How Tyrants Fall

 Dr Marcel Dirsus is a Non-Resident Fellow at the institute for Security Policy at Kiel University. An expert on regime instability and politicalviolence, he has advised democratic governments, foundations, multinational corporations and international organisations includingNATO and OECD. His writing and research has been featured by the Financial Times, Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, New York Times andWashington Post.

How Tyrants Fall

 

 

And How Nations Survive

 

 

Marcel Dirsus

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

www.johnmurraypress.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 2024 by John Murray (Publishers)

 

Copyright © Marcel Dirsus 2024

 

The right of Marcel Dirsus to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designsand Patents Act 1988.

 

Cover design © Luke Bird

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For Anneliese

Contents

Introduction: The Golden Gun

 

1 The Dictator’s Treadmill

2 The Enemy Within

3 Weakening the Warriors

4 Rebels, Guns and Money

5 Enemies, Foreign and Domestic

6 You Shoot, You Lose

7 No Other Option

8 Be Careful What You Wish For

9 How to Topple a Tyrant

 

Acknowledgements

Notes

Introduction: The Golden Gun

I don’t deny I’m lonely. Deeply so. A king, when he doesn’t have to account to anyone for what he says and does, is inevitably verymuch alone.1

Mohamed Reza Pahlavi, shah of Iran

 

The most powerful tyrants on earth are condemned to live their life in fear. They can make their enemies disappear with a snap of theirfingers. They, their families and their acolytes may control entire countries from the luxury of their palace, but they also have to spend theirevery waking hour plagued by the fear of losing everything. No matter how powerful they become, they cannot pay for or order that fearto disappear. If such tyrants make one wrong move, they will fall. And when tyrants fall, they often land up in exile, in a jail cell, or under theground.

On a cold winter day in late 2007, the patrolling Amazonian Guards in their green camouflage gave the all clear. A moment later, ColonelMuammar Gaddafi emerged from the Hôtel de Marigny in central Paris. After descending the steps, he walked along a red carpet drapedover the pristine grass. At the end of the carpet lay a giant tent. The Hôtel de Marigny, the building used by the French government toaccommodate state guests, was used to catering to the whims of powerful rulers, but never before had a Bedouin tent been constructed inthe garden so that a visiting dictator could meet guests in the ‘desert tradition’.2

Inside, the tent was adorned with images of camels and palm trees. It was furnished with huge leather chairs in which an attentive audiencecould sit and listen. In the evening, visitors were greeted by the flames of a large fire.

Beyond his tent, which was a workplace, Gaddafi made Paris his personal playground. Originally invited to France for just three days, hedecided he would stay for five. He had arrived in Paris with his infamous all-female bodyguards and an entourage so large it required ahundred vehicles to snake through the city. He was received by President Nicolas Sarkozy with full military honours. When Gaddafidecided that he would like to see the Palace of Versailles because he was fascinated by Louis XIV, he brought with him a ‘delegation’ of ahundred people. He was whisked from his tent in an extra-long white limousine that

caused traffic jams wherever it went. When he wanted to take a boat down the Seine, the bridges along the river had to be closed to thepublic.3 Gaddafi even went on a pheasant shoot, a highly unusual outing for a twenty-first-century visiting head of state.4 But for Gaddafi,it was normality. His high-handed approach to the rest of the world had been exemplified by his response to an incident in 2008 when hisson was arrested in Geneva for assaulting two domestic employees in a luxury hotel. The following year the dictator asked Italy, Germanyand France to ‘abolish’ Switzerland.5 When that didn’t happen, Gaddafi called on Muslims around the world to wage a holy waragainst the country. And at the United Nations General Assembly, where leaders usually get fifteen minutes to speak, Gaddafi spoke forninety-three. During the speech, he called the Security Council the ‘terror council’, promoted his own website, complained about beingjet-lagged and discussed the assassination of John F. Kennedy.6

Eccentricities aside, Gaddafi, who had controlled Libya since the late 1960s, was a murderous dictator.

If he wanted this life to continue, he needed to stay in power. And to stay in power, he relied on striking fear into everyone he ruled. On thestreets of Tripoli, ordinary people, if they ever spoke out against the regime, faced immediate danger of imprisonment or even death. Ona single day in the summer of 1996, his security forces massacred more than twelve hundred people in one of the regime’s tortureprisons.7 Even anti-regime thoughts were deemed dangerous. As one Libyan put it: ‘Not only would we not dare express any criticism,we wouldn’t even dare thinking anything critical in our heads.’8

Yet even at the height of his power, with many of his enemies rotting underground or in prisons, Gaddafi saw threats all around. The wallsaround his main compound were four metres high and one metre thick. Underneath the compound, Gaddafi had his men construct anetwork of tunnels so vast that a golf cart was used to move around within it.9 The tunnels served as a means of escape and also containedan underground television station to allow the dictator to address his people while under siege.10 Another Gaddafi compound in Tripolicontained an operating theatre behind heavy blast doors, so the dictator’s life could be saved, even during a bloody revolution. Theunderground labyrinth there was so extensive that one journalist referred to it as a ‘maze’.11

A man who thinks his future will be bright doesn’t need multiple compounds with kilometres of underground tunnels. But Gaddafi knewhis future wasn’t secure. For dictators, there is a very real need to construct such defences. The threats are huge and constant.

