The coup d'état has been a staple of history. Its modus operandi and results are all too consistent, writes Ayman El-Amir Pervez Musharraf, forced to resign last week as president of Pakistan, is not the first army general to come to power by a military coup and will not be the last one to be ousted by another. Musharraf was overthrown when the army that brought him to power concurred with political forces that he had to go. Under the threat of impeachment Musharraf chose to jump rather than be pushed. When the military seized control of Mauritania in 2005 and overthrew the corrupt, 20-year-old regime of former president Sid' Ahmed Ould Tayaa they pledged to hand over power to a civilian administration within a year. Coup leader Colonel Ely Ould Mohamed Vall went even further, announcing that members of the military council that hatched the coup would be barred from running in the 2007 election in order to ensure it would be free and fair. This was greeted with scepticism in Mauritania and elsewhere: military coups, after all, have become a way of life in Africa and Mauritania itself has been the scene of 16 coup attempts since it gained independence from France in 1960. The officers surprised everyone by making good on their promise and free, multi-party elections were held in 2007 with Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheikh Abdullahi emerging as president. After more than sixty years in which military coups and counter-coups became endemic in developing countries the phenomenon has become increasingly unacceptable to democratic and human rights institutions, international organisations, the coalition of Western states and the population of developing countries themselves. It was no surprise, then, that the coup that took place in Mauritania earlier this month, ousting elected President Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheikh Abdullahi and his prime minister, was roundly condemned by the European Union, the African Union and the UN Security Council, regretted by the United Nations Secretary-General and cautiously criticised by the Secretary-General of the Arab League, of which Mauritania is a member. The implication is that the world community has come of age and, despite political alliances and economic interests, is increasingly intolerant of democratically elected governments being unseated by small groups of senior army officers seeking to settle old scores, or junior officers who covet power and riches. The use of military power to consolidate political positions at home has a long history. Julius Caesar's foreign conquests made him eligible for the position of Consul of the Roman Empire in 53 B.C. He was then named Dictator - a temporary post created and filled by the Roman Senate in times of national crisis -- three times, the last of which was in 44 BC, the year of his assassination. In 1799 Napoleon Bonaparte, following his unsuccessful campaign in Egypt and his return to France, engineered a military coup against the Revolutionary Directorate and established himself as Consul and, a few years later, as emperor. During the 19th century coup d'états were rampant in Spain and the Balkans. So while military coups may seem the preserve of developing and newly-independent countries they were in fact borrowed from colonial masters. Wolfgang Kapp, a rightwing journalist and activist, incited army officers to stage a military putsch in Berlin in 1920. Hitler followed with another attempt in 1923. French army officers in Algeria made two coup attempts in 1942 and in 1961 -- the second by the Secret Army Organisation (OAS) that was opposed to General Charles de Gaulle's policy of withdrawal from Algeria. South America, playground of US policies and business interests for most of the 20th century, has been the scene of scores of military coups since Argentina launched its first in 1930. One of the bloodiest in recent memory was the military coup in Chile jointly planned and executed by General Augusto Pinochet and the CIA in September 1973 to unseat the democratically elected president Salvador Allende. Between 2000 and 3000 people, most of them young activists, were tortured and killed. In Nicaragua, Anastasio Somoza ruled the country as a military dictator sponsored by the US from 1934 until 1956 when he was assassinated. Of his brutal autocracy President Franklin DcRoosevelt once said, "he is a son-of-a-bitch, but he is our son of a bitch". It would seem that South America has now become politically mature. Escaping US intrigues, it now has left-leaning leaders, similar to Allende, deposed and assassinated 35 years ago because he was the first democratically-elected leftist president and former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger was wary of a domino effect. The US has its own share of attempted coups. Documents from the Congressional sub-Committee on Un-American Activities, which under Senator Joseph McCarthy launched a witch-hunt for leftist-leaning American intellectuals in the late 1940s, reveal a coup plot against President Franklin D. Roosevelt. It was reportedly instigated by stock market and financial institution gurus, the Morgan-Mellon group, to nip in the bud Roosevelt's New Deal programme and create a Fascist state modelled on Germany. The plan was revealed in Congressional testimony by Navy Major-General Smedley Darlington Butler who had been co-opted to be part of the revolt. Prescott Bush, President George W Bush's grandfather, was named as one of the co-conspirators in the plot. In Africa and the Arab Middle East, where decades of colonial rule left no institutions for the democratic rotation of power, military coups substituted for the ballot box. Military coups in Africa sometimes led to civil war, as in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Since its independence from Britain in 1960, Nigeria has witnessed 12 coups and counter-coups in addition to a major civil war in 1967. It still suffers from rebellions in the Niger River Delta