Idi Amin was responsible for the deaths of probably 300,000 Ugandans. The cream of society – academics, lawyers, clerics, doctors, scientists – were murdered, along with countless common people. During eight years in power, he destroyed a thriving economy, so much so that it took over thirty years for GDP to return to where it had been when he took power. ‘He will never be rehabilitated’, writes the Africanist Richard Dowden, ‘but to this day when you mention his name many Ugandans laugh rather than weep.’1
Amin often provoked laughter. On the occasion of the Silver Jubilee in 1977, he asked Queen Elizabeth for some of her twenty-five-year-old underwear. When informed that the British economy was in crisis, he launched a ‘Save the British Fund’ which raised 43,000 East African shillings, not to mention tons of bananas, coffee and vegetables. A lover of Scottish pipe music, he once offered to lead the Scots in a war of independence. In 1971, in an attempt to mend fences with Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere, he confessed: ‘I love you very much and if you had been a woman I would have considered marrying you . . . But as you are a man that possibility does not arise.’2
In truth, Amin was as funny as a laughing hyena. He used humour to disarm opponents, intentionally cultivating the image of a buffoon and taking advantage of those who fell for it. Many saw him as a not-very-noble savage, the perfect embodiment of every white assumption of what a black man should be. As Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, who grew up in Uganda, wrote, Amin ‘is the monster that has long dwelt in the Western imagination – very black, colossal, sexually insatiable, brutal, easily aroused to fury and intemperate acts yet gullible like a child, covetous, power crazy, cannibalistic, corrupt and so on . . . Some white people felt oddly comforted by this archetype who so fitted what they thought they knew about black men; they were sure they could control and manage such beasts.’3
Amin’s father was a poor Kakwa peasant from the north of Uganda, his mother a witch doctor – a fact which might explain the significance her son assigned to dreams and omens. He received some schooling at the local mission, though probably not much, given that he was essentially illiterate. What he lacked in brainpower, he made up in physicality: he was six feet, four inches tall, weighed 300 pounds, was immensely strong, ruggedly handsome, and possessed a 200-watt smile. He was also a superb athlete – his prowess at boxing, rugby and running delighted his sports-mad colonial masters.
Soldiering offered the best escape from rural poverty, and also the opportunity to use his physique to good advantage. In expeditions against marauders in northern Uganda, Amin impressed his British officers with bravery and brute strength. His rise was consequently rapid; in 1959 he was one of the first Ugandans promoted to ‘effendi’, a non-commissioned rank reserved for native soldiers who possessed leadership potential. Three years later, as a lieutenant posted to the Northern Frontier of Kenya, his barbarism surfaced. A minor cattle rustling problem was used as excuse for slaughter – villagers were tortured, beaten to death and buried alive. By this stage, however, Ugandan decolonization was too far advanced for the British to court-martial a black lieutenant they had singled out for stardom. The incident was quietly buried, except by Amin, who incorporated it into his personal folklore.
Amin seemed symbolic of the new, independent Uganda – unrefined, immensely strong and hugely optimistic. His star rose when he came under the wing of Prime Minister Milton Obote, who, like others, assumed that this simple soldier could easily be controlled. The two were made for each other. Both were crooks, fully prepared to fleece their country. Over the next seven years, they found plenty of opportunity for thievery and for consolidating their respective power. Obote had in mind a classic autocracy, unfettered by parliamentary procedure. That meant that he needed the brute force Amin could provide. Amin was generously rewarded, eventually gaining complete control of the military and police. As he gained power, however, the acolyte turned on his master. A regular sequence of assassination attempts, though never conclusively linked to Amin, had his fingerprints everywhere. By the end of 1970, Obote was searching for a way to rid himself of his troublesome general.
In January 1971, Obote made the mistake of leaving the country in order to attend a Commonwealth summit. Before leaving, he challenged Amin to account for huge sums missing from the defence budget. Amin, sensing a ‘now or never’ moment, had his soldiers occupy key points in Kampala. Obote, told that he would not be allowed to return to Uganda, denounced Amin as ‘the greatest brute an African mother has ever brought to life’.4
Amin cast himself as a reluctant coupmaster, an unselfish patriot interested only in saving Uganda. He was, he claimed, a simple soldier without political ambition. Judging by the raucous celebrations, most Ugandans believed him. ‘Amin told us many times’, Henry Kyemba, a former aide, recalled, ‘that the traditional political life of Uganda would reassert itself, that elections would be held, that the civil service would not be interfered with, that the country would soon get back on an even keel. Because Obote had been so unpopular, Amin was acclaimed as a hero.’ He was the perfect populist – a giant of a man with an incandescent smile who walked through crowds without bodyguards, telling jokes, kissing babies, slapping backs. ‘The first time I saw Idi Amin was when . . . he leapt on to a platform in my local town to address the people,’ Dowden recalls. ‘“I am one of you, I know you, we are going to make life better” [he shouted] . . . I was swept along by Amin’s ebullient enthusiasm, joining the crowd to shout a huge “O ye” in answer to his . . . If he had offered me a job at that moment . . .’ That scene was repeated in village after village, where all were implored to work for Uganda. Asians, who numbered more than 50,000, were told that they would always be welcome, though they were politely encouraged ‘to socialise and co-operate with your brother Africans. Marriages can unite Ugandans together.’5
Intrigued by developments, Donald Slater, the British high commissioner in Kampala, found that Colonel Baruch Bar-Lev, the Israeli defence attaché, had helped engineer the coup. Bar-Lev informed Slater that ‘all potential foci of resistance, both up-country and in Kampala, ha[s] been eliminated’. Being intimately familiar with the violent nature of Ugandan politics, Slater understood precisely what that meant. He explained to the Foreign Office that Israeli interest in Uganda arose from a desire to make life difficult for Sudan, as payback for supporting Egypt in the Six Day War. Amin had earlier cooperated with the Israelis by funnelling arms to Anya-Nya rebels in Sudan, much to Obote’s dismay. As Slater explained: ‘[The Israelis] do not want the rebels to win. They want to keep them fighting.’ Amin was not particularly interested in Sudanese politics; he simply wanted the perks that friendship with Israel could bring. It’s no coincidence, then, that his first state visit as Ugandan leader was a shopping trip to Tel-Aviv. That visit gave the Israelis their first real glimpse of the friend they had bought. Shocked by Amin’s greed, Golda Meir refused to give him everything he demanded, but did transfer some tanks, an assortment of small arms and a personal jet.6
The British, who had come to despise Obote, celebrated Amin’s arrival. The Daily Telegraph, always appreciative of obedient Africans, called him ‘a welcome contrast to other African leaders and a staunch friend of Britain’. Echoing that sentiment, a Foreign Office memo proclaimed: ‘General Amin has certainly removed from the African scene one of our most implacable enemies in matters affecting Southern Africa.’ It seemed politic to ‘take prompt advantage’ of this fortuitous development. ‘Amin needs our help.’ To that end, Slater was instructed ‘to get as close to Amin as you can and see whether you can . . . feed a certain amount of advice’.7
Slater, burdened by a swollen conscience, counselled circumspection. That brought a mild rebuke from the foreign minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home, who reminded Slater that ‘The PM will be watching this and will, I am sure, want us to take quick advantage of any opportunity of selling arms. Don’t overdo the caution.’ In early April a Foreign Office minister, Lord Boyd, travelled to Kampala and reported that Amin wanted a signed portrait of the Queen and a state visit to Britain as soon as possible. The FO could hardly contain its delight.8
Slater eventually warmed to the man. ‘He has earned a great deal of popularity by mixing freely, driving his own jeep, ignoring security precautions,’ one report contended. ‘I believe him sincere in his wish to hold elections.’ Despite rumours of ethnic massacres, assassinations and kidnappings, Amin was invited to London. The highlight of the trip came when he got to ride with the Queen in an open carriage, and dine at Buckingham Palace. After inspecting military bases, he asked for armoured cars and aircraft – preferably the new Harrier jump jet. Much to the dismay of the Ministry of Defence, the Foreign Office was in favour of selling Amin everything he wanted. The reasoning went: if the British did not do so, some other country would.9
Meanwhile, the true nature of Amin’s statecraft was emerging. He had almost no understanding of government, but was intimately familiar with the military. The mysterious was therefore transformed into the familiar – Uganda became a military state, right down to renaming Government House ‘the Command Post’. Soldiers were installed as political advisers and military tribunals replaced civil courts. Veteran civil servants were told that henceforth they would be subject to military discipline. The government, recalled Moses Ali, a former aide, became dominated by ‘illiterates and sycophants . . . They could not even read maps, they excelled in praising him, they were no better than Amin himself.’ Out in the hinterlands, local government was divested to army commanders who established individual fiefdoms streamlined for terror and larceny.10
‘The second day Amin was in power, people started dying,’ a former aide revealed. ‘He . . . is a man of death, and this satisfies him. “I am power” I have heard him say . . . The important thing to him is to survive – and thus to eliminate all opposition. To kill a wife, to kill a son – it doesn’t concern him.’ Removing opposition was a huge task, since enemies were everywhere. Amin established the Public Safety Unit and the State Research Bureau, overlapping agencies specializing in espionage and terror. A facility for interrogation, torture and execution was established at Nakasero, where inmates were given hammers or clubs and ordered to bludgeon one another to death. Some had nails hammered in their skulls. At Mugire Prison in Kampala, execution was swift but brutal. ‘You would hear a short cry and then sudden silence,’ a former prisoner described. ‘I think they were being strangled and then had their heads smashed. Next day the floors of . . . the elimination chambers . . . were littered with loose eyes and teeth.’11
An indication of Amin’s power came shortly after the coup when an explosion at Makindye Prison killed thirty-two army officers, most of them from the Acholi and Langi tribes loyal to Obote. Around two-thirds of the army, or about 6,000 soldiers, were executed during his first year in power. The decimation of officer ranks opened the way for rapid promotion. Corporals become colonels virtually overnight. Amin’s air force commander, Smuts Guweddeko, was plucked from a telephone exchange, while his chief henchman, Major Malyamungu, had previously been a night watchman.
Loyalty was a commodity subject to steep inflation. A huge proportion of the Ugandan national income went toward buying the allegiance of soldiers. A regular ‘whisky run’ would leave Entebbe airport and fly to Stansted, where planes would be loaded with booze, electrical goods, jewellery and perfume for distribution to officers and troops. All this booty bankrupted Uganda. When money ran short, Amin ordered more to be printed.
By 1972, the once charming smile looked menacing. Amin remained popular by appealing to base emotions – xenophobia, paranoia and greed. Ugandans were encouraged to turn against the Asians among them, who became ‘parasites’. Most Asians were third- or fourth-generation émigrés, whose ancestors had been brought to Uganda by the British to provide an entrepreneurial class. In September 1972, Amin, acting upon an order from God communicated in a dream, ordered them out. They were allowed to take only what they could carry. Ordinary Ugandans, told that Asian wealth would be redistributed, welcomed the expulsion. In truth, however, there was hardly anything left after the army swept it up like locusts. Amin failed to realize that Asian businesses were the bedrock of the Ugandan economy. Since these businesses could not run themselves, they quickly disappeared. Construction ground to a halt, shops closed and factories went quiet.
