With Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi dead after 42-years of brutal rule, the eyes of the Arab world have turned to the region's other dictators who still remain in power: Bashar al-Assad, who rules the roost in Syria even after slaughtering over 3,000 peaceful protesters, and Yemen's similarly embattled and cruel Ali Abdullah Saleh. On Oct. 21, jubilant Libyans poured into Tripoli's Martyrs' Square, chanting, "Syria! Syria!" But could Syria really be next? A sobering word of caution may be in order in these heady times.
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The course of unfolding events in North Africa and the Arab world eerily matches almost exactly the trajectory followed by sub-Saharan Africa's village revolutions in the early 1990s. Whereas the Arab Spring was triggered by the self-immolation of Tunisia's Mohamed Bouazizi in December of last year, Sub-Saharan Africa's moment in the sun was sparked by the collapse of the former Soviet Union in 1989. Winds of change swept across the continent, toppling long-standing despots in Benin (1991), Cape Verde Islands (1992), Congo Brazzaville (1992), Ethiopia (1991), Liberia (1990), Malawi (1991), Mali (1991), Sao Tome & Principe (1990), Somalia (1991), South Africa (1994), and Zambia (1991).
Not that these were entirely peaceful transitions either. In Liberia, General Samuel Doe bled to death in 1990 after rebels cornered him and cut off one of his ears. His body was burned and the ashes thrown into a river. Mohamed Siad Barre fled Somalia in 1991 in a tank that ran out of gas near the Kenyan border. In March of that year, angry Malians took to the streets to demand democratic freedom from the despotic rule of Gen. Moussa Traore. He unleashed his security forces on them, killing scores, including women and children. But pro-democracy forces were not deterred and kept up the pressure. Asked to resign on March 25, he retorted: "I will not resign, my government will not resign, because I was elected not by the opposition but by all the people of Mali." Two days later, when he tried to flee the country, he was grabbed by his own security agents and sent to jail. From there, he lamented: "My fate is now in God's hands."
In some African countries, such as Togo and Zimbabwe, autocrats put up fierce resistance, learned new tricks and beat back the democratic challenge. In others, such as Benin and Congo Brazzaville, ousted autocrats clawed their way back to power. In yet other countries, like Ethiopia and Zambia, the so-called new democrats turned out to be worse than the despots they ousted, affirming the African aphorism: "We struggle very hard to remove one cockroach from power and the next rat comes to do the same thing."
So what do the African village revolutions have to teach us as we look forward to the next stage of the Arab Spring?
First, rah-rah street protests alone are not sufficient to defeat a dictator. Neither is a single individual, group or party; it takes a coalition of opposition forces. The freedom movements in Iran, Syria, Yemen, and other countries have been stymied by disunity and divisions within opposition forces. Even when an opposition can unify into a solid protest movement, as in Egypt, it still needs the aid of an auxiliary institution -- such as the military, the judiciary, the media, or some combination -- to succeed in toppling a dictator.
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