How to Be a Dictator

by Frank Dikotter

  At their first meeting on 10 September members of the Workers’ Party of Ethiopia unanimously elected their ‘visionary leader’ as General Secretary of the Central Committee and pledged their people to implement the slogan ‘Forward with the Revolutionary Leadership of Comrade Mengistu Haile Mariam’. A member of the Politburo stepped forward, solemnly reading a biography of the Chairman, comparing the life of ‘the saviour of Ethiopia, brilliant, generous’ to the second coming of Christ. Mengistu, who had checked every word of the speech, was all humility, mumbling modestly that he did not deserve the praise.39

  Even more impressive than the Party Congress Hall was the Tiglachin Monument, or Our Struggle Monument, a soaring stele designed by the North Koreans. It stood fifty metres tall, topped by a red star. On two sides of the stele intricately carved bronze reliefs illustrated the history of the revolution, from the downfall of the emperor to Mengistu Haile Mariam, leading his people towards a socialist future.40

  In early September the main avenues of Addis Ababa were closed for several days, as North Korean advisers drilled large crowds for the parade. People who failed to turn up and march on command were beaten, imprisoned or starved, as food was rationed.

  The big event took place on National Day, as some 70,000 students, villagers and troops marched past the reviewing stand on Revolution Square, carrying giant posters of Marx, Lenin and Mengistu, and shouting revolutionary slogans: ‘Forward with the Revolutionary Leadership of Comrade Mengistu Haile Mariam’. Mengistu stood to attention. In a display of military might, hundreds of tanks, armoured personnel carriers and rocket launchers rumbled through the square. But the main attraction must have been a float with a giant statue of Mengistu, his left fist clenched in the air. It was decorated with yet another slogan, reading ‘Without the Wise and Revolutionary Leadership of Mengistu Haile Mariam our Struggle Cannot Succeed’.41

  A few years after the revolution all religious objects from the Ethnology Museum had been removed and placed in storage, but little had appeared about the new regime itself. As part of the tenth anniversary, a special exhibition opened its doors, at long last presenting a unified vision of the past. From paleoanthropological times to the Battle of Adwa and the overthrow of the emperor, the country was presented as an uninterrupted line of evolution, a story of progress and redemption culminating in the figure of Mengistu.42

  By most estimates the celebrations cost between US$50 and 100 million.43 Even before they began millions of people were starving. Ethiopia was a poor country, and rigid socialist economics did not help. Forced conscription and civil war further undermined a fragile countryside. Per capita cereal production declined by 15 per cent from 1974 to 1984, although more grain was requisitioned to pay for a higher military budget. The first signs of famine appeared in 1983, as parts of the country suffered from an unusually severe drought. By the summer of 1984 thousands of people were dying in the Wollo region alone, with towns overrun by starving villagers begging in the streets or waiting to die beside barren fields. The regime covered up the crisis, taking foreign reporters to see collective farms where people prospered. Since the famine affected the rebellious north, the regime also took advantage of the crisis by letting local people who sympathised with the rebels starve to death. By the time Mengistu addressed the crowd for five hours on the tenth anniversary of the revolution in September 1984 some seven million people were on the verge of starvation.44

  The famine sparked international attention after harrowing images of wizened children on saline drips were broadcast on BBC news in October 1984. It galvanised a global campaign to raise millions in aid. In February 1985 Mengistu finally appeared on state television, declaring that the country faced a grave crisis resulting from drought. He proposed a solution, calling for the resettlement of famished villagers from the north to the more fertile plains of the south. Under the cover of aid the regime forcibly moved entire population groups out of rebellious areas to distant parts of the country. More than half a million people were relocated, often impelled by threat of violence. Worse was to come, as resettlement was followed by another scheme, known as ‘villagisation’. It was collectivisation under another name, with scattered households herded into planned villages where the state controlled everything. By most estimates at least half a million people died in the 1983–5 famine.45

  Much food aid was redirected from civilians to soldiers. Civil war had raged since 1977, as a variety of liberation movements were established in the wake of the revolution. Among them were the Oromo Liberation Front, the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front and the Afar Liberation Front, all located in Ethiopia’s barren north. But the Derg’s foremost enemy was the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front. At the height of the war against Somalia in the summer of 1977 Mengistu had called for a ‘total people’s war’ against all aggressors. After he won the Ogaden War with backing from Cuba and the Soviet Union he had hoped to crush decisively the secessionist movements in the north. But operation Red Star, a huge military campaign in 1982 involving more than half the country’s army, was a complete failure. Unlike the plateau in the east, the north offered ideal terrain for guerrilla fighters, with soaring mountains, treacherous cliffs and desolate plains covered with rocks.46

  Mengistu assumed personal command of the operation, temporarily moving most of his cabinet to Asmara, the capital of Eritrea. But the very qualities that had helped him to win control of the Derg in the revolution’s early years now militated against him. He went to war without a clear strategy, believing that his formidable army would prevail through sheer strength of numbers. When his troops failed to dislodge the insurgents from their mountainous strongholds he accused his generals of incompetence and treason, having them arbitrarily executed. He trusted no one, establishing a surveillance network of political commissars around the high command. Since loyalty was prized more than competence, flatterers and opportunists were promoted.47