The Ugandan growth rate, which had been rising at a yearly average of 4.6 per cent before Amin took power, went into freefall, hitting –11.9 per cent in 1980. During the first five years of Amin’s rule, sugar production declined by 83 per cent, tobacco by 28 per cent and coffee by 22 per cent. A great deal of produce went unsold, since transport was perpetually in chaos. By 1977, only one in twenty trucks registered in Uganda actually worked. ‘They can still grow export crops’, a UN agronomist remarked, ‘but uncertain delivery dates and past failure to live up to contracts have turned buyers off.’ Foreign investment evaporated as financiers deserted a country that no longer worked. Amin had come to power promising to make all Ugandans rich, yet during his reign basic commodities like sugar, salt, cooking oil and soap were affordable only to those able to pay extortionate black market prices. Smuggling was the sole sector of the economy in growth. That said, black market traders took huge risks. The standard punishment for holding contraband salt was to force the culprit to eat his entire stock. Even animals suffered – elephants were poached for ivory, hippos shot for meat. Crocodiles, on the other hand, fared well, feasting on a steady supply of corpses dumped in the Nile.12
Terror, too, was a growth area. With little system, but great energy, Amin slaughtered the cream of Ugandan society – doctors, engineers, poets, artists, teachers, judges and journalists – and took enormous pleasure in doing so. A former aide described the state of fear: ‘You are walking, and any creature making a step on the dry grass behind you might be an Amin man. Whenever you hear a car speeding down the street, you think it might suddenly come to a stop – for you. I finally fled, not because I was in trouble or because of anything I did, but out of sheer fear. People disappear. When they disappear, it means they are dead.’ Omnipresent lawlessness gave petty criminals freedom to rape, steal and murder at will. While a massacre of the peasantry was never Amin’s aim, he created the conditions for it to happen.13
Bodies floating in the Nile provided demonstration of Amin’s capricious power. As a method of control, fear proved as effective as violence itself. Amin took delight in announcing disappearances on the radio before the individual in question was actually grabbed. In 1977, after the Church of Uganda complained about army behaviour, Amin targeted the much-respected Archbishop Janan Luwum. Ugandans were told that Luwum had died in an auto accident, when in fact he had been shot, almost certainly by Amin himself. The clumsiness of the cover-up was probably intentional – Amin was sending a message that those with absolute power did not need to construct a good story. Equally contemptuous was the murder of High Court Judge Benedicto Kiwanuka, who was bundled from his courtroom moments before a trial was to begin. Thugs dragged him to a car, removed his shoes, and stuffed him in the trunk. The shoes were then neatly placed on the pavement as a symbolic assertion of Amin’s ability to make people disappear.
The outside world was slow to react, perhaps because most Westerners expected Africans to behave this way, and because they still found it difficult to take Amin seriously. He was a sick joke; tales of his perversity were eagerly traded. Stories that he kept the heads of his victims in his freezer and occasionally ate his enemies fed a macabre appetite for horror. Myth eventually smothered the man; bizarre tales obstructed comprehension that Amin was a real person who carried out real murders. Refuge was sought in simple explanations: it was widely believed that Amin was suffering from advanced syphilitic insanity or that he consumed several bottles of whisky a day. Both explanations promised a quick demise, without need of intervention.
Foreign opposition nevertheless mounted. Human rights activists pushed for a ban on Ugandan coffee, apparently unaware that, thanks to Amin, very little coffee was being produced. The criticism caused Amin to turn against his former friends. The expulsion of Asians was a calculated act of malice toward the British – an attempt to flood the UK with refugees. British stock fell further when they refused to provide the arms Amin demanded. In 1975, he threatened to execute Denis Hills, a British resident in Uganda who had called him a ‘village tyrant’. The death sentence was lifted only after the foreign secretary, James Callaghan, went to Kampala and made a humiliating plea for mercy. After that victory, Amin added a Victoria Cross to a tunic already crowded with decorations. He became ‘His Excellency President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea, and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular’.
In 1972, the United States cut off aid. In a memo to the State Department, the American ambassador Thomas Melady described the Ugandan regime as ‘racist, erratic and unpredictable, brutal, inept, bellicose, irrational, ridiculous, and militaristic’, not to mention ‘xenophobic’. Reacting to American disdain, Amin made overtures to the Soviets and began threatening the few remaining US citizens in Uganda. The national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, suggested breaking off diplomatic relations, but Secretary of State William Rogers warned that this might make matters worse. Ties had to be maintained, he argued, because Amin ‘is crazy and we have to recognize it’. The Americans did eventually close their embassy, but then watched helplessly as Amin drew closer to the Arabs. When a plane carrying 112 American Peace Corps volunteers stopped at Entebbe airport on its way to Zaire, Amin had the group detained on suspicion of mercenary activity. They were eventually released, but a point had been made.14
Playing the Americans like a puppeteer, Amin then announced that he was no longer interested in Soviet aid. ‘They wanted me to become a socialist in return for two squadrons of MIGs, but I refused.’ Taking the bait, some State Department officials pressed for a resumption of relations, arguing that Amin was likely to be around for a long time. The election of Jimmy Carter, however, brought rapprochement to an abrupt halt. Uganda seemed a good test case for Carter’s human rights principles. In one of his first foreign policy pronouncements, the president proclaimed that the Amin regime ‘disgusted the entire civilised world’ and called upon the UN to ‘go into Uganda to assess the horrible murders that apparently are taking place’. Amin responded by announcing the detainment of 200 Americans still resident in Uganda. When reporters asked Paul Chepkwurui, the Ugandan chargé d’affaires, the reason for the detainment, he replied: ‘There are some bad people in Uganda, and maybe if some of these missionaries tried to leave on their own, they might be harassed or something.’ Once again, Big Daddy had made fools of those who thought they could control him. ‘He always acts the same way,’ a Ugandan exile remarked. ‘He threatens a group of foreigners, and then he says everything is O.K. Then he threatens them again, and then he says everything is O.K. The foreign government dances back and forth – and everyone forgets about the thousands of Ugandans who are dying.’15
After peace was restored to Sudan in 1972, Israel lost interest in Uganda. When their benificence dried up, so too did their welcome. Some 500 Israeli advisers were sent packing, and Amin suddenly started shouting about Zionist conspiracy. He shifted from pro-Israeli to pro-Arab overnight, in the process rediscovering an Islamic heritage and developing an enthusiasm for building mosques. Muammar Gaddafi of Libya became his new best friend. Meanwhile, Amin sent a telegram to UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim, praising Hitler and the German people who ‘knew that the Israelis are not people who are working in the interest of the people of the world, and that is why they burnt the Israelis alive with gas’. On 27 June 1976, terrorists from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, in conjuction with the Baader–Meinhof gang, hijacked an Air France flight from Tel Aviv and landed at Entebbe, with Amin’s permission. Almost all of the non-Jewish passengers were released, leaving about 100 hostages, who were offered in exchange for 50 Palestinian prisoners, most of whom were held in Israel. In the midst of the crisis, seventy-five-year-old Dora Bloch was taken to a Ugandan hospital for emergency medical treatment. On 4 July, Israeli commandos staged a daring rescue, freeing the hostages. Three were killed, along with one Israeli soldier, all of the hijackers and forty-five Ugandan soldiers. On hearing of the raid, Amin took out his rage on Bloch. She was dragged from her hospital bed and beaten to death.16
By the end of the decade, Amin gradually ran out of things to destroy. In 1979, he threw his corpulent army across the border into Tanzania, as part of a long-running attempt to humiliate Nyerere. On this occasion, most of his soldiers were too drunk to fight, or too distracted by pillage. When Nyerere counter-attacked with his much more disciplined force, Ugandan resistance melted. Before long, Tanzanian tanks, backed by disgruntled Ugandan exiles, were entering Kampala, cheered on by locals. Gaddafi briefly offered help, but then wisely backed away. The coup had a foreign cast, but in truth Amin was brought down by the lunacy of his own febrile ambition.
Amin, along with four wives and more than thirty children, escaped Kampala just as Tanzanian forces were circling the city. He went first to Tripoli, then to Saudi Arabia, where he was offered asylum on the condition that he keep quiet. Under the circumstances, that was an onerous condition – silence never suited Amin.
The BBC correspondent Brian Barron followed the Tanzanian tanks into Kampala. ‘We . . . immediately went to the headquarters of his secret police, the State Research Bureau . . . We stumbled down the stairs of the empty building into a charnel house. The floor was awash with blood, the bodies of the SRB’s last victims lying in the darkness in their concrete dungeons.’ The carnage, it seemed, was over. Back came Obote, who killed more Ugandans than the inefficient Amin ever managed. The thievery also continued, which meant that Uganda’s economic devastation only worsened. But because Obote killed quietly, most people forgot about Uganda.17
Ferdinand Marcos was a brilliant lawyer, military hero and gifted politician who rose from humble beginnings to become president of the Philippines. Actually, none of that is true, except for the part about being president. The rest is fabrication, a carefully constructed screen behind which a ruthless thief hid.
During the Second World War, Marcos served in the Battle of Bataan, an experience mined for heroic tales. Numerous decorations for valour, including the Congressional Medal of Honor, were claimed, almost all without substance. In 1949, his fabricated war record proved useful in gaining a seat in the Philippines House of Representatives. Ten years later, a further inflated record helped in his successful Senate race. In the meantime, he married the former beauty queen Imelda Romualdez, history’s most famous lover of shoes, and a liar in his same galaxy. Since the Romualdez clan was one of the most powerful in the Philippines, she was the perfect complement to the ambitious Marcos.
Ever since the Spanish–American War, the United States had governed the Philippines with tolerant suzerainty, leaving day-today administration to a cabal of rich Filipino landowners whose perfidy was ignored as long as they protected American interests. That arrangement continued after the Second World War when America morphed from colonial to neocolonial power. Because Marcos was closely connected to the network of families with whom Americans did business, he was perfectly situated to benefit from the relationship. He was a devout believer in democracy and capitalism – or, to be precise, the theory of the former and the reality of the latter. That proved enough for the Americans, who needed a reliable ally during the Cold War. His thievery was ignored. ‘Marcos . . . has always been corrupt by American standards,’ the American ambassador admitted. ‘But by Filipino standards he is no better or no worse than other Filipino politicians.’18
In 1964, Marcos ran for president. A consummate marketer, he paid the journalist Hartzell Spence to produce a biography that further embroidered already fabricated tales of heroism. Spence’s For Every Tear a Victory turned the Bataan experience into a comic book adventure. The CIA, recognizing Marcos’s value, vouched for his lies. American newspapers obediently printed whole sections of the book verbatim, thus enhancing his credibility. For years, a US army investigation exposing the ‘criminal’ fabrications in the Marcos story was quarantined by dark forces in Washington.19
With American help, and his own immense wealth, Marcos won the election by 670,000 votes. To ordinary Filipinos, he was their John Kennedy, a handsome man of youthful vigour who promised new frontiers and seemed genuinely interested in helping the poor. Ambitious public works schemes during his first term confirmed that impression. What Filipinos did not see, however, were the bribes and kickbacks which allowed Marcos to grow richer as he grew more popular. Those projects also camouflaged his failure to act upon his main campaign promise – land reform. He was not about to alienate his wealthy partners in crime.
