How to lose a country gracefully (part IV)

By Khmer Democrat, Phnom Penh
Brutal Khmer Dictators, Your Days are Numbered Series

This New York Times article by its executive editor Bill Keller, in several parts, is dedicated to the leaders of this autocratic regime with the hope that they are smart enough to see a better path into their future:

Part IV

How to Lose a Country Gracefully

Bill Keller

The New York Times, March 1, 2011

Some of your best allies are in your jails.

Gorbachev freed Andrei Sakharov from exile; de Klerk released Nelson Mandela. Both leaders then enlisted their liberated adversaries as negotiating partners, buying some credibility at home and abroad. [Time to open the door rolling out the red carpet for Sam Rainsy to come home.] These partnerships inevitably fell victim to mistrust, but they helped assure that the end of the old order was managed rather than catastrophic.

Armies are people, too.

We tend to think of armies as instruments. But they are also constituencies with families to feed, jobs to protect, a stake in the future, a yearning for respect. If a leader can command his army only with threats of summary execution or by holding family members hostage, as Libya’s desperate despot, Muammar el-Qaddafi, is reported to have done, you can safely bet his days are numbered.

One of the smartest things de Klerk did to prevent the civil war many feared in South Africa was to negotiate job security for the apartheid-era army. And one of the smartest things Nelson Mandela did was accede to this demand, so that when he became the first president of free South Africa, he inherited a military that regarded him as their paymaster.

[ cont'd ]

How to lose a country gracefully (part I)

How to lose a country gracefully (part II)

How to lose a country gracefully (part III)