The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy

  Copyright © 2012 by William J. Dobson

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Jacket design by Michael J. Windsor

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Dobson, William J.

  The dictator’s learning curve : inside the global battle for democracy / by William J. Dobson.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Democratization. 2. Dictatorship. I. Title.

  JC423.D666 2012

  321.8—dc23 2011050286

  eISBN: 978-0-385-53336-2

  v3.1_r1

  For Kelly, Kate, and Liam

  Democracy, freedom, human rights have come to have a definite meaning to the people of the world which we must not allow any nation to so change that they are made synonymous with suppression and dictatorship.

  —ELEANOR ROOSEVELT SPEAKING AT THE SORBONNE, SEPTEMBER 28, 1948

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  CHAPTER 1 | The Czar

  CHAPTER 2 | Enemies of the State

  CHAPTER 3 | El Comandante

  CHAPTER 4 | The Opposition

  CHAPTER 5 | The Youth

  CHAPTER 6 | The Pharaoh

  CHAPTER 7 | The Professionals

  CHAPTER 8 | The Technocrats

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  Peter Ackerman sits in his spacious corner office at the end of Pennsylvania Avenue. From his perch, he literally looks down on the World Bank. The sixty-four-year-old Ackerman is the managing director of Rockport Capital Incorporated, a discreet boutique investment house, and on a crystal clear August afternoon he is walking me through a PowerPoint presentation, talking to me about “risk returns.” The slides, however, have nothing to do with investments, dividends, or finance; rather, the topic is the best way to overthrow a dictator.

  Twenty-five years ago, Ackerman would have seemed an unlikely person to be giving advice on how to confront the world’s worst regimes. He was too busy making a killing on Wall Street, the right-hand man to the junk bond king Michael Milken. In 1988, Ackerman earned $165 million for organizing the $25 billion leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco. When an insider-trading scandal broke, sending Milken to jail, Ackerman paid $80 million to the U.S. government and walked away with roughly $500 million.

  A considerable part of that fortune is now being channeled into helping topple tyranny around the globe. In 2002, Ackerman founded the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, which runs seminars, workshops, and training sessions on successful nonviolent strategies and tactics for overthrowing repressive regimes. Activists from Egypt, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and dozens of other countries know Ackerman well. Some have visited these top-floor offices in Foggy Bottom. Some have attended his workshops in half a dozen different foreign capitals. Others have watched his films—most commonly, Bringing Down a Dictator, which tells the story of how young Serbs deposed Slobodan Miloševic in October 2000. The film won a Peabody Award and has been translated into Arabic, Farsi, Mandarin, Vietnamese, and at least seven other languages. Georgians widely credited the film for helping to inspire their 2003 Rose Revolution, a peaceful democratic rebellion that removed the former Communist boss Eduard Shevardnadze. In 2006, Ackerman also got into the video game business, paying for the development of A Force More Powerful, a game that lets activists practice their strategies for ousting tyrants in a virtual world. Thousands of copies have found their way into some of the world’s most repressive countries. In 2010, he released a new game called People Power. (“The game is the most subversive thing I have ever done,” he says. “I have spent millions improving it.”) When I ask him why he is making the task of defeating tyrants his life’s work, he looks at me and says, “I’m just in the distribution business. I’m just responding to demand, that’s all.” And, he could have added, business is good.

  It is not easy being a dictator today. Not long ago, an autocrat, whether a nationalist strongman, revolutionary hero, or Communist apparatchik, could use blunt weapons to keep his people under his thumb. Joseph Stalin sent millions of his countrymen to the gulag. Mao Zedong launched mass revolutionary campaigns targeting intellectuals, capitalists, and any group in China he believed to be insufficiently “red.” His Great Leap Forward cost more than 35 million lives in a handful of years. The regime of the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin murdered as many as 500,000 people. In three years, nearly 2 million Cambodians died in Pol Pot’s killing fields. In February 1982, Hafez Assad crushed an uprising in the Syrian city of Hama. After besieging the city with attack helicopters and heavy artillery, his troops went house to house. More than 25,000 Syrians were slaughtered before the month was over.

  Dictators are still capable of great crimes. But today the world’s despots have more forces arrayed against them than ever before. With the end of the Cold War, many lost their chief sponsor and economic lifeline in the Soviet Union. The democracy promotion business became a cottage industry, almost overnight: an army of Western experts, activists, and election monitors now stands at the ready to shine a spotlight on human rights abuses, gross corruption, and election rigging. Twenty years ago, Beijing’s leaders only needed to worry about the glare of television cameras when the tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square. As soon as the Chinese Communist Party declared martial law, it literally pulled the plug on CNN’s broadcast. No longer. In 2006, an expedition of European mountain climbers filmed Chinese soldiers shooting Tibetan monks, women, and children on a nineteen-thousand-foot mountain pass high in the Himalayas. The slaughter was quickly broadcast on YouTube and led to denunciations of China’s violence toward refugees by international human rights groups. In 2011, Syria banned all foreign journalists from reporting on the country’s uprising against Bashar Assad’s regime. No matter; each day Syrian activists posted shocking footage of the government’s brutal repression, as peaceful protesters and funeral processions became targets for the regime’s snipers. Today, the world’s dictators can surrender any hope of keeping their worst deeds secret: if you order a violent crackdown—even on a Himalayan mountain pass—you now know it will likely be captured on an iPhone and broadcast around the world. The costs of tyranny have never been this high.