over allegations that the oil wealth in the South is being siphoned to the North. Sierra Leone suffered a cruel civil war, stoked by Liberia, which itself later fell in the same pit. Its leader, Charles Taylor, has now been hauled before the International Criminal Court. Senegal and South Africa seem to be the only stable democracies in Africa. In Asia India and Pakistan, integral parts of the "subcontinent" of the British Empire, present a stark contrast. While in India the army resolutely refused military intervention, even in times of national turmoil, grave political crises and assassinations, Pakistan has alternated between government by political parties and military coups. Nine years after seizing power in a military coup, and despite strong US backing, President Musharraf has now resigned under pressure of impeachment charges by the parliamentary coalition that won the elections in February this year. President Bush has lost one of his most loyal allies. In the Arab Middle East Syria gained independence from France in 1945 and during the period from 1949 to 1969 had 16 coups or coup attempts. The last one, in 1969, was led by Lieutenant-General Hafez Al-Assad. He later became prime minister and then president, ruling until he died in 2000, only to be succeeded by his son Bashaar Al-Assad. While established Arab monarchies rotate power at a snail's pace, sometimes by palace coups, other Arab countries have changed regimes via military coups which then perpetuate themselves in power, selecting successors or, following Syria, grooming their offspring to take control. Egypt is the oldest military regime in the region. Army officers staged a military coup in 1952 and proclaimed Egypt a republic in June 1953. It is interesting that until the first President Mohamed Naguib was ousted by Gamal Abdel-Nasser in 1954 he consistently referred to the army coup as"The Blessed Movement" and not a revolution. It was only when Nasser replaced Naguib and was named president in the 1957 referendum in which he ran unopposed and reportedly received 99.999 per cent of the popular vote, that the term "revolution" was introduced. It also turned out that the booklet, "The Philosophy of the Revolution", a supposed distillation of the coup's raison d'être attributed to Nasser, was written two years after the 1952 coup, and was authored by a ghost writer, Mohamed Hassanein Heikal. In most cases once a military coup stabilised and established control of the country the conspirators shed their military fatigues and donned civilian clothes to create the impression that the unpopular ancien regime had been replaced by another, more progressive and trustworthy civilian one. Yet they took every occasion to make it clear that the tanks that brought them to power were still in the background. In addition they introduced new tools of suppression, purportedly to protect the population from what Nasser obliquely defined as "the enemies of the people". In other African countries coup leaders cared less for appearances, seeking to remind everyone they controlled the military. In Nigeria, where each of the 12 coup leaders that ruled the country between the 1980s and 1990s, claimed revolutionary credentials and a kind of chaste militarism, billions of petrodollars were siphoned off to Western banks. General Sani Abacha, who seized power in 1993 and survived two coup attempts, died suddenly in 1998, reportedly in the arms of his mistress, though many suspected she was a prostitute. In Myanmar, historically Burma, the military has ruled for more than 45 years after toppling the civilian government of Prime Minister U Nu in 1962. They always appear in military uniforms and had no qualms in mercilessly suppressing last year's protests, led by Buddhist monks. Almost all 20th century coups have presented themselves as revolutions, claiming a radical agenda and cleaner government. Few of them, though, had a clear vision of what to do once they wiped out the old regime and its symbols. In Egypt one of Nasser's exhortations was "Liberty, all liberty for the people, but no liberty for the enemies of the people". It meant little beyond taking revenge on the old elitist class and replacing it with a new elite, loyal to the army and its leader. "The Philosophy of the Revolution" and its "objectives" were afterthoughts. The main concern for four years after the coup was to consolidate the hold on power, eliminate any resistance and resolve the power struggle among the coup's leaders. Only when this was achieved was attention turned to what might come next. Almost invariably this included a one-party system that was controlled by the coup leader. Even where regimes donned civilian clothes they remained utterly opposed to pluralism or rotation of power. Once the military establish control, they can be prised from power only by another coup. Unfortunately, since in many cases the new leaders turned out to be far more corrupt, avaricious and power-addicted than the regimes they replaced, the question of definition, or presentation, became important: they announced themselves as revolutionaries. Yet a military coup is by nature elitist. The use of the term "revolution" is deliberately contrived to create the appearance that the movement is a change "of the people, by the people for the people", an expression of the unanimous will of the people or, at the very least, is undertaken on their behalf. The problem with this claim is that once coups place their trust not in "the people" but in the officer corps and its extensions. Thus was a dichotomy between people who could be "trusted" and people with "expertise" introduced in the early days of the Egyptian military regime -- a division that led to disastrous results. A coup by an elitist military corps could also act to pre-empt a full-scale and mature revolutionary movement, as was the case in Egypt in 1952. How do genuine mass movements such as the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Cuban Revolution and Mao