There are fewer dictators around nowadays; the international climate no longer favours autocracy, and the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund disapprove. Like some large mammal with a valuable coat, the dictator’s very existence is in question. Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, a man I have met and interviewed several times over the past 20 years, has all the right instincts yet permits an opposition and a free judiciary to exist; one day soon he will pack up and leave office. Dictators are not what they used to be.
Not even the American State Department defends them any more, even though it once set so many of them up. The British and French governments, who have always been able to swallow almost any appalling behaviour if they thought it would earn them a pound or two, are finding that the field of opportunity has diminished drastically. Only the Israelis habitually send advisers and sell weapons to regimes which others prefer to avoid.
Perhaps, instead of waiting to applaud when their people chase tyrants from office and kill them or put them on trial, we should tempt the few remaining dictators to go early by offering them a place in a theme park where they can stage mock executions, hold triumphant march-pasts, invest their money in imaginary Swiss accounts, and decorate the streets and buildings with their own gigantic portraits. A little careful flattery by their faithful courtiers might well persuade them that our applause and laughter represented the appreciation of the masses, and that they were still loved as much as they always had been, of course.”
So far as I know, John Simpson has never visited Thailand.
Deputy Editor |
