Washington, June 21 (IANS) North Korean strongman Kim Jong Il has been ranked the world’s worst dictator, and Somalia tops Foreign Policy magazine’s annual index of the world’s failed states, with Pakistan in the 10th place.
Piracy and terrorism-plagued Somalia, which takes the top place for the third year in a row, is followed by four other African nations – Chad, the Sudan, Zimbabwe, and the Democratic Republic of Congo – in the top five, according to the index released Monday.
And despite the presence of hundreds of thousands of US troops as part of a nearly decade-old battle that promised stability, Afghanistan and Iraq rank sixth and seventh. One of America’s principal allies in the so-called war on terror, Pakistan, is number 10.
‘None of the current top 10 has shown much improvement, if any, since Foreign Policy and the Fund for Peace began publishing the index in 2005,’ the magazine said on its website.
India is ranked 87 in a list of 177 countries. In India’s immediate neighbourhood, Burma has been placed at 13, Sri Lanka 22nd and Nepal 25th. China is ranked at 57th place. Three Nordic nations – Norway, Finland and Sweden – are ranked as the most stable countries.
Asia is home to 30 per cent of the top 60 weakest states and the Middle East has just over 10 percent.
The index uses publicly available data to to analyse 177 countries on ’12 metrics of state decay — from refugee flows to economic implosion, human rights violations to security threats,’ the magazine said.
The magazine also ranked the world’s worst dictators, with North Korea’s Kim Jong Il leading the way. Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe is number two. The leader of the world’s most populous nation, Hu Jintao of China, takes the 10th spot.
