16 - Thugs and Autocrats Run Amok
Across the globe a collection of locally powerful despots are now watching to see how the U. S. and Europe deal with Putin. They want to know what Putin can get away with in disrupting world order and how far Western nations and others who respect the integrity of sovereign states and eschew settling disputes by combat permit Putin to run roughshod. That host of autocrats and Putin wannabees should not escape our obloquy and attention. Giving space to them is not meant to turn our gaze, even for more than a moment, away from the cascading tragedy in Ukraine. Likewise, we should not completely neglect these other areas of the globe where citizens are deprived of their human rights and, too often, their lives and livelihoods. Autocrats proliferate, and will become more emboldened if Putin subjugates Ukraine and walks away free.
This edition includes but a few of the many places on the planet where liberties are trampled, lives forfeited, and immiseration is rife. There will be more in future editions of this newsletter, as well as on he tragedy of Ukraine.
Turkmenistan
Putin would prefer that Ukraine models itself on today’s Turkmenistan, a compliant and well-ordered ex-Soviet state.
A former obedient satellite on the Caspian Sea, Turkmenistan became a nation after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. It is the tenth largest world exporter of natural gas, and has very little else. A stop along the ancient Silk Road from China to the West, it now holds only 6 million people within a mostly desert country 21 percent larger than California.
Last week, after sixteen years of despotic rule in his Central Asian domain, President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov blithely transferred control to his son Serdar, who quickly won a sham presidential election with 73 percent of the vote, against token opposition. His father had triumphed in a previous election with 98 percent of the total. But such easy victories hardly compare to the long repressive reign of the only other president of Turkmenistan, the father’s predecessor and the founder of the post-Soviet state.
That was Sapurmurad Niyazov, who ruled from 1991 to his death in 2006, when the elder Berdymukhamedov took over. In 2007, Niyazov’s Turkmenistan was rated the second worst entity in the world, after North Korea, and opinions of the country are now little different. Its peoples are systematically repressed, jailed, tortured, and abused. It has never known any human rights or civil liberties; Serdar Berdymukhamedov is unlikely to rule any less harshly than his father or Niyazov, or the groomed authoritarian successors in neighboring Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, or Uzbekistan.
Niyazov was known for constructing monstrous statues of himself, calling himself the Turkmenbashi (or chief of all Turkmen), banning higher education, removing physicians and other health professionals, tyrannical outbursts, demanding constant toadying, and renaming the months of the year after himself and his mother. He is also alleged to have siphoned $2 billion of the country’s natural gas profits into his own pockets, concealing the loot offshore. Overall, he successfully plunged Turkmenistan “ever deeper into neo-Stalinist torpor,” remaining friendly and loyal to Putin throughout.
Gunguly Berdymukhamedov proceeded to walk firmly in Niyazov’s Soviet-style footsteps. Human Rights Watch in 2020 called his government among the world’s “most repressive.” It strictly controlled all movement of citizens within the country while prohibiting travel outside. It censored the media and, in 2022, still held political prisoners from the 1990s. It seemed unwilling to recognize how impoverished and hungry large proportions of its people had become as a result of reduced profits from gas and the government’s failure to supply food markets, which are regime controlled, with purchases from abroad. Meanwhile, in 2020 the president honored his favorite dog breed with a 19- foot high gold statue, and compelled banks to support a strengthening of its pedigree. Turkmenistan today is the kind of cramped and cowed place Putin would like to rule.
Burma (Myanmar)
The United States last week finally agreed officially that Burma’s near extermination of the Muslim Rohingya minority in its western Rakhine State in 2017 amounted to genocide, and that the military rulers of the country should be prosecuted as war criminals. That is hardly going to happen any more quickly than world order will place Putin before the International Criminal Court. Burma is not a signatory to the Court, so it will take either a vote of the Security Council (which China is poised to veto) or employing Bangladesh (a signatory) as a proxy because that is the country to which about one million displaced Rohingya fled.
The U. S .has imposed sanctions preventing financial flows, imports, exports, and travel for the army leaders who perpetrated the Rohingya genocide and now rule Burma despotically after yet another coup in early 2021 that ousted (a pliant) overwhelmingly elected governing body led by Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. (She now faces 173 years in prison on seventeen trumped-up charges.)
