Word: bokassa
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Pick a dictator, almost any dictator - Cuba's Fulgencio Batista, the Philippines' Ferdinand Marcos, Haiti's Papa and Baby Doc Duvalier, the Shah of Iran, Central African Republic Emperor Jean-Bédel Bokassa - and they all have this in common: they allegedly stashed their loot in secret, numbered accounts in Swiss banks, safely guarded by the so-called Gnomes of Zurich. This association - of bank secrecy and crime - has been fed into the public's imagination by dozens of books and movies. It's a reputation that rankles the Swiss, who have a more benevolent view of their commitment...
...artist Jeff Koons is - much less why he's sharing a tribute with Helen Keller, Hans Blix and Jacques Cousteau. And you don't have to be a rabid (Groucho) Marxist to turn down membership in a club that includes murderous Central African Republic "Emperor" Jean-Bédel Bokassa...
...course, no one could have predicted that Bokassa would end up a cannibalistic dictator when he was nominated to the Legion at the end of World War II. But French traditionalists do warn that unless the Legion returns to honoring people for their sacrifices, it will eventually be viewed by history as one that celebrated the rich and famous for just being the rich and famous. "Today, there are more CEOs and fewer civil servants, more sports stars and more show-business personalities [nominated for the Legion]," lamented an editorial in the conservative daily Le Figaro. "This intrusion of glitter...
...Cheap Chinese consumer goods have also stretched African shoppers' small budgets. Meanwhile, for a nation like France to complain about China's human-rights record on Africa seems beyond a pot-kettle comparison - France has long sponsored African "democrats" like former Central African Republic leader Jean-Bédel Bokassa, who was ultimately convicted of at least 20 murders. Likewise, the U.S. has close ties to Ethiopia's abusive regime, and to oil-rich kleptocracy Equatorial Guinea, whose dictator was welcomed to Washington in 2006 as "a good friend" by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice...
Some of the more rococo NYE-Y2K fetes I've seen advertised suggest a collaborative extravaganza mounted by Donald Trump and Emperor Bokassa...