How dictators fall

Thursday, March 3rd, 2011

Muammar Gaddafi speaking on Libyan state television last week: experts say that the use of violence by a regime under challenge triggers further escalation by protesters who are demanding change. Photograph: BBC

László Tökés is not remembered much outside Romania these days. Now 58 and the bishop of Királyhágómellék, in March 1989 he was a parish priest in Timosoara facing eviction from his church apartment. His crime was to have preached against the policy of “systemisation” – the restructuring of his country’s towns and villages ordered by the authoritarian regime of Nicolae Ceausescu.

Ethnically Hungarian, Tökés had a long history of criticising the regime and so when he refused to quit his home, it became a cause célèbre and drew the attention of Ceausescu’s secret police, the notorious Securitate. By December 1989, it was not only his parishioners who were standing guard to protect his flat, linking hands around the property, but ethnic Romanians who swelled into a crowd that filled the surrounding streets.

What followed over the next few days is better known than Tökés ‘s personal tale: the mass protests in Timosoara which led, in quick order, to the fall of the once-mighty Ceausescu regime.

If this story of one man and his country sounds familiar, that is perhaps because it is. Not only because the Arab world is going through a series of popular convulsions which some commentators have compared to the events in Communist Europe in 1989, but also because of what his story tells us about the social dynamics of rebellion against authoritarian regimes.

A large part of the problem of understanding how modern rebellions come about is the reporting of them. Euphoric moments are condensed to slogans on one hand and on the other into vivid narratives of the crimes of the fallen regime. What falls through the cracks is the process by which the actions of an often small dissident circle are translated into a mass movement involving a sufficient cross-section of society to sweep away a tyrant.

If that clouds our understanding, so too does the tendency to limit our examination of rebellions to the facts of the revolutionary moment itself. Instead, what we should be doing is examining why populations ever accept dictatorships. In doing so, we may comprehend more about why they are then rejected, often so suddenly. Roger Petersen, author of Resistance and Rebellion: Lessons from Eastern Europe , is one of those who has studied the question: “How do ordinary people rebel against powerful and brutal regimes?” His answer is that most rebellions can be divided into three distinct mechanisms or phases.

The first, according to the Petersen road map of rebellion, is the most critical – the slow shift in the largest part of the population from what he calls regime “neutrality” to what he describes as a “widespread but unorganised and unarmed resistance”.

The behaviour associated with this phase is one that typically involves “anti-regime graffiti, singing nationalist songs, handing out or accepting anti-regime literature and participating in spontaneous demonstrations”.

It was precisely this that was in evidence in the case of the protests that centred on Laszlo Tökés ‘s apartment in 1989 where the gathering crowds at first sang hymns but then quickly moved to singing a banned nationalistic song, Deteapt-te, române! (Wake Up, Romania) This had also been sung by demonstrators two years before in the mass protests in the city of Brasov.

The second phase Petersen describes is that of locally organised and armed rebellion. And the third phase, he says, is maintaining that rebellion.

“It is about first actors,” Petersen said last week. “There are people prepared to oppose the regime, but it is about those people you see who will drive within a few hundred metres of a demonstration to see if there are enough people for them to join in as well. It is about people making that strategic decision about joining in whose concern is: I can’t be the only one.”

In this, Petersen believes the use of social media has been helpful in the recent uprisings, precisely because it increased the number of those “first actors” on the street. “In eastern Europe there were three signs that people would look at – the participation of the students, the workers and the overall involvement of society” in deciding when to join in.

Crucial too in the slow build-up to rebellion, adds Petersen, is another key plank of social decision-making – the abandonment of a deal with the autocratic regime that sees people accept certain benefits such as employment and education in favour of different values like “dignity”.

“I think in Hungary and Czechoslovakia for a long time there was a feeling among many that said ‘Let’s not talk about politics, let’s talk bread. That is the deal that we’ll accept’. But after a certain point it’s not just bread any more, it’s dignity. It’s ‘I don’t have an autonomous life’. I don’t know precisely when that stage comes up.”

If there is a point of strong similarity between a number of the revolutions of 1989 and what is happening now in the Arab world, it is in the gradual abandonment of this “bread not politics” deal.

At Cairo University, Professor Ahmad Shalabi has dubbed this acquiescence to power in exchange for certain economic and social benefits the demuqratiyat al-khubz – the democracy of bread. He describes the political bargain between post-independence Arab leaders who have received deference from their people in exchange for subsidised services. It is a bargain that has collapsed confronted with the espousal by regimes of neo-liberal economic policies, widespread corruption and the same desire by young Arabs for more political autonomy.