  The tide began to turn against dictators long before the Internet or Twitter, and even well before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Their troubles really began in Portugal in 1974. To be precise, they began at 12:25 the morning of April 25, when a Lisbon radio station played the song “Grândola, Vila Morena,” a signal to units in the Portuguese military to commence a coup. By the next day, Portugal’s dictator, Marcello Caetano, had been driven into exile. According to the scholar Samuel Huntington, the political forces released on that day marked the beginning of a global democratic wave that would lead to authoritarian regimes giving way to democracy for decades to come.

  After Portugal, a string of right-wing dictatorships collapsed across southern Europe. The military juntas in Latin America and authoritarians in East Asia followed. All were shocks, but the 1989 collapse of Communist governments across Eastern Europe was a seismic shift. In 1974, there had been only forty-one democracies throughout the globe. By 1991, when the Soviet Union also fell, the number of democratic governments had jumped to seventy-six.

  And it proved to be only Act I of democracy’s boom years. Africa soon accounted for more than a dozen new democracies. Key democratic transitions occurred in major states like Indonesia and Mexico. By 1998, the United States had set up democracy promotion programs in more than a hundred countries. Serbia’s revolution added another country to the democratic column in 2000. The “color revolutions” in Georgia in 2003, Ukraine in 2004, and Kyrgyzstan in 2005 symbolized the high-water mark of freedom’s advance against authoritarianism. By 2005, the number of democracies in the world had more than tripled since Portugal’s young military officers first heard that song on the radio.

  But then something changed. The democratic tide crested, and the world’s most unsavory regimes—a mélange of dictators, strongmen, and authoritarian governments—made a comeback. Political freedom around the world declined for the next five years, according to Freedom House’s annual survey. The five-year drop was the longest continuous decline in political rights and civil liberties since the watchdog organization began measuring these trends forty years ago. Military coups overturned democratic governments in Asia, while a populist brand of authoritarianism gained ground in South America. Even the fresh success stories in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan appeared to unravel. In 2010, the number of democracies had dropped to its lowest point since 1995. More broadly, the percentage of countries designated “free” had remained unchanged for more than a decade, frozen at roughly 46 percent. Huntington’s wave appeared to have run its course.

  The problem didn’t rest with democracy itself. As the Arab Spring reminded everyone in 2011, even amid a global recession, the
ideals of political and economic freedom have not lost their saliency. People everywhere still aspire to be free. What changed is the nature of dictatorship. Today’s dictators and authoritarians are far more sophisticated, savvy, and nimble than they once were. Faced with growing pressures, the smartest among them neither hardened their regimes into police states nor closed themselves off from the world; instead, they learned and adapted. For dozens of authoritarian regimes, the challenge posed by democracy’s advance led to experimentation, creativity, and cunning. Modern authoritarians have successfully honed new techniques, methods, and formulas for preserving power, refashioning dictatorship for the modern age.

  Today’s dictators understand that in a globalized world the more brutal forms of intimidation—mass arrests, firing squads, and violent crackdowns—are best replaced with more subtle forms of coercion. Rather than forcibly arrest members of a human rights group, today’s most effective despots deploy tax collectors or health inspectors to shut down dissident groups. Laws are written broadly, then used like a scalpel to target the groups the government deems a threat. (In Venezuela, one activist joked that President Hugo Chávez rules through the motto “For my friends, everything, for my enemies, the law.”) Rather than shutter all media, modern-day despots make exceptions for small outlets—usually newspapers—that allow for a limited public discussion. Today’s dictators pepper their speeches with references to liberty, justice, and the rule of law. Chinese Communist Party leaders regularly invoke democracy and claim to be the country’s elected leaders. And modern authoritarians understand the importance of appearances. In the twentieth century, totalitarian leaders would often hold elections and claim an absurd percentage of the ballots. Soviet leaders routinely stole elections by announcing they won an improbable 99 percent of the vote. Today, the Kremlin’s operatives typically stop stuffing the ballot boxes when they reach 70 percent. Modern dictators understand it is better to appear to win a contested election than to openly steal it.

  We like to believe that authoritarian regimes are dinosaurs—clumsy, stupid, lumbering behemoths, reminiscent of the Soviet Union in its final days or some insecure South American banana republic. And to be sure, a small handful of retrograde, old-school dictatorships have managed to limp into the twenty-first century. They are the North Koreas, Turkmenistans, and Equatorial Guineas of the world. But they represent dictatorship’s past. They make little to no effort to appear to be anything other than what they are. They have been reduced to remote outposts while other regimes have learned to evolve, change, and, in some cases, thrive. No one wants to be the next North Korea.

