 Privatise the business of deposing dictators
The news that the businessman Ely Calil vehemently denies having masterminded a violent coup to overthrow the dictator of Equatorial Guinea ought not to surprise us. It was an illegal action, as the coup leader Simon Mann has sadly found to his cost. It was also an operational disaster.
But there was something noble in attempting to rid the world of one of Africa’s most brutal dictators and replace his regime with the opposition party.
After Obiang Nguema had his uncle Macias Nguema shot, he soon turned out to be almost as monstrous and paranoid a dictator as his predecessor. “The catalogue of murder and torture in his prisons, police stations and elsewhere is toe-curling,” writes Adam Roberts [no relation], author of The Wonga Coup, an authoritative account of the attempted coup. “Amnesty
Mercenaries were right to target Obiang. Now let’s use them to topple Mugabe, says Andrew RobertsInternational and Human Rights Watch frequently report on extrajudicial executions, torture and rape by police and soldiers.”
In April 2005, a British judge described Obiang (left) as a “despot” who rules “without regard to the rule of law, or democratic institutions (such as free elections) and through a regime which uses torture to procure confessions”. One of the other plotters of the ‘Wonga Coup’ besides Mann has already been tortured to death in President Obiang’s notorious Black Beach prison, where Mann, too, has been imprisoned since his extradition from Zimbabwe.
Opposition political figures are regularly tortured and executed inside the jail. One political opponent, Pedro Motu, had his liver removed in 1993, and the suspicion is widespread that Obiang subsequently ate it. Another inmate had his hands whipped so badly Â
Post published in: News