Since the coup that overturned Daw Suu Kyi’s election, the ruling army junta has battled a clandestine citizen group called the National Unity Movement and a clutch of ethnic armies that are attempting to overcome military repression. Thousands have been killed and many more imprisoned in both central Myanmar and the twelve separate ethnically-based and in some cases Christian states that surround the Bamar (Burmese) Buddhist core.
Yemen and Ethiopia
Not least by any means, two wars on either side of the Red Sea have caused severe humanitarian crises that – in their senseless cruelties – rival Ukraine’s. Since 2015, a war has been fought for control over much of Yemen and its oil. A Houthi army from the north ousted the elected government from the capital and, with the government army backed militarily by Saudia Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (with some air support by the US), the two sides have been fighting ever since. The Shiite Houthi are supported by Shiite Iran.
In the Yemeni war, so far about 400,000 have died and more than 3 million have been displaced internally. The one-time elected government mostly controls the country’s south, the Houthi the north and some of the oil fields. Farther east, in the wild desert lands trending toward Oman, al-Qaeda still reigns, largely outside of the formal war zone.
Seven years of merciless combat have devastated and impoverished much of the country that is not fully desert. Food shortages have been constant in much of the country, especially in the south. The UN now reckons that 5 million people are food deprived, with severe hunger and starvation likely. Nearly 2.3 million are children, facing real starvation. Largely cut off from grain supplies from Ukraine, wheat flour shortages will grow and exacerbate the military crisis in Yemen.
Similarly, as a result of the Oromo-led Ethiopian government’s attacks against its Tigrayan province since late 2020, about 600,000 citizens of Tigray (and of Ethiopia) are at risk of starvation; the Ethiopian government has blocked the UN and others from sending relief supplies to held feed Tigray’s people. Two million people have been displaced from their homes. The government has also cut electricity and most road traffic. The UN accuses Ethiopia of using food deprivation as a weapon. The actual war is a stalemate even though the government side has access to better equipment and ammunition. A ceasefire was agreed upon earlier today, and may stanch more fighting and permit relief supplies to arrive. But there have been false starts before, and lots of double-dealing.
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Zimbabwe
Zimbabweans go to the polls tomorrow in a series of spirited by-elections to fill twenty-eight parliamentary seats that were vacated two years ago. Zimbabwe’s parliament has 270 members, 179 belonging to the long ruling Zimbabwe African National Union- Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) and 89 to what was the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). But tomorrow’s contest, a forerunner of next year’s full-scale national election, is between ZANU-PF and the very new Citizens’ Coalition for Change (CCC), led by Nelson Chamisa, formerly a leader of the MDC before that party split badly in 2020. Now 69 of the 89 MDC seats in the existing Parliament adhere to CCC.
That all sounds confusing, but what is truly at stake tomorrow is the future of one of Africa’s longest-enduring kleptocratic despotisms. Under President Robert Mugabe (1980-2017) Zimbabwe eliminated nearly all human rights and civil liberties, punished dissent in the Putin and Berdymukhamedov style, tortured prisoners, and engaged in vast excesses of kleptocratic corruption.
Emmerson Mnangagwa, Mugabe’s long enforcer and bagman, and General Constantino Chiwenga ousted Mugabe in a palace coup in 2017, promising reforms to follow. But Zimbabwe remains as desperately despotic as before, with soaring inflation (as in 2008) and hunger so acute that the World Food Program still feeds one-quarter to one-third of all Zimbabweans.
If Chamisa’s party can win a major proportion of the contested seats tomorrow, doing so may give long disenfranchised Zimbabweans hope for the future. But Zimbabwe’s security forces traditionally do their best to intimidate and coerce potential voters. ZANU-PF buys the support of voting blocs, too, and pressures chiefs to lean on their local constituents. Then, too, numerous elections in Zimbabwe have been falsely counted and reported, with rigging a reliable occurrence.
President Mnangagwa, known locally as “the crocodile,” will not want to see his hold on wealth and power in Zimbabwe be challenged successfully by Chamisa and the CCC. Democratic values are once more at risk, as they are throughout a world replete with would-be Putin clones.
More about humanity at risk and conflict mitigation on Monday. Thank you for reading.