  The Red Star operation became a war of attrition, as hundreds of thousands of young men and boys were forcibly conscripted into the armed forces. They were barely fed and often beaten before being thrown into battle against some of the most hardened insurgents in the world. By the middle of the 1980s civil war and famine had become permanent features of the regime.48

  Despite an army of 300,000 and twelve billion dollars in Soviet military aid, the regime began to collapse under the onslaught of different rebel movements. In March 1988 the Eritrean rebels scored a decisive victory at Afabet, a strategic garrison town reinforced by trenches and bunkers in the middle of the Sahel. It was the largest battle in Africa since El Alamein. Some 20,000 soldiers were killed or captured, changing the balance of war. A few months later, with Mengistu absent in East Germany seeking more arms, his senior officers attempted a coup. It failed, but increased the rate of desertions among the rank and file. When the Eritreans stormed the port of Massawa on the Red Sea in February 1990 even Moscow lost faith, determined to pull out of the conflict. Gorbachev urged Mengistu to reform.

  The assorted guerrilla fighters were now on the move, spearheaded by the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front, and reaching the outskirts of Addis Ababa by the end of 1990. Over the following months Mengistu increasingly lost touch with reality, alternating between declarations of defiance and dark hints of suicide. On 16 April 1991 he spoke on the radio, ranting against traitors and foreign plotters. Three days later he proclaimed a general mobilisation ‘to safeguard the integrity of the motherland’. In a frenzied move, he clung on to all his titles but replaced several of his most senior ministers, all to no avail. On 21 May he escaped, slipping out of the capital to board a small plane and fly across the border to Nairobi. From there he went to Zimbabwe, where President Robert Mugabe granted him asylum.49

  Within weeks the regime melted away. Even before Mengistu’s escape his forces had vanished into the landscape as the rebels moved south. His posters were vandalised, some riddled with gunshot. Lenin was toppled from his pedestal. His sayings disappeared fro
m the masthead of the party newspaper. On Revolution Square the slogans and stars were covered in paint. Nothing but rusty scaffolding remained where Mengistu had once been displayed.50

  Mengistu left behind a legacy of devastation caused by war, famine and collectivisation, but no enduring institutions and no lasting ideology. He arrogated all power to himself, ensuring that no decision was made without his consent. Even the party he so painstakingly built up was no more than an instrument of personal rule. Since he embodied the revolution it vanished the moment he fled.

  Afterword

  In a garage run by the municipality of Addis Ababa, Lenin is lying on his back, surrounded by weeds and empty oil drums. Few people come to visit him. Those who do are warned by local workers not to wake him.1

  He is large and weighty, and bringing him down from his pedestal was hard work. Heavy machinery had been required, as ropes could not even make him shake. He was not, of course, the first one to go. After the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989, Lenin was dismantled a thousand times, sometimes attacked with hammers or decapitated, occasionally mothballed. Other despots, too, were toppled. Across Albania jubilant crowds tackled statues of Enver Hoxha, who had controlled the country for forty years. For decades portraits, posters, slogans, busts and statues had gone up, but the tide had turned.

  It took many observers by surprise. Dictators, the thinking went, were unshakable, like their statues. They had captured the souls of their subjects and moulded their thinking. They had cast a spell on them. But there never was a spell. There was fear, and when it evaporated the entire edifice collapsed. In the case of Ceauşescu, the moment he faltered when challenged by demonstrators in front of the party headquarters on 21 December 1989 can be pinned down almost to the minute. That moment took several decades to arrive.

  There is no cult without fear. At the height of the twentieth century, hundreds of millions of people across the globe had no choice but to acquiesce in the glorification of their leaders, who backed up their rule with the threat of violence. Under Mao or Kim, mocking the leader’s name was enough to warrant assignment to a labour camp. Failure to cry, cheer or shout on command carried a heavy penalty. Under Mussolini or Ceauşescu, editors received daily instructions on what should be mentioned and what was proscribed. Writers, poets and painters, under Stalin, trembled at the thought that their praise might not appear sufficiently sincere.

  When the term ‘cult of personality’ is bandied about to characterise any and every effort to glorify a leader, this trivialises what occurred in modern dictatorships. When democratically elected presidents or prime ministers groom their image, or pose in front of children who sing their praises, or engrave their name on gold coins, or surround themselves with flatterers, they engage in political theatre. It may be repulsive, or appear narcissistic and even sinister, but it is not a cult. To have followers proclaim that their leader is a genius is not a cult either. In the first stage of a cult, a leader needs to have enough clout to abase his opponents and force them to salute him in public. But with a fully developed cult of personality no one can any longer be quite certain any more who supports and who opposes the dictator.

