Алистер Смит - The Dictator's Handbook - Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics

Born of necessity, these camps became the foundation for an important political force in Mexico City. Instead of separate individuals unhappy with their government, the earthquake formed a concentrated mass of desperate people. Forced together into crowded camps, they shared their disillusionment with the government. Organizing a protest rally was suddenly relatively easy. Ready and willing participants were on hand and had little to lose. With the government largely absent, these social groups became important political forces that rapidly deployed as large antigovernment demonstrations. Unable to oppose these groups, the government sought to accommodate them. It is widely believed they played a key role in Mexico’s democratization.4

The story of Anastasio Somoza’s deposition in the Nicaraguan Revolution in 1979 is broadly similar. In 1972, a 6.2 magnitude earthquake struck the capital of Managua, killing around 5,000 people and forcing about 250,000 homeless people into camps. Somoza and his cronies profited from disaster relief but did nothing to resettle the enormous number of homeless people who had gathered in refugee camps in the capital. These camps became organizing grounds for the activists who eventually ended Somoza’s reign.

Not all autocrats make the mistake of ignoring disasters or ignoring the creation of refugee camps. Consider the case of Myanmar in 2008. Than Shwe is the military leader of Burma (officially known as Myanmar). Although he has been described as an unremarkable man, he understands the essentials of staying in power.5 On May 2, 2008, a massive cyclone, named Nargis, swept across the Irrawaddy Delta in southern Burma causing havoc. The delta’s residents, mainly poor fishermen and farmers, received no warning of the coming storm. The storm destroyed entire towns and villages. The official death toll is 138,000, though other estimates suggest it might be as high as 500,000.

No one can blame Than Shwe for the storm or for the low-lying villages’ vulnerability to storm surge. However, Burma’s military regime provided no warning and did nothing to help the survivors, and for that they can be blamed. Indeed they did worse than nothing: they actively prevented help from being delivered. Many people in Rangoon, the major city in southern Burma that was itself heavily damaged by the storm, attempted to help those in the delta. They were not allowed. Small businessmen and traders were reduced to smuggling small amounts of food into what remained of towns and villages.

The international community rallied to offer assistance. As tens, or possibly hundreds, of thousands of people died of hunger and thirst in the aftermath of the storm, ships full of disaster relief supplies sat off the coast. The military junta refused to allow relief workers in. Visas were almost impossible to obtain. Information was extremely scarce. The government requested aid, but asked that it be in the form of bilateral government-to-government assistance. Effectively, Than Shwe was saying, “send cash, but you can’t come in.”

About a week after the disaster, the army started entering the larger towns and villages of the delta. They were not there to help. They were there to disperse survivors who had congregated in schools and temples. Even though their numbers rarely exceeded a few hundred, survivors were expelled from their shelters and told to return home. It mattered little that, in most cases, their entire village had been destroyed and they had no food, water, clothing, or shelter to return to. Indeed, one report observed,

Survivors were loaded onto boats and ferried back to the destroyed villages they had recently escaped from. In some areas the clearances happened quickly; as the emergency phase was now officially over, the authorities wanted people back in their villages by June 2, when the next school term was scheduled to begin. But survivors had no idea what they were returning to; was there even anything left at places they had once called home? And how would they get food and water there?6

The government did not even attempt to answer these questions.

In the PBS documentary, Eyes of the Storm , a senior Burmese general is seen addressing a group of survivors.7 Starving and destitute, they ask for a handful of rice. The general tells them that he is here now (but still he makes no offer of assistance) and that they must go back to their village and “work hard.” While the army seized (and sold on the black market) the few relief supplies allowed in, the people were told they could eat frogs. Effectively the government told these survivors to go away and die quietly: inhumane in the extreme, but good small-coalition politics. Dead people cannot protest.

Are Disasters Always Disasters for Government Survival?

Earthquakes and other disasters shake up political systems. However, the nature of the shakeup is very different under different institutions. Democratic leaders are very sensitive to disaster-related casualties. Allowing people to die reveals serious policy failure. Democrats need to deliver good public policy to reward their large number of backers. When they fail to do so, they are liable to be removed. Disaster-related deaths result in protest and in the removal of leaders in democracies.

To illustrate the difference in political responses to poor disaster relief in a non-democratic and democratic setting, we contrast Cyclone Nargis with Hurricane Katrina. Katrina struck the US Gulf Coast in August 2005. This was the most costly natural disaster in US history, with damages estimated at $81 billion. The death toll was 1,836.

The government, from President George W. Bush down to New Orleans’s mayor, Ray Nagin, stood accused of mismanagement and lack of leadership. Nagin delayed the evacuation order for the city until nineteen hours before the storm struck. As a result many people became trapped. Then, once the New Orleans Superdome football stadium was set up as an emergency center, it became overwhelmed when 30,000 rather than the anticipated 800 people showed up. Federal disaster relief was slow in arriving. Many of the casualties were the sick and elderly who were overcome by heat and dehydration.

The tenure of US leaders was seriously jeopardized by the disaster. Many observers think Katrina contributed significantly to the Republican Party’s midterm electoral losses in 2006 and their significant losses, including the presidency, in 2008. Yet, while it is clear that the situation could have been handled much better, it bears no resemblance to Cyclone Nargis. In contrast, despite having allowed at least 138,000 people to die, Than Shwe felt sufficiently well entrenched to allow a farcical election in 2010, which the government-backed parties won easily (at least according to official sources).

As seen in the cases of Mexico and Nicaragua, disasters can serve as rallying points in autocracies. Disasters can concentrate opponents of the regime, making it easier for them to coordinate. Yet the death toll from disasters has relatively little effect on a dictator’s chance of staying in power. Indeed, if anything, large numbers of people dying in disasters actually enhance the political survival of autocratic leaders.

As we know, autocrats don’t buy political support with efficient public policy. Resources spent saving the lives of the people cannot be spent on cronies. In addition, as we have seen, autocrats are skilled at exploiting the international community. By letting more people die they may in fact be able to extract more relief assistance. The implications of these results are frightening. Small wonder, then, that far more people die in natural disasters in autocracies than in democracies.

Letting people die is good governance in autocracy, but it is disastrous for the tenure of democrats. Although a detailed statistical analysis of the relationship between disasters,8 deaths and leader tenure is complex, we compared what happens in a country when 200 or more people die in a magnitude 5+ earthquake, to what happens in the same size earthquake if fewer people die. In particular, we looked at the effect of such circumstances on the odds of a country’s leader being removed from office within two years following the earthquake.