10.21.1110:13 AM ET

How Dictators Die

It’s rare for despots to die on their feet, still fighting. Historian Andrew Roberts surveys the ways rulers meet their end, and says Libya should be thankful to Gaddafi for the way he went.





The list of monstrous dictators to die in power is a depressingly long one, and includes Josef Stalin, Gen. Francisco Franco, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Marshal Tito, Papa Doc Duvalier, and Vladimir Lenin, the last of whom had survived an assassination attempt. Robert Mugabe, Fidel Castro, and possibly Hugo Chávez all look set to die in power, too, although there must be high hopes that Bashar al-Assad may be overthrown by the brave protesters in Syria, who have already suffered more than 3,500 deaths since the uprising began. Assad is far more likely to flee than to fight to the death, however. Like Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein stayed in his country when the results of his genocidal policies finally caught up with him, but was pulled, hairy and blinking, out of a hole in the ground in Tikrit, although his sons did fight bravely to the death. (At the time of writing it is thought that Gaddafi’s son Mutassim died fighting as well.)

It was fortunate that he chose to stay and fight, rather than destabilizing Libya from abroad, perhaps for decades to come.

The genocidal Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic paid for his crimes with his life when he was assassinated in 1961. Whereas the case of Antonio Salazar of Portugal was a curious one, in that he slipped in his bath in 1968, giving him a brain hemorrhage, and was replaced in office. But when he regained his lucidity he wasn’t told he was no longer premier, and he died two years later under the impression that he still was.

Many dictators get off scot-free. After his overthrow as dictator of Uganda in 1979, Idi Amin fled first to Libya and then to Saudi Arabia, taking the top two floors of the Novotel Hotel in Jidda, where he lived until his death in August 2003. Similarly, Ferdinand Marcos managed to get himself, his billions of dollars, and his wife Imelda’s shoe collection out of the Philippines in February 1986, winding up in Hawaii until his death three years later. Alfred Stroessner fled from a 1989 coup in Paraguay and lived in Brazil for the next 18 years. Meanwhile, Mobuto Sese Seko escaped Zaire in May 1997 and died in Rabat, Morocco, that September, yet another successful fugitive from justice. Almost alone among dictators, Gen. Augusto Pinochet of Chile actually returned his country to democracy during his lifetime.

Plenty of dictators escape execution even once caught. Pol Pot of Cambodia died under house arrest in 1998, and Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia died of a heart attack in his cell before his verdict was handed down in 2006. Charles Taylor of Liberia is currently on trial in The Hague, where there is no death penalty. Similarly, Emperor Jean-Bedel Bokassa of the Central African Republic was imprisoned for only seven years. He was released in 1993, died three years later among the population he had ravaged, and is suspected even on occasion to have cannibalized. Jan Kambanda of Rwanda has been serving a life sentence in Mali since 2000, considerably more comfortable than the horrific death sentences his henchmen meted out during the 1994 genocides there. Meanwhile, Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban since 2002, is still at large.

The moral of the Gaddafi story is that it is very rare for dictators to meet their end bravely, still inside the country they are fighting to recapture. It was fortunate that he chose to stay and fight, rather than destabilizing Libya from abroad, perhaps for decades to come. As he was never going to go quietly, the manner of his demise at long last gives Libyans something for which they can thank Colonel Gaddafi.