Lyndon Johnson, keen for Philippine support in the Vietnam War, was generous with aid. Marcos played Johnson liked a fiddle, expressing warm support for American efforts in Indochina, but never providing real help. The US nevertheless took solace in the knowledge that the Philippines remained stable. As for the corruption, Americans were fatalistic. ‘Marcos is a product of the political system . . . not the cause of that system,’ wrote Ambassador Henry Byroade. ‘The whole atmosphere has been one of public expectancy that anyone able to move through these ranks would capitalize financially on their positions – and anyone who did not would be considered naive indeed – if not down-right incapable.’20
Marcos’s performance during his first term would easily have been enough to win re-election, but, rather like Nixon, he wanted a landslide. To that end, he engineered the most corrupt election in Filipino history. Bribes were freely distributed and black propaganda liberally spread. His opponent, Sergio Osmeña, was accused of being a CIA stooge – an ironic charge given the help Marcos received from American friends. ‘We were helping him get re-elected,’ Paul Kattenburg, director of Philippine affairs at the State Department, later admitted. ‘How we specifically did it, whether we just put money in there, or whether we printed things or helped him stuff the boxes or God knows what, I just don’t know. But . . . the election was crooked as hell.’21
To bolster his campaign, Marcos commissioned a film of his wartime exploits. Rejecting a boring documentary, he demanded a Hollywood-style epic. Top of his wish list was a buxom American starlet to play his wartime lover. According to Byroade, Marcos’s biggest weakness was women – ‘he liked American blondes’. Those prepared to pimp for him were generously rewarded. ‘No . . . price is too high to pay . . . [in] satisfying the presidential genitals,’ his former aide Primitivo Mijares admitted. Procurers could expect ‘a fat governmental contract, an unsecured multi-million peso loan, or anything of [value]’. On this occasion, a crony was sent to Hollywood to find suitable candidates. He returned with two, Joyce Reese and Dovie Beams.22
Marcos chose Beams, whom he made his mistress, showering her with presents, holidays and bundles of money. In return, she occasionally took briefcases full of cash to foreign banks for deposit. On one of these trips, she bought a small tape recorder, supposedly for recording language lessons Marcos provided, in preparation for her role in the film. The lessons were frequently interrupted with spontaneous lovemaking and Beams sometimes ‘forgot’ to turn off the recorder. Before long, she had a large store of incriminating material. The sounds of lovemaking were scandalous enough, but even more inflammatory was presidential pillow talk, in which he openly discussed rigging the election. At one point, he revealed plans for manufacturing an internal communist threat so serious that it would allow him to declare martial law.
Money and violence were twin pillars of the Marcos campaign. Vigilante gangs terrorized Osmeña supporters and intimidated voters. On the island of Batanes, the heavily armed Suzuki boys murdered public officials and took over radio stations, telegraph offices and polling stations. Elsewhere, another group of thugs, ‘The Monkees’, received training in vote rigging and intimidation from the Special Constabulary. The military, assigned the task of collecting ballot boxes from outlying islands, were ordered to burn those from areas unsympathetic to Marcos and replace them with pre-stuffed boxes. In one precinct in southern Cebu, votes for Marcos outnumbered registered voters by 2,000.
Osmeña was ‘outspent, outshouted, and outgunned’, Eduardo Lachica of the Philippines Herald remarked. While Filipinos were accustomed to fraud, never before had they witnessed an election so lopsided. Marcos won by 1.7 million votes, gaining 74 per cent, and dominating congressional races. Osmeña rightly complained that ‘democracy was raped’. The margin of victory made it impossible for Marcos even to pretend that the election had been fair. Fraud on such a grand scale also proved enormously expensive. Marcos spent around $168 million, over five times the amount expended eight years earlier by all parties in the election. The money came not from his personal fortune, but from the Treasury. Whenever money ran dry, pesos were printed, causing skyrocketing inflation. By 1970 the country teetered on the verge of economic collapse, forcing Marcos to seek a $100 million loan from the US. After the IMF stepped in to stabilize the peso, the Philippines underwent a forced devaluation of 50 per cent, which devastated the 27 million citizens who made less than $200 a year.23
After the election, many Filipinos gave up on Marcos. He was now the unpopular president of a nation caught in a spiral of decline. His butchering of the economy caused crime rates to soar and civil unrest to spread. All this breathed life into the communist movement, which had been moribund prior to his arrival. Formally established in 1968, the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) was headquartered in Tarlac Province, north of Manila, where its military arm, the New People’s Army, conducted insurgency operations. Meanwhile, on Mindanao, the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), a Muslim separatist group, began a low level war of liberation.
As revelations of thievery and corruption emerged, public discontent grew and moves were made to impeach Marcos. He responded by promising to give away everything he owned. In fact, his wealth was ‘given’ to the Marcos Foundation, where it was sheltered from do-gooders. Amid tight security at his inauguration, Marcos assumed a new guise, that of humble penitent. ‘Our people have come to a point of despair,’ he solemnly admitted. ‘I know this for . . . I have heard the cries of thousands and clasped hands in brotherhood with millions of you. I know the face of despair and I know the face of hunger.’ The people, he claimed, had been betrayed. ‘Our government is gripped in the iron hand of venality, its treasury is barren, its resources are wasted, its civil service is slothful and indifferent, its armed forces demoralized and its councils sterile.’ He promised a crusade against corruption. ‘Our society must chastise the profligate rich who waste the nation’s substance . . . on personal comforts and luxuries.’24
Those not fooled by the charade took to the streets in protest. On 26 January, during ceremonies surrounding his State of the Nation address, Marcos listened in silent rage as Father Pacifico Ortiz drew attention to the ‘growing fears, the dying hopes, the perished longings and expectations of a people who had lost their political innocence’. Those people, Ortiz added, ‘know that salvation, political or economic, does not come from above, from any one man or party or foreign ally . . . salvation can only come from below – from the people themselves, firmly united . . . to stand for their rights whether at the polls, in the market place or at the barricades’. Four days later, in what was called the ‘Battle of Mendiola’, the discontented stormed the presidential palace, colliding head on with the new, American-trained Metrocom paramilitary security force. The worst political violence in Philippine history saw six student protesters gunned down and hundreds injured.25
Marcos meanwhile sought solace with Dovie. She assiduously recorded lovemaking sessions, afterwards posting the tapes to friends in the States. When Marcos announced that he was dissatisfied with the rough cuts of her film and might cancel it, she fled to Los Angeles vowing revenge. Seven months later she returned, telling anyone who would listen that Marcos was a philandering liar. Wind of the scandal reached the papers, where journalists, no longer inclined to cooperate in mythmaking, decided to publish the story, though always in hooded language. Imelda found out about the affair by reading her morning paper. ‘It had reached the point where even the angels in heaven were beginning to hold their noses,’ said her bodyguard.26
Fearing for her life, Dovie sought protection from the US Embassy. American officials, however, were disinclined to intervene, given their need to remain friendly with Marcos. Byroade offered her a bribe, funded by Imelda, in exchange for silence. Those negotiations broke down when she revealed the existence of the tapes. In desperation, she called a press conference, where one of the tapes was played. Thanks to an enterprising reporter, a pirate copy was slipped to student protesters, who played it from campus loudspeakers. Passers-by listened to their president begging Dovey for a blowjob.
The crisis spurred Imelda into action. In public, she covered for her husband, spreading rumours that Dovey was a CIA agent. Dovey was spirited out of the country, escorted by Delfin Cueto, the first lady’s favourite assassin. She, however, managed to give him the slip in Hong Kong and returned safely to the US. Marcos meanwhile poured scorn on Dovie’s allegations, claiming that she was psychologically disturbed. That prompted her to release more tapes, in addition to clippings of his pubic hair, originally offered as a token of his love.27
Imelda turned humiliation into opportunity. ‘It was the girls that did it,’ a former CIA agent reflected. ‘That gave Imelda her power, her hold over Marcos . . . It put her out of his control.’ She briefly toyed with running for president, but decided instead on monetary compensation. In order to ensure her continued support, he signed over a sizeable chunk of the nation’s wealth, including shares in gold mines and the newly built San Juanico Bridge. She was also made Governor of Metro Manila and Minister of Human Settlements, two fiefdoms useful for larceny. A one-time friend of the family reflected: ‘In the Philippines, a philandering husband has to pay for the rest of his life. Marcos just used our taxes.’28
Philippine law prevented a president from serving more than two terms. Marcos, however, was not about to allow the law to get in the way of his thievery. In 1972, by careful use of bribes and intimidation, he managed to get that ban nullified, thus allowing a third term. His re-election, however, was by no means certain, given the damage his reputation had suffered. Senator Benigno ‘Ninoy’ Aquino had capitalized on the public’s disgust by putting himself forward as the only man capable of cleaning up politics.
Since the possibilities for stealing the election were greatly reduced, Marcos decided that martial law offered more promise. This necessitated manufacturing an internal threat to justify the suspension of civil liberties. The rather meagre danger of communist revolution was therefore carefully magnified through bogus crises. One of these involved a fishing trawler, the Karagatan, which ran aground off Luzon, supposedly with 3,500 rifles, 80 rockets and 160,000 rounds of ammunition on board. The strength of the NPA was inflated to 1,000 men, a ten-fold increase on previous estimates. Marcos warned of the ‘imminent danger’ of communist revolution, and complained that Philippine society was ‘sick, so sick that it must . . . be cured now’. The CIA, though never inclined to underestimate a communist threat, on this occasion struggled to find evidence of one.29
The US realized that the crisis was manufactured, but was disinclined to protest. As early as 15 September 1971, Nixon advised Byroade that the US would back Marcos ‘to the hilt’ if he declared martial law. The president explained:
We would not support anyone who was trying to set himself up as a military dictator, but we would do everything we could to back a man who was trying to make the system work and to preserve order. Of course, we understood that Marcos would not be entirely motivated by national interests, but this was something which we had come to expect from Asian leaders. The important thing was to keep the Philippines from going down the tube, since we had a major interest in the success or the failure of the Philippine system. Whatever happens, the Philippines was our baby.
