Word: despot
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...economic prosperity and political stability is greeted with immense enthusiasm. That, plus his military victories, may soon catapult him into the presidency of Zaire. But in recent weeks the delight has been tempered by a sense of trepidation. As Zairians contemplate the possibility of getting rid of one despot, they shudder at the prospect of replacing him with another. "If Kabila were in power," muses one surgeon in Kinshasa, "we would have to make him understand that we do not want to live under dictatorship. I have suffered so much. I cannot live like that again...
...despot will not be coming to the cloning lab today. Before long, he knows, the lab's science will come to him--and not a moment too soon. The despot has ruled his little country for 30 years, but now he's getting old and will have to pass his power on. That makes him nervous; he's seen what can happen to a cult of personality if too weak a personality takes over. Happily, in his country that's not a danger. As soon as the technology of the cloning lab goes global--as it inevitably must--his people...
...DESPOT RUN AWARD: Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia, besieged by protesters...
MENGISTU HAILE MARIAM, 59; Ousted Marxist President of Ethiopia From 1977 to 1991, he ruled supreme. Now he is Addis Ababa's most reviled criminal defendant. Five years after he was driven out of his country by rebels, Ethiopia's Red Terror despot is being tried on charges of murder and genocide--in absentia. The guest of Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe since 1991 (apparently in gratitude for the help he gave Mugabe's independence struggle in the 1970s), Mengistu lives in luxurious exile in a government-supplied villa in an exclusive suburb of Harare, Zimbabwe's capital, safe from repeated...
Washington's hopes could still prove to be wishful thinking. Even as President Bill Clinton portrayed Saddam as a failing despot, "out of touch" with his closest aides, even as Hussein Kamel called for Saddam's overthrow into "the garbage heap of history," the brothers may not want to deal--or to be seen dealing--with the West. In any case, neither fits anyone's idea of a flower-power liberal. They rose by nepotism, survived by cunning and thrived by doing their leader's most morally questionable will. However quickly Saddam might replace them, though, Iraq's slow strangulation...