I see the ex-president of Tunisia is holed up in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. I used to live there and a buddy claims to have met Idi Amin in the grocery store.
Saudi Arabia accepted both men, but forbade them from leaving and in Amin’s case turned off his international telephones. By taking them in, Saudi Arabia may very well have prevented a pair of bloodbaths. On the other hand, they certainly prevented justice from being done.
Woud it be a good idea for the world to have a refugee for defunct dictators? The idea would be to encourage them to not fight to the last man.
Both the people cited fled anyhow, even without a definite sanctuary to go to.
Im not convinced it would really avoid bloodbaths. Mostly it would just function as a more guaranteed ‘get out of jail free’ and if anything encourage dictators to hang on till the last minute, as they’d have somewhere definite to go to.
My impression is dictators fight very hard to retain control regardless if there is an “out”. I suppose you might say at the very tail end a dictator might scoot sooner with an out but that is already after so much trouble I am hard pressed to see why giving them an out improves things much.
I’d rather see them with no out and strung up by their toes. Maybe (just maybe) they would consider that and be somewhat less ruthless to avoid such an outcome.
Or maybe not but not seeing how having an out improves things any more than the prospect of a shallow grave somewhere.
No. These guys rarely face justice as it is because of the money they steal when they’re in power and the connections they make. They don’t need an additional method for getting away with oppressing their countries. I have no way of knowing for sure, but I think a dictator’s decision to fight or escape is based on whether or not he has any support remaining in his country, not whether he has anywhere to go. Who was going to fight for Ben Ali if he stayed?
Middle of a desert with no power, no influence, becoming irrelevant and eventually forgotten. Yeah rarely has justice been better been served. Dictators are at the end of the day politicians and politicians have an innate need to be in the limelight.
Calls for justice are all well and good, but Dictators like all politicians have a power base and and real supporters. Hanging a dictator means you make a martyr send him to Rab-ul-Khali and well you have a pathetic and pitiful old man.
Saddam became a martyr because everything else about the war was botched, up to and including his execution. And he was executed in late 2006, which was almost four years after the war started. The insurgency existed before he was killed and so did all the sectarian tension and other problems, so I am not convinced his death had any bearing on that.
And yes, Duvalier is under arrest and may be charged with theft and crimes against humanity. How is that preferable to seeing him live out his life comfortably on a ‘refuge?’
Unfortunately, we took a step backwards when Spain tried to prosecute Pinochet. Chile drew a line and Spain ignored it. I do not know what would have happened if Pinochet had not been persuaded to step down, but by trying to prosecute him we sent a message to all dictators that it is not safe to step down. I call giving them immunity the lesser of two evils.
We will be in a far more terrifying existence when bad people have no possibility of escape and can be plucked from anywhere in the world by whichever government. Since that will apply to everyone, guilty or innocent and no-one would be safe to find refuge from ( a possibly malevolent ) world government.
It’s as well to allow some people an out. Moralistic vindictiveness rarely achieves abstract justice.
Officially there shouldn’t be a sanctuary for those who rape their country and torture their citizens.
However, there are times when the dictator leaving is the least bad option. For example, would Tunisia have been better off if Ben Ali stayed around and it became a prolonged fight between thugs in his control and the people protesting? I don’t know if anyone took him aside and gave him an unofficial deal of ‘You can leave peacefully or you can end up hanging from a meat hook. Saudi Arabia will let you in…’
For example, I know Saddam Hussein was offered this sort of deal just before the second invasion. He rejected it, but imagine how many lives might have been saved if he had accepted.
Fun fact: Idi Amin ate a half-dozen oranges every day during his exile, believing it would cure his impotence.
I like godix’ plan. An official home for Bad People Who No Longer Command Air Forces? Fuck that. A de facto one in Jeddah? I can live with that (though Amin lived out his days in luxury).
Doesn’t sound that way. He tried to stick around by making some nominal reforms, and when he gave up and fled the country, he tried to go to France first. They told him to fuck off, and he may have considered a few other countries before going to Saudi Arabia.
There still would have been a power vacuum if Saddam and his sons had left, and without him, the lid on the religious tension still would have come off. It might have been better, but we don’t know. The problem is not that he had no place to go, it’s that he evidently didn’t realize an invasion was coming no matter what he did. Even if there were a dictator’s refuge, who was going to let Saddam stick around? Everybody hated him.
I thought this is what France was for? It should also promote itself as a refuge for child rapists and people who find Jerry Lewis more than mildly amusing.