On 15 February 2011, protests broke out in Benghazi, Libya’s second most populous city, after the regime arrested a lawyer whorepresented victims of the 1996 prison massacre. In Gaddafi’s Libya, where opposition wasn’t tolerated, it was a rare sign of dissent.12With the regime’s armour cracked, the situation rapidly escalated as opposition intensified and spread to other cities. In response,Gaddafi gave a speech on national television in which he vowed to ‘cleanse Libya house by house’.13 ‘I will not leave the country,’Gaddafi said, before adding that he would ‘die as a martyr’.14

But at this stage, Gaddafi was still confident that he wouldn’t have to die. And although the rebels came to control entire cities, the regimeretained the ability to go on the offensive. By 16 March, Gaddafi’s forces were closing in on rebel-held Benghazi when one of his sonsgave an interview in which he boasted that ‘everything will be over in 48 hours.’15

With Gaddafi having referred to his enemies as rats, there was now the real possibility that a campaign of mass killing would unfold in frontof the world’s eyes.16 Faced with that prospect, the United Nations Security Council voted 10‒0 in favour of taking ‘all necessarymeasures’ to protect civilians.17 The end was a long time coming, but this was its beginning. Two days later, French fighter jets took tothe air to attack the regime while warships of the United States Navy launched cruise missiles to neutralise Libyan air defence systems.Speaking from Brazil, President Barack Obama said: ‘We cannot stand idly by when a tyrant tells his people there will be no mercy.’18

In October, with the regime severely diminished and bombs still falling from above, Gaddafi knew the moment he had long feared hadarrived. There were no more compounds, no more tunnels, no more walls that could protect the dictator. Instead, Gaddafi and his menmoved from house to house in Sirte, the coastal town near which the dictator had been born. Supplies were limited and his bodyguardswere forced to scrounge around to find pasta and rice to feed the group. Gaddafi himself was clearly confused. ‘Why is there no water?Why is there no electricity?’ he would ask the head of his guard. Trying to flee was risky, but with the rebels so close and the shellingconstant, staying in Sirte was not an option. Eventually, a reluctant Gaddafi agreed to escape. Originally scheduled to leave at 3 a.m., underthe cover of darkness, his convoy of around forty cars didn’t leave until five hours later. By that time, the sun was up. Half an hour after theconvoy left, it was struck by missiles. One of the explosions was so close that the airbag deployed in the Toyota Land Cruiser in whichGaddafi was travelling.19 The leader and a few of his men decided to flee on foot. After making their way across a farm, they had no optionother than to hide in a foul-smelling drain.20

When rebels grabbed him, he was unable to compute what was happening. He was Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, the Godfather of Libya,King of Kings of Africa. And, as he once described himself: the Leader Who Lived in All Libyans’ Hearts. ‘What’s this? What’s this, mysons? What are you doing?’ Gaddafi asked.21 His ‘sons’ proceeded to brutalise him. Beaten by the mob and sodomised with abayonet, the last footage of Gaddafi shows him on top of a car, his head bloodied, asking for mercy.22

With the dictator finally under their control, the rebels celebrated. In one of the defining images of the conflict, a young rebel was seenbeing carried on his comrades’ shoulders, holding a golden gun decorated with intricate engravings. That gun belonged to Gaddafihimself, supposedly given to him by one of his sons.23 This is what I call the Golden Gun paradox: tyrants can have all the trappings ofpower, even a gun made of gold, but at the point where they need to use their power to save themselves, it is already too late. A dictatorcan never save himself with a golden gun. For Gaddafi, holding the gun only imbued power as long as people believed it did. The momentthey stopped, the gun was useless.

By the end of that day, 20 October 2011, the gun was gone and the dictator was dead. As a final indignity, Gaddafi wasn’t afforded thequick burial that is customary in Islam. Instead, his topless corpse was displayed in the meat locker of a local shopping mall for all to see.24When a journalist talked to a local man about it, he responded that Gaddafi had chosen his own destiny. ‘If he had been a good man, wewould have buried him,’ he said.25

And indeed, if Gaddafi had been a good man, or even just a democratic leader instead of a dictator, chances are he would have had a verydifferent end.

Tyranny is hazardous.

According to a recent study that examined the way 2,790 national rulers lost power, 1,925 (69 per cent) were just fine after leaving office.‘Only’ about 23 per cent of them were exiled, imprisoned or killed.26 But that was across all countries and political systems. Zoom in onthe personalist dictators – the leaders with most power concentrated in their hands – and the numbers are reversed: 69 per cent of thosetyrants are thrown into jail, forced to live their life abroad or killed.27 The odds for a tranquil retirement are worse than the flip of a coin.

I’ve studied dictators and the way they stay in power or lose it for more than a decade. As a postgraduate at Oxford, I examined the livesof the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Who were these people? How did they rise to the top in a system that couldbe so hostile? And what did they care about?