That message was reiterated in the summer of 1972, when the State Department officially confirmed that ‘in the event of serious insurgency problems the United States would [extend] support’. Marcos responded by assuring Nixon that American interests would not be imperilled and that opposition figures would be given an opportunity to leave the country.30
With all his actors on stage, Marcos felt confident for the performance to begin. On 22 September a number of bombs rocked the Philippines. Blame was laid at the feet of the NPA, even though no arrests were made. Later that evening, a motorcade carrying Defence Minister Juan Ponce Enrile was sprayed with gunfire, all the shots conveniently hitting the wrong car. (Enrile later admitted that the ambush had been staged.) Shortly after that incident, Marcos declared martial law. The NPA’s actions, he claimed, ‘have assumed the magnitude of an actual state of war’. He directed his armed forces to ‘prevent or suppress all forms of lawless violence as well as any act of insurrection or rebellion and to enforce obedience to all the laws and decrees, orders and regulations promulgated by me’.31
Troops took control of the media, communications facilities, universities, trade unions and opposition parties. Around 30,000 people were placed in concentration camps, including prominent politicians, journalists, student leaders and union officials. The process was carried out with surprisingly little outcry. For Aquino, this came as no surprise. ‘The people are now ready for leadership,’ he told a reporter. ‘They will accept a diminution of civil liberties . . . You can cut corners now.’ Byroade likewise noted that ‘A rather surprising number of people seem to be in the mood of letting Marcos go ahead and take over . . . This does not mean any great shift of popularity . . . Rather it is more a philosophical resignation to “Who else is there?”’ Rafael M. Salas, a former executive secretary, felt that events clearly demonstrated Marcos’s acute understanding of his country. ‘He knows the average Filipino . . . [He knows] to what degree [a Filipino] can be scared, what are the limits before he becomes violent. Within these limits, he will apply any sort of artifice.’32
Ever the lawyer, Marcos called his regime ‘constitutional authoritarianism’. He insisted it would be administered by civilians, not the military. ‘This is martial law as conceived by a constitution,’ he proudly boasted. ‘It is not the offensive type of martial law . . . Anything illegal would be anathema, contrary to everything we are fighting for.’ Within one year, he promised, order would be restored and democracy would return. Having been warned of imminent revolution, Filipinos breathed a sigh of relief when nothing of the sort materialized. Crime disappeared, mainly because journalists were prevented from reporting it. ‘There is calm and even rejoicing among the people now,’ Marcos claimed. On that subject, at least, he wasn’t lying.33
The Marcos kleptocracy would remain in power until 1986. His ‘inoffensive’ form of martial law resulted in 3,257 ‘extra-judicial’ deaths, 35,000 cases of torture and 70,000 political prisoners. In the mid-1980s, Imelda openly boasted that ‘we own practically everything in the Philippines’. Marcos eventually accumulated assets valued at between $5 billion and $10 billion, making him, in financial terms, the second most corrupt leader in history. The US cooperated fully. As one Senate report admitted, US policy was guided by the realization ‘that we need the Philippines more than they need us’. Marcos understood that need perfectly, and exploited it with ruthless efficiency.34
Like Idi Amin, Pol Pot had a lovely smile. Boyhood friends found him good company – quiet but fun. ‘He never said very much,’ one friend fondly recalled. ‘He just had that smile of his. He liked to joke, he had a slightly mischievous way about him.’ Others described him as an ‘adorable child’ who ‘wouldn’t hurt a chicken’. In the 1960s, when the child became a communist revolutionary, he adopted the alias ‘Pouk’, the Khmer word for ‘mattress’, because he was good at smoothing conflict. Only later, when skulls were stacked like cans on shelves, did the mattress become a bed of nails. Only then did the smile seem sinister.35
It is easy to blame the Cambodian killing fields on Pol Pot. The label ‘psychopath’ provides a reassuring way of imposing quarantine on evil. But that’s too simple. Pol Pot was definitely one of the most malevolent men in history, but he did not by himself fashion the barbarity.
Why, then, did a beautiful country of gentle people descend into utter madness? Perhaps because the image itself deceives. Cruelty and violence were endemic in Cambodian society long before Pol Pot. The educational system relied heavily on rote learning, producing a population overly respectful of authority and disinclined to introspection. The Khmer, unlike their Vietnamese and Chinese neighbours, were not heavily influenced by Confucianism, which holds that the errant individual can be reformed. They believed instead that enemies, being irredeemable, had to be eliminated. It was not uncommon for murder to be followed by a symbolic act of cannibalism – the liver cut out and eaten in order to underline the subjugation.
Cultural factors tending toward barbarity were magnified by external pressure peculiar to the 1970s. Cambodia, supposedly a neutral country, was in truth a slave nation ruthlessly exploited by the Chinese, the Americans and the Vietnamese. The Ho Chi Minh trail ran through Cambodia, thus allowing Vietnamese communists to smuggle arms southward through an area sheltered from American interdiction. Viet Cong units slipped into Cambodia whenever the tide of conflict shifted unfavourably. The port of Sihanoukville became an increasingly important conduit for VC supplies. Fearful of angering communists in his own country, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the Cambodian leader, did not resist these incursions. Though not technically at war, Cambodia was a battlefield.
Hanoi’s exploitation of Cambodia angered Pol Pot, leader of the Kampuchean Communist Party (KCP). On that foundation, he built a successful revolution. His rabid nationalism delighted the Chinese, who welcomed disunity among Indochinese communists, the better to limit their influence. The success of the KCP, particularly in the north-western provinces, disturbed Sihanouk’s carefully cultivated neutrality. Mistakenly assuming that Pol Pot was a puppet of Hanoi, Sihanouk courted the United States, a move that delighted Nixon. Before his inauguration, he had advised Kissinger that ‘a very definite change of policy toward Cambodia should be one of the first orders of business’. The president hoped that a freer hand in Cambodia would lead to success in Vietnam.36
Nixon’s friendship was expressed with bombs. ‘I want a plan where every god-damn thing that can fly goes into Cambodia and hits every target that is open,’ he told Kissinger. On 18 March 1969, the US began pounding Cambodia, the aim being to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail, destroy supplies destined for the VC, and eliminate guerrilla bases. Under ‘Operation Menu’, a greater payload was dropped on Cambodia in fourteen months than fell on Japan during the entire Second World War. The operation was kept secret (except from those underneath the bombs) because, according to Kissinger, Sihanouk would otherwise have been forced to reveal his complicity.37
The B-52s failed to eliminate the Vietnamese threat, but did succeed in further destabilizing Cambodia. A year after the bombing began, Sihanouk was ousted by his own ministers. The new government, under General Lon Nol, immediately demanded that all Vietnamese troops leave, much to Nixon’s delight. Nixon’s good fortune was, however, destined to be short-lived, since Lon Nol was even weaker than his predecessor. The ultimate benefactor was Pol Pot, whose insurrection thrived on government fragility. By May 1970 Khmer Rouge troops had captured most of the countryside, forcing Lon Nol’s forces into urban areas.
With the situation steadily worsening, Nixon decided to invade. Fifteen thousand American and ARVN troops crossed the border on 1 May 1970. ‘Cambodia . . . has sent out a call to the United States . . . for assistance,’ Nixon subsequently claimed. That was a lie: Lon Nol was not fully informed beforehand and the operation was designed to bolster American efforts in Vietnam, not to aid the struggle against the Khmer Rouge. Nixon admitted as much when he angrily asserted that his ‘legal justification’ was ‘the right of the President of the United States . . . to protect the lives of American men’. In Kissinger’s view, ‘Cambodia could not be considered a country separate from Vietnam’.38
Pol Pot could not have asked for a better recruiter than Nixon. Peasants whose lives were torn apart by American action proved particularly susceptible to KCP propaganda. ‘The bombers may kill some Communists, but they kill everyone else, too,’ a disgruntled villager complained. ‘The ordinary people . . . sometimes literally shit in their pants when the big bombs and shells came,’ a former KCP leader recalled. ‘Their minds just froze up and they would wander around mute for three or four days. Terrified and half-crazy, the people were ready to believe what they were told . . . That was what made it so easy for the Khmer Rouge to win the people over.’ Nixon achieved what had heretofore seemed impossible, namely harmony between Pol Pot and Sihanouk. A new alliance called the National United Front for Kampuchea (FUNK) was formed, in which Sihanouk provided political credibility and Pol Pot brute force.39
The United States, having intervened solely for selfish reasons, was not about to make a long-term commitment. When the Americans eventually left, the main obstacle to a Khmer Rouge victory was removed. The country nevertheless still had to endure three more years of brutal civil war. On 17 April 1975, the revolution was complete – the US watched helplessly as Khmer Rouge troops entered Phnom Penh and swept Lon Nol aside.
Year Zero in the new Democratic Republic of Kampuchea began. Pol Pot was a man in a hurry. ‘To win such a big victory in just five years is extremely fast,’ he proclaimed. ‘The party has thus ordered that the national construction efforts to be carried out from now should be fulfilled rapidly so that ours will rapidly become a prosperous country with an advanced agriculture and industry and so that our people’s standard of living will be rapidly improved.’ Shortly after the victory, Sihanouk accompanied Khieu Samphan and Khieu Thirith, two rabid KCP ideologues, on a visit to Zhou Enlai, who warned against a quick conversion to communism. Sihanouk recalls how his two colleagues ‘just smiled an incredulous and superior smile’. They later boasted: ‘We will be the first nation to create a completely communist society without wasting time on intermediate steps.’40
The striking feature of Cambodian communism was its utter simplicity. Party documents read like primary school summaries of Marxist thought. ‘The masses are a grouping of individuals en masse and they are the ones who create a society,’ a Party Congress paper stated.
They are the laborers who are the producers, the workers who are cleaner than other classes . . . the petty-bourgeoisie, the exploiting feudalists, and capitalists ‘do not belong to the masses’ . . . If we look back to ancient times, we see that at that time, there were slaves and masters; and later on, there were feudalists governing but they were all defeated by the craftsmen. Then, Marx found out the facts and encouraged struggle to fight against the capitalists and build socialism.
Simple theory inspired simple solutions, encouraging the assumption that change could occur rapidly. Literally overnight, old Cambodia was destroyed: the KCP abolished the law courts, the postal system, religion and money. Pagodas were destroyed. In their place came barren wooden barns where the religion of revolution was preached.41
Class divisions were eradicated by turning everyone into workers. To this end, urban areas were evacuated. Cambodia underwent a forced migration of between 2 and 3 million people. Not surprisingly, the death toll was prodigious. Hospitals were emptied, with the very ill transported to the countryside on beds, most dying en route. Richard Dudman, one of the few Westerners to gain access to Phnom Penh after the evacuation, found ‘the eerie quiet of a dead place – a Hiroshima without the destruction, a Pompeii without the ashes’. The people were told that evacuation was necessary to protect them from American bombing and because food shortages were severe. In truth, the real aim was to obliterate the urban bourgeoisie. ‘The city is bad’, an official explained, ‘for there is money in the city. People can be reformed, but not cities. By sweating to clear the land, sow and harvest crops, men will learn the real value of things. Man has to know that he is born from a grain of rice.’ The eradication of decadent cities was designed to protect the purity of the peasant, who was identified as the real Cambodia. ‘Our traditional mentality, mores, traditions, literature, and arts and culture and tradition were totally destroyed by U.S. imperialism . . . Our people’s traditionally clean, sound characteristics and essence were . . . replaced by imperialistic, pornographic, shameless, perverted, and fanatic traits.’ Party documents railed against the ‘overwhelming unspeakable sight of long-haired men and youngsters wearing bizarre clothes’ – evidence of corrupt American influence in urban areas. One refugee recalled how, during the evacuation, ‘I saw the Khmer Rouge arrest about twenty young men with long hair. They shot them before our eyes.’42
‘The party opposes independent-mindedness,’ went one proclamation. That simple statement validated incredible brutality. Schools were closed, libraries ransacked and books burnt in order to destroy independent thought. Holidays, music, entertainment and romance were banned. Contentment would come through uniformity: everyone would wear the same clothes, eat the same food, and even chew in a communist manner. Children were encouraged to turn on their parents, the better to destroy romantic notions of family. Near Phnom Thom, children were forced to watch as their bourgeois parents were systematically executed. ‘Why are you crying over enemies?’ an official shouted as the pile of corpses grew. ‘If you don’t stop we’ll kill you too!’43
Migrants to the countryside were ‘new people’, automatically suspicious because of their corrupt origins. They were given the hardest labour in the worst conditions and were forced to undergo incessant political indoctrination. Those seen as particularly dangerous, like schoolteachers, doctors, lawyers and anyone educated, were simply executed. Professionals and intellectuals who returned from exile in France in order to do their bit for the new Cambodia were met at the airport by Khmer Rouge goons, taken away, tortured and killed. Death sentences were meted out to those who complained about conditions, grieved over the death of relatives, engaged in religious worship, stole food, wore jewellery, or engaged in unauthorized sexual relations.
