An article by Stephen Castle, published recently in the Sunday Independent, revealed some of the horror that marks the brute-regime of Saparmurat Niyazov, the archetypical ‘president-for-life” of Turkmenistan. The country regained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, only for its people to find themselves under a more obdurate master, infinitely more efficient at the crushing of human communion, individuality and aspiration than practical communism had ever hoped to manage.
Niyazov is among the latest in a never-ending lineage of egomaniacal despots, of which the world seems incapable of ridding itself. As if from a production line in hell itself has come, over history, a regular supply of pedigreed monsters.
There are no signs that production is running down. Last century, among the most efficient mass murderers, were Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, Kim II Sung, Francisco Franco, Augusto Pinochet and, let us never forget, Mr Idi Amin. In this terrible race, there were many runners-up, a squall of others keeping alive the traditions of vicious autocracy, immune to the most basic of human values. Were they prescribing for the Husseins or Ceausescus or Milosoviches and the rest of their self-obsessed brethren? If ever there was a bloodline, this is it.
Niyazov is more than faithful to this depraved mould, he takes it further. In North Korea, people are still expected to bow before and worship a gigantic 20m-high statue of their past leader, Kim II Sung. On top of the tallest building in Turkmenistan’s capital, Ashgabat, Niyazov has had erected a vast gold-leaf-dressed statue of himself which goes one better: it rotates mechanically to follow the sun. He has renamed the month of January after himself, another month after his wife. He has closed down schools, crippled the health services, banned music. The prisons are overflowing with political dissenters. The lucky ones are just killed. Like the penalties imposed on those in China who didn’t know by heart the little red book of The Sayings of Chairman Mao, similar grim punishments and exclusions come to those in Turkmenistan who don’t know the Rhukhnama, a 400-page book of the ruminations of its president.
Coincidentally to reading Castle’s article, I had just finished reading the excellent new novel from Thomas Keneally — he of Schindler’s Ark, from which Stephen Spielberg made his repugnantly sentimentalised film version, Schindler’s List. Keneally’s new work is called The Tyrant’s Novel and is set in an unnamed Middle Eastern country under the iron fist of a tyrant who calls himself Great Uncle. Based largely on Iraq as it was under Hussein, the country is suffering oil-for-food sanctions imposed by a corrupt United Nations. Other similarities abound. Great Uncle runs it all by means of terror. He has a feral son, modelled on Uday Hussein, who with, his goon friends, carouses in expensive luxury vehicles, runs the national football team as his own and shoots anyone he dislikes.
The story is told by a writer living out the years of silence in an isolation camp for asylum-seekers, more often than not the primary reward for those who manage to flee from tyrannies. The writer’s name is Alan Sheriff. In his recollections are other characters who, in what seems to be an alienation device, are given ‘Western” names.
The Tyrant’s Novel aspires to the Orwellian, doing so more in category than in scope: Great Uncle perpetuates Big Brother; where Orwell had Thought Police, Keneally has Overguards, and so on. As a counterpoint, the book disagrees with the simplistic dismissals of Nineteen Eighty-four, which hold that Orwell’s predictions came and went unfulfilled. Today there are mutations of Nineteen Eighty-four wherever you look. In Orwell’s novel the face of Big Brother was everywhere. In Iraq, Hussein’s face and image adorned every public space. In Libya no one can turn around without being confronted by heroic representations of Colonel Moammar Gadaffi. Narcissism is ventral physiology in these kinds of men.
It seems to be a matter of how far along the alluring path of personality cult leadership any particular leader has gone. In Keneally’s novel, Great Uncle has a daily ‘Hour of Adoration” broadcast on television: praise, citation and tribute to himself. You have to be purblind not to draw comparisons. SABC television news, if in more pallid concentration, has become largely an undisguised admiration of the sayings and works of President Thabo Mbeki, the rewards of his administration. The Nats did exactly the same. Before 1990, SABC television was as warm with Bothas, De Klerks, Heunises and Koornhofs.
Reflecting on the world’s political and military monsters, the old question continually nags: How do people like Niyazov ever sleep? When a political ruler issues decrees that set loose terror, does he write it all off as a necessary suspension of morality in the perpetuation of an ideology? Or is it just plain old psychopathy, the sheer enjoyment of the Gulag or death camp commander in causing pain and fear. If none of those, how does Tony Blair sleep knowing that little more than his political vanity has caused so much death and ruin in Iraq? Do he and George Bush eat blood for breakfast?
The Tyrant’s Novel is a good, if frightening, read.