  Totalitarianism proved to be a distinctly twentieth-century phenomenon. It was the most ambitious undemocratic gamble ever made, and it performed poorly. Arguably, only North Korea clings to the totalitarian method, enabled in large part by its development of a nuclear weapons program and the late Kim Jong Il’s willingness to starve his own people. But modern dictators work in the more ambiguous spectrum that exists between democracy and authoritarianism. Most strive to win their people’s support by making them content, but failing that, they are happy to keep their critics off balance through fear and selective forms of intimidation. “My father used to say that he would rather live in a dictatorship like Cuba,” Alvaro Partidas, a Venezuelan activist, told me. “At least there you knew if you criticized the government, they would put you in prison. Here they rule through uncertainty.”

  From a distance, many of the world’s leading authoritarians look almost democratic. Their constitutions will often provide for a division of powers among the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary. There may be important differences among them: some have one legislative house instead of two, some offices are appointed rather than elected, different bodies have varying degrees of oversight. But many of the institutional features of authoritarian states—at least on paper—have close analogues to some of the most boring, humdrum European democracies.

  Take, for example, Russia. Even as Vladimir Putin became increasingly authoritarian, he never did violence to the Russian constitution; he worked in the seams of Russia’s political system, centralizing power through channels that could at least appear to be democratic. Thus, critics could complain that the Kremlin’s requirement of minimum voting thresholds to win election to the parliament—each party must capture at least 7 percent of the vote—is a cynical ploy to block opposition candidates. Indeed, it was. But Putin could point to similar requirements in the electoral systems of democratic stalwarts like Poland, Germany, and the Czech Republic. Likewise, in Venezuela, Hugo Chávez has proposed replacing the direct elections of governors with presidential appointments for regional leaders. Again, it is a transparent attempt to centralize political power and eliminate opponents. And it is also a feature of some of the world’s most placid democracies, countries like the Baltic states of Estonia and Lithuania. The point is that on their own these revisions are not abuses of power. Many of the features of a modern authoritarian regime are individually not at odds with a healthy democracy. A discrete piece of a government’s mechanics can be highly ambiguous. After all, even aspects of American democracy—like the Electoral College and the Federal Reserve—are undemocratic. You must, instead, look at how a modern authoritarian political system works in practice. To do so, you must get up close.

  Few know better how dictatorships have remade themselves than Ludmilla Alexeeva. The eighty-four-year-old human rights defender is one of the last Russian dissidents who can trace her resistance to official Moscow to the late 1960s, to the early days of the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. Even now, frail and unable to walk far without assistance, she spearheads a movement to win Russians their right to freely assemble. On the morning I sat with her in her apartment in Moscow, the phone rang off the hook. (“Human rights defenders are in demand today,” she said, laughing. “We are very popular in our country.”) When she began as an activist, the risks were grave. A Soviet dissident needed to be “prepared to sacrifice himself or one day find himself in prison or in a mental clinic. Nowadays, the same person must face that he can either be made disabled or murdered.” Once the regime would have arrested someone, and he would never be heard from again. Now he has an accident or appears to be the victim of a random attack.

  Likewise, the Soviet citizen had few legal protections. That is not true of Russians today. “The Russian constitution guarantees the same set of freedoms and rights as any Western constitution,” says Alexeeva. “But actually only one right is really observed—the right to travel abroad, to leave.” The effect is that many people who might have opposed the regime simply left. Thus, while the dictatorship of the Soviet system required closed borders, the authoritarianism of Putin’s Russia aims to sustain itself with open borders and passports. The world may have changed, but the savviest dictators have not been sitting still. As fast as their world may have turned upside down, as fast as the old rules may no longer apply, so too did the most skilled regimes learn and adapt.

  At its root, a dictatorship’s most inviolable principle is the centralization of power. It is that principle—the control of the many by the few—that makes today’s authoritarian regimes increasingly anachronistic. In every venue of modern life, hierarchies are falling, institutions are flattening, and the individual is left empowered. The central tenets of dictatorship become more outmoded every day. Thus, in a world of unfettered information and open borders, authoritarian regimes are conscious, man-made projects that must be carefully built, polished, and reinforced. The task is less complicated for the pariah states that have chosen to fall into a defensive crouch and hold the world at bay. They may endure for years or decades, but it is hard to see how they are not imprisoned by the walls they build to protect themselves. More complex are the modern dictatorships that choose to interact and open themselves to the very pressures that have imperiled others. They seek to blend repression with regulation to gain the most from the global political system without jeopardizing their grip on power. There is a deliberate architecture to the modern authoritarian regime, and it requires constant repair and refurbishment. And not just because of abstract forces of modernity. Because, as dictators have become more nimble, so too have those who threaten to tear them down.