The Dictator's Handbook (45 page)

If some mass organizers see how to mount an uprising, the problem still remains of when to strike. The right moment almost always depends on their country having a new leader, a sick leader, or a bankrupt leader. Tunisia's Ben Ali, for instance, was rumored to be seriously ill, possibly suffering from prostate cancer, and Egypt's Mubarak, in his eighties, may also have been ailing. Those who want to protest when the time is right and those overseas who want to see democracy blossom can work on laying the groundwork ahead of time. This may be much easier to achieve than we sometimes believe.

Cell phone technology and access to the Internet can transform the lives of people, even poor people, in developing nations. Even simple information, like market prices for crops, can make an enormous difference in the income of a farmer, and of course, the more they can earn the harder they will work. Such mobile technologies are also giving poor people access to services, such as banking and insurance, which many of us in developed nations take for granted. Mobile phone accounts will be increasingly used to transfer money so that with a simple text message a farmer can pay for fertilizer or receive payment for his crops.
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The political empowerment of the people by such technology goes way beyond economic benefits. The adoption of such technologies will make it impossible for leaders to turn off an important means through which the citizens can coordinate, without also turning off the commerce and economic activities that the leadership needs to provide the tax resources with which to sustain themselves in power. When economic circumstances dictate that a despot's flow of cash depends on allowing the people to converse, the dictator is truly between a rock and a hard place. Turn off the technology for long and there will not be enough money to buy coalition loyalty. Leave the technology on and the
people can coordinate to overthrow their autocrat. Given such circumstances, a smart dictator will look ahead and work out that he is better off liberalizing now than risk being exiled, jailed, or killed later. It is not happenstance that a SIM (subscriber identity module) card for mobile phones costs over $1,000 in Burma. It is also not a coincidence that J. J. Rawlings liberalized when Ghana faced economic collapse.

Rawlings, recall, went from abusive dictator to competitive democrat. He did so because the ruinous economic policies associated with decades of dictatorship had driven Ghana's economy so far into the ground that he could no longer ensure even enough food for the people to have the strength and the will to work to produce revenue for him. Liberalizing the economy to encourage people back to work was the only way he could continue to pay his coalition. It helped him cling to power, but the freedom that went along with liberalization empowered the people.

Democratization does not require a leader to be benevolent; such leaders are hard to come by, and often misguided. Rawlings was a “reluctant democrat,” but he became a democrat nevertheless. Economic need is a far more reliable path to empowering the people. Foreign aid all too often eases the financial stranglehold on leaders. Rawlings first went cap in hand looking for an international backer. Only when that failed did he embark on market reforms. There are important lessons to be extracted from his experience, especially when combined with the power of contemporary technology.

Rawlings had the right anticipatory response to economic disaster. Not all leaders can be counted on even to be reluctant democrats. When they are unprepared to liberalize, even in the face of economic disaster, there is still plenty that foreign aid donors could do to swing the tide in favor of personal and economic freedom, and even to persuade petty dictators that it is in their interest to liberalize. Using foreign aid to set up nationwide wireless access to the Internet and to provide the poor with mobile phones could be a win-win-win-win among the four constituencies affected by aid. Leaders will gain because commerce will improve, generating more revenue for their discretionary use. Some donor constituents will benefit because they will
sell the necessary technology to their government to be given in aid. That will make them happier with their incumbent, improving the democratic donor's chances for reelection. And unlike most aid, citizens in the recipient countries will also benefit. First, they will have a better chance to make a good living. Second, they will be in a better position to freely assemble over the Internet and press their government for greater freedom and reliance on a larger coalition. And, as we said, smart leaders, benefiting as they will from the flow of money, will accept the technology and will, in time, be likely to liberalize so that they can stay on in power.

Those who reject the technology will also be helping the cause of freedom. By saying no to technology that helps the people help themselves, they will make clear that they are intransigent autocrats. Then donors will know better than to waste their resources on them and that will free up more aid dollars to help those people, places, and leaders who are willing to take the political risks to gain the economic benefits. If the policy concessions to be bought with aid are economic, then this is just the sort of aid that can satisfy the donor's interests, the recipient's interests, the wishes of the donor's coalition, and the poor people that we all give lip service to wanting to help. For those who want to buy security concessions, aid will, alas, probably continue as it has in the past. But then those buying security concessions might also think about how large a business advantage they are giving to competitor cell phone producers at the expense of their homegrown industry.

Finally, even when aid is given for security reasons, it can be utilized more effectively. Lots of aid is bad for poor people as we know. Even when it is just about buying policy concessions, however, it could be made to work better, at least from the donor's perspective. Instead of giving aid on the promise by recipients that they will change their policies, aid money could be put in an independently controlled escrow account. Aid deals then would need to define precise performance criteria. If those criteria are met, then the funds are released. If the criteria are not met or performance does not come up to agreed standards, the money reverts to the donor. In such a world donors would pay to get what they want and would not throw good
money after bad if the expectation of payment is not adequate to change the recipient's behavior. Remember, that was one of the fixes we proposed for dealing with the great aid sinkhole that Pakistan has become.