After I left Oxford, I thought I was done with worrying about tyranny (and sitting in dusty libraries). Eager to see the world, I decided towork for a brewery in the Democratic Republic of Congo. But the most memorable lessons I learned there weren’t about hops or barley,but about how authoritarian regimes work – and how many tyrants are constantly living on a knife edge.

While I was in Lubumbashi on 30 December 2013, armed attackers stormed the studios of the national broadcaster in Kinshasa. Gunmentook control of the airwaves and delivered a message against the president, Joseph Kabila. They told him he was finished, his time was up.While they spoke, their accomplices attacked the country’s main airport. A military base was hit.28

On the other side of the country in Lubumbashi, reliable information was hard to come by: ‘Have you heard what’s happening inKinshasa?’ curious people asked at the brewery. During lunch, I tried to find out what exactly was going on. Nobody knew. With theviolence seemingly far away, I started to make my way back to the office which, like my bungalow, was within the same compound. On anormal Monday, this walk would have been one of the best parts of the day. Lubumbashi itself is not exactly a green city, but thevegetation within the compound was lush. While walking, I’d marvel at the size of the palm trees or watch strange-looking birds flyingoverhead. It seemed like an oasis.

That day was different. On my way back to work, the stillness of the air was broken with a crack. It was a gunshot. Then, another one andanother one, a rat-a-tat of gunfire coming from three directions. Then I heard something bigger, an explosion. A million thoughts wererunning through my mind. Behind the walls of the compound, a stray bullet was unlikely to become a problem. But what if that explosionwas a mortar? Another one of those could do serious damage even if I wasn’t the intended target. I was more than 1,500 kilometres fromthe German Embassy. The airports were closed, so flying wasn’t an option if things got worse. If we had to evacuate, it would have to beto the south, via land, across the border to Zambia. Now in a slight panic, I turned round to talk to colleagues. ‘What are we going todo?’ The answer was: ‘Nothing.’ Yes, they had heard the shots, but they had heard them before and nothing very serious ever affectedthem, so why should it now?

And that was that. As a visiting European behind a concrete wall, there was a layer of insulation between the danger and me. Out in the city,others weren’t so lucky.

I turned around again and went back to work.

The coup attempt in Kinshasa had been launched by a religious leader – Paul-Joseph Mukungubila – and the military was attacking hischurch in Lubumbashi.29 When it became evident to the self-declared prophet that he wasn’t going to be successful, he fled the countrywith five of his eighteen wives and twelve of his nineteen children.30 Joseph Kabila, who had ruled the country since his father wasassassinated, stayed in power.

I remember thinking that the calm reactions were strange. Shouldn’t something be done? But then again, when it comes to a strugglelike Mukungubila’s with Kabila, what can you do? Nothing. All you can do is wait and see if the tyrant will fall, paving the way for anothertyrant to take his place.

A few months later, I returned to Europe, but I could never get that day out of my head. How can it be that some countries experiencesevere instability with such regularity that their people have grown so inured to it? Why did Kabila manage to hold onto power for fivemore years? When do leaders like him lose power? And, when they do, what happens next?

I decided to research how tyrants fall. During my doctorate I focused on irregular leadership changes like the one Mukungubila attemptedin the Democratic Republic of Congo. Since then, I have worked on these issues not just at university but also with multinationalcompanies, foundations and international organisations such as NATO and the OECD, always drawn to the question of how tyrants fall.

In October 1938, when Nazi Germany had already annexed Austria and taken over the Sudetenland, Winston Churchill gave a speech tothe people of the United States. It was a call to arms:

 

You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. On all sides theyare guarded by masses of armed men, cannons, aeroplanes, fortifications, and the like – they boast and vaunt themselves before theworld, yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear.31

 

When most people think of tyrants, they conjure images of a man (and it is almost always a man) who wields absolute power. That is amyth. No political leader has ever had absolute power. Even the most powerful dictators need others in order to stay in power. To remainon their pedestal, they need to manage those closest to them. If they don’t, they are at immediate risk.

The central problem that tyrants face is that eliminating the many immediate threats to their position can be costly and creates anever-ending cycle of new problems. Eventually, the tyrant may fall off his pedestal. And when that happens, it’s not just the tyrant who isat risk, because entire countries can crumble under the weight of a falling dictator.

Before we go further, a word of caution: no two dictatorships are alike. North Korea isn’t Turkmenistan and Cuba isn’t Russia. Similarly,tyrants are different from one another. Nowadays, leaders are usually described as tyrants when they act in a way that is cruel andoppressive. That leads to an incredibly broad array of leaders. Since most of them are men, I will usually refer to the tyrant as he. The tyrantcould be a king, a personalist dictator or the head of a military junta. Or perhaps the tyrant is general secretary of the party in a one-partystate or at the top of a theocracy – deriving its legitimacy from God’s supposed will. The nation he leads can be rich or poor, mountainousor flat.

