Ditching the Dictators: A Practical Guide
If Britain and America really want to get rid of the world’s tyrants they can, writes Mark Palmer
The Sunday Times
January 4, 2004

Skepticism, even cynicism, greet this double standard, this contradiction between the pro- democracy rhetoric and frequent pro-dictator actions of our leaders. Liberals and conservatives agree that democracy is preferable to dictatorship. The question is how to deal with the Ayatollah Khameneis, Kim Jong Ils and Fidel Castros, as well as the Mubaraks, Musharrafs and Karimovs.

Most Europeans and many Americans oppose the use of force. Even the superhawk Richard Perle says: “We’re not going to make war on the world for democracy . . . We should be using all instruments of American influence to accomplish that purpose and most of these instruments are not military.”

So what are those instruments? One of the most powerful is simple advocacy. Standing before the British parliament on June 8, 1982, President Ronald Reagan predicted that all communist and other dictatorships would be put on the “ash heap of history”.

I wrote the draft of that speech and remember the criticism that this rhetoric made working with the Soviet Union impossible. But it reverberated within the gulag. Gadaffi is less courageous than yielding to pressure (domestic and international); and we must remember that he sent a plane-load of weapons to Liberia to undermine the international efforts to remove Charles Taylor, his fellow dictator.

Gadaffi is a big financial supporter of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, and bought Libya’s chairmanship of the United Nations human rights commission from fellow African and other dictators. The only solution for Libyans, Africans and the rest of the world is his removal from power. History gives us no example of a dictator becoming a democrat while still in power.

Dictators are the main cause of what ails the world — famine, refugees, poverty, drug trafficking, environmental degradation, corruption, war, genocide and terrorism.

Fortunately there are thousands of freedom-loving Libyans, Iranians, Saudis, North Koreans and Cubans. From Chile to Indonesia, from Poland to South Africa and most recently from Belgrade to Tbilisi, the weapons of non-violent conflict — organisation, communication, general strikes, mass protests — generated from within and supported from outside have reduced the number of dictatorships from 43% to one-quarter of the world’s nations since 1973. And hardly a shot was fired.

Across the foreign ministries of the democratic world there is a stunning lack of understanding of this power and a lack of organisation to help. The best kept secret in multilateral diplomacy, the Community of Democracies launched in Warsaw in 2000, should move towards the centre of British, American and other democracies' foreign policies. Its budding democracy group at the UN could take back the UN human rights commission from the dictators.

The community should establish a "from dictatorship to democracy centre" similar to the economic development institutions that we have with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The centre would work with democrats inside the dictatorships and the dictators themselves on plans and action programmes for transition to full democracy. It would set deadlines for dictators. It would share experience from past transitions, including training in the methods of non-violent struggle and material support.

The dictators will not co-operate unless there are pressures. The prospect of a trial will help to focus their minds on the need for a negotiated way out. Saddam and the dictators of Yugoslavia, Liberia, Chad, Rwanda, Chile and Argentina have confronted this reality in a growing international practice. Dictatorship itself should be recognised as a crime against humanity and we should gather the evidence against each one of the last, least wanted.

Far better to develop a new class of such smart sanctions narrowly targeted on the dictator, his assets and his cronies than to continue with broad economic and other sanctions that penalise suffering people and usually have the effect of reinforcing the dictators' hold on power. The United States might be persuaded to drop its sanctions against Cuba if European and Latin American democracies would join us in a serious effort to bring democracy to that island.

One of the few things which holds these dictators in place is that the people of the country in question often feel abandoned by the rest of the world. During the second world war, Churchill and Roosevelt broadcast regular fireside chats which motivated people to resist and eventually defeat the dictators of that time. Something comparable could be done today: a different prime minister each week could give a talk translated into Chinese, broadcast on radio, television and via the internet about China's future and how we can help to bring it fully into the modern democratic world.

Another way to pierce the isolation is for our ambassadors and embassies, frequently the only islands of freedom inside dictatorships, to become active on the side of the people. Conventional diplomacy must be set aside.

Harry Barnes, the American ambassador to Chile in the mid- 1980s, joined a candlelight vigil to give moral support to the regime's victims and their families. In Budapest as the American ambassador, I marched in the streets with the democratic opposition. In China today the British, American and other democratic ambassadors could show solidarity with that country's largest and most repressed spiritual movement by doing the Falun Gong's exercises in public parks.

It is not enough to be outraged by the starvation deaths of 2m North Koreans, caused by a dictator's thirst for total control and eternal power: the dictator must be convicted of crimes against humanity and forced to step down.

With a willingness to compromise, America and Europe's democrats can sit together and agree upon the best ways to make these dangerous political relics extinct.

Having such a new deal, with a serious and consistent commitment to oust the remaining dictators, a set of effective multinational institutions and an opening, largely peaceful strategy, nothing can stop the democracies and democrats from finishing the job.

Mark Palmer is the author of Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025.