The ill or disabled, an unaffordable burden, were often murdered. Meanwhile, all those identified as ‘mongrels’, i.e. not pure Khmer, were forced to leave. Since Cambodia was a multi-ethnic society with large concentrations of Chinese, Vietnamese and Thai who had lived in the country for generations, the social disruption was immense. Perhaps the worst sufferers were the Cham, an ethnic minority who arrived from Vietnam in the fifteenth century. A pogrom killed 90,000, half their number.
‘Money is a tool of dictatorship of the capitalist class,’ a party document proclaimed. Elementary logic concluded that abolishing money would solve the problem. ‘We won’t use money again, and will never ever think about re-circulating currency . . . The more we forget about money, the happier we feel; not using money is good and comfortable.’ While the abolition did not completely eradicate capitalism, it did remove a major manifestation of freedom, namely the ability to purchase. It also meant that work, being unpaid, became indistinguishable from slavery. The government’s assertion that there was no unemployment was true, since nearly everyone was a slave.44
‘Within Cambodian society’, a party document boasted, ‘there is equality without rich or poor, and there are no longer capitalists, feudalists or petty-bourgeoisie, only workers and farmers.’ Everyone was supposed to be equal, but that was a typical communist con. Cadres always managed to find food, despite widespread starvation. In the wake of the evacuation of urban areas came a horde of party hacks, looting in the name of class struggle. Nor was cronyism absent, despite claims to ideological purity. A niece of a prominent government official was given a prestigious job as an English translator for Radio Phnom Penh, despite knowing hardly any English.45
The journalist Elizabeth Becker was shocked by the drastic transformation of Cambodia. ‘Although the terrain was achingly familiar, the people . . . seemed alien . . . The few peasants I saw wore rags. No one was allowed to talk to me freely . . . Cambodians . . . answered my questions from official translators with blank faces or occasional expressions of fear.’ Becker was one of the few Western journalists allowed an audience with Pol Pot. She met him in a huge receiving room, the elegance of which contrasted sharply with the suffering outside. ‘Pol Pot [was] seated like a king . . . Here was the man who had committed some of the worst crimes in modern history and he was not what I had expected . . . He was actually elegant – with a pleasing smile and delicate, alert eyes . . . his gestures nearly dainty.’ Instead of an interview, Becker got a lecture. For over an hour, ‘in the softest voice’, he railed against the violation of his country by the Americans, Soviets and Vietnamese. ‘I left convinced he was insane.’46
The revolution adopted a mantra justifying murder – ‘If you keep these people there is no profit, if they go there is no loss.’ Every Cambodian dreaded the capricious utterance of those words. ‘We search for the microbes within the party,’ Pol Pot told cadres in 1976. ‘As our socialist revolution advances . . . seeping into every corner . . . we can locate the ugly microbes.’ Schools, no longer necessary for education, were turned into torture chambers where ‘microbes’ were first forced to confess and then were executed for imaginary crimes. At the school in Tuol Sleng, ‘classrooms were converted into prison cells and the windows were fitted with bars and barbed wire. The classrooms on the ground floor were divided into small cells, 0.8m x 2m each, designed for single prisoners, who were shackled with chains fixed to the walls or floors.’ Kang Khek Leu managed Tuol Sleng, where 17,000 people died. ‘I and everyone else who worked in that place knew that anyone who entered had to be psychologically demolished . . . given no way out . . . Nobody who came to us had any chance of saving himself.’ In each cell a long list of rules validated cruelty. ‘If you disobey any . . . regulation, you shall get either ten lashes or five shocks of electric discharge.’ Even suffering was regulated. ‘While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry.’ Torturers were sometimes as young as twelve, since the very young proved easy to indoctrinate. Children learned the trade by tormenting animals. Those who performed well were then let loose on humans.47
‘We saw enemies, enemies, enemies everywhere,’ Kang Khek Leu confessed. Since party paranoia was boundless, so too was killing. A party congress in January 1977 noted that much progress had been made in purifying the country, but the slaughter would still have to continue.
Our enemies are now weakening and are going to die. The revolution has pulled out their roots, and the espionage networks have been smashed; in terms of classes, our enemies are all gone. However, they still have the American imperialists, the revisionists, the KGB, and Vietnam. Though they have been defeated, they still go on. Another thing is that the enemies are on our body, among the military, the workers, in the cooperatives and even in our ranks. To make Socialist Revolution deeply and strongly, these enemies must be progressively wiped out.
When Dudman asked Ieng Sary, number three in the KCP hierarchy, about the killings, the latter did not deny them. He questioned, however, why the West was so worried about the fate of a few rich Cambodians and so uninterested in how the lot of the poor had improved. In view of the ‘complicated situation’ after the war, the KCP deserved credit for ‘solv[ing] the problem in good condition’ and ‘avoid[ing] many more killings’. Sary seems to have believed his own propaganda. ‘Basically, the . . . situation is good,’ he told his diary in 1976. ‘So far, we have used a short-cut, but it is the very correct path. In the (outside) world, socialist revolutions have spilled a great deal of blood, but we have not spilled much blood. But for taking this path, we would have experienced much bloodshed.’ As it happened, one-quarter of the Cambodian population was slaughtered. That seemed an affordable loss, since, as party slogans starkly proclaimed, ‘One or two million young people are enough to make the new Kampuchea.’48
In an interview in 1997, Pol Pot remarked: ‘I came to carry out the struggle, not to kill people.’ His aim, he insisted, had been ‘to stop Kampuchea becoming Vietnamese. For the love of the nation and the people it was the right thing to do.’ Ironically, the policies designed to make Cambodia resistant to Vietnamese interference in fact rendered her more susceptible to conquest. When Vietnamese troops invaded on 25 December 1978, they found a people devastated by hunger, savagery, social distintegration and murder. Within two weeks Phnom Penh was conquered, sending Pol Pot scurrying into the hinterland.49
The Chinese, driven by hatred of the Vietnamese, continued to support the Khmer Rouge and insisted that the UN should recognize Pol Pot’s exiled regime as the legitimate government. For geopolitical reasons, the US played along, in order to impress their new friends, the Chinese. In any case, still smarting from their defeat in Vietnam, the Americans were not about to back Hanoi. The principle of ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ passed for intelligent foreign policy. Kissinger explained that ‘the Chinese want to use Cambodia to balance off Vietnam . . . We don’t like Cambodia, for the government in many ways is worse than Vietnam, but we would like it to be independent. We don’t discourage . . . China from drawing closer to Cambodia.’ That warped policy continued for the rest of the decade, even after Jimmy Carter’s election supposedly brought greater attention to human rights. ‘I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot,’ Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski later confessed. ‘Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him, but China could.’ The US, he admitted, ‘winked publicly’ as China continued to arm the Khmer Rouge.50
Nixon, Ford, Kissinger and Brzezinski tacitly supported the Khmer Rouge, for purely cynical reasons. In contrast, leftist intellectuals in the West, including Noam Chomsky, openly supported Pol Pot for sublime ideological reasons. The hard left salivated at the way the communist experiment was implemented with such alacrity. Doctrine – and distance – ensured blindness toward human suffering. Leftists swallowed every last line of KCP propaganda and begged for more, while openly rejecting evidence of brutality. The British academic Laura Summers could find ‘little evidence of famine’, even though she did not visit the country. She admitted that, ‘Life is without doubt confusing and arduous . . . but current hardships are probably less than those endured during the war.’ She and her friends blithely concluded that a communist omelette necessitated breaking a few eggs. Malcolm Caldwell argued that, ‘The forethought, ingenuity, dedication and eventual triumph of the liberation forces in the face of extreme adversity and almost universal foreign scepticism, detachment, hostility and . . . sabotage ought to have been cause for worldwide . . . congratulation rather than the disbelief and execration with which it was in fact greeted.’ The world, he felt, had much to learn from Pol Pot. The revolution heralded ‘the great . . . and necessary change beginning to convulse the world’, which would ‘shift it from a disaster-bound course to one holding out promise of a better future for all’. To all that, an angry François Ponchaud, author of Cambodia: Year Zero, replied: ‘How many of those who say they are unreservedly in support of the Khmer revolution would consent to endure one hundredth part of the present sufferings of the Cambodian people?’51
When fantasy finally yielded to truth, Summers and her friends indulged in some impressive logical contortions. Khmer Rouge crimes, they argued, demonstrated that the regime was fascist, not communist, since true communists are incapable of such cruelty. Caldwell, who accompanied Becker on the trip to Phnom Penh in 1978, seems to have been limbering up for a somersault of just this sort. ‘If it is true that Pol Pot has . . . killed Khmer peasants, I have to make a different evaluation of Kampuchea’s development . . . Killing an innocent peasant is a token of fascism.’ That equivocation proved fatal. The Khmer Rouge could not afford to have their most outspoken cheerleader switch sides. Shortly after his audience with Pol Pot, Caldwell was murdered.52
Pol Pot accepted that perhaps 800,000 Cambodians died as a result of his experiment. More reliable estimates set that figure at 1.7 million. Recent studies have suggested a figure exceeding 2.2 million. Before his death in 1998, Pol Pot admitted that ‘our movement made mistakes’. They weren’t, however, his mistakes, but those of followers who misunderstood instructions. ‘There were people to whom [I] . . . felt very close and . . . trusted . . . completely. Then in the end they made a mess of everything.’ While his attempt to evade blame suggests a cowardly rat, Pol Pot was right about one thing, namely the matter of collective responsibility. His people did make a mess of things. His skill came in moulding them into killers by playing upon their fear, racism, class bigotry and hunger for violence. ‘Pol Pot’, Kang Khek Leu recalled, ‘said you always had to be suspicious, to fear something.’ The desire to survive inspired a willingness to kill.53
Death was ubiquitous, but killing was inefficient. Cambodia was a poor country unable to afford instruments of mass extermination. The people died not in huge gas chambers or in front of individual machine gunners. In most cases, Cambodians killed other Cambodians, individually, by beating them to death. ‘It is important to do torture by hand,’ a Tuol Seng handbook proclaimed. ‘When the enemies respond in a way that fits with . . . our questions, we get so happy we laugh and have a good time.’ The people willingly joined in the slaughter. They could have stopped Pol Pot, but they chose not to do so.54
Rhodesia: From Smith to Mugabe
On 11 November 1965, Ian Smith, prime minister of the British colony of Rhodesia, unilaterally declared independence. ‘There can be no happiness in a country’, he argued, ‘where people, such as ourselves, who have ruled themselves with an impeccable record for over forty years, are denied what is freely granted to other countries.’55
The Unilateral Declaration of Independence, or UDI, was a desperate attempt to stop Father Time. White Rhodesians, who constituted just 5 per cent of the population, could not accept the logic of decolonization, namely that power would eventually be transferred to the black majority. Nearly six years earlier, the then British prime minister, Harold Macmillan, had warned the South African parliament that a ‘wind of change is blowing through this continent, and whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact’. Whites in neighbouring Rhodesia foolishly thought that by taking control of their own affairs they could shelter from the wind.56
Smith was a man enslaved to fantasy. His Rhodesian Front (RF) had been formed with one essential purpose: to preserve white rule. Harold Wilson, the British prime minister, thought Smith ‘a confused and unhappy man’ held captive by deluded supporters. ‘He has been in these last weeks under intolerable pressure from his colleagues and from unreasoning extremists . . . But it must not be forgotten that it was Mr. Smith who called the Rhodesian Front into existence.’ In Wilson’s view, ‘reason had fled the scene and . . . emotions, unreasoning racialist emotions at that, had taken command’.57
