"Why coups are less and less popular," a fascinating chart on The Economist website, is worth a look. It's a snazzier version of the report put out by the very serious HIIK, the Heidelberg Institute for International Conflict Research, as part of the Human Security Report Project (HSRP).
It shows how "le coup d'etat" is way down as a means of toppling governments. From its heyday in 1963, when there were 25 coups, through 2007, when there was just one.
Of course you never know: there used to be a joke in US embassies about how a CIA station in West Africa would submit an annual coup prediction, knowing that they'd eventually get it right.
I only experienced one coup, whose initial stage was largely bloodless: the Algerian Army's overthrow of one of its own, President Chadli Bendjedid in 1992, and its subsequent cancellation of elections that the Islamist FIS party was poised to win. We had a view from the living room of the tanks below our window, streaming down the waterfront boulevard in Oran.
Though the coup itself was relatively bloodless, the aftermath has been more than a decade and a half of bloodletting: Algeria descended into a spiral of terrorist violence and reprisal from which it has yet to fully emerge.
I'm sure that the people who developed the coup chart are meticulous in their methodology, and have footnotes to annotate instances of regime-change, where, like in Iraq in 2003, the coup was administered from the outside.
And then there's the category of regime-change in a stateless territory, like the overthrow of the Somali Islamic Courts by US surrogate Ethiopia, which Aidan Hartley ("The Zanzibar Chest") describes so well in the current Vanity Fair. That's a "coup" for you: the only group which is capable of reining in on the anarchic warlords and pirates is overthrown.
Sometimes militaries don't need to carry out a coup to exert their power, as Steven Cook illustrates in his book "Ruling But Not Governing." In which he shows how the militaries in Egypt, Algeria, and Turkey, in ways both overt and subtle, exercise the real power behind the scene.
Coups beget coups. My diplomatic career began in 1979, in the same month that the Shah of Iran was overthrown in the Islamic Revolution. His career had begun in a coup, helped to power in 1953 by the CIA. Some of my diplomatic classmates wound up as hostages in the 1979 US Embassy takeover.
I went off to the "quiet" Caribbean, and just missed witnessing the pro-Cuban coup on the island of Grenada in March 1979. During my time in the Eastern Caribbean, I dealt with some of the aftermath of Maurice Bishop's coup. He in turn was killed in a 1983 coup, which precipitated (presaged is another word) Ronald Reagan's "rescue" of the island from the Cuban menace. Live by coup, die by coup.
This is beginning to resemble something from Forrest Gump, interloping on history. Sorry.
So I will end with today's "Analysis" from BBC World Service, which you can listen to here. It's full of examples - like Condoleezza Rice meeting first with Army chief General Kayani during her recent visit, before she even sees the elected civilian leaders - of why in Pakistan, it's still the Army that calls the shots.
Coups: they may be falling out of favor, but their absence is not proof of democracy's rise. In much of the world, men-with-guns, whether of the respectable kind that have traded their uniforms for business suits, or those who command child soldiers, are still very much with us.
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