Titans of History (74 page)

In 1946 Wojtyla was ordained as a priest. He rose rapidly through the Church ranks to become archbishop of Kraków in 1963 and a cardinal in 1967. By this time he was established as one of the most important religious figures in Poland, where he was frequently at odds with the communist authorities. He was no unthinking firebrand, but he was more than willing to stand up to the authorities, as when he supported industrial workers in Nowa Huta in their efforts to build a new church.

Wojtyla's profile increased rapidly at the Vatican, where he was a trusted adviser to Paul VI. So when Paul and his successor, John Paul I, both died in 1978, it was he who won a tight ballot of the cardinals. At the age of just fifty-eight he became pope.

International attention was lavished upon the first non-Italian
pope for nearly half a millennium. This suited John Paul II, who set about spreading a global message of freedom for those in need. On his first foreign trip, to Mexico, he spoke up for the unemployed and oppressed, though he held back from advocating political regime change.

After bringing great pressure to bear on the authorities, in 1979 John Paul was permitted to return to Poland, becoming the first reigning pope to visit a communist country. Announcing his arrival as a “pilgrim,” he was given a rapturous welcome that was broadcast around the communist world. The sight of crowds chanting “We want God” caused an international sensation. Having shaken up the communist authorities, John Paul then visited a number of countries on the other side of the Iron Curtain. In Ireland he denounced sectarian violence and terrorism, and in America he spoke passionately against the selfishness of consumerism and capitalism.

In 1981 John Paul was shot at close range in Rome by a Turkish gunman, Mehmet Ali A
ğ
ca. The pope had fiercely criticized communism, and it later emerged that the gunman had connections to the Bulgarian secret police, and therefore to the Soviet KGB. The bullets missed his vital organs by millimeters, which he took as a sign from God to continue his work. He publicly forgave his attacker.

Throughout the 1980s John Paul continued his spiritual opposition to communism. After the peaceful revolution of 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev—who admitted that without John Paul II there would have been no such speedy end to communism—paid a humble visit to the pontiff in Rome, opening diplomatic relations between most of the former Soviet capitals and the Vatican.

During the next decade John Paul took on the task of extending the hand of peace to the Jewish and Islamic peoples. He allowed
the first mosque to be built in the Vatican, and in 1993 he signed an agreement to open relations with Israel. In 2000 he made a high-profile trip to the Holy Land and visited a Holocaust memorial. He also promoted many cardinals from the developing world.

Throughout his long pontificate John Paul stood up for freedom with unwavering resolve. His inspiring voice carried huge authority. His condemnation of Paraguay's dictator Alfredo Stroessner helped to bring down the latter's regime, while a speech opposing the death penalty led to its abolition in Guatemala. An appearance on Italian television led to a Mafia don surrendering himself.

Pope John Paul II was generally inflexible over doctrine, remaining doggedly conservative in matters such as the ordination of women and the use of contraception, even in the face of Africa's AIDS epidemic. Nevertheless, he will be remembered as one of the most outstanding popes in history. To the end he was an inveterate opponent of oppression and inequality. This man of peace used his position nobly and made the papacy relevant again—even for non-Christians. The first steps have been taken to canonizing John Paul.

1921–1989

The party apparatus of government … cling tenaciously to their open and secret privileges and are profoundly indifferent to the infringement of human rights, the interests of progress, security, and the future of mankind
.

Andrei Sakharov, memorandum to Leonid Brezhnev (March 5, 1971)

Andrei Sakharov, the physicist who was once called the Father of the Soviet H-bomb, became the most prominent political dissident in the world, protesting against the evils and contradictions of Soviet totalitarianism. He represents both the peaks of Russian science and intellectual achievement and the courage of an individual to stand up to rampant tyranny. That stand led to rejection, maltreatment, exile and hardship. Yet, unlike most dissidents, Sakharov survived to see his efforts bear fruit.

