Evan Mawarire is a Zimbabwean pastor and opponent of the Mugabe government:
When you are pressed hard by a dictator, you don't sit down. You stand up! You keep speaking, you keep rising, because the freedom we ask for is not what they give us, but what is inside us. . . .
We are freedom in every moment that we refuse to be silenced. We are freedom every time we refuse for the handcuffs convince us that we have lost hope. We are freedom every time we are arrested and we leave the jails and the courts and go right back to demanding the very thing that they arrested us for.
I'm curious how many dictators have been removed from power without the use of force...
ReplyDeleteFollowing up on my idle thought, because after all, the internet is at my fingertips, it seems it does happen from time to time - but because of pretty clear extenuating circumstances.
ReplyDeleteThere's King Juan Carlos I of Spain, who dismantled the Franco regime upon succeeding Franco himself... but he had long had secret misgivings about Franco's rule, and had simply been making an outward show of support for it and toeing the party line until Franco died. And technically, he himself was never actually a dictator.
There's Pinochet... but he lost the support of the army, and no dictator survives that.
Some people argue that Indira Gandhi counts as a dictator, since she granted herself and her government sweeping emergency powers in 1975 to enable (among many other things) a rewrite of the constitution... but she was democratically elected and she did legally have the authority to invoke those powers, and when she lost the 1977 election, she stepped down.
Chun Doo-hwan of South Korea was unquestionably a military dictator... but given the geopolitics of South Korea, he essentially ruled at the pleasure of the United States. His power was greatest when he could leverage the conflict with North Korea, and position himself as a necessary lynchpin in maintaining the security of Korea and its allies - but moving into the final years of the Cold War, the US became increasingly concerned with not wanting to be seen to be propping up authoritarian regimes, and so he lost his actual power base, and had no other option than to step down.
There's João Figueiredo of Brazil... but in a parallel to Juan Carlos of Spain, he appears to have mostly just inherited his position from his more hardline junta predecessors - and once he rose to power he had his own ideas about how the country should be run, and he began a gradual democratization process.
And... that's kind of it. There really aren't that many other modern dictators I'm finding who have lost power without people resorting to violence.
Lots of Latin American, Asian, and African countries have been oscillating between military rule and elected governments for decades; I think there have been three cycles just within Thailand. So if you count every time a military regime steps aside for an elected government I think we could be into the dozens.
ReplyDeleteJaruzelski and his military junta, though you may reasonably argue he wasn't a dictator, just a face for the regime.
ReplyDeleteIt does get a little fuzzy, distinguishing between dictators and juntas.
ReplyDelete