El-Bashir

NEW YORK, Feb 12, 2005 (UPI) — Parade magazine’s yearly list of the planet’s 10 worst living dictators has named Sudan’s Omar Bashir as the head of world’s most ignominious class.

Although last year Bashir ranked a mere seventh among the 10 worst dictators, this year’s list has him as the worst of the worst because of the 70,000 people who have been killed in Sudan’s Darfur region and 6 million internally displaced as a result of Khartoum’s ethnic cleansing, contributing editor David Wallechinsky wrote in Sunday’s edition of Parade.

Among his signature forms of abuse: slave trading and aerial bombing of women’s and children’s refugee camps.

Following Bashir are, in order: Kim Jong Il (North Korea), Than Shwe (Myanmar, formerly Burma), Hu Jintao (China), Crown Prince Abdullah (Saudi Arabia), Muammar al-Qadafi (Libya), Pervez Musharraf (Pakistan), Saparmurat Niyazov (Turkmenistan), Robert Mugabe (Zimbabwe) and Teodoro Obiang Nguema (Equatorial Guinea).

Receiving dishonorable mentions are King Mswati III (Swaziland), Aleksander Lukashenko (Belarus) and Fidel Castro (Cuba), the world’s longest-reigning — and in Latin America an almost beloved — dictator.

Wallechinsky developed his list by consulting such human rights groups as Freedom House, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Reporters Without Borders.