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GROUND REALITIES

Generals rising, nations falling

Syed Badrul Ahsan
NOW that General Abdel Fattah al Sisi has taken charge of Egypt as its president, you begin to wonder if you are not really going through a sense of dejA vu. After all, there was a time, from the 1960s through the 1980s, when military officers, sometimes plain soldiers, made it somewhat a fashion to seize their countries in the name of restoring law and order. In the event, they ended up being the problem rather than the solution to the crisis that had tempted them to seize office.
You could, of course, argue that General Sisi has been elected to the presidency. There is little question about that. Then again, observe the manner of his rise to power. As army chief and defence minister under President Mohammad Morsi, he felt little remorse in planning the coup that would result in the ouster of Egypt's only properly elected president. Morsi is in prison. And we are not quite sure how long Sisi will be in office. If you observe the history of post-1952 Egypt, you will not fail to note the long years an earlier generation of the country's military leadership spent mapping its political landscape. Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak allowed no room for democracy to take root. General Sisi has now speared democracy and risen to power in brutal fashion.
There have been all the moments when army officers have without embarrassment turned against their political leaders and pushed their countries down the road to disaster. Augusto Pinochet, elevated to the position of Chile's army chief by President Salvador Allende in 1973, only weeks later led the bloody coup that left the president and thousands of Chileans dead. He presided over a reign of terror that would notend till 1990. Chile yet bears the scars inflicted on it in those dark times.
There is the unforgettable tale of Indonesia, where six generals were murdered in what was given out, in 1965, as an abortive coup d'etat by the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI), the Indonesian communist party. It was left to a seventh, surviving general, Suharto, to use the tragedy as an excuse to push President Sukarno from power, have the respected PKI leader DN Aidit and at least a million Indonesians, on suspicion of their being communists, killed between 1965 and 1967. Suharto turned out to be not only a ruthless dictator over the next three decades but also a foremost kleptocrat, along with his family. His comeuppance came when a popular revolt pushed him from power. Indonesians have since then remained busy trying to find peace for themselves.
There is a strange malady among some soldiers. They honestly believe theirs is a God-given right to sort out the mess politicians sometimes make in a country. Of course, there are politicians who do upset things, which sometimes and justifiably has the army coming in. Had the Bangladesh army not stepped into the political arena in
January 2007, the lajuddin caretaker administration would have caused bigger disaster than it already had in the country. But observe the earlier instances of military involvement in Bangladesh's politics. General Ziaur Rahman felt little compunction in pulling Bangladesh away from the principles around which it had waged a War of Liberation against Pakistan. And General Ershad simply wished to Islamise the state, to our collective horror. Both these men have left politics deeply wounded. Zia would not tell Bangabandhu's government of the coup being planned against it. And Ershad had only one desire: to push the elected President Sattar from office.
The record of generals taking charge has never been a clean one. Justice M.R. Kayani spoke for a whole lot of people when, soon after General Ayub Khan's overthrow of civilian government in Pakistan in 1958, he praised the Pakistan army tongue-in-cheek. For the first time in history, said he, the Pakistan army had done a most remarkable thing: it had occupied its own country. And the army was to occupy the country three more times. Incredibly, it would turn into a band of murderers in 1971 through putting three million Bengalis to death. Incredibly, again, 93,000 thousand soldiers of this army, which prided itself on being the world's best fighting force, would surrender to the Bengalis and the Indians and spend three years in prisoner of war camps.
Now you have General Prayuth Chan-ocha in Thailand. At a time when the country was on a democratic course, he and his soldiers should have stayed loyal to the Yingluck Shinawatra government when a rowdy opposition called for its departure. Every army owes it to itself to defend the elected government of its country. Prayuth did not do that. He simply took over, proscribed a few media organisations and imposed censorship on news. When even Myanmar is gradually opening its windows to the world, Thailand has rudely been pulled back into the past. Memories of men like Field Marshal Thanom Kittikachorn have not yet faded away. Prayuth joins that club of unprincipled men.
The damage that military rule does can be fathomed through the experience Nigerians have gone through. Civilian government was laid low in 1966 and men like Aguiyi Ironsi, Yakubu Gowon, Ibrahim Babangida and Sani Abacha were systematically to reduce an oil-rich country into an impoverished society dependent on foreign largesse. Nigeria is today a sad country, with villains of various sorts prowling around.
You read of the dictators of the past—in Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia; in Ghana, Algeria, Sierra Leone; in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Indonesia. You read of the ruins they made of their countries. And now read of the democracies of Singapore, Malaysia and the Phillipines; of India and Sri Lanka; of Peru and Mexico. There are the wounded civilisations on the one hand. And there is the vibrancy of life and ideas on the other.
Which is why Abdel Fattah al Sisi's emergence in Egypt is reason for worry.
The writer is Executive Editor, The Daily Star.
E-mail: ahsan.syedbadrul@gmail.com