Andrei Sakharov was an intelligent child who was able to read by the age of four. His father encouraged his interest in physics experiments, which Andrei later called “miracles I could understand.” At Moscow University in the 1940s he was recognized as one of the brightest young minds of his generation. In 1948 he was recruited to join a nuclear research team under the personal control of Stalin's ruthless henchman Lavrenti Beria, and he spent much of the next decade involved in top secret projects in Turkmenistan.

The project in which Sakharov played the pivotal role was the creation of a hydrogen bomb—a weapon much more powerful
than the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The Americans tested their first H-bomb in 1952; the Soviets followed in 1953. As the Cold War arms race between America and the Soviet Union accelerated, Sakharov believed that his work was contributing to world peace by helping to maintain a balance of power. But as the years passed, he began to have doubts about “the huge material, intellectual and nervous resources of thousands of people” which were being “poured into the creation of a means of total destruction, capable of annihilating all human civilization.”

In 1961 Sakharov, now in a very prominent position as his country's preeminent nuclear scientist, urged the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to stop atmospheric nuclear tests, believing that the radioactive fallout could ultimately lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. After agreeing to look into the matter, Khrushchev simply ignored him. From this point onwards, Sakharov grew more critical of the Soviet regime. Despite a US–Soviet agreement in 1963 to refrain from detonating nuclear devices in space, underwater or in the atmosphere, there was little political commitment to nonproliferation, let alone disarmament.

The arguments about nuclear weapons led Sakharov on to broader political questions. In 1966 he urged the new Soviet leadership, under Leonid Brezhnev, to turn away from rehabilitating the reputation of Stalin. He was rebuffed—though Stalin was not in fact fully rehabilitated.

The Soviet leadership could not ignore Sakharov's next move. In 1968 he wrote a book entitled
Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom
, which denounced the oppressive Soviet regime and argued for closer links with the West. It caused a storm in Moscow's dissident circles, and an even greater reaction when it was read abroad. Sakharov was a marked man. But he was not cowed and continued to protest—against the persecution of the
dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in favor of the rights of national minorities, and against the mistreatment of political prisoners. In 1975 he won the Nobel Peace Prize, but he was forbidden to leave the country to collect it. His second wife, Yelena Bonner, herself a courageous dissident, collected it on his behalf.

In response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979, Sakharov called for an international boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics. In January 1980 he was arrested by the KGB and transported to internal exile—and grim living conditions—in the city of Gorky. Only Bonner's trips between Moscow and Gorky from 1980 to 1984—during which time she was harassed and publicly denounced—gave him a lifeline to the outside world. In 1984 she too was arrested, for slandering the regime, and was sentenced to five years' exile in Gorky. Bonner joined her husband on long and painful hunger strikes in order to secure medical attention for their family.

In 1985 a new and reforming Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, came to power, determined to end the stagnation and oppression that Sakharov had so long criticized. The following year Sakharov was released and invited back to Moscow. He returned as a hero and was elected to the Congress of People's Deputies, the Soviet Union's first democratically chosen body. He went on to play a prominent part in the democratic revolution that was sweeping the Soviet Union and remained in Russia until his death from a heart attack in 1989.

Yelena Bonner was a vocal critic of Russian atrocities in Chechnya and of the return of Russia to KGB-style authoritarianism, dying in 2011. She and her husband remain beacons of the struggle against tyranny.

1924–79

The cottage industry Dachau of Africa
.

Robert af Klinteberg on the state of Equatorial Guinea under Nguema

Francisco Macías Nguema, who officially called himself the Unique Miracle, was the corrupt, demented, homicidal, skull-collecting first president of Equatorial Guinea in west Africa. In a continent that has endured governance by a legion of bloodthirsty madmen, Macías Nguema stands out as one of the worst.

