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Politics
Home›African Arguments›Politics›Exceptional Circumstances and Coups d'Etat

Exceptional Circumstances and Coups d'Etat

By Mike McGovern
February 3, 2009
2216
3

mmcgovernI live in a West African city where dark wraparound sunglasses have become very expensive, if you can find them at all. That is because young men are copying the major style statement of their new head of state. His first act upon taking power in a coup d’état was to suspend the republican institutions (National Assembly, Supreme Court, the standing ministries) and to ban all political party, trade union and spontaneous political activities. Still, he was introduced from the second day of the junta’s existence as ‘Le Président de la République‘.

The coup followed the long-awaited death of the president, who had ruled, disastrously, for 24 years. Although in the last three years of his life he was said to drift in and out of diabetic comas, he was unwilling either to quit power or to delegate it. Although pillage of the state’s patrimony began in the 1990’s, it became vertiginous in the last years of the former president’s life, when no one was minding the shop. About four years ago, the Central Bank was reportedly emptied of all its foreign currency reserves. Since the national currency has little value in any other country, government officials were forced to go to the market to buy dollars and Euros from the money changers. Two of those accused of stealing from the Central Bank were arrested, but while they awaited trial, the former president arrived and demanded that his two close friends be released at once. The next day, the president announced, ‘I am the government, I am justice’ in this country. This event sparked a 19-day general strike that shut down both formal and informal sectors. About two weeks into the strike, a protest march was met by soldiers who opened fire into the unarmed crowd killing 120 and wounding over 1,000. Security forces killed another 60 to 70 civilians in the weeks after, using a ‘state of siege’ as license for rape, armed robbery, and looting.

In this situation of near-total collapse of the state, many (though not all) welcomed the military takeover. As I talked with people, they often identified several reasons why they supported the coup, if only as the lesser evil. First, it was bloodless. Everyone here recognizes that deepening impoverishment, recent wars in neighboring countries, and ethnic polarization caused by the former president’s divide and rule strategies had rendered the country exceptionally fragile. Second, they are happy that it was a lower ranks coup, which ushered in a new generation of younger officers, and hopefully some younger civilians, too. Thirdly, they are pleased that the younger generation, though ascendant, has treated their elders with respect, forgoing such iconoclastic gestures as taking central figures from the last regime out to the beach and shooting them, as putschistes of a previous generation did.

These are, however, short-term calculations. Trade unionists, NGO heads and other ‘civil society’ leaders quickly squandered both legitimacy and leverage by welcoming the putschistes and acting as their advocates to skeptical donors, diplomats, and the diaspora population. In a country that has known only two authoritarian leaders in 50 years of independence, this is not surprising: civil society has never had the opportunity to exercise its role as a contre-pouvoir, no matter how many USAID-funded seminars its members have attended. In retrospect, even the cataclysmic general strike and demonstrations of two years ago now appear as if they took place as much in spite of as because of civil society leadership. Contributing to this structural issue is the fact that the intelligentsia of the country remains convinced that its history is sui generis, and that the various international bodies that have condemned the coup have done so largely out of a failure to appreciate the local particularities of the situation.

In this situation absolutely everyone shares two points of orientation. First, everyone (local and expatriate) agrees that the state has been utterly run into the ground, that the judicial and legislative systems are deeply dysfunctional, and that grand theft and mismanagement have left the country’s political economy in shambles. Second, everyone agrees that large-scale violence in some form (popular uprisings, civil war, counter coup) is a real risk, and that all must be done to avoid this. The unanimity ends here, however. Is the best way out of a situation of illegality an attempt to use the moment of rupture to begin the first small steps back towards legality, or is it the time to ‘take the plunge’ into full illegality, making a dramatic break with the past, and giving a (hopefully) benign dictator exceptional powers to make exceptional (and rapid) reforms? Is the avoidance of violence at all costs in the short term setting up a situation that is more likely to devolve into violence in the medium to long term?

