Translated from the Italian

by Avril Bardoni

Walker and Company, 2003

DANIEL SKINNER

Reading interviews with dictators is an enlightening, yet troubling experience. The average dictator at once blends outrageously quixotic and captivating tales with rationalizations of brutal crimes, carefully set in revisionist narratives of history. By any measure, being the leader of a state even a purported western democracy is a job that lends itself to dirtied hands and controversy, since political decisions inevitably yield losers as well as winners. But when a leader assumes power on the heels of tumult, or civil war, the extremes are likely to be even greater.

Of course, there are many ways one could write a book assembled ostensibly from encounters with dictators. In the preface to Talk of the Devil: Encounters with Seven Dictators, Italian journalist Riccardo Orizio seems eager to peek beneath the well-known public facades of his interviewees, which include Ethiopia’s Mengistu, the Central African Republic’s Bokassa, Uganda’s Amin, Poland’s Jaruzelski and Haiti’s Duvalier as well the once-powerful Mira Markovic (wife of Slobodan Milosevic) and Nexhmije Hoxha (wife of Albanian leader Enver Hoxha). Orizio gives the reader early hope that he will seek answers to the apparently unanswerable questions that follow tragic events.

However, we are instead reminded starkly that Orizio is a western journalist who can’t seem to break out of the old mould. Similar to the guilty-before-proven-guilty approach being dealt to former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic in the western media, Orizio’s book serves as a perfect case of Orientalism never listening, always pretending to understand, relishing the hints of the exotic and charismatic, and above all always judging before the fact. The range of twentieth century post-war trials run by the victors of wars, from Nuremberg to The Hague, suffers from a similar bias: how can a tragic history, condemned by a victor’s justice, be morphed into something meaningful and productive?

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book is not the interviews themselves, but the stories of how Orizio made contact with his dictators, and the way they were living when he found them, sometimes in exile, other times living discreetly in their old neighborhoods. Orizio takes us through the Saudi neighborhoods where Idi Amin, a converted Muslim, apparently passed his days amateur boxing, lounging in health clubs and spending hours at the airport seeing the foods sent from his family back in Uganda through customs. Meanwhile Mira Markovic splits her week between blitzkrieg visits to her Sloba in his Dutch prison cell and her role as Professor of Sociology at the University of Belgrade. It’s clear that Orizio’s dictators believe their actions were warranted and in the service of their nation, with the exception of the occasional mistake or overreaction. None, of course, believes that they were given sufficient credit for their efforts, and all blame their fall from power on the disruption of historical truth by meddling forces.

It seems that once you get them in the room, interviewing dictators can be easy. As Orizio shows, they rant endlessly, and their stories and claims are as engrossing as they are confusing at least they are to the outsider without intricate knowledge of the actual events. As a reporter trying to put together a captivating piece of journalism, Orizio makes good use of the crazy factor. As background to his interviews, Orizio recounts stories of Idi Amin addressing the Queen of England as Liz, showing up unannounced in England for a surprise state visit only to declare that he came to shop for size 14 shoes, as well as his hobby of sending snide (and extremely funny) communiqus to other world leaders of questionable virtue such as Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger and Kurt Waldheim. Even a brief glance at the interviews with Amin show that same playfulness and bravado, which even exile could not dampen.

More humorous still are the titles that these leaders gave themselves, and which they still largely claim, such as the Central African Republic’s Jean-Bedel Bokassa, who anointed himself Emperor, and claims that Pope Paul VI canonized him in secret as the Third Apostle of the Holy Mother Church. Amin, seemingly more modest than Bokassa, simply declared himself the Last King of Scotland.

Ridiculous titles aside, the seven encounters highlight important themes common to Orizio’s interviewees. The Ethiopian leader Mengistu, Amin, Jaruzelski, and Mrs. Hoxha all imply that their rise to power was in some way enabled by Cold War wrangling and, in particular, the poverty perpetuated by the need to align with either the Soviet or the American camp. Mengistu, in particular, blames his nation’s tumult on the almost complete disregard with which wealthy western nations treated nations deemed unworthy of economic support.

Orizio also looks at the suspicious relations between the Hoxhas, Jean-Claude Duvalier and Mother Theresa, and questions Polish General Jaruzelski about his decision to deny the first Polish Pope, John Paul II, entrance into Poland for several years after his election to the papacy. Orizio’s interviews, while lacking real attempts to provide new perspectives on these issues, are able to sharpen our understanding of the historical moments in which these leaders ruled, and it becomes clear that many of them are still psychologically trapped in the old historical framework.

Sadly, however, one perhaps gets the truest picture of Orizio’s book by beginning with the end. The Coda features a letter from former Panamanian General Manuel Noriega, in response to Orizio’s request for an interview for the book. Noriega politely declines the interview on the grounds that he does not consider [himself] to be a forgotten individual’ a phrase Orizio had used when soliciting interviews certainly a far cry from the word dictator which now appears on the cover. Sure, his interviewees are likely to have balked if the project had been more truthfully described from the, outset but the worth of his book is jeopardized by his insincerity.

What could have been gained from a more balanced conversation with these leaders? The US, for one, is plagued by a sense that world conflicts are in some way simple. We have seen this in virtually every major international conflict of the twentieth century, from Viet Nam to Bosnia. This kind of simplistic cultural analysis also underpins the rationale for the US-led attacks and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, with barely a soldier among the occupiers being trained in the languages, histories or demographics of the lands they occupy. The official government line leading up to the preemptive war against Iraq was that Saddam Hussein was an irrational political actor capable of and willing to do anything. Unfortunately, even the most basic analogical thinking would reveal that this is the same irrational spirit that underlies the unwillingness of George W. Bush to listen to legitimate worldwide critiques of American military power and foreign policy. Clearly, talking with dictators, if someone were willing to seriously engage them, could yield enormous rewards for understanding the leaders of the future. Sadly, Orizio’s book leaves us with these questions largely unanswered, and an opportunity squandered.