မတရားတဲ ့အမိန့္ဟူသမွ်........တာ၀န္အရဖီဆန္ၾက

The world’s worst leaders do not simply cling to power through brute force and the denial of basic rights. They are buoyed by cash from a variety of legal—and illegal—trades. Here’s how a few stay afloat.

STAN HONDA/AFP/Getty Images

Than Shwe

Burma

Lifelines: natural gas, opium

Burma’s enormous natural gas reserves, which account for nearly a third of the country’s exports, buy the friendship of neighboring China, India, and Thailand. Profits are funneled to the junta’s paranoid leaders and military brass, who brutally suppressed protests last fall. And though the junta claims it cracks down on the country’s opium trade, which supplies 80 percent of Southeast Asia’s heroin, cease-fires with drug kingpins who operate openly in the region’s notorious Golden Triangle suggest that junta leaders look the other way in return for a slice of the action.

KCNA/AFP/Getty Images

Kim Jong Il

North Korea

Lifeline: counterfeit money

Illicit activities form the cornerstone of North Korea’s destitute economy, with drug trafficking, the ivory trade, and counterfeit cigarettes supplanting the millions the regime once earned from selling missile technology. But it’s Kim Jong Il’s secretive Office 39 that some U.S. officials believe truly keeps his regime afloat. Responsible for raising the hard currency to bankroll the lifestyles of top officials, Office 39 is allegedly behind the counterfeiting of millions of “supernotes,” the world’s most sophisticated forgeries of U.S. dollars.

Salah Malkawi/ Getty Images

Omar Hassan al-Bashir

Sudan

Lifeline: oil

Presiding over a genocide is generally grounds for international condemnation, or worse. Not so in the case of Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who maintains power with the help of lucrative oil contracts with China, Japan, and Malaysia, among others. Thanks to oil, the country’s GDP has tripled since 2000, and the brutal ravaging of Darfur hasn’t stopped foreign energy companies from setting up shop in Khartoum. A former finance minister has said that 70 percent of the government’s share of oil profits goes toward defense. That should be more than enough for Bashir to fuel his friendship with the rebels in the country’s oil-rich south.

Failed States Index 2008