail.com

ISBN 0-099-44067-9

200pp. Price not listed

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