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

Than Shwe came to power in 1992. His regime stamped out the protest of February 2007 immediately. However, the junta’s fear of protest was justified by events in August 2007. Following an announcement of fuel price increases, on August 19 about 500 protestors, led by many of the student protest leaders who had been active in 1988, took to the streets. These protests continued over a number of days. Participation soon dwindled to double digits as the army engaged in widespread arrests, but in September these protests reignited when several hundred monks marched. The army beat the monks. Two monks were chained to a lamppost and beaten. One allegedly died.

Monks are revered in Burma. The violence against them generated further protest. A government delegation was trapped for six hours by protesters. Across Burma monks took the symbolic act of overturning their alms bowls against the government, a ritual known as thabeik hmauk . Religious services were denied to all members of the military. Across the country groups of monks began to march. These protests grew daily. People began to talk of a Saffron Revolution, saffron being the color of the monk’s robes. This was precisely what Than Shwe feared most.

On September 25 the government ordered a crackdown. Protesters were attacked, first with rubber bullets, then with live ammunition and whips. The army also raided monasteries and carried monks away at night. Many of the remaining monks were dispersed to their villages to prevent them from congregating. After three days the protests had completely ended. Although government forces utterly crushed all opposition, it was a costly operation. The esteem in which monks are held meant many soldiers were reluctant to harm them. There were fears that the army might not be willing to attack temples. In the end they were, but it no doubt cost the regime lots of resources to buy such loyalty.

Inhumane as Shwe’s actions were, they represented good autocratic politics. He survived to rule another day. Nor is Shwe alone in placing being a leader ahead of being a good human being. Life is miserable for the people in resource-rich autocracies the world over. In these regimes, governments prevent the people from coordinating. Their lives are isolated, miserable, and unproductive. But revolution and protest are not hopeless acts, as the next set of examples make clear.

Power to the People

A few of history’s revolutionaries stand out for their success not only in overthrowing a nasty regime, but in creating a people-friendly government in its place. America’s George Washington, South Africa’s Nelson Mandela, India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, and the Philippines’ Corazon Aquino are a few cases in point. Perhaps even more interestingly, a few leaders threatened with revolution have also democratized as the path to keep themselves in power. Ghana’s Jerry John “J. J.” Rawlings is a perfect example. Common threads run through each of these democratizers—common threads that are absent from revolutions that replaced one dictator with another, such as occurred under Mao Zedong in China, Fidel Castro in Cuba, Porfirio Diaz in Mexico, and Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya.

Democratic revolutions are most often fought by people who cannot count on great natural resource wealth to sustain them once they overthrow the predecessor regime. These “good” revolutionaries just are not as lucky as Libya’s Colonel Muammar Qaddafi or Kazakhstan’s Nursultan Nazarbayev. Although contagion prompted an extreme threat to Qaddafi’s political survival in 2011, his oil wealth gave him a substantial fighting chance against the rebels. He had the money to buy soldiers and keep them loyal, something his resource-poor Tunisian and Egyptian neighbors did not. They, like good revolutionaries, had to rely on the productivity of the people to generate the revenues they needed to reward supporters. To encourage the people to work productively, good revolutionary leaders needed to increase the people’s freedoms. If the people can meet and talk then they can earn more. As a very simple example, if farmers have access to telephones, newspapers, and radios, then they can find out about market prices. This allows them to take the crops to the right markets at the right time. Roads and transport networks reduce transaction costs. Given the ability to earn more, farmers work harder and the economy improves. Unfortunately, for a leader, those same freedoms allow people to organize. The same media, telecommunications, and roads that increase productivity also make it much easier for the same farmers to hear about antigovernment demonstrations and join them. In much the same way that Mexico City’s 1985 earthquake lowered the barriers for coordination and organization, increasing the public good of freedom makes protest more likely.

In the latter half of the 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev faced a dilemma. The economy of the Soviet Union was failing. Without additional resources he could not continue to pay his essential backers. He might have turned to oil—of which Russia has plenty—to save the day, but oil prices were depressed in those years. His best shot at keeping rebellion at bay was to liberalize the Soviet economy, even though that also meant giving the people more power over their lives. Gorbachev showed himself willing to take that risk.

Some might suggest that Gorbachev is a better person than Burma’s General Shwe. Probably he is, although we cannot help but notice that he cracked down on constitutionally protected secessionist movements in Azerbaijan, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. The Soviet military response to the efforts of the people in those republics to gain their freedom is hardly the response of an enlightened leader. The Soviet “black beret” militia killed fourteen and injured 150 people in Lithuania.12 A week later, 4 more people were killed and twenty injured when Soviet forces cracked down on Latvia’s efforts to attain independence.13

Why did the enlightened Gorbachev take these harsh actions? He was responding to political pressure from within his coalition. Topranking Soviet military officers together with others urged Gorbachev to impose direct Kremlin rule in breakaway provinces. They wrote in an open letter that was circulated at the Congress of People’s Deputies, “If constitutional methods prove ineffective against separatists, criminal speculators and the paramilitary forces that are continuing to spill the blood of the people, we suggest instituting a state of emergency and presidential rule in zones of major conflicts.”14 Gorbachev understood the political risks of ignoring key military and political figures in his coalition of essentials.

Gorbachev’s failure to quash the secessionist movements was a significant contributor to the decision by hardliners in his government to launch a coup that overthrew him. He was restored to power—briefly—when the people, backed by Boris Yeltsin, occupied Red Square and forced the coup makers to retreat. But for Gorbachev the damage was done. He returned to power, recognized the independence of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, only to find himself unable to sustain his government or even the existence of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was formally dissolved three months later.

Gorbachev’s policy of perestroika, aimed at restructuring the Soviet political and economic system, can be understood as his effort to increase the government’s revenue to forestall just such problems as the secessionist movements and their political aftermath. It didn’t work out for him or the Soviet form of government, but that is what it means to take risks. Sometimes they turn out your way and sometimes they don’t.

Today Russia is backsliding away from democratization. While under Boris Yeltsin’s post-Gorbachev government Russia maintained free and competitive elections, that is much less true today. Vladimir Putin, former member of the Soviet secret police (the KGB) and Yeltsin’s immediate successor, moved the political system sharply back from its emerging dependence on a large coalition and good governance. He made it much more difficult for opposition parties to compete by severely restricting freedom of assembly. He made it much more difficult for opposition candidates to get their message across by nationalizing television and much of the print media. He made it much more difficult for people to articulate their dissatisfaction by making it a crime to make public arguments that disparaged the government. In short, he systematically reduced the availability of freedoms that compel a democratic government to attend to the wishes of the people. Why could he do this? As we have noted, Russia is awash in oil wealth. During Putin’s time, unlike poor Gorbachev’s, oil prices were at record highs so he could pay key backers to help him quash opposition, and possibly even have enough extra money from oil to keep the people happy enough that they don’t rebel against their loss of freedom.