Word: mobutu
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...mindedly determined than he is. Still, Saddam could have saved his regime by coming completely clean on his weapons-of-mass-destruction program. He could have saved himself by giving up political power. Other modern strongmen staring at a similar fate, from the Shah of Iran to Congo's Mobutu Sese Seko, have done it, and Saddam was suspected of stashing away enough secret wealth to make it easy. But he did not, and the reasons lie very much in his own biography...
...wouldn’t want to put a lot of stake in the distinction between the two sides. Just look at the Democratic Republic of the Congo where the current government was a start-up rebel group not five years ago, fighting the recognized but despicable government of Mobutu Sese Seko. Under the definition of the Kimberly Process, Mobutu’s diamonds are fair game, but the rebel diamonds would have been illegal. It’s unfortunate that the Kimberly Process taints its moral position with a trivial, political distinction...
...prudently, albeit reluctantly, tolerated unfreedom in certain places. Why? In order to win the larger battle for freedom on the global scale. Today we "coddle" Musharraf of Pakistan, Mubarak of Egypt, the Saudi princes. Yesterday we coddled Pinochet of Chile, Marcos of the Philippines, the Shah of Iran, Mobutu of Zaire and a train of South Vietnamese generals...
...Indian travel narrative, An Area of Darkness. Many of the details and themes in a long and truly frightening piece, "Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad," he turned into his novel Guerrillas. In "A New King for Congo," his meditation on the late Zairean kleptocrat, President Mobutu, he alludes to Heart of Darkness, comparing Conrad's Kurtz to Mobutu: "Seventy years later, at this bend in the river, something like Conrad's fantasy came to pass. But the man was black, and not white; and he had been maddened not by contact with wilderness and primitivism...
...short work, most of which has been languishing uncollected for decades. A native of the tiny island of Trinidad, Naipaul is a travel writer almost by default--he is a foreigner everywhere he goes--and it's a privilege to look through his outsider's X-ray eyes at Mobutu's Zaire, or at a would-be revolutionary in Guyana, or at a holy man in Bombay, and see what is normally invisible to the tourist...