This diversity also applies to the tyrants themselves. Some, such as Saddam Hussein, have had terrible childhoods in which they wereregularly beaten and abused.32 Others, such as Mao, were coddled when they were young.33 Adolf Hitler was such a choleric that hecould barely stop himself from shouting once he became agitated. Pol Pot rarely showed any emotion. There are also massive differencesbetween the way these tyrants have attained power. Some have climbed the pedestal by being good at organising and outmanoeuvringtheir competitors. Others, such as Idi Amin, were simply more brutal than everyone else. The most ‘successful’ tyrants, for exampleStalin, were good at both.

As a result of this diversity, every sweeping statement will have an exception. But there are patterns and common traits. By looking at theforest, we can better understand most of the trees. Unfortunately, we can’t always inspect them close up. Unlike democracies, which arecomparatively transparent and open, dictatorships are dens of secrets. People who talk out of turn can disappear. Governmentdocuments are laced with lies. Journalists who report the truth may not last long.

Trying to understand tyranny is not easy. Perhaps the deputy prime minister is a mere puppet, or perhaps he really is the second mostimportant political figure in the country. Or perhaps the institutions of the state don’t matter much because they are controlled by arevolutionary political party. Or, maybe neither state nor party matters anymore because power is so personalised. It is quite possible thatthe tyrant’s bodyguard is more powerful than cabinet members or party elites because he has the dictator’s ear and proximity is moreimportant than formal power. It’s hard to tell. Dictatorships run on whispers, clandestine deals and cover-ups.

The other difficulty of studying the fall of tyrants is that, however severe the political instability, however frequent the rebellions, it’s notevery day that a tyrant actually falls.34 In a functioning democracy with meaningful elections, you get plenty of chances to observe howleaders lose office. Dictators, on the other hand, can remain in office for many decades. When they do go, they might fall in an instant,taken out by a single gunshot, or toppled within hours during a coup. And it can be difficult to determine how exactly they did fall – partlybecause it happens so rarely, but partly because the fall of tyrants often involves a tipping point, at which leaders become so unstable thattheir supporters desert them en masse – only later to pretend that they had been opposed to them all along.35

You also can’t understand tyrants just by looking at the person. They operate within a system – and they need that system to stay inpower. We’ll therefore be exploring how authoritarian regimes work. One way to think of a regime, as opposed to the leader, is to thinkof it as the rules by which new leaders are chosen.36 So when the generals that make up a military dictatorship replace the top general witha new general, it’s a different leader but still the same regime. But if protestors sweep away the entire military junta to create a democracyor a communist dictatorship in its stead, that’s a new regime. It’s not just the person, but the system itself, that has changed.

When I started working on this book, I spoke to diplomats, journalists, dissidents, human rights activists and (former) spies. Since thesubject of the book is so broad, I also consulted experts on economic sanctions, nuclear weapons, military history, quantitativeforecasting and many other topics. Not everyone can be quoted, but all of them were fascinating.

There were also some more unusual encounters. Early on, I spoke to a professor of Roman history who was kind enough to discussEmperor Caligula’s reign with me at great length. Next, I met an American-Gambian who went to prison for plotting to liberate hishomeland from a tyrant who had pledged to rule for a billion years. At one point, I was in a WhatsApp call with a Central African politicianaccused of war crimes, wondering whether I genuinely thought it was ‘nice to meet him’.

The book also allowed me to discover more of my own country. To me, born in western Germany just after the end of the Cold War, theGerman Democratic Republic (GDR) always felt distant. The GDR existed neither long ago nor far away, but it might as well have been in adifferent universe because it was almost impossible to imagine it existing so close by. The journey of writing this book changed that. Tospeak to Siegbert Schefke, who was instrumental in bringing down the regime beyond the wall, I drove to Leipzig. Hearing him talk about9 October 1989 – the day that ‘fear changed sides’ – made all the things that had seemed so abstract feel real and essential for me andfor all of us to understand.37

This is a book about the trade-offs faced by dictators and the people around them. They all want multiple things and they can’t havethem all, so there are tough choices to be made. In the next chapter, ‘The Dictator’s Treadmill’, I am going to lay out why tyrantsusually try to stay in power once they have attained it. For starters, tyranny can be an attractive position. But more importantly, steppingdown voluntarily is incredibly dangerous. Most aren’t willing to take the risk, so they attempt to stay in power. To have any chance ofstaying in power, they have to focus on palace elites and soldiers. But, as I demonstrate in the chapters ‘The Enemy Within’ and‘Weakening the Warriors’, doing so is difficult. Also, focusing time and money on neutralising threats from armed men and powerfulelites creates plenty of problems down the line. As resources are taken from the masses and given to a narrow group near the top, thepopulation may rise up against the regime. As members of the elite are purged from the capital, they may return from the hinterland asrebel leaders. And as the military is paralysed, soldiers have a more difficult time dealing with rebels or foreign invaders. Lastly, somethings simply exist outside the tyrant’s control. A dictator can do everything to maximise his chances of staying in power, but still beassassinated. The risk might even be higher as a result of doing everything ‘right’. In the end, whether through natural death or violentremoval, every tyrant does fall. But what happens next? The fall of tyrants often leads to chaos and conflict. In the chapter ‘Be CarefulWhat You Wish For’, I explore under what circumstances that can be prevented. Now that we know how tyrants fall and what happenswhen they do, other questions come into focus. Can outsiders accelerate the fall? If so, how? And should they?

