Word: bangui
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...humid, upriver capital of Bangui two years ago, former French colonial army Captain Jean-Bédel Bokassa donned an ermine robe and mounted a giant eagle-shaped throne. As 3,500 formally attired guests looked on, he crowned himself Bokassa I, unchallenged Emperor of a landlocked, poverty-stricken country that he renamed the Central African Empire (pop. 2 million). At a cost of $20 million, it was the most extravagant coronation since that of Napoleon, Bokassa's idol. Then the new Emperor intensified an already psychotic reign of terror, which included the mass murder last April...
...empire was mercifully short-lived. While Bokassa was away in Libya last week, he was deposed in a bloodless, midnight coup by former President David Dacko, himself overthrown by Bokassa in 1966. The downfall of the "Butcher of Bangui" gave Africa something to cheer about: the continent is now rid of its three most notorious dictators. In April, Field Marshal Idi Amin Dada was driven from Uganda by rebels and invading Tanzanian troops. Last month the equally despised President-for-Life of tiny Equatorial Guinea, Francisco Macias Nguema, was booted by a military coup...
...radio broadcast, Dacko, 49, a former schoolteacher who was the first President of the former French colony after independence in 1960, proclaimed the country the Central African Republic again and promised to "return sovereignty to the people." At week's end French troops flew to Bangui to maintain order and perhaps to make sure Bokassa does not return from exile...
...Butcher of Bangui," as the African newspaper has dubbed His Imperial Majesty Emperor Bokassa I of the Central African Empire, is a ruler whose future may be on the block. Last week the U.S. suddenly recalled Ambassador Goodwin Cooke, following reports by Amnesty International, the London-based human rights organization, that in April about 100 schoolchildren had been murdered by Bokassa's imperial guard in the capital of Bangui. A week earlier, French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing pointedly avoided shaking hands with the Emperor at a Franco-African conference in Rwanda...
Bokassa denied Amnesty's charges of murder, claiming that the victims were "grownup" students in revolt against his regime. "In my country," he declared, "everybody calls me Papa." Unfortunately for Papa, his Ambassador to Paris, General Sylvestre Bangui, resigned and sought asylum in France after confirming that the massacre had indeed taken place. His mission now, said Bangui, would be to lead a "liberation front" against Bokassa...