5 Idi Amin
Amin was dictator of Uganda from 1971 to 1979. Amin charmed and promised the world that he would bring peace and democracy to the people of his country. Instead he turned Uganda into a poverty-stricken land patrolled by death squads. Amin was possibly the most brutal and merciless dictator of all time. His rule was characterized by human rights abuses, ethnic persecution, political repression, massacres and the expulsion of 80,000 Asians from Uganda. Amin pitted his people and executed hundreds of thousands of his people. Amin was probably the most sadistic dictator in the 20th century. He would show executions of people on television. Amin tortured and killed his country’s soldiers, government officials, teachers, artists, doctors, journalists, engineers, politicians, police officers, photographers, lawyers, business people, ordinary citizens, ministers and children. Amin’s men tortured and killed people with sledge hammers while Amin kept the pictures for fun and amusement. Amin often had his victims buried alive. Amin would often give the heads of his enemies to crocodiles. Hundreds of thousands of dead bodies washed up to the shores of Lake Victoria. Amin killed 4,000 people by throwing them into crocodile infested rivers. About 50,000 people died from disease, most were children. He would cut the flesh of people and force them to eat it until they died. Amin ate human flesh and he said proudly that he was a cannibal. He also drank human blood. Amin mutilated one of his wives and had her limbs sewn upside down. Amin killed and tortured 300,000 to 500,000 Ugandans. Amin was forced in exile in Saudi Arabia for the rest of his life. Amin died almost 25 years later in 2003. In that time Amin lived a very peaceful life.
4 Pol Pot
Pol Pot was Prime Minister of Cambodia from 1976 to 1979. His plan was to destroy the civilization of Cambodia and turn it into a new age. He turned Cambodia into a killing field. Pol Pot is the only man in history that ordered an official genocide against his whole country and he killed the greatest percentage in the amount of time he was in power. He declared that the Buddhist religion, money, and personal possessions would all be banned. His communist government forced mass evacuations of cities. Millions of Cambodians were displaced, tortured and killed. People were separated from friends and families. People died from effects of slave labor, malnutrition, poor medical care, starvation and execution. Hundreds of thousands were clubbed to death and buried alive. Thousands were killed from disease and torture. Many were hanged. Millions of people including the elderly, pregnant women, and children would stand in water up to their necks in cold and rainy seasons, working on canals, with legs and feet swelling up and bleeding. If you stopped working because of illness, you would not be feed or you would be killed. If a worker made a mistake, he or she would be flogged to death or shot. You would be expected to work until you dropped dead. Many people had no rights to eat. If people were found eating dead humans, they would be buried alive. Pol Pot wanted teenagers to become solders with a love of killing. If Cambodian people married people of Vietnam, the husband and wife would be killed. People that spoke and looked like Vietnamese were also killed. Pol Pot often ordered people to kill and fight Vietnamese. He took pictures of the people he executed and recorded them in detail. Prisoners were forced to drink humane urine. He ordered babies to be torn limb by limb. People were beaten to death by blunt instruments like hammers, spades and axe handles. People were also killed by sharpened bamboo sticks. Some of his men killed people by bleeding them to death. He liked to keep the skulls of dead people. To Pol Pot, his people’s lives were not just cheap, but of no value at all. He killed 1 to 3 million Cambodians, 25 to 33 percent of the country. Pol Pot died in April in 1998 of natural causes.
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