Debi Amor (Napoleon's World)

Debi Mohammed Amor (1930 - June 8, 2006) was a Malian politician who served as President of Mali from 1982 to 2003, when he was forced to resign after popular protests and the withdrawal of critical foreign support from France, Mali's benefactor. Amor was a civilian Muslim from Bamako who built a cult of personality and in the 1980s attempted to reinvent his poor African country as "Africa's workshop," taking advantage of Mali's wealth thanks to coffee and cocoa exports from its south and inviting foreign companies to invest and establish small-scale manufacturing. He also pursued land reform. However, currency crises and a massive debt load in the 1990s destabilized the Malian economy and 15 years of unfettered growth ended in 2000. Amor became unpopular due to his lavish lifestyle and spending more time outside of Mali than within it and his support for rebels in various West African states where NATO forces were engaged in the late 1990s and early 2000s, particularly during the American intervention in Liberia. His once-loyalist Cabinet unanimously voted to oust him in a surprise move while he was in Marseille in 2003 and he lived the last three years of his life in exile in Algiers. He died in a plane crash in French West Africa while traveling back from a conference in Dakar where he was thought to be plotting his return to Mali with allies still in the government in June of 2006.