Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier saw himself as more than just President-for-life on the Caribbean island of Haiti. He considered himself a voodoo deity, superior to the Christian God, and at the beginning of his reign even the Lord's Prayer was changed as follows: "Our Doc, who art in the National Palace for life, hallowed be Thy name by present and future generations, writes Deaglán de Bréadún
Thy will be done in Port-au-Prince as it is in the provinces. Give us this day our new Haiti and forgive not the trespasses of those anti-patriots who daily spit upon our country. Let them succumb to temptation, and under the weight of their venom, and deliver them not from evil." Papa Doc turned out not to be a god after all, because he died like anyone else in April, 1971. He was succeeded by his son, Jean-Claude, a.k.a. "Baby Doc", amid continuing accusations of political repression, human rights abuses and corruption, mainly attributed to the island's secret police, the chillingly-named Tontons Macoute (Bogeymen). Graham Greene captured the atmosphere of Haiti in his novel, The Comedians.
Baby Doc was overthrown in 1986 and was flown into exile in France by the US Air Force. He rented a villa on the Riviera, which ironically was next door to Graham Greene.
The author of the current book, a journalist with the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, caught up with Baby Doc in Paris. Now in his 50s, the fallen ruler still nurtures hopes of a return to power and exudes bland reassurance in the face of allegations against his regime. Far from being torturers and assassins, the Tontons Macoute were "artisans of the social revolution". During a visit to Haiti while Duvalier was still in power, the Pope claimed the majority of the people were victims of misery, hunger, fear and excessive inequality, but Baby Doc responds that John Paul II "was not well informed".
In a slight but well-written volume, Riccardo Orizio reports encounters with other former dictators: in Saudi Arabia he found Uganda's exiled leader, Idi Amin, whose clownish behaviour at times distracted attention from the allegations of mass killings and cannibalism levelled against him. When "Big Daddy" lost power, the heads of some of his adversaries were found in fridges at the presidential residence. When his wife, Kay, died, he reportedly had her arms and legs amputated, then sewn back wrong way round, because she had undergone an abortion. "Now you see what happens to wicked mothers," Amin is supposed to have said. Some 300,000 people were murdered under Amin's rule.
But now, Orizio speculates that the former dictator may be pardoned and allowed back from exile, to stop him supporting anti-government rebels. Asked if he feels any remorse, Amin replies: "No. Only nostalgia." The "star" of this unsavoury cast is the late Jean-Bedel Bokassa, formerly Emperor Bokassa the First of the Central African Republic. Like Amin, he was accused of cannibalism after dozens of human cadavers were found in a gigantic freezer in one of his residences. On one occasion, Bokassa and his "imperial guard" mowed down 150 protesting schoolchildren with machine-gun fire. He also reportedly fed his opponents publicly to lions and crocodiles, and had beggars dropped from aeroplanes. A gruesome dish, "fillet of opposition leader", is said to have been served at his table, although Bokassa was cleared of cannibalism by a court.
Bokassa almost ruined the political career of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, when the former president of France and current head of the Convention on the Future of Europe allegedly omitted to declare diamonds from Bokassa as an official gift. "I was his friend, almost like a relative," Bokassa told the author.
But like Amin, Bokassa had his clownish side, as seen in his solemn announcement in 1970 that he had awarded himself the title of Grand Master of the International Brotherhood of Knights Collectors of Postage Stamps.
The others in this collection include Poland's Jaruzelski and Ethiopia's Mengistu, ruthless and feared in their day but now almost forgotten. How quickly the world's attention is distracted by fresh horrors and outrages. Amnesty International estimates the death-toll in Mengistu's "Red Terror" at 500,000. He now languishes in Harare, where a change of regime could leave him somewhat exposed.
Orizio's style of literary reportage is reminiscent of the Polish journalist, Ryszard Kapuscinski. His impressions are at least as important as the content of the interviews, which in some cases are quite short or, in others, are conducted with the dictator's spouse, namely, Mira Markovic Milosevicz and Enver Hoxha's widow, Nexhmije.
One would have liked more about the links between the various dictators and the supposedly respectable governments which tolerated and even encouraged them.
But the author has done the world a service by reminding it in such readable fashion of these chapters in the saga of man's inhumanity to man. Read it and weep.
Deaglán de Bréadún's The Far Side of Revenge: Making Peace in Northern Ireland is published by Collins Press, Cork. He is the Foreign Affairs Correspondent of The Irish Times
Talk of the Devil: Encounters with Seven Dictators. By Riccardo Orizio. Translated from the Italian by Avril Bardoni. Secker and Warburg, 200pp. £15.99