Tyrants cannot be ignored. We must pay attention to them – and understand them better. Losing power can easily mean not just a loss ofprivilege but a loss of freedom or even life. And to a large extent, this peril explains why tyrants act the way they do while they are in power.We’ve all read outlandish stories about dictators who seem unhinged. The Turkmen dictator Saparmurat Niyazov built atwelve-metre-high gold statue of himself on top of a monument in Ashgabat that rotated to follow the sun.38 The North Korean leader,Kim Jong-un, had an education ministry official executed with an anti-aircraft gun – supposedly for falling asleep in a meeting.39 Part ofIdi Amin’s self-bestowed title was ‘Lord of All The Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas and Conqueror of the British Empire inAfrica in General and Uganda in Particular’.40

At first glance, these rulers seem insane. And evidently, these aren’t normal people. They’re often narcissists; sometimes psychopathic;and almost always ruthless. But the surprising truth is that most of them are also rational. They haven’t lost their minds. Instead, given thesystem in which they operate and the information they have, strategies to torture, kill and let the masses starve while they collect riches inthe presidential palace are rational. It’s a way to survive.

And it has been that way for thousands of years. Democracy as we now understand it is young, dictatorship is old. Most humans,throughout recorded history, have suffered under the rule of tyrants. In 1800, nobody on earth was living in a genuine democracy. Crueland oppressive governments weren’t an exception but the norm. Whether the tyrant was a chief, duke, king, emperor, bishop, sultan orcolonial governor, that’s how societies were organised. People were subjects and tyranny felt inevitable. Political change largelydetermined who was the tyrant, not whether there was one.

Even in comparatively recent history, tyrants reigned supreme. At the end of the Second World War, more than 90 per cent of countrieswere not democracies.41 This was also a time when vast swathes of the world didn’t rule themselves at all. Instead, they were coloniesruled from afar. Following this, during the Cold War, both sides supported tyrants if they judged it to be in their interest. London had ahand in overthrowing a democratically elected leader in Iran in favour of Shah Pahlavi. Beijing kept Pol Pot’s regime alive while it keptkilling. Worried about falling dominoes, the United States fought wars in defence of vile dictatorships in Korea and Vietnam. The Frenchgovernment paid for the coronation of Jean-Bédel Bokassa, the Central African dictator who crowned himself emperor, while his peoplestarved. Bokassa might have been a despot, but he was their despot. That was in 1977.

But the Cold War was also a time of national liberation – with many people who had once been colonised taking back control. Originally,the United Nations had just fifty-one members. By the middle of the 1970s, it had reached 144. Now it’s 193.42 Unfortunately, thathasn’t always led to freedom or democracy. In fact, studies show that the number of dictatorships grew between 1946 and the 1970s.43For many, independence meant trading in a foreign power for a local tyrant. And those foreign powers were apt to back a loyal despot inorder to retain influence. A friendly tyrant, they frequently figured, was more useful to them than an elected adversary.

After the end of the Cold War, democracy blossomed. By 2012, less than 12 per cent of countries remained closed autocracies – the typeof system in which citizens don’t get any choice at all.44 For a while, it even looked as if the model of liberal democracies had triumphedto become the new normal. Western societies waited for what Francis Fukuyama called the ‘End of History’, the ultimate triumph ofdemocracy.45

But of course, tyranny had never truly gone away – it was just easier to ignore. In the twenty-first century, that became impossible. Theworld couldn’t ignore Kim Jong-un, who had access to a nuclear arsenal capable of wiping out entire cities in a single attack, when hefired missiles over Japan. Vladimir Putin destabilised an entire continent, committing war crimes along the way. Saudi tyrants sent a deathsquad to dismember a journalist working for the Washington Post. Rwanda’s regime has repeatedly hunted down opponents to murderthem.46 After securing his position at the top of the Chinese Communist Party for life, Xi Jinping told his generals that they should ‘dareto fight’.47

Those, of course, are only the autocracies that already exist. In Europe, for example, multiple democracies are at imminent risk. In 2014Viktor Orbán declared he would make Hungary an ‘illiberal democracy’ – in reality, a form of authoritarianism. In Turkey, Recep TayyipErdoğan and his allies have restricted the political space to such an extent that it has become increasingly difficult for the opposition to winelections.

And while totalitarian leaders have become rarer, the world’s remaining dictators continue to persecute their own people andopponents. Whether it be via wars of conquest or the attempted destruction of entire cultures, the threat of tyranny remains acute. If wedon’t understand how tyrants operate, we can’t constrain them at home or limit their threat abroad.

Over the last decade, there have been countless newspaper articles, tweets and books about the defence of liberal democracies. None ofthem will be sufficient. Whether it happens suddenly by means of a coup d’état or gradually through the dismantling of core institutions,some democracies will die. When that happens, all of us should know what comes next and how it can be reversed.

That is the primary purpose of this book: to provide a guide to despots’ limitations, their regimes’ weaknesses and the ways theycollapse. But understanding them isn’t enough. This book will also explore how to bring them down.