The British had felt inclined to grant independence, but were not enthusiastic about black majority rule. Many MPs, especially within the Conservative Party, considered surrendering power to blacks in Rhodesia an abomination. Nevertheless, in the face of worldwide condemnation of Smith’s action, the British obligingly protested. Wilson argued that UDI was ‘an act of rebellion against the Crown . . . and actions taken to give effect to it will be treasonable’. Tough words were not, however, the prelude to tough action. Downing Street resisted pressure, mainly from African nations, to use force. Wilson opted instead for economic sanctions, hoping gradually to wear down Smith’s resistance. Most of the world followed suit, but Portugal and South Africa did not. As a result, triangular trade patterns evolved, allowing many countries to maintain a moral stand without having to suffer for their principles. By 1972, trade with Rhodesia was healthier than before UDI. The white standard of living rose significantly, thus encouraging a new influx of settlers who were eager to live like colonials in the supposedly post-colonial era.58
The black population felt let down by Britain, but they were accustomed to that. ‘Mr Smith has won,’ one black Rhodesian told The Times on the day UDI was declared. ‘I don’t hear Mr Wilson’s aeroplanes.’ Not all blacks were that fatalistic, however. The nationalist group ZANU (Zimbabwe African National Union) had made its feelings clear well before UDI. ‘We do not trust you’, a telegram to Wilson read. ‘We will not rely on you in future. We the people of Zimbabwe, shall fight through our own way until we liberate ourselves. It is abundantly clear to us that you and your government do not want African majority rule.’ Many blacks saw no difference between rule by Smith or rule by London. ‘The position of the Africans is still the same,’ Edward Ndlovu, deputy secretary of the rival nationalist group ZAPU (Zimbabwe African People’s Union), argued. ‘Apartheid has always been in Rhodesia.’ The only solution, it seemed, was armed struggle.59
Britain tried to negotiate with Smith but he grew more intransigent. A deal tabled in 1966 would have delayed majority rule past the year 2000, but he declined it, as he did an even better offer the following year. He had quite clearly decided that the British could be ignored. In 1969 he pushed through a new constitution, promising that it would ‘entrench government in the hands of civilised Rhodesians for all time’. Then, on 2 March 1970, Rhodesia perfunctorily declared itself a republic, severing all links with the Crown. The move, Smith explained, ‘was forced upon us’. He assumed that Western nations would be forced to accept the fait accompli, and would react by lifting sanctions and extending diplomatic recognition forthwith. Both Britain and the United States, however, immediately insisted that they would not recognize the new republic.60
Smith had so far handled the independence issue with consummate dexterity. Just when things were going well for him, however, circumstances beyond his control rendered Rhodesia’s security much more precarious. In neighbouring Mozambique, gains made by Liberation Front of Mozambique (FRELIMO) guerrillas threatened Portugal’s hold over her colony. That success allowed ZANU, beginning in 1972, to use areas under FRELIMO control as forward bases for launching raids into north-eastern Rhodesia. Matters worsened in April 1974 with the end of the Salazar regime in Portugal. Salazar, a loyal ally, had helped Smith sidestep sanctions. The new government in Lisbon quickly withdrew from Mozambique, effectively handing the country over to FRELIMO. This meant that the 760-mile eastern border with Rhodesia was open to infiltration by ZANU at any point.
Cuban forces, which had been helping the insurgents in Angola, found themselves under-occupied after the Portuguese pulled out. Castro, rather than bringing his forces home, decided to see what mischief they might make in Rhodesia. Other communist countries, including Russia and China, likewise funnelled an ever-increasing supply of modern weaponry to ZAPU and ZANU. Especially worrying for Smith was the influx of Soviet SAM missiles, a counterweight to his monopoly of air power.
These developments caused the mood to change in Pretoria. Rhodesia, Angola and Mozambique had provided South Africans with a buffer zone between themselves and black-controlled Africa. For that reason, South Africa had assiduously supported white governments in those countries. But the departure of Portugal from Angola and Mozambique blew that cordon sanitaire to smithereens. Once an asset, Rhodesia suddenly became a liability. John Vorster, the South African premier, came to the conclusion that a stable black regime offered more security than an embattled white one. ‘As the South Africans see it, beyond the short run the Rhodesian position is hopeless,’ The Times reported. ‘The net has now tightened.’61
Vorster pressured Smith to make a deal with opposition forces in his country, in order to ensure a smooth transition to black rule. Backing him was Zambia’s Kenneth Kaunda, who was tired of having his country used as a base for ZAPU insurgents. The first fruits of this pressure was Smith’s agreement to release the nationalist leaders, Joshua Nkomo of ZAPU and Robert Mugabe of ZANU, both of whom had been in prison for more than ten years.
While Smith seemed doomed, it was not clear which nationalist group would inherit Rhodesia. Bishop Abel Muzorewa, leader of the African National Council, provided the most moderate option, but his desire for peace implied inflated consideration to white interests. Both ZANU and ZAPU judged the plan an insult to the black population. ‘Muzorewa’s . . . surrender of the principle of “one man one vote” and his unprincipled flirtation with Ian Smith represent a radical and dangerous deviation from the correct line of the masses,’ ZAPU officially declared. Despite the bluster, Nkomo was ready to bargain with Smith, in the interests of a quick end to the costly war. Had Smith grasped that nettle, he might have been able to retain a vestige of power. Pragmatism, however, was not a distinguishing feature of his regime.62
Mugabe, in contrast, considered negotiation an abomination. He did not, in any case, think it necessary, certain as he was that Smith would eventually be strangled by his own intransigence. Resigned to the long game, Mugabe sought majority rule without diluting conditions. Promises of Marxism and land redistribution were designed not only to inspire followers, but also to incense white Rhodesians, making them ever more intractable. As he saw it, victory would be won through armed struggle and would, therefore, be total. ‘ZANU has been committed to a policy of violent revolution in order to change totally and completely the existing social and political system,’ a party document proclaimed. ‘There won’t be a ceasefire until there is a definite programme to transfer power to the African people of Zimbabwe.’63
As events quickly demonstrated, Mugabe was right about Smith’s intransigence. In August 1975, talks with Muzorewa, organized after pressure from Vorster and Kaunda, were abandoned after just one day because Smith would not allow immunity to be given to nationalist leaders in order to attend. ‘It would involve people who are well-known terrorist leaders who bear responsibility for . . . murders and other atrocities,’ he explained. A meeting with Nkomo in December proved similarly unproductive. Smith was shackled by his own remit, which was to prevent majority rule. ‘We are prepared to bring black people into our government’, he conceded, ‘but I don’t believe in majority rule, black majority rule, ever in Rhodesia, not in a thousand years.’64
Mugabe, meanwhile, was consolidating his guerrilla army at bases in Mozambique. ‘I am going to war,’ he told his mother, adding that he did not know ‘whether I shall return or not’. Emboldened by the arrival of their leader, ZANU forces intensified their raids, attacking white homesteads in Eastern Rhodesia. At the same time, in response to the failure of talks between Smith and Nkomo, ZAPU, operating from bases in Zambia and Botswana, also went on the offensive. Smith now faced a two-front war of frightening intensity. Whites watched as their paradise crumbled. Faced with the daily threat of ambush, they turned their farms into mini-fortresses. Many simply left – either to escape the danger, or to avoid being drafted into military service.65
The escalation of the conflict, and Mugabe’s Marxism, alarmed Henry Kissinger. He feared that Rhodesia would become another Angola – in other words, a magnet for Soviet meddling. Vorster, increasingly impatient with Smith’s obduracy, shared Kissinger’s concerns. Together, they sought to force Smith to accept majority rule. South Africa cut supplies of fuel and arms, while Kissinger reminded Smith that it was foolish to alienate Americans. At a meeting in Pretoria in September 1976, he shoved in front of Smith a five-point programme for a settlement based on black majority rule ‘within two years’. Under the plan, an interim government consisting of equal numbers of white and black representatives would forge a new constitution. Elections would then follow. As a sweetener, sanctions would end immediately and ‘substantial economic support would be made available’. Smith nevertheless felt betrayed. ‘You want me to sign my own suicide note,’ he snarled.66
Desmond Frost, the Rhodesian Front chairman, lambasted the United States for seeking to ‘spend . . . thousands of millions of dollars in literally buying the white man out of Rhodesia’. As Smith recognized, however, complaining would not make the deal go away. ‘It was made abundantly clear to me’, he told his people, ‘that as long as present circumstances in Rhodesia prevailed, we could expect no help or support from the free world. On the contrary, the pressures on us . . . would continue to mount.’ While isolation had once inspired fierce intransigence, Smith was now resigned to defeat. ‘Dr Kissinger assured me that we share a common aim and a common purpose, namely to keep Rhodesia in the free world and to keep it from communist penetration.’ It therefore seemed necessary to accept the offer, since further struggle would only result in even more ignominious terms. ‘Clearly, this agreement does not give us the answer which we would have liked. However, it does present . . . an opportunity . . . [for] Rhodesians to work out amongst themselves, without interference from outside, our future constitution.’67
While Smith claimed that he had no option but to accept Kissinger’s deal, that did not stop him from undermining it. While going through the motions of implementing the plan, he plotted with Muzorewa, in the hope of finding an alternative that might neuter black resistance, satisfy whites, and placate Kissinger and Vorster. A deal was reached in March 1978, and, thirteen months later, the ANC easily won elections, largely because ZANU and ZAPU boycotted them. Muzorewa became prime minister of the new nation, called Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, but the civil service and military remained in the hands of whites, and Smith was still in the government. He justified the arrangement on the grounds that, if power were to be distributed solely on the basis of skin colour, ‘Rhodesia would . . . develop into a kind of banana republic where the country would in no time be bankrupt.’ The arrangement nevertheless destroyed Muzorewa’s already threadbare credibility; Nkomo and Mugabe dismissed him as a puppet.68
The guerrilla war continued, spreading throughout rural areas. The agricultural community was devastated, with schools closed, the health service in tatters and ambushes a daily threat. All this caused the white exodus to quicken. With the situation spiralling out of control, Britain made one last attempt at a negotiated settlement by inviting black leaders to London. Muzorewa and Nkomo accepted, but Mugabe demurred, in fear that a settlement would dilute his revolution. That intransigence drew the wrath of Kaunda and Samora Machel, president of Mozambique, both of whom wanted the suffering in their countries to stop. Mugabe was bluntly told that if he refused to attend, all aid would cease. Incandescent with rage, he accused his allies of selling out. ‘The frontline states said we had to negotiate, we had to go to this conference,’ he recalled. ‘Why should we be denied the ultimate joy of having militarily overthrown the regime here?’ Since he could not defy Kaunda and Machel, he went to London determined to wreck the conference.69
While in London, Mugabe discovered the limits of his power. Despite his hostility, an agreement for a ceasefire was forged. When he refused to accept it, Machel reiterated that Mozambique would no longer provide sanctuary to ZANU guerrillas. Though he felt robbed of ultimate victory, Mugabe eventually accepted the need to cooperate. Under the terms of the Lancaster House agreement, signed on 21 December 1979, Zimbabwe briefly reverted to colonial status, until a new government could be elected.