For the first forty-four years of Macías Nguema's life, Equatorial Guinea was a Spanish colony. Three times in succession Nguema failed the civil-service entrance exams, only passing on the fourth occasion because the bar was purposely lowered by the Spanish to enable him to do so. Thereafter he occupied increasingly influential positions, eventually gaining a seat in the national assembly.

In 1968 Spain granted the country independence, and in the subsequent presidential elections Macías stood on a left-leaning populist platform. He won. Initially, Nguema appeared to promote a free and liberal society, but the honeymoon period lasted a mere 145 days. Nguema had developed an intense hatred of the Spanish (perhaps as a reaction to his earlier dependence on them) and, indeed, foreigners in general. Spanish residents became the target of state-sanctioned terror, and by March 1969 over 7000 of them had abandoned the country—many of them skilled workers. In their wake, the economy collapsed.

Initially, some within the government, such as the foreign minister Ndongo Miyone, attempted to rein in the excesses. But they paid a high price for doing so. In the case of Miyone, he was summoned to Nguema's presidential palace and beaten, then hauled off to prison and murdered. Similar treatment was meted out to others who dared to oppose Nguema: ten of the twelve ministers who formed the country's first post-independence government were killed. In their place, Nguema appointed relatives or members of his clan, the Esangui. Thus one nephew was made commander of the national guard, while another was simultaneously minister of finance, minister of trade, minister of information and minister for security. The dreaded security _services were manned entirely with his placemen and he ordered them to bludgeon his victims to death in a stadium as a band played “Those were the days, my friend.”

As Nguema tightened his grip on power (he made himself president for life in 1972), the killing became ever more capricious. On two occasions he had all former lovers of his then mistresses put to death. More broadly, two thirds of the members of the national assembly and all the country's senior civil servants were arrested and executed. The more fortunate fled into exile. In 1976, 114 senior civil servants—all of whom had been appointed by Nguema to replace those he had previously got rid of—petitioned him for a relaxation of the persecution. Every single one of them was subsequently arrested, tortured and murdered.

The same year also saw the closure of Equatorial Guinea's central bank and the execution of its director, as all meaningful economic activity—other than that directed toward the benefit of Nguema—was brought to a standstill. From then on, all foreign currency that entered the country was delivered directly to the president and hoarded. When Nguema ran short of funds, his forces oversaw the kidnapping and ransoming of foreign nationals.

In his determination to control all aspects of life, Nguema ordered that all libraries and all forms of media be shut down. The only form of worship permitted was of Nguema himself, with people required to acknowledge that “There is no God other than Macías” and “God created Equatorial Guinea thanks to Papa Macías.”

Over time it became clear that Nguema was clinically insane, talking to himself and alternating between mania and depression. Drugged up on stimulants, he ordered the building of a vast new presidential palace in Bata, but then decided to retreat instead to his home town in the Mongomo region of the country. There, he kept the entire national treasury in bags, alongside a range of human skulls, fueling terrifying rumors of his supposed magical powers.

Nguema finally fell in August 1979 in a military coup led by his nephew, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo—who continues to rule to this day—although not before setting fire to much of the country's wealth. He tried to flee, but was locked in a cage suspended in a cinema, where he was tried for 80,000 murders and sentenced to death. The new regime had to get Moroccan mercenaries to carry out the execution—fear of his magical powers prevented local troops from doing it themselves.

During his decade-long reign of terror, Nguema had brought Equatorial Guinea to its knees. Out of its population of over 300,000, some 100,000 had been killed and 125,000 had fled into exile as Nguema transformed his country into a hell on earth. After a reign of almost thirty years, his nephew's tyranny remains one of the most corrupt and repressive in Africa. Torture is endemic, and local radio hails him as a god while he grooms his son to succeed him.

1925–98

Pol Pot does not believe in God, but he thinks that heaven, destiny, wants him to guide Cambodia the way he thinks it the best for Cambodia … Pol Pot is mad … like Hitler
.

Prince Norodom Sihanouk, former ruler of Cambodia