What Are the Worst Countries in the World?

Here's a Clue: It's Not Mongolia

I reckon everyone can have his own opinion about what the worst countries in the world are. For example, I’ve always thought poorly of Mongolia. I’ve never been there, nor has anyone ever spoken ill of Mongolia in my presence. I just think it would suck to be called a Mongol or a Mongoloid.

I don’t much like Papua New Guinea, either. Strike one is “Guinea” in the name. Can’t they change the name to something less rodential? Strike two is the cannibalism. I don’t know if they still eat people in Papua New Guinea, but I do know they did in the not-so-distant past. PNG’s government apologized just last month for the intentional ingestion of four foreign missionaries in 1878. I’m a pretty tolerant fellow, but I just can’t have warm feelings for a place where headhunter is not actually a synonym for job recruiter.

Now that I’ve thought about this, perhaps cannibalism should be strike one.

Several organizations have attempted to rank nations from best to worst using various criteria. The United Nations’ Human Development Index ranks countries by their livability.

Norway and Canada have traded the top spot every year since 1994.

Transparency International puts together an annual list of the world’s most corrupt countries. On its 2006 list, Finland, Iceland and New Zealand are the least corrupt. Haiti is the most corrupt.

Foreign Policy magazine and the nonprofit Fund for Peace put together an annual list of the worst countries in the world called the “Failed States Index.”

The index assigns scores of one to 10 to every nation in a dozen social, economic and political categories. The worst score you can get in a single category is a 10. The worst possible overall score is 120.

So here are the worst countries in the world, according to the Failed States Index. All 10 are violent, miserable, corrupt and poor, so I’ll focus my short descriptions on the traits that vault them ahead of other notorious s#!tholes.

(10) Central African Republic (Score: 101) — The worst thing about C.A.R. is its border with Sudan. Refugees are piling in from Sudan’s genocide-ridden Darfur province, bringing with them rebels armed by Sudan’s government.

(9) Guinea (101.3) — Not to be confused with Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau or Papua New Guinea. Numerous clans and families are angling to take over after ailing dictator Lansana Conté kicks the bucket. The result: Full-scale civil war looms.

(8) Afghanistan (102.3) — The Taliban, followed by a U.S. invasion and a botched rebuilding effort, followed by an ascendant Taliban. The only good news coming out of Afghanistan these days is for heroin addicts: Opium production has doubled in the past two years. Afghanistan now produces 93 percent of the world’s opium.

(7) Democratic Republic of Congo (105.5) — The DR of C’s failure rating has actually gone down, thanks to last year’s elections — the first real elections in Congo’s 40 years of Congohood. Still miserably poor and violent, but less so than at any time in the past 15 years.

(6) Cote d’Ivoire (107.3) — This West African nation is divided in two. Rebels control the north. The government controls the south. The United Nations keeps the two halves from warring. Though all-out war between the halves stopped in 2004, the warring halves haven’t figured out how to reconcile.

(5) Chad (108.8) — Like the Central African Republic, Chad was a hellhole that got more hellish and holish when Sudan’s Darfur war spilled over its border.

(4) Zimbabwe (110.1) — President-for-life Robert Mugabe’s misrule has turned this once-thriving agricultural nation into a famine-stricken refugee factory.

(3) Somalia (111.1) — Somalia’s southern half has not had a working government since 1991. When an Islamist government almost took control last year, U.S. and Ethiopian forces invaded.

(2) Iraq (111.4) — Everything was going, like, totally awesome here until the liberals and media and the Dixie Chicks ruined it.

(1) Sudan (113.7) — The Darfur genocide.

Did anyone else notice that three of the 10 worst failed states (Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia) have been touted by the Bush administration as War on Terror™ success stories? I’m just saying.

What Are the Worst Countries in the World?

More News