Dead Tyrants & Global Justice

Looking back at 2006, the record of bringing bloodthirsty dictators to justice is dismal: one for four.

The death of Augusto Pinochet, the former Chilean dictator whose secret police killed and tortured thousands of dissidents, helped seal 2006 as the most fateful year for war criminals and other human-rights violators since the Nuremberg trials of 1946.

At the time of his death, Pinochet faced unambiguous charges of ordering his secret police to kill at least 3,197 people and torture about 23,000. He died less than three months after Chile's Supreme Court lifted the immunity that had been protecting him.

Like Pinochet, Slobodan Milosevic died early this year before the end of his trial. Also like Pinochet -- but on a larger scale -- Milosevic controlled a large military and police operation that was responsible for many of the 200,000 deaths in the former Yugoslavia during his reign.

Saddam Hussein, by contrast, lived to see his sentence, and the charges against the former Iraqi president have been as unambiguous as those against Pinochet and Milosevic. Saddam, always in strong control of the Baath Party and Iraqi armed forces, was sentenced Nov. 6 to hang for crimes against humanity in the execution of 148 men and children from the Iraqi town of Dujail in 1982.

Also in 2006, Charles Taylor, the former Liberian dictator, was captured and sent to The Hague.

Additionally justice came, although a little too late, for the ex-dictator of Ethiopia, Mengistu Haile Mariam, whose brutality exceeds Pinochet's. From 1974 to 1991, Mengistu ruled Ethiopia with an iron fist. Suspected of killing 150,000 people, his regime contributed to the 1984 famine.