That can seem idealistic. Tyranny often looks remarkably stable, after all. Some of the world’s most famous dictators support this view:Muammar Gaddafi, for example, ruled Libya for over four decades, more than twice as long as Angela Merkel was chancellor of Germany.And on top of that, the data show that autocratic regimes can be even more durable than individual leaders.48 To give just one example,North Korea has been ruled by three men for more than half a century, father, son and grandson.

Look closer, though, and you soon realise that authoritarian stability tends to be a mirage. Most non-democracies aren’t like Gaddafi’sLibya. Instead, they are often more like Kabila’s Democratic Republic of Congo, with a lack of central government control and constantconflict, sometimes civil war. And even Gaddafi’s type of tyranny only looks to be stable – but isn’t. Unlike democracies, these arepolitical systems which are designed to revolve around a single individual or a small group of elites. That might work for them, for a time,but systems such as those are not resilient. When a shock comes and the system is challenged, the consequences can be devastating,leading to conflict, starvation or war. In the case of Libya, the war against Gaddafi was followed by war amongst the militias that wanted toreplace him. More than a decade after his golden gun failed to save him, the shooting still hadn’t stopped.

The amateurish coup attempt that happened while I was in the Democratic Republic of Congo wasn’t an anomaly. Most attempts to takeout a tyrant fail because strongmen are prepared. But inevitably, they do fall. The question, then, is how.

1

The Dictator’s Treadmill

I will never be known as the former President of Zaire.1

Mobutu Sese Seko, president of Zaire

 

Being a dictator is like being stuck on a treadmill that one can never get off.2 Tyrants can run and run, but the best they’ll ever do is stayupright. If they get distracted for even an instant, their legs may shoot out from under them, and they’ll get hurt. Many dictators who falloff never get on again. And they can’t step off safely either. In the world of tyrants, trying to stay in power may end badly, but voluntarilyrelinquishing it can be even more dangerous.

But if it’s so difficult to get off the treadmill, why would anyone get on in the first place?

It’s not necessarily a bad place to be, at least for a while. Politicians everywhere tend to be comparatively wealthy. For example, themedian wealth of a member of the United States Senate stood at $1.76 million in 2018.3 In democracies, some former leaders can makemillions from speaking events and book deals. Boris Johnson (or Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson to be more accurate), for example,was paid almost £250,000 for giving a single speech in Singapore after he left Downing Street.4

But democracies have rules that prevent politicians from dipping their hands into the coffers of the state. As much as democratic politicalleaders might want to, there’s a good chance they’ll be found out if they engage in corruption, as they face investigative journalists,independent policemen and a vibrant civil society. If they do get found out, there are likely to be serious consequences because judges canrarely be swayed (or paid) to look the other way. Once an infraction comes to light, opposition politicians are going to do their best tomake leaders’ lives as miserable as possible in order to win the next election. It’s not a perfect system, but it usually stops the worstabuses.

Tyrants, by contrast, operate in an environment that more closely resembles the Wild West. There may be rules, but they aren’t enforced,or are enforced selectively. Autocracies are enrichment machines. Unencumbered by the restrictions that hold back democratic leaders,the opportunities for stealing are almost endless.

The capital needs a new airport? Tyrants can give the contract to their daughter-in-law to make sure things stay in the family. A foreignfirm no longer wants trouble with the tax authorities? Get them to pay a ‘fee’ to make the case go away. Does it really matter if all of theammunition that was ordered makes its way to the army? Perhaps some can be lost in transit after a certain foreign bank account iscredited with the value of the balance. A company owned by the state is about to be privatised? Why not sell it to a loyalist for 10 per centof its actual value? I scratch your back, you scratch mine and the money never stops flowing.

When done effectively, everyone at the top makes money. But the tyrant himself? He can get rich beyond belief.

Turkmenistan is one of the most secretive societies on earth. As one of the least visited countries on the planet, its people used to beincredibly poor. In 1998, more than four out of ten Turkmen lived in extreme poverty – having access to less than $2.15 per day.5 Butthat’s not to say that Turkmenistan, the country, is poor. Far from it. According to the World Bank, ‘Turkmenistan’s gas reserves areestimated to be the world’s fourth largest, representing about 10 per cent of global reserves.’ ‘In addition to cotton and naturalgas,’ the Bank’s analysts say, ‘the country is rich in petroleum, sulphur, iodine, salt, bentonite clays, limestone, gypsum, and cement –all potential inputs to chemical and construction industries.’6

Turkmenistan’s problem wasn’t so much that there was no money, but that the money wasn’t distributed to the people who neededit. But at least one Turkmen is always rich: the man at the top. At the turn of the millennium, that man was Saparmurat Niyazov, a dictatorbest-known for the absurd cult of personality he created after coming to power in 1985. Among other things, Niyazov banned smoking inpublic after heart surgery meant he had to give up cigarettes, gave himself the title of ‘Turkmenbashi’ (father of the nation), bannedmen from listening to car radios and renamed months of the year after himself and his mother.7

Niyazov also wrote a book called Ruhnama. A combination of biography, poetry and self-help, the book was essentially treated like areligious text. Every single Turkmen student had to read it. Civil servants had compulsory study sessions on it every week. (The Ministry ofForeign Affairs, for example, met for theirs at 5.30 p.m. on Wednesdays.) The glorification was so extreme that Niyazov himself oncenoted drily: ‘Various people say it’s a personality cult.’8 It was.

