How tyrants fall and how.., p.9
How Tyrants Fall: And How Nations Survive, page 9
Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime’s drive to reduce the threat of the military had multiple pillars. The military was purged of suspect elements, which were replaced by party members who passed the loyalty test. In the words of the Baathists themselves: ‘Who does not take our path stays at home with his wife.’54 They also established the Popular Army and the Republican Guard. The Popular Army was a ‘party-based, party-led mass alternative to the regular army’55 – a militia, in other words. Its members didn’t get the best training or the best weapons, but there were a lot of them. The Republican Guard started out as a much smaller organisation specifically designed to protect the regime. With all these structural changes to the security forces, Saddam no longer faced the threat of a unified opponent. Instead, all the smaller factions of the security forces had to consider the strong possibility that they would have to fight each other as well as the dictator if they ever attempted to overthrow Hussein.
This brings us to the second measure despots can use to ‘coup-proof’ their regime: reducing trust between generals and their soldiers as well as among the generals. Saddam Hussein was constantly shuffling the security agencies around.56 That’s not an anomaly, it’s standard practice for despots.
In addition to reducing trust, shuffling people around has the advantage of making it harder for people to talk to, and cooperate with, each other. Dictators definitely don’t want the minister of defence, minister of the interior and the head of intelligence to spend a lot of time with one another. If they did, they could sound one another out and begin to make plans. It’s best if they are suspicious of each other, always vying for attention from the palace. Divide so you don’t get conquered.
Relatedly, coup-proofing works best when there’s no single actor (aside from the tyrant) who knows too much or can bring people together. So in place of having a chairman of the joint chiefs of staff who has regular meetings with everyone in charge of the people with guns, have everyone report straight to the dictator’s study. That way, they don’t trust each other, they don’t talk to each other, they don’t act behind the tyrant’s back. Yasser Arafat was infamous for this: every part of the Palestinian security apparatus reported to him.57 Arafat’s micromanagement was so intense that he would sometimes sign the cheques made out to paramilitary units for amounts as small as $300.58
Now that security forces are structured in a way to make coups less likely, it’s all about making sure that the right forces are in the right place. Most obviously, tyrants want some loyal forces in the capital near the presidential palace and the other key installations that need to be protected. But since having a force too large in the capital brings risks as well, some tyrants have gone the other way, and moved the regular troops further out. No more manoeuvres anywhere near the capital. Regular military bases in the vicinity? No. When regular troops are no longer near the capital, it’s sufficient to place the parallel forces between the tyrant and the main threat (which is their own military).
As a hereditary monarchy with at least one adversarial nation-state nearby, Saudi Arabia has a regular military (the Saudi Arabian Armed Forces), a counter-balancing force (the Saudi Arabian National Guard) and a dedicated force to protect the House of Saud (the Saudi Royal Regiment). In the 1970s, the royal family decided that the existence of a counter-balancing force wasn’t sufficient. With the regular military primarily deployed to military cities that the Saudis had built (at great cost) at key trouble spots and invasion routes on the country’s periphery, the National Guard were physically placed between the Armed Forces and the royal household.59 The Saudi Royal Regiment, then, acted as a last-resort guarantor in the event that intending-perpetrators of a coup happened to make it to anywhere near the royal palace in Riyadh.
These structural measures are a way to decrease the ability of conspirators to coordinate, work together and execute a successful coup. It’s also a way for tyrants to exploit a paradox: the men with guns, trained to kill, don’t actually want to use violence.
There’s a public misconception that coups are always intensely violent. Some of them most definitely are. But if you witness a coup in which soldiers clash with other soldiers, or soldiers direct fire at civilians, something isn’t going according to plan. After analysing close on four hundred coup attempts, political scientist Erica de Bruin found that under half of them involved fatalities. There’s a reluctance to shoot at comrades.60 In part, this is cultural: soldiers, who are trained to fight external enemies, often resist the use of violence at home and this can lead to a split within the army. On a personal level, it’s also about the loss of legitimacy. Defending the country against threats from abroad can be respectable; in some societies, it’s seen as heroic. But shooting at their own people – the military or civilians, in particular women and children – to take power? Few will call you a hero. And in the end, that helps cruel governments to stay in power. If leaders can credibly signal that either will be necessary to overthrow them, their chances of staying in power increase considerably.
But there’s a catch: this deterrent only works if those plotting to overthrow the regime believe that the parallel security forces will put up a meaningful fight when the coup is carried out. That means they need to be loyal to the dictatorship and effective enough to inflict serious pain on the regular forces. If they’re obviously a paper tiger, the real one will simply tear them to pieces.
For dictators, the effectiveness of parallel military forces can be achieved through training, equipment and positioning. If tyrants have done all that, they’ve taken the first steps towards staying in power. But there’s more that needs to be done to prevent unplanned retirement. With the military split and weakened, now is the time to give it a reason to support the status quo. The most straightforward way to achieve the loyalty of the parallel security forces is to spoil them rotten. Give them money, give them toys, increase their opportunities for personal enrichment through corruption. It’s no coincidence that parallel security forces tend to be better equipped than their regular counterparts.
