Word: bedel
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...climactic moment, Bokassa, 56, crowned himself and placed a smaller coronet on the head of the youngest of his three wives, 28-year-old Empress Catherine. (Rumor has it that the Emperor also keeps a blonde Rumanian mistress on the side.) Two-year-old Crown Prince Jean-Bedel Bokassa, dressed in a white naval uniform, yawned occasionally during the ceremony and next day fell fast asleep at a postcoronation parade...
...Jean-Bedel Bokassa was educated at mission schools, joined the army at the start of World War II and by 1950 had risen to the rank of company sergeant. He survived the debacle at Dien Bien Phu and later retired as a captain. When the Central African Republic became independent in 1960, the country's first President (and Bokassa's cousin), David Dacko, named him commander of the army. As the fledgling state suffered through the inevitable independence pangs, the frustrated President at one point shouted to a group of bureaucrats: "What this country needs is a good...
...numerous charges of brutal, disfiguring tortures in Iraq, especially in Baghdad's Kasr-al-Nihaya Prison. In many black African countries, few torture victims survive to tell their stories. In such one-man dictatorships as Francisco Macias Nguema's Equatorial Guinea, Idi Amin's Uganda, Jean Bedel Bokassa's Central African Republic and Ahmed Sekou Toure's Republic of Guinea, unimaginably cruel, capricious and unpredictable tortures are everyday occurrences. In tiny Equatorial Guinea, which has suffered a reign of terror since gaining independence eight years ago, political prisoners have had their eyes gouged...
...French colony of Ubangi-Shari) has long been one of Africa's most benighted backwaters, and shows every sign of remaining just that for a long time to come. Aside from its one lucrative industry, diamond mining, the country's most striking feature is its ruler, Jean-Bedel Bokassa, 53, a former sergeant in the French army who may be the continent's most brutal tyrant...
February 1953: Jean-Bedel Bokassa, a sergeant in the French army in Indochina, bids a reluctant goodbye to his two-month-old daughter Martine and her Vietnamese mother, Nguyen Thi Hue and goes home to Central Africa...