In January 1980, Mugabe returned home for the first time in five years. The huge crowd greeting him was an indication of the militant mood he had successfully fostered. Thousands of youths, their emotions swinging wildly between jubilation and anger, provided a clear hint that violence would figure prominently in the upcoming election. They carried banners and wore T-shirts celebrating the paraphernalia of their war – land mines, rockets, Kalashnikovs. Mugabe was inclined to encourage their militancy, but Machel told him to behave. He warned that if Mugabe played the role of Marxist demagogue, whites would leave Zimbabwe in droves and economic ruin would result. Heeding that warning, Mugabe offered a convincing display of moderation. ‘Stay with us,’ he told whites, ‘please remain in this country and constitute a nation based on national unity.’ He further promised: ‘We will not seize land from anyone who has a use for it. Farmers who are able to be productive and prove useful to society will find us co-operative.’70
While Mugabe feigned civility, his followers wreaked havoc. For them, violence was a legitimate tool of electoral campaigning. Eastern Rhodesia, Mugabe’s stronghold, became a no-go area for supporters of Muzorewa and Nkomo. ‘The word intimidation is mild,’ Nkomo complained. ‘People are being terrorised. It’s terror. There is fear in people’s eyes.’71
The result was a landslide. ZANU won 63 per cent of the vote, and 57 of the 80 seats set aside for blacks (whites were guaranteed 20 seats). Nkomo got just 24 per cent and 20 seats, while Muzorewa was annihilated, earning just 8 per cent and 3 seats. The result suggests that ZANU intimidation was highly effective, but that explanation is perhaps too simple. In truth, a significant proportion of voters supported Mugabe not because they liked him, nor because they were frightened into doing so, but because they wanted an end to the war. They rightly concluded that, if Mugabe failed to win, the armed struggle would continue. Zimbabweans voted for peace and got Mugabe.
‘You have inherited a jewel,’ Julius Nyerere of Tanzania told Mugabe. ‘Keep it that way.’ Apparently mindful of that warning, he sought to allay the fears of those whites inclined to leave. ‘If yesterday I fought you as an enemy, today you have become a friend and ally with the same national interest, loyalty, rights and duties as myself,’ he told them on the eve of independence.
If yesterday you hated me, you cannot avoid the love that binds you to me and me to you . . . The wrongs of the past must now stand forgiven and forgotten. If ever we look to the past, let us do so for the lesson the past has taught us, namely that oppression and racism are inequalities that must never find scope in our political and social system. It could never be a correct justification that because the whites oppressed us yesterday when they had power, the blacks must oppress them today because they have power. An evil remains an evil whether practiced by white against black or black against white.
Iron had been turned into gold. Even Smith expressed delight at this feat of political alchemy. Whites who were hastily preparing to leave the country unpacked their bags. The charm offensive continued when Mugabe offered Nkomo a place in his new government and announced that white representatives would also be given posts, ‘so as to bring about a government that will be reassuring to all people of Zimbabwe’. In newspapers around the world, Mugabe was acclaimed a hero.72
‘I don’t know why a lot of people in the West don’t like me,’ Mugabe remarked in 1978. He surmised it was because they found his Marxism frightening. ‘Western society claims to be pursing Christian principles. Is there anything to beat the principle of social togetherness, justice to the whole people, rather than justice to a few, such as Rockefeller and Ford? . . . If we are poor together then that’s acceptable. But if we are poor because a few individuals are rich then obviously I cannot accept that system.’ Mugabe’s interviewer on that occasion was not entirely convinced. The big question, Lawrence Pintak concluded, was ‘whether Mr Mugabe is sincere in his desire to build a society based on equality and justice for all, or if he is the potential tyrant that so many believe’.73
In early 1975, Amnesty International announced that Iran was one of the world’s ‘worst violators of human rights’. A few years earlier, President Richard Nixon voiced a different opinion. In a conversation with Imelda Marcos, he remarked that ‘while perhaps Iran’s formal government did not meet the idealistic criteria of many critics, it was perhaps the best system for Iran’. He praised the Shah – ‘a strong and selfless leader who was a great favorite . . . and who had generously and progressively . . . distributed Iran’s great oil revenues to the benefit of his people’.74
There was a small grain of truth to what Nixon said. The transformation under the Shah had been astounding. ‘When I left [in
1960] . . . this was still a backward country,’ an academic remarked after a decade abroad. ‘Only a few cities . . . had running water . . . Most industry was handicrafts, and about eighty percent of the people still lived in rural villages . . . when I came back, it was a different country. All the young people . . . were going to school. There are a hundred thousand university graduates now and almost two hundred thousand people in universities.’ Between 1960 and 1979, a rural agrarian country changed into an urban industrialized one. Tehran’s population more than doubled, coal and cement output trebled, and production of iron ore increased from 2,000 to 900,000 tons. In order to service this modern economy, railways, roads and ports were developed. The transformation was funded by oil revenues, which rose from $285 million in 1960 to $20 billion in 1976.75
The ‘White Revolution’, however, seriously destabilized society – something Nixon chose to ignore. The effect could be seen in Isfahan, once a paradise. ‘Five years ago, there were five hundred and sixty thousand people . . . and this was one of the most beautiful cities in the world,’ a local official remarked in 1978.
Then the Shah . . . put a steel mill here . . . Naturally, foreign companies followed suit . . . Now we have more than a million people. The doubling in five years of a population that had been stable for three hundred years has changed everything. This used to be an educational center, with a university, many religious schools, and lots of music. Now it is an industrial town. Over three hundred thousand workers have come in from the countryside . . . They live five or six to a room . . . They make good wages . . . but . . . they’re miserable.
‘I could cry about what has happened here,’ a bazaari complained. ‘It used to be a paradise of water and gardens and beautiful buildings. Now the town is full of strangers.’76
Land reform was central to the White Revolution. Large estates were bought up and redistributed, thus transferring power from landowners to the state and neutralizing a group that stood as an obstacle to modernization. Landowners had, however, provided a stabilizing influence by acting as a source of authority in the countryside. Without them, the people were cut adrift, desperately seeking stability in an uncertain world.
New welfare agencies, designed to promote progressive ideas, were set up to replace the authority of landowners. These agencies, or corps, dealt with literacy, health, religion, development, etc., and were staffed by university graduates loyal to modernization. Being outsiders, they were greeted with suspicion in the hinterlands. This was especially true of the religious corps, drawn from theology graduates from secular universities, rather than from the more conservative and traditional madrasas, or colleges of Islamic education.
The Shah envisaged a modern utopia – a ‘great civilisation’ inspired by central government, with Japan as its model. Opposition was not tolerated. When the parliament, or Majlis, proved uncooperative, the Shah neutralized it, turning Iran into a one-party state. Iranians found this denial of basic freedoms intolerable, but worse still was the way their culture was obliterated in the rush to modernize. ‘In his enthusiasm to build the country, [he] . . . ignored the people in it,’ an Isfahan academic remarked. ‘The masses were left out of his development program. The bazaari were left out. The mullahs were left out.’ Much to the people’s dismay, the new wealth was unevenly distributed. A handful of families became very rich through lucrative contracts and corruption. As a result, the further change progressed, the more enemies the Shah created.77
One common complaint related to the role women played in the White Revolution. A general liberation meant veils were removed and Western dress became common. Co-ed schools were encouraged. ‘I do not want co-education,’ the Ayatollah Shariatmadari objected. ‘I want to separate the schools of learning from the schools of flirting . . . in co-educational schools there is a corruption of moral values . . . The girls . . . have illegitimate children, and others have abortions. The girl loses her self-respect and her status in society. Either she suffers a great personal loss or she takes up another way of life – prostitution.’ Young males from conservative families found the female invasion distressing. ‘They don’t know how to deal with the young women sitting next to them in their classes,’ the Isfahan bazaari complained. ‘In the past, they had never seen any women . . . not wearing a veil. Now they see miniskirts and bare arms and bare legs. They say to me, “What do they want, these women? What are they trying to do to me?”’78
The ulema, graduates of the madrasa, posed the greatest threat to the White Revolution. According to Islamic custom, government belonged to the Imam, or his representative, the mujtahid. A secular government was accepted on sufferance – the ruler tolerated only if he respected Sharia law. Since the Shah’s reforms seriously undermined Sharia, he found himself on a collision course with religious authority. As change gathered pace, the ulema, symbolic of stability, found their popularity grew. They opposed the Shah not only because he represented corrupt modernism, but also out of self-protection. Ulema had depended on charitable endowments, or waqf, which usually meant land. This arrangement had allowed most to live a comfortable life. Land reform, however, undermined that system, at the same time that it supplanted religious authority in the countryside. The ulema’s hardships also ironically improved their reputation, since their wealth had once rendered them suspect.