I write this entry to pose several questions, rather than try to answer them: How can we take into account the particularities of a country and also the predictability of experiences from other countries in roughly comparable situations? How can we take seriously local actors’ just concerns with short-term considerations while underlining the medium-to-long term risks being built into the situation by present compromises? How should donors navigate between the Scylla of pulling the plug on all economic assistance and risking economic and social implosion, and the Charybdis of pumping just enough money into the system so that it continues to limp along, forestalling the advent of real change? Lastly, while everyone agrees that violence is to be avoided if at all possible, is it realistic to hope for real structural transformation without violence? It was not so long ago that many intellectuals and activists accepted that such transformations required a degree of violent upheaval. Are we sufficiently self-aware of the ways in which our epistemic stance has shifted so as to preclude violence as a legitimate means of political change?

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3 comments

  1. Alex de Waal 3 February, 2009 at 11:04

    The late Ato Kifle Wodajo, eminent Ethiopian diplomat, cautioned the African Union against adopting the clause in its Constitutive Act which outlaws unconstitutional changes in government. While he enthusiastically endorsed the sentiment behind the prohibition, he advised that there might be circumstances in which it would be a mistake, for example a popular uprising, which “illegally” brought down an authoritarian regime with constitutional authority, or even in some instances a military coup. Sometimes, enthusiasm for a general principle can be taken a step too far.

  2. Deborah Rohde 25 February, 2009 at 12:06

    Does the end justify the means?  It is a sad situation when the choices require loss of freedom, violence, or both.  Isn’t there a third option, involving compromise, nonviolent dissent and moral, ethical decisions?

  3. Mike McGovern 27 February, 2009 at 04:40

    I think the ends do not justify the means.  Moreover, I tried to suggest that in the Guinean case, the ends and means might be mismatched in such a way that even the major compromises made in terms of ‘loss of freedom, violence, or both’ might still fail to achieve their intended aims.  That the situation in Guinea at the end of the Conte era was a ‘sad’ one is not news to Guineans, and left most people in Guinea with a straightforward answer to your final question:  No. 

    I still happen to disagree with the near-unanimous view (amongst both Guineans and the international donors and diplomats resident there) that the constitutional succession was untenable.  However, I don’t take that position on the basis of an assumption that people (including the President of the National Assembly, who should have assumed the interim president role) would have negotiated in good faith and with the best interests of the country in mind.  My assumption would be just the opposite.  Rather than argue for a constitutional succession on principled grounds, I would have argued for it on tactical ones, since the President of the National Assembly was deeply disliked, mistrusted, and weak.  Given that, he would have had to have negotiated with all the actors on the political scene. 

    By contrast, the soldiers have named most of the (putatively civilian) government, are doing a good job of mobilising populist politics, and have inherited a sycophantic state media apparatus.  They also hold the weapons in case things turn sour.  Although things are going reasonably well so far, there is one stark difference between them and a constitutional successor:  They are under no compulsion to negotiate with any Guinean actors.  To the extent that they do so, it is under conditions of their own choosing, and within limits they alone determine.  These are exactly the conditions under which the last Guinean military government (hailed in their day, too, as saviours) consolidated their power 25 years ago.

    This discussion is, however, largely academic, as many of these decisions/positions have been taken.  Looking forward, it seems clear to me that most Guinean actors have bargained away whatever leverage they may have had.  In that scenario, international actors are left with a very delicate role to play–do they ‘go over the heads’ of Guinean civil society, religious leaders and even opposition party leaders, who have welcomed the coup, and if so, who are their local allies and interlocutors?  In this regard, I disagree with Alex, inasmuch as the legalistic requirement that ‘forces’ the AU, EU, ECOWAS to condemn the coup both provides one of the few points of leverage in the current Guinean situation and allows those international actors to portray their positions as having been taken somewhat in spite of themselves.  The element of flexibility that results from this ambiguity may prove to be very important in the medium term if key Guinean actors should have  change of heart.

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