Zedong's revolution, compare with new age coups in Argentina, Chile and Brazil and bloodless ones in Egypt, Libya, Syria and Tunisia? Revolutions and coups have always used the masses as their fodder, but decades later it would seem that China's peoples' revolution has been vindicated, and is certainly more successful than that of Lawrence Kabilla in the Congo. The 1919 revolution in Egypt against the British administration of the country and suppression of the people's will was a true mass movement in which thousands of Egyptians were killed. The 1952 coup leaders and their consorts were unfair to the history of their country when they downgraded it to the status of a bourgeois, feudal revolt. This question of definition is more than mere semantics. It concerns fundamental issues of legitimacy. Many coup plotters glossed over the issue, considering that their most powerful source of legitimacy the power of the gun that can be freely point at any opponent's head or the power of the jailer who can detain anyone under a plethora invented rules and laws. For countries like pre-1952 Egypt and, in a different vein, factional Lebanon, which had known legitimacy through the ballot box, a new, unconventional legitimacy needed to be elaborated. Apologists for, and beneficiaries from, military rule soon contrived this compensation for the elitist, unrepresentative nature of the new regime. They called it "revolutionary legitimacy". It was perpetuated via emergency laws. As time passed new brands of legitimacy were spawned as circumstances dictated: there was the "legitimacy of the party", whether it was the Communist party or the Arab Socialist Baathist party, "legitimacy" bestowed by victory in war or simply the legitimacy of the will of the people as measured by fraudulent referenda, elections or constitutional amendments endorsed in circumstances of political intimidation. Wars of national liberation create genuine legitimacy for the ensuing regimes lthough, sadly in some cases, political oligarchies seized power and manipulated the objectives of the war, usually with the involvement of the military. The army in Algeria intervened after the 1992 general elections because the results favoured the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS). It is remarkable that, as a matter of record, no military regime that came to power in the last 50 years has proved to be less corrupt or more competent in addressing issues of national development, raising standards of living or establishing a sound, democratic society, than the regimes they set out replace. In most situations, after military regimes come to power they fabricate a state of fear, positing internal and external enemies. General Pinochet staged his coup to save Chile from the threat of Communism. In the process he liquidated thousands of young intellectuals and activists in the name of "fighting subversion and terrorism". Each of these regimes has created its own set of enemies to mobilise the population and justify the use of extraordinary and oppressive measures. There has never been a lack of accusations and punishments to call on, ranging from treason and the guillotine during Robespierre's Reign of Terror, to subversion, terrorism, Communism and spreading and counterrevolutionary propaganda. Such tactics were sometimes used to earn the support of foreign allies (fighting communism, stemming religious fundamentalism, eradicating terrorism), or to pit one group of the people against another. Some of the practices committed in the name of protecting the revolution have left the regime blood splattered and terrorised the most committed nationalists. The charges of terrorism that military juntas once used to intimidate the opposition and suppress dissent have now turned into a real threat. From Sri Lanka to Sudan, from Iraq to Spain and from India to Chechnya people feel they are sitting on a time bomb that could go off at any moment. Military regimes are now involved in a catch-22 situation in which the fight against terrorism employs such extraordinary measures that they are guaranteed, in turn, to spawn new generations of terrorists. No one knows exactly who the enemy is or when he (or she) is going to strike, as the tragic events of 11 September demonstrated. The terrorists themselves are spawned by the corruption, impoverishment, inequality, social marginalisation and political exclusion that have become endemic in post-coup d'etat societies. It is a real-life dramatisation of Animal Farm. Serious imbalances in international relations, particularly in the post-Soviet era, have dramatically changed the global scene. The end of the Cold War and of the struggle for national liberation - Palestine excepted -, the fragmentation of the Soviet Union and new alliances imposed by a unipolar power have frozen the dynamics of democratic change and undermined national causes. The "revolutionary" regimes of yore have become the autocracies of today, their survival assured by a combination of the military they control, democratic window dressing through fraudulent elections, regional and international alliances that tolerate injustice for political gain. During the Soviet era the US used to plot political change in collaboration with the military in countries that mattered to its interests. The 1953 military coup in Iran against Prime Minister Mohamed Musaddaq after he nationalised foreign oil interests, and the coup that brought Pinochet to power, will be studied by political analysts for a long time to come. The CIA also tried to topple Hugo Chavez in Venezuela in 2002 but failed. Coup d'etats by the military, which sees titself as the guardian of a nation's honour and security, remain possible though now, more than ever before, they are frowned upon. For the next two decades the world will have to grapple with the problems of terrorism and that could prove sufficiently destabilizing to see the emergence of neo-Fascist regimes. And then the world will be back to square one.