When Niyazov wasn’t busy coming up with arbitrary rules for the Turkmen people, he stole from them. In 2001, Turkmenistan andUkraine signed a gas deal. According to a later investigation by the German magazine Der Spiegel, the deal was set to generate around$1.7 billion in the following year alone. But since Turkmenistan was (and continues to be) a dictatorship, much of the money didn’t gointo the government budget but into foreign bank accounts under direct control of Saparmurat Niyazov. The exact details are unknown,but even if the reports are somewhat inaccurate and Niyazov skimmed off ‘only’ 10 per cent, that’s $170 million on a single deal in asingle year. And of course, that wasn’t the only instance of corruption. When a London-based non-governmental organisation (NGO)looked into the dictator’s finances, it concluded: ‘A significant portion of revenue never finds its way into state coffers.’ ‘A horrifying75% of the state’s spending’, they continued, ‘appears to take place off [the government’s] budget.’9 Given such opportunities,it’s little wonder that dictators are often the richest men in their country.

That’s a pretty big incentive to ascend the treadmill. But the treadmill is relentless.

On 5 January 2022, fifty-seven-year-old Asel stood on Almaty’s main square. The ruling regime in Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan’s biggestneighbour, had been cutting subsidies on liquefied petroleum gas. Protests quickly began in the west of the country, where the gas wasespecially important for people to get around. By the time Asel stepped into Republic Square in front of what used to be the presidentialresidence, the country was gripped by protestors.

On that day in Kazakhstan’s biggest city, the situation got out of control. While Asel protested peacefully, a group of young men arrived.Their faces hidden by masks, they smashed windows and destroyed cars on their way to the government building just off the square.Bullets started flying and people started to panic. Asel lost consciousness. When she came to, her leg was bleeding heavily. She’d been hitand if she couldn’t get medical treatment, she wouldn’t have long to live. More bullets whizzed through the air, narrowly missing her.

Dragged towards a truck by two men, she was driven to hospital. The pain was now so severe that she couldn’t help but moan in anguish.Some others on the crowded vehicle were much worse off. ‘Several people were on top of my wounded leg. Some of them were notbreathing,’ Asel later told the BBC. At the hospital, Asel’s nightmare didn’t stop. Armed men went from ward to ward, looking forpeople who had dared to protest against the regime. ‘If you go out to protest again, we will kill you,’ one of them shouted. The onlyreason why Asel wasn’t taken away by them that day is because the bullet to her leg made it impossible for her to walk.10

From the outside looking in, it seemed to be the classic story of a tyrannical regime fighting against its own people: the people rose up, theregime did its best to put them back down. But on the inside, the Kazakh unrest was much more than that. It was the struggle of one tyrant,who had formally stepped down, against another, who was trying to step out of his boss’s shadow.

Nursultan Nazarbayev stepped onto the treadmill in 1984, at the young age of forty-three, when he became first secretary of theCommunist Party of Kazakhstan. At the time, the country was still part of the Soviet Union. After the USSR dissolved, he becameKazakhstan’s dictator. Then, in 2019, he tried to step down.

Nazarbayev had succeeded in amassing incredible personal power over the years. On the day of his resignation from the presidency, hesaid: ‘I have taken a decision, which was not easy for me, to resign as president . . . I am staying with you. Caring for the country and itspeople will remain my concern.’11

Initially, things seemed to be going well for the former president. Astana, the country’s capital, was named ‘Nur-Sultan’ in his honour.If you visited it from abroad, chances are you were going to fly into Nur-Sultan International Airport, also named after Nazarbayev. In thecity itself, you might also come across Nazarbayev University or Nazarbayev Avenue.12 The man himself was no longer president, but heretained the title of ‘Elbasy’ – or ‘Father of the Nation’ in Kazakh. The Elbasy title, which was given to him in 2010, meant that hecontinued to have special privileges – like immunity from prosecution. Nazarbayev was untouchable; or at least that’s how it seemed.But then he ran into a problem that many have faced before him: it’s difficult to protect oneself after giving up the levers of government.That’s because it’s impossible to be a dictator without breaking laws and making enemies. Dictators have stolen, tortured, maybekilled. So if they ever want to step down, they need to make sure that none of that catches up with them. To do that, they need someone atthe top who will look after them. Finding that someone is incredibly challenging.

Nazarbayev’s hand-picked successor, the career diplomat Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, was seen as so toothless that he was oncedescribed as Nazarbayev’s ‘furniture’.13 In fact, Nazarbayev’s control initially remained so tight that the new president had to getthe old president’s formal approval to choose most new ministers. President Tokayev wasn’t even able to choose the head of his ownsecret service without Nazarbayev’s approval.14 That Nazarbayev could fence Tokayev in like this was always part of the reason why hewas chosen. In addition, since Tokayev had spent much of his working life abroad representing the regime in places such as Singapore andChina, Nazarbayev thought Tokayev lacked the networks and alliances at home to challenge him.15 The plan was simple: Nazarbayevwould formally step down but continue to exercise power through Tokayev and others to ensure that he would remain safe.