  One such is Kim Jong-un, from the third generation of his family, in control of North Korea since 2011. In 2015, after having executed some seventy high-ranking officials, including several generals and his uncle-in-law, he handed out badges bearing his portrait to his inner circle. Statues dedicated to the family went up in every province the same year. Like Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-un tours the country, offering on-the-spot guidance with his entourage eagerly writing down his every word. He walks like his grandfather, he smiles like his grandfather, he even looks like his grandfather.2

  Kim is but one of many dictators who have thrived, despite the spread of democracy since 1989. Assad fils stepped in the shoes of Assad père in 2000. In an echo of the ‘humble country doctor’ François Duvalier, Bashar al-Assad at first presented himself as a ‘mild-mannered ophthalmologist’. Then the doctor spread a culture of fear, covering Syria with his image while suppressing dissent with an iron fist.3

  New dictators have appeared. In the early years of the twenty-first century Turkey appeared to be a democracy in the making, with a vibrant civil society and a relatively open press. Then along came Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Elected president in 2014, he began building up his image as the country’s strongman. In 2016 he used a failed coup as a pretext to clamp down on all opposition, suspending, dismissing or imprisoning tens of thousands of people, including journalists, academics, lawyers and civil servants. And even as he purged his opponents he glorified himself. His speeches were broadcast several times a day on television, his face plastered on numerous walls, while his supporters likened him to a second prophet. Turkey is still a far cry from the fully fledged dictatorships that dominated the twentieth century, but those, too, took time to build up.4

  In the wake of the Cultural Revolution the communist party in China amended its constitution explicitly to forbid ‘all forms of personality cult’, making slow but inexorable progress towards greater accountability. But the regime has been turning back towards dictatorship. After Xi Jinping was elected General Secretary of the party in 2012 his first act was to humiliate and imprison some of his most powerful rivals. Then he disciplined or purged hundreds of thousands of party members, all in the name of a campaign against corruption. As the regime makes a concerted effort to obliterate a fledging civil society, lawyers, human rights activists, journalists and religious leaders are confined, exiled, and imprisoned in the thousands.5

  The propaganda machine has consistently idolised Xi. In the capital of Hebei province alone some 4,500 loudspeakers were installed in November 2017, before a major party congress, calling on all people to ‘unite tightly around President Xi’. The party organ gave him seven titles, from Creative Leader, Core of the Party and Servant Pursuing Happiness for the People, to Leader of a Great Country and Architect of Modernisation in the New Era. ‘To follow you is to follow the sun’ went a new song launched in Beijing. Trinkets, badges and posters with his portrait are ubiquitous. His thoughts became compulsory reading for schoolchildren the same year. Fear goes hand in hand with praise, as even mocking the Chairman of Everything in a private message online can be treated as a heinous crime punishable by two years in prison. In March 2018 he became Chairman for life, as the National People’s Congress voted to abolish limits on his term.6

  Nonetheless, dictators today, with the exception of Kim Jong-un, are a long way from instilling the fear their predecessors inflicted on their populations at the height of the twentieth century. Yet hardly a month goes by without a new book announcing ‘The Death of Democracy’ or ‘The End of Liberalism’. Undeniably, for more than a decade democracy has been degraded in many places around the world, while levels of freedom have receded even in some of the most entrenched parliamentary democracies. Eternal vigilance, as the saying goes, is the price of liberty, as power can easily be stolen.

  Vigilance, however, is not the same as gloom. Even a modicum of historical perspective indicates that today dictatorship is on the decline when compared to the twentieth century. Most of all, dictators who surround themselves with a cult of personality tend to drift off into a world of their own, confirmed in their delusions by the followers who surround them. They end up making all major decisions on their own. They see enemies everywhere, at home and abroad. As hubris and paranoia take over, they seek more power to protect the power they already have. But since so much hinges on the judgements they make, even a minor miscalculation can cause the regime to falter, with devastating consequences. In the end, the biggest threat to dictators comes not just from the people, but from themselves.

  Select Bibliography

  ARCHIVES

  ACS Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Rome

  ANR Arhivele Naţionale ale României, Bucharest

  BArch Bundesarchiv, Berlin

  GDPA Guangdong sheng Dang’anguan, Guangzhou

 
GSPA Gansu sheng Dang’anguan, Lanzhou

  HBPA Hebei sheng Dang’anguan, Shijiazhuang

  Hoover Hoover Institution Library and Archives, Palo Alto

  MfAA Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amts, Berlin

  MAE Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Paris

  NARA National Archives at College Park, Washington

  NMA Nanjing shi Dang’anguan, Nanjing

  OSA Open Society Archives, Central European University, Budapest

  PRO The National Archives, London

  RGANI Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Novei’shei Istorii, Moscow

  RGASPI Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial’no-Politicheskoi Istorii, Moscow

  SMA Shanghai shi Dang’anguan, Shanghai

  SECONDARY SOURCES

  Abbott, Elizabeth, Haiti: The Duvaliers and Their Legacy, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988.

  Altman, Linda Jacobs, Shattered Youth in Nazi Germany: Primary Sources from the Holocaust, Berkeley Heights, NJ: Enslow Publishers, 2010.

  Andrieu, Jacques, ‘Mais que se sont donc dit Mao et Malraux? Aux sources du maoïsme occidental’, Perspectives chinoises, no. 37 (Sept. 1996), pp. 50–63.

  Applebaum, Anne, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956, New York: Doubleday, 2012.

  Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York: Harvest Book, 1973.