Photos: When rulers go bad: A peek inside 5 doomed dictators’ opulent lifestyles

In Libya, the people are still waiting.

Over 40 long years, the erratic and increasingly ruthless Moammar Kadafi plundered his country and crushed his opponents. Enriching himself and his cohorts at the expense of his people, he built fabulous monuments to himself.

After his bloody end, cornered in a drain pipe in 2011, rebels and ordinary Libyans exploded.

Locals “repossessed” almost anything they could carry. As one rebel fighter told a Daily Mail interviewer in 2011: “Libyan children have no childhood; their lives are destroyed by Kadafi. But his children, his family, have everything.” Perhaps he was referring to the fantasy fairground complete with carousel and zoo inside the compound in the capital, Tripoli.

Libya is trying to get some back. Last year, the nation called on South Africa to help it recover millions in state funds, gold and diamonds it believes are stashed in that country.

And there’s the long-delayed promise to turn Kadafi’s feared Tripoli compound Bab Azizia -- bombed by NATO, vandalized, briefly a Friday market site, now a garbage dump -- into a vast entertainment complex for all the people.

Finally, last summer, Libya’s tourism minister again announced: “The work to clear away the rubble from the ruins of Bab Azizia, which was a black spot in Tripoli, has begun.”

OK, fingers crossed. Even the Libya Herald doesn’t see quick movement ahead on the promised green space, lake, museum, aquarium, cafe and cultural site: “Any development could, however, be stymied by private property claims” dating back to the original seizure of the land -- by Kadafi himself.

Above: Rebel fighters trample a bust of Moammar Kadafi inside the Bab Azizia compound.   (Sergey Ponomarev / Associated Press)

Say “Imelda Marcos,” and don’t we still think “shoes”?

Decades later, the image remains of those rows and rows of designer shoes -- left behind when she and her longtime husband, President Ferdinand Marcos, fled for Hawaii after years of greed and excess.

When the Marcos family was ousted in a “people power” revolution in 1986, Philippine investigators estimated their corruptly accumulated riches in the billions.

Corazon Aquino, the next president, vowed change; the government seized the Marcos’ assets and called for a commission to recover more.

So what did the people get back?

Well, the shoes, for one thing. In a museum.

Yup, much of the fancy footwear ended up in Marikina City, an area known for -- you guessed it -- shoe manufacturing. And then in recent years, it turned out that some of Imelda’s collection stored elsewhere had, yes, rotted from neglect. How ironic.

OK, what else? Well, that much-heralded Commission on Good Government did get back some New York real estate and millions from Swiss bank accounts.

It’s an uphill battle.

The Marcos family, you see, is back in the Philippines and back in power. Yes, the still-going-strong-in-her-80s Imelda is a congresswoman; her daughter Imee is a provincial governor; her son Bong Bong is a senator.

As the head of that good government commission told a BBC interviewer: “Filipinos are too forgetful -- and we forgive too easily.”

Forgive and forget? For lost billions of dollars? Really?

Above: Former First Lady Imelda Marcos points to some of her 200 shoes on display at the Shoe Museum in suburban Marikina City.   (Pat Rtoque / Associated Press)