Among the mujtahid, the Ayatollah Khomeini stood out because of his willingness to involve himself in secular politics. The Shah, he argued, was seeking ‘to spread . . . colonial culture to the remotest towns and villages and pollute the youth of the country’. Khomeini’s opposition was formidable because it was based not just on religion but also, fundamentally, on nationalism. The Shah was chastised for selling Iran’s soul to the corrupt West. This explains Khomeini’s power: while other religious critics focused on narrow issues like land reform or the status of women, he concentrated on matters of nationalist import. The Shah, unable to tolerate opposition of this sort, exiled Khomeini to Turkey in 1964. The following year he moved to Najaf in Iraq, where he became a focal point of anti-government agitation.79
With secular modes of political expression stifled by the centralization of power, Khomeini became the most important outlet for discontent. ‘We want Khomeini,’ one worker told a journalist. ‘He will take power from the rich and give it to us.’ According to Shapur Bakhtiar, the Shah’s last prime minister, Iranians decided that Khomeini had a divine mission. ‘People . . . thought he would create a paradise.’ Somewhat surprising was the way Khomeini appealed to young urban intellectuals, those educated under the White Revolution. Their discontent was partly economic. ‘Students have grown up under the Shah, and they don’t know what things were like before development started,’ the Isfahan official explained. ‘All they know is that the Shah promised that Iran was going to be like France or Germany. That isn’t happening.’ As a result of their disappointment, they were ‘turning back to the old days, and pursuing an idealized version of what things were like then. They are pushing the mullahs to go back and re-create the wonderful past.’ The problem was compounded because many students came from poor, rural families of conservative religious background. Going to university was a rude awakening; they often felt polluted by Western values, what became known as ‘Westoxication’. The very people who the Shah hoped would provide the backbone of a new, progressive culture abandoned him in favour of an aged, reactionary cleric.80
Intellectual justification for the marriage of secular radicalism with conservative Islam was provided by Dr Ali Shariati, who argued that a moral revolution based on Shi’ite custom was the essential precursor to socialist transformation. He also believed that ‘revolutionary leadership is incompatible with democracy’, an idea that dovetailed nicely with Khomeini’s autocratic nature. Meanwhile, some Islamic fundamentalists looked to Marxism for political guidance. The Ayatollah Motahari, ideological architect of the Islamic Revolution, rejected Marx’s atheism, but saw value in his ideas about the eradication of social injustice and anti-imperialism. As one closet Marxist confessed, ‘[Marx] exposes the imperialists and their rape of all the countries of the Third World, including Iran.’ Thus, two seemingly antithetical strains of opposition, namely traditional Shi’a culture and radical Marxism, became fused in the person of Khomeini, the figurehead of ‘Islamic Marxism’. The radical left allied themselves with Khomeini in order to destroy the secular progressives who wanted neither the Shah, nor religious fundamentalism, nor Marxism. They did not, however, understand that they were being used. After taking from them what he needed, Khomeini crushed them.81
An economic downturn added new grievances to simmering discontent. Fuelled by oil and fantasy, the White Revolution paid scant attention to the need to build a stable economy. Between 1973 and 1976, Iran literally overdosed on spending. Oil revenue went toward development projects that had little justification beyond display. As a result, the economy overheated and inflation skyrocketed, with rents in Tehran trebling. The government responded by slamming on the brakes, instituting an austerity policy that froze growth and increased unemployment. Those still waiting for the benefits of the economic miracle joined the swelling ranks of the discontented.
‘Inflation’, The Economist reported, ‘reached such alarming proportions that the Shah, who tends to look at economic problems in military terms, declared war on profiteers.’ That was not strictly true, since the very rich were left alone in favour of an offensive against the bazaaris. ‘Inspectorate teams’, in truth vigilante gangs, were sent into the bazaars to root out those deemed to have betrayed the people’s trust. Guild courts, masterminded by the ruthless security service SAVAK, imposed some 250,000 fines, banned 23,000 traders and sent 8,000 shopkeepers to prison. One shopkeeper rightly complained that ‘the bazaar was being used as a smokescreen to hide the vast corruption rampant in the government’.82
Beginning around 1977, a liberalization of sorts occurred within Iran, partly because of the worldwide attention paid to human rights abuses. This liberalization meant that the discontented grew more assertive. The National Front, first active in the 1950s, was revived to give focus to secular opposition, and the Tudeh Party, a Marxist group operating underground since 1953, also underwent a resurgence. Neither group, it should be stressed, advocated an Islamic republic, though both were prepared to work with the mullahs.
Discontent boiled into protest in May 1977 when middle-class intellectuals began challenging the government through letter-writing campaigns, radical pamphlets and poetry readings. When police tried to break up a peaceful reading at Aryamehr University on 19 November, students took to the streets, colliding head-on with SAVAK. One student was killed and over seventy injured, leading to a rash of sympathy protests. Religious dissidents then joined the protest. On 7 January 1978, riots broke out in Qom after a government-controlled newspaper clumsily accused Khomeini of a wide range of sins, among them spying for the British and writing erotic poetry. Seminaries and bazaars emptied as angry citizens demanded an official apology. Security forces again reacted with unwarranted force, resulting in a number of deaths. In Tehran, bazaaris closed their shops as a mark of respect for the Qom martyrs. The fact that the bazaaris and the ulema were now working in concert was a worrying development for the Shah.
Iran, remarked Shariatmadari, ‘is erupting like a volcano, and, like a volcano, after building up pressure for years and years it is impossible to stop’. The Shah refused at first to respond to the tremors, seeing them as a harmless manifestation of the liberalization he had allowed. He thought the demonstrations would, like a safety valve, release pressure. While that indeed happened, the security forces had not properly adjusted to liberalization. They reacted in character, namely with violence and torture. Iran found herself in a situation where the people were more inclined to protest and were daily supplied with reasons for doing so.83
In August 1978, Jafar Sharif-Emami was appointed prime minister with a view to placating religious opposition. ‘I’m a patient man,’ he claimed. ‘I do not intend to leave this office until there is calm in Iran.’ To this end, he reinstated the Islamic calendar and closed casinos and nightclubs. Concessions, however, simply made the discontented more confrontational. A schoolteacher was openly scornful: ‘We’re given to understand that the ruling clique is talking about religion now, and putting on a turban and the white garments of holiness. But that is a mere pretense. Even a child can see through that.’84
Reeling from the protests, the government declared martial law on 7 September 1978. In a stroke, Sharif-Emami’s efforts to appease were negated by General Gholam Ali Oveissi, the new military governor of Tehran. Widely reviled as the ‘butcher of Iran’ after his vicious response to riots in 1963, Oveissi lived up to his reputation. On the 8th, thousands took to the streets, many unaware that martial law had been declared. Their ignorance proved fatal. Oveissi’s goons, confident that they could now exercise maximum force, fired indiscriminately, killing a hundred protesters and wounding many more. The worst violence occurred in Jaleh Square, where a peaceful demonstration met a hail of bullets. ‘Black Friday’, as it became known, proved a point of no return.
Khomeini’s greatest ally was the Shah, whose insensitive governance inspired inexhaustible displeasure. There was nothing inevitable about the Ayatollah’s remarkable rise; at various stages, political subtlety might have ensured a more moderate outcome. For instance, it is difficult to understand the logic behind the Shah’s decision to ask Saddam Hussein to expel Khomeini from Iraq. That simply fuelled the indignation felt by religious protesters, while failing to limit the Ayatollah’s influence. In fact, the opposite occurred. Khomeini ended up in France, where he used the modern media to communicate with his people more effectively than had been possible from Najaf.
Government efforts to cut inflation provided new reasons for unrest. Price controls annoyed the bazaaris, as did the fall in the inflation rate, since they liked to pay back loans in inflated money. The growth rate, which had been hovering around 15 per cent, suddenly fell to 2 per cent in 1978, causing contracts to dry up and unemployment to rise. The effect was particularly noticeable in the construction industry, where a shortage of workers turned into a surplus virtually overnight. Take-home pay fell by around 30 per cent, cancelling out the fall in inflation. In October the heretofore quiet workers joined protests by downing tools.
Unable to restore order, Sharif-Emami resigned on 5 November. Senior military commanders, concerned about the spiralling chaos, demanded a military government. The Shah complied, but intentionally blunted its ferocity by putting at its head General Gholam Reza Azhari, who lacked Oveissi’s ruthlessness. General Nasser Moghadam, head of SAVAK, complained that ‘the government is not strong enough. We in the security forces . . . feel handcuffed.’ Meanwhile, the Shah tried desperately to court public favour. ‘The revolution of the Iranian people cannot fail to have my support as the monarch of Iran and as an Iranian,’ he proclaimed. ‘I have heard the revolutionary message of you, the people . . . Remember that I stand by you in your revolution against colonialism, oppression and corruption.’ Iranians struggled to understand what precisely the Shah meant. Khomeini rejected the speech outright, correctly judging it an act of desperation. ‘This is the end for the Shah,’ he remarked. ‘The monarchy will be eradicated. Pahlavi forced himself upon the Iranian people; no one wanted him.’85
In early December came the holy month of Moharram, which would climax with festivals commemorating the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, the Prophet’s grandson. The government tried to take control of celebrations, but soon found itself overwhelmed by the people’s desire for a huge demonstration of rejection. Some 2 million people took part in protests on 9 and 10 December, the largest in Iranian history. The protests were notable for their peacefulness, due in large part to the desire of both lay and religious leaders to avoid bloodshed. Both had come to the conclusion that the will of the people would soon overwhelm the Shah. ‘The national movement should not assume the form of an armed struggle,’ Khomeini had insisted. The effect was clear to a reporter from the Christian Science Monitor, who saw ‘A giant wave of humanity [sweep] through the capital declaring louder than any bullet or bomb . . . the clear message, “the Shah must go”.’86
In one last desperate move, the Shah asked Bakhtiar to be prime minister on 4 January. Despite the disapproval of his National Front colleagues, Bakhtiar accepted. ‘I tried to act as a statesman, to avoid catastrophe,’ he later explained. In doing so, he incurred the wrath of Khomeini, who had proclaimed on 3 November that cooperation with the Pahlavi regime was, by definition, treasonous. Bakhtiar convinced the Shah to leave Iran, which he did on the 16th. Political prisoners were released, SAVAK dissolved, censorship relaxed and elections promised. The moves, though well-intentioned, were futile. National Front colleagues continued to spurn Bakhtiar and Khomeini called him a traitor. Bakhtiar’s decision to allow Khomeini to return to Iran was understandable, but also fatal. ‘I knew Khomeini was a crook,’ Bakhtiar explained, ‘but I was still not prepared to stop him from returning.’ The Ayatollah arrived on 1 February, and four days later Bakhtiar left office. He fled the country on the 11th.87
After Bakhtiar’s departure, a provisional government headed by Mehdi Bazargan was installed, but in truth the unstoppable Khomeini was in charge. On his direction, revolutionary committees took control of mosques and factories. In Tehran, a revolutionary council, hand-picked by Khomeini, insinuated itself into the nation’s governance. At the end of March, a referendum expressed overwhelming support for an Islamic Republic. What that meant, however, was not entirely clear. Bazargan envisaged a parliamentary democracy conducting government on Islamic principles. Radical clerics, however, had different ideas. They wanted power vested in the ulema, who would govern through the revolutionary council and whose authority revolutionary guards would enforce. An Assembly of Experts, dominated by radical ulema, rejected Bazargan’s model.
The new constitution, promulgated in November 1979, maintained the customary structure of President, Cabinet and Parliament, but otherwise differed markedly from the modern conception of a republic. Government would henceforth ‘extend the sovereignty of God’s law throughout the world’. Civil law would be derived from Islamic doctrine. The authority of secular institutions was severely curtailed by the power vested in the Revolutionary Guard and by a council of twelve guardians, who could veto legislation if it contradicted Islamic doctrine. Finally, a supreme guide, or vali faqih, would oversee all aspects of governance. That role went to Khomeini, appointed for life.88
The rest of the world struggled to understand. The revolution had once seemed familiar to observers, be they conservative, liberal or Marxist. Iran seemed a classic case of democratic will overcoming autocracy. Then, however, the religious element, which most Westerners blithely assumed to be incidental, imposed its character upon the revolution, producing something altogether alien. ‘The notion of a popular revolution leading to the establishment of a theocratic state seemed so unlikely as to be absurd,’ one White House aide noted. Quite how absurd would be revealed very quickly.89