It’s not an unusual story. Dictators step onto the treadmill thinking that they can become rich or enjoy the power such a position brings.And for a while, it works out for them. But eventually, due to old age or fatigue, they want to step down. So they make a plan: give a littlehere, give a little there, step off the machine.

In reality, giving an inch doesn’t work: they give a little, they risk it all. Before long, this also became clear to Nazarbayev. His luck startedto run out as the protests spread. ‘Shal, ket’ (‘Old man, go!’) the protestors shouted.16 With much of the anger directed at thesystem the old man had created, Tokayev seized the opportunity to expand his power.

On 5 January 2022, the day Asel was shot in Almaty, Nazarbayev lost his chairmanship of the Security Council. Tokayev also took on theleadership of Nur Otan, the presidential political party that has since been renamed Amanat.17 The public holiday celebrating thecountry’s former president? Cancelled.18 The capital city of Nur-Sultan? It became Astana again.19 Perhaps more worrying for theformer president, the handpicked successor also began to remove some of Nazarbayev’s men from the power structures of the regime.The head of the KNB, the country’s powerful domestic intelligence agency, was not just replaced in his role but arrested for treason.20Then, on the morning of 6 January, came the final blow for Nazarbayev as three thousand Russian paratroopers, at the request of Tokayev,landed in Kazakhstan to defend the regime. With the might of the Russian military seemingly on his side, Tokayev was now unquestionablythe country’s strongest man.

None of the laws, fancy titles or council posts mean anything once tyrants have left power. The only thing that matters is whether thepeople that come after the tyrant are powerful enough to start chipping away at their predecessor’s power in order to expand theirs. Ifthey are, they usually will – and that started to happen in Nur-Sultan Astana. Events were out of Nazarbayev’s control. He risked losing hismoney, his freedom or even his life. His family was at risk, too.

There’s a central trade-off here that cannot be resolved. On the one hand, tyrants looking to step down have to find someone powerfuland competent enough to protect them once they are no longer in power. On the other hand, somebody who is competent and powerfulenough to protect them can also destroy them. And often, their successors do destroy the outgoing tyrant, because it is rare for aself-respecting tyrant to allow themselves to play second fiddle.

Dictators who try to pass the torch often get burned. So, if that doesn’t work, what alternatives are there once they set foot on thetreadmill? One option would be to turn the country into a democracy instead of passing on power to the next tyrant. It sounds attractive,not least because harsh punishments for former leaders are less likely in democracies than they are in autocracies. As the political scientistsBarbara Geddes, Joseph Wright and Erica Frantz have found, democratisation more than doubles the chance of a ‘good’ outcome forleaders once they leave office.21

There are all kinds of different models of democracy. German democracy involves a parliamentary system in which multiple parties cometogether to form coalitions. In the United Kingdom, the voting system is different so coalitions are more unusual – but no longer unheardof. In the United States, the president is also the commander-in-chief and, if need be, he or she can order military action. The Swiss haveorganised their democracy in a way that is a lot more direct. From time to time, when enough signatures are collected, everybodyinvolved can vote not just for politicians to represent them, but for or against individual policies. In September 2022, for example, Swissvoters got a direct vote on ‘factory farming’ – they could have banned it but chose not to.22

Most tyrants would rather hinder than help democracy. Democracies vary hugely but what they all have in common is that voters are incharge. There might be intermediaries (in the form of politicians) and not everybody’s vote will carry the same importance, but thepeople can change their government if they are unhappy with it.

For tyrants, being an average president or prime minister in a democracy is not a substitute for commanding the entire state from theconfines of the presidential palace. All of a sudden they’re supposed to allow investigative journalism? The Glorious Father of theRevolution is to be constrained by parliamentarians? And it’s no longer possible to turn mining concessions into millions? No, thank you.

Perhaps more importantly, there’s no guarantee that an attempt to democratise would allow tyrants to stay in power. They may end upstill losing office or worse; or be held accountable by empowered parliamentarians or independent judges. Such scenarios are especiallythreatening to personalist dictators. According to a study on the breakdown of autocratic regimes, their chance of a ‘good’ outcomeonly stands at 36 per cent even if democratisation works out. Other sorts of dictator have more of an incentive to democratise. Forauthoritarian leaders who derive their power from being at the top of a political party, the party can act as a shield, protecting the formertyrant from the masses.23 But a personalist dictator, the type with the most personal power, has no such thing. So even if a transition todemocracy happens, there’s every chance he will be in trouble.

And even if turning off the treadmill were desirable, it’s not an option all tyrants have. They can try pulling the plug, but it doesn’t meanthat they will actually reach a point at which their country turns into a democracy. The primary reasons for this are the concerns of the elitesaround them.

For this is not just a decision for leaders but also one for courtiers and power brokers around the palace, who will also have a stake in thesurvival of the regime.