Larbi Sadiki, who lectures on democratisation at Exeter University and has recently returned from observing Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution, asks the key question. “When you look at who protested in Tunisia you have to ask why did the middle classes join with those from the misery belt of places like Sidi Bouzid and Kasserine? It is a psychological process. With rebellions, quantity makes quality.

“The key moment comes when people are asking themselves why they are not joining in. Knocking on their neighbours doors to say ‘Let’s go to Habib Bourguiba [the main avenue in Tunis and the focus of that country's protests].’

“This is the tipping point, when this part of society decides this is our fight too. That’s what you saw after 9 January in Tunisia. After that point people were looking at what was happening and saying these kids who are getting killed are dying for us. Then everyone becomes personally concerned.”

The case of L ászló Tökés also dramatises another feature of rebellions – the necessity to focus on a key identifiable victim in a population that is already primed with sufficient dissatisfaction for rebellion. In Tunisia that figure was Mohammed Bouzizi, the fruit seller from Sidi Bouzid who set himself on fire. In Egypt early focus was provided by the murder of Khaled Said,who was savagely beaten by the police in Alexandria last June and whose name became a rallying call for the activist networks who participated in the first big demonstration against the regime.

In the 1986 fall of Ferdinand Marcos it was the long-held suspicion of Filipinos that the dictator had helped cover up the assassination of Benigno Aquino at Manila airport in 1983 that acted as a lightning rod for opposition to his long rule, and transformed Aquino’s wife, Corazon, into his leading challenger.

And the use of violence by the regime under challenge, argue both Petersen and Sadiki, acts as a further crucial trigger for escalation by protesters against the regime. It is not simply because the state use of violence – whether in Bahrain or Romania, Egypt or Libya – acts as reminder of its brutal nature at a time when it is more vulnerable than it realises. It is also because the use of state violence confronts those still part of the state with a moral and strategic question: whether to tolerate the use of force and hope the regime survives, or peel away and join the opposition.

“It is the other side of the story to that of those rebelling,” says Petersen. “There are different considerations for those in the military, police or special forces, defined by their role. They are required to make a choice: whether they can switch sides and hope the people accept their new narrative in the new world after the regime, or stick by it to the end.

“Whether you defect to the opposition depends on these differential kinds of moral calculus. Ordinary soldiers, for instance, have their own calculus. And if they decide not to fire on protesters that sends a signal to the higher-ups in the military. Then pretty soon you might see the interest of the military changing.”

Petersen, however, has one caveat. That this kind of negotiation in an organisation like the military does not necessarily hold true if there is the early and “crushing” use of violence.

Which leaves a final question: whether, by their very nature, autocratic regimes are not equipped with sufficient flexibility or institutional and individual self-awareness to survive by negotiating with people power at the moment of greatest threat, when it becomes obvious that it poses an existential challenge to the regime.

Part of the problem in the Middle East and elsewhere has been the very tactics used by regimes to protect themselves from internal challenges. In an influential study by James Quinlivan, an analyst with the non-profit research and development Rand corporation, this strategy is called “coup-proofing”. Ironically, it is this kind of tactic that has often made these kinds of government more vulnerable to popular uprisings than others.

At its simplest, “coup-proofing” is the way in which regimes consolidate a small mafia-like inner core made up of cronies, family, tribal or ethnic interest while using incentives to encourage the security forces, both military and police, to protect the regime while monitoring each other.

The unintended consequence of this, however, is paranoid, inward-looking and detached regimes often isolated from the reality of what their people think, reinforced in their own view of their invulnerability and importance by a cadre of yes-men.

This, perhaps, explains why dictatorial regimes, regarded as stable and invulnerable by outside observers can collapse as quickly as they can, not least when a key element like the military – as happened in Egypt and Tunisia – removed its support. And it is not, as John Barry and Christopher Dickey remarked in a recent article in the Daily Beast website, a cheap business.

In the end, however, the success of a rebellion depends on the crossing of a fear barrier by enough people, not simply the small group of dedicated dissidents. A judgment that the risk is worth it and the rebellion might actually succeed.

“I was in a crowd in Vilnius in 1991 when 15 people were killed,” recalls Petersen. “I remember people’s response was not to back down but to head to parliament instead.”

Albert Camus, asked “what is a rebel?”, and answering his own question, said: “A man who says no.” It is at this point, when fear is gone, that whole nations say no. And it is when tyrants fall.

Source : http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/02/protests-how-dictators-fall