Another option is to select soldiers based on a certain identity.
In her excellent book When Soldiers Rebel, Kristen Harkness outlines how governments have sought to bind soldiers to the regime. She explains how, during the Middle Ages, European armies were ‘rooted in reciprocal feudal ties’.61 Later on, France and Germany would transform their officer corps in a way that made it possible for aristocrats without significant land holdings to become officers. In fact, even some non-aristocrats were allowed to become officers – but only in engineering roles and artillery. In Britain, promotions within the military had to be bought. None of these systems was based on merit. But the advantage that they did have was that they bound military elites to the state.
Within Europe, those systems eventually changed as the military was opened up to larger groups of citizens. But long after this happened at home, colonial empires maintained a military recruitment system based on identity in their colonies. In colonial India, the British Empire had an explicit ‘martial race doctrine’ according to which it differentiated between those ethnicities it saw as capable of warfare and those that were unsuitable or unreliable. In Africa, the colonisers were constantly wary about finding themselves in a situation where the colonised would stand up and fight back. To mitigate that risk, the British Empire ensured that no ethnic group ever gained control of the two core institutions of the colonial state – the civil service and the military. If one was promoted heavily to the administrative class, soldiers were recruited primarily from the other.62
Moreover, many colonial units were regional and not based on the territory of future independent states. The King’s African Rifles, a British colonial unit, for example, drew soldiers from British East Africa (Kenya), Nyasaland (Malawi) and British Tanganyika (Tanzania).63 The purpose of this was, once again, to prevent the emergence of unified opposition.
Lastly, all colonial empires in Africa were reluctant to allow local populations into the officer corps. In a military with 25,000 men, the Belgian Congo had not a single African officer.64 The colonised, in other words, were wanted to make the administration of the colonies cheaper, but they were not required in any leadership role. Even in the case of the British Empire, which was comparatively more inclined to promote from the local population, the numbers were small. By 1960, the entire Nigerian Army had just eighty-two Nigerian officers – and 243 seconded from the British military.65 As one might imagine, this practice made it difficult for independence leaders to tie their soldiers to their regime. They simply couldn’t trust them.
One solution that many post-independence leaders pursued was ‘ethnic stacking’ of security forces. The idea here is that, due to their ethnic identity, these groups have an advantage in the current system; if the leader who put them in power were to fall, they might lose the privileges afforded to them. And who would want that? Tyrants speculate that few do.
In a study of Africa since independence, Harkness found evidence for the remarkable extent to which autocratic leaders have engaged in ethnic stacking: around 50 per cent of them implemented stacking methods. (For democratic leaders, it was around 24 per cent.) What’s more, the process was clearly advantageous for them. Leaders who didn’t engage in ethnic stacking stayed in power for an average of around six years. Those that ‘create and personally control coethnic paramilitary units’ stayed in power for more than twice as long.66
Ethnic stacking is a way to make the status quo appealing to soldiers. They benefit because of their identity, giving them a reason to support the regime. But if the carrot doesn’t do the trick, there’s also the stick – making all other alternatives so dire that the men in camouflage have no other option but to support the status quo. Back in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, security services regularly committed gross human rights violations on behalf of the regime. One of their frequent targets were the Kurds.
The Kurds, an ethnic group spread primarily across Turkey, Iran, Syria and Iraq, were the victims of brutal violence at the hands of the regime for decades. They were harassed, tortured and killed.
The men that committed those crimes? They were hated. And when an opportunity to fight back against them came along, there was no hesitation. In March 1991, Kurdish forces took Sulaimaniya’s Central Security Prison, where countless inmates had had to endure beatings, torture and hunger while Hussein and the Baathist regime were in charge.67 In that small corner of northern Iraq, the tables had now turned. The security forces that did the torturing and killing were weaker, and those they had tormented had the upper hand.
According to Kurdish sources, not one of the 300 secret policemen who defended the prison survived. After the complex was liberated and all of them were dead, a forty-five-year-old headmaster who was tortured in a soundproof chamber at the prison said he wished all of them would come back to life ‘so we could kill them again’.68 Under those circumstances, the loyalty of soldiers and intelligence officers to the regime has to be ‘to the death’ because they cannot switch sides or lay down arms.69
Implementing some combination of these measures can help tyrants survive to fight another day. If they don’t tackle the problem, they will almost certainly fall because there will be a day when the generals decide that they, rather than the despot, should be in power. And when they do and are united, they will be very hard to beat because violence is their specialty.
In both Saudi Arabia and Iraq, coup-proofing ‘worked’ in the sense that there were no successful coups. Saddam Hussein’s regime only fell once the United States, an overwhelmingly strong outside power, decided to remove him. Before that, he held onto power even after a series of hugely embarrassing military defeats. South of the border, the House of Saud continued to rule the country named after their family from Riyadh.
But if coup-proofing is the key to avoiding coups, why doesn’t everybody simply reorganise the military and intelligence services once they rise to power? One of the challenges, as Erica de Bruin demonstrates in her book How to Prevent Coups d’État, derives from the process itself.70 Having a coup-proofed military increases the chances of a regime’s survival, but once the tyrant starts the process, and before he’s finished, his situation is perilous.