Perhaps the toughest cases for improvement are resource-rich monarchies and autocracies. The people in such places are kept down, the leaders become fabulously wealthy, and they have the means to brutalize opponents. But even in these places there are means to achieve change without the horrendous consequences experienced by those who revolted against oil-rich Qaddafi. Both the international community and domestic would-be rebels could provide the right foundation for the peaceful shift from dictatorship to democracy. Let us begin with the harder sell—the international community.

South Africa's Nelson Mandela taught the world an important lesson when he came to power. Alas, it is a lesson only poorly learned. Following the collapse of the apartheid government, he organized truth and reconciliation commissions. These were designed to provide people who had oppressed the apartheid regime's opponents to come forward, confess their crimes, and be granted amnesty. The United Nations certainly could build a body of international law that motivates dictators facing rebellion to turn power over to the people peacefully. The UN could prescribe a process for transition from dictatorship to democracy. At the same time it could stipulate that any dictator facing the pressure to grant freedom to the people would have a brief, fixed period of time, say a week, to leave the country in exchange for a blanket perpetual grant of amnesty against prosecution anywhere for crimes committed as his nation's leader. There is clear precedence for such a policy. It is common practice to give criminals immunity if they agree to testify. Some victims are bound to resent that the perpetrator of heinous acts goes unpunished. Unfortunately, the alternative is to leave the dictator with few options but to gamble on holding onto power through further murderous acts. Certainly there is little justice in letting former dictators off the hook. But the goal should be to preserve and improve the lives of the many who suffer at the hands of desperate leaders, who might be prepared to step aside in exchange for immunity.

The incentives to encourage leaders to step aside could be further strengthened if, in exchange for agreeing to step down quickly, they would be granted the right to retain some significant amount of ill-gotten gains, and safe havens for exile where the soon-to-be ex-leadership and their families can live out their lives in peace. Offering such deals might prove self-fulfilling. Once essential supporters believe their leader might take such a deal, they themselves start looking for his replacement, so even if the leader had wanted to stay and fight he might no longer have the support to do so. The urge for retribution is better put aside to give dictators a reason to give up rather than fight. Muammar Qadaffi had none of these opportunities and so faced a stark choice: live the life of the hunted or fight to the death. He chose the latter, to the detriment of the Libyan people and anyone who values humanity.

Additional choices can be provided. Britain's transition from monarchy to constitutional monarchy provides a valuable lesson. Leaders want to survive in office and maximize their control over money. But what if their choice is to trade the power of office in exchange for the right to the money? The English monarchy once had both power and money but it faced severe pressure that could have ended, as in so many other places, with the erstwhile royal family having neither power nor money. That is what happened to the Russian and French royal families, and for that matter the Stewart branch of the English royal family, in the wake of revolution. Imagine, instead, that they had the option of keeping the crown but turning power over to a properly elected government of the people, as William and Mary and the subsequent Hanoverian dynasty did in England. As compensation for doing so, they could have been granted the right to keep the family's wealth and even the assurance of further income from the state for a long, specified period of time (say 100 years). The transition to being fabulously wealthy figureheads of constitutional monarchies is an option the Saudi Arabian royal family, the Jordanian royal family, and the royal families of the Emirates might well contemplate as a better option than trying to crush rebellion. Revolutionaries might fail today or tomorrow, but leaders have only to lose once and by then it will be too late for them to negotiate their way to a soft landing.

Just as there are actions that can promote beneficial change, there are also actions that hamper progress. One of the most popular unhelpful solutions is an election. Leaders at risk often decide to hold fraudulent elections to create the impression of openness and fairness. Needless to say, bogus elections don't move a country toward better policies or more freedom for the people. Rather, fake elections empower the ruler by increasing the ranks of the interchangeables without adding in any meaningful way to the size of the influential and essential groups.

True, meaningful elections might be the final goal, but elections
for their own sake
should never be the objective. When the international community pushes for elections without being careful about how meaningful they are, all that is accomplished is to further entrench a nasty regime. International inspectors, for instance, like to certify whether people could freely go to the polling place and whether their votes were properly counted, as if that means there was a free and fair election. There's no reason to impede the opportunity to vote or to cheat when counting votes if, for instance, a regime first bans parties that might be real rivals, or if a government sets up campaign constraints that make it easy for the government's party to tell its story and makes it impossible for the opposition to do the same. Russian incumbents don't need to cheat in counting votes to get the outcome they want. They don't need to block people from getting into the polling place. They deprive the opposition from having access to a free press and from holding rallies so, sure, observers will easily conclude that elections were free and fair in the narrow sense, and just as easily we can all recognize that they were neither really free nor fair.

Ultimately, elections need to
follow
expanded freedom and not be thought of as presaging it!

Sometimes the problems of the world seem beyond our capacity to solve. Yet there is no mystery about how to eradicate much of the
world's poverty and oppression. People who live with freedom are rarely impoverished and oppressed. Give people the right to say what they want; to write what they want; and to gather to share ideas about what they want, and you are bound to be looking at people whose persons and property are secure and whose lives are content. You are looking at people free to become rich and free to lose their shirts in trying. You are looking at people who are not only materially well off but spiritually and physically, too. Sure, places like Singapore and parts of China prove that it is possible to have a good material life with limited freedom—yet the vast majority of the evidence suggests that these are exceptions and not the rule. Economic success can postpone the democratic moment but it ultimately cannot replace it.