THE phrase, the banality of evil was coined by Hannah Arendt in her report of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1962.

Watching Eichmann in the dock earlier this week in a programme about how the Nazi was finally brought to justice by the Israelis, I was reminded just how those words nailed it. Completely.

Eichmann was one of the chief architects of the Holocaust but fled to Argentina as the Third Reich crumbled.

The New Yorker commissioned Arendt to cover the trial.

In 1963, her writings were published as Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, a sobering reflection on “the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us — the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.”

One of the perplexing things about our world is that while evil, given the opportunity, can explode into colossal, unthinkable, incomprehensible tragedy, the individuals responsible are characterised by nothing more than with absolute mundanity.

The same might be said of Robert Mugabe or General Ratko Mladic, both of who took centre stage this week.

I never saw Mladic although I witnessed at first hand some of the devastation his crowd inflicted in the Balkans when I travelled the length of Croatia with the Royal Signals. Not the least of it was the ethnic cleansing and total destruction of towns like Vukovar.

Mugabe on the other hand, I did come across at close quarters, in of all places, Kuala Lumpur.

I spent two days, with press accreditation at the annual summit of the Non Aligned Movement as part of a holiday in Malaysia.

The NAM is made up of countries that were originally not allied to the West or the Soviet Bloc during the Cold War.

It includes most of Africa, South America and some of Asia.

Mugabe was there and so was Fidel Castro.

I wanted to see what a tyrant looked like up close and I wanted to ask him why he was killing his own people.

As this elderly, slight man left the conference platform, I inserted myself into a line of Malaysian soldiers directly in front him.

He walked towards the only white man in the room, looked directly at me and held my gaze for three or four seconds and then turned away.

This brief encounter happened not long after activist Peter Tatchell tried to make a citizen's arrest of Mugabe in London and I imagined he may have I was going to pull a similar stunt.

I was not brave enough to try that or, several thousand miles from home, even make a political statement. In fact, I achieved nothing except to confirm in my own mind just how mundane evil can be, stripped of all trappings, like Mladic in the dock in the Hague or the Nazis at Nuremburg. Banal tyrants capable of enormous evil with their small hands, then, now and in the future.

John Steinbeck put it best: "It isn’t that the evil thing wins, it never will - but that it doesn’t die.”