Kwame Nkrumah’s story shows why that moment can be so dangerous. When Nkrumah first went into Ghanian politics in the late 1940s, Ghana was a British crown colony known as the Gold Coast. Once Ghanaians achieved independence, Nkrumah became the country’s first leader. He quickly became worried for his own security. As a result, he began to put some specialised intelligence and security units under his personal command. Since that wasn’t enough to make him feel safe, he then started to turn the presidential bodyguards, the President’s Own Guard Regiment (POGR), into a fully-fledged fighting force capable of deterring those who might try to destroy him. The size of the force grew rapidly and the benefits the men received were vastly better than those of the regular troops.71 Nkrumah was initially reluctant to focus on ethnicity as a recruitment tool because he saw ‘tribalism’ as a ‘canker-worm which, unless removed, may destroy the solidity of the body politic, the stability of the government, the efficiency of the bureaucracy and the judiciary, and the effectiveness of the army and police’.72 But although he did not particularly favour ethnic stacking, officers from some ethnic groups, including his own, were frequently promoted while others were seemingly overlooked. Crucially, Nkrumah didn’t stop there but went after the police as well.73
The intelligence and security services aside, Nkrumah consolidated his political power by other means also. By 1964, a constitutional amendment had turned Ghana into a one-party state with Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party on top.74 Nkrumah was declared president for life, and many of his political opponents found themselves imprisoned in a fort that had once been used to hold slaves en route for the United States. What’s more, soldiers were used in an internal security role to suppress strikes.75 At this point, all warning signs should have flashed bright red.
In early 1966, the president for life left for a trip to Vietnam and China. With Nkrumah and many of the key defence officials out of the country, it was the perfect time to make a move. At around midnight, Colonel Emmanuel Kotoka, stationed some two hundred kilometres northwest of Ghana’s capital Accra, started to move his troops. When they came close to Accra’s airport, they were joined by a company of paratroopers who had been training for a few days near the capital. After this, things moved rapidly. By around 2.30 a.m., the conspirators arrived at Flagstaff House, the president’s compound. The Ministry of Defence, the radio station and the post office were surrounded. At 6 a.m., Ghanaians heard Colonel Kotoka on the radio declaring that the ‘National Liberation Council’ had taken power. The President’s Own Guard, the force that was intended to fight back in the event of a coup, did put up a fight. But by noon that day, the ‘commander of the Presidential Guard marched out with his troops and surrendered’.76
Those who orchestrated the coup were undoubtedly unhappy with the overall political and economic situation in the country, but what really motivated them to overthrow President Nkrumah (who subsequently lived out his days in Guinea) were Nkrumah’s moves to counter-balance the military and diminish the role of the police.77 J. W. K. Harlley, the police commissioner who took part in the coup, explicitly justified his role by saying that Nkrumah had created a ‘private army of his own at an annual cost of over half a million pounds in flagrant violation of a constitution which he himself had foisted on the country to serve as a counterpose to the Ghana Armed Forces’.78
Nkrumah’s attempt at coup-proofing failed because it created an incentive for the regular security forces to strike while the parallel forces were too weak to resist.
The overall problem, then, is that the very things tyrants do to reduce the threat of the military can lead the military to act against them.
In theory, there’s a way out of this. If the tyrant can persuade another state to guarantee the security of the regime with its military, the regime can concentrate on coup-proofing without worrying about military effectiveness. It can then reduce its military force to one so weak that it becomes manageable. During the Cold War, for example, the French military sometimes stepped in to save dictators from their own soldiers. In some cases, as with an operation to reinstall Gabonese president Léon M’ba in 1964, French troops were flown in to reverse a coup.79
The foreign guarantor is an attractive option for tyrants but it’s rarely on offer. Even if it is, it comes at a price: every time a leader becomes so dependent on a foreign power that he cannot survive without it, his room for manoeuvre is severely reduced.
Most difficult is finding another state to provide that service. Not only does another state need to have a motive for intervening, they need to be able to do so. The list of potential security suppliers is short. Coups happen quickly and to have any effect, foreign troops already need to be in the area.80 It’s no good if they are in the Caribbean or a training ground overlooking the Pyrenees. They need to be in the region, or better still, already in the country, in order to make a meaningful difference.
Then tyrants need to find a state with troops that are not just nearby but also strong enough to deter or at least overwhelm the coup-plotters. In Gabon, it was only possible to reverse the coup because the French paratroopers were strong whilst the Gabonese were weak. According to one estimate, the Gabonese security forces at the time, military and police combined, numbered a mere six hundred men.81 Nowadays, the list of militaries that could theoretically pull off something like this is not long. If there’s a coup in Egypt and a European power sends paratroopers to try to reverse it, those paratroopers will probably come home in coffins – if they come home at all.
As can be seen, convincing a foreign power to defend the regime against potential coups d’état is a challenging task. They are being asked to risk the lives of their own troops to defend an unstable dictatorship at huge reputational cost. As a result, most tyrants are on their own when dealing with the military.
