Thugs in power
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The term “thug” originated in 18th-century India. There, the Thugees were a group of Hindu religious extremists who believed in ritual sacrifice. Their main activity was to kidnap and murder travellers along India’s highways. Over the years, some 40 or 50 gangs of them are estimated to have killed between 20,000 and 30,000 travellers per year. Early in the 19th century, the British authorities became seized of the problem and began arresting Thugees. In a period of five years, some 3,000 Thugees were convicted in British courts and either hanged or sent to penal settlements for life. That put an end to the Thugee movement in India, but the name continues to exist in modern English usage.
The Concise Oxford English Dictionary defines thug as a “vicious or brutal ruffian.” Unfortunately, that definition fits too many of the leaders on the world stage today. While we have in recent years witnessed the demise of people such as Moamar Gadhafi of Libya, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, there are still too many of their ilk in power around the world, and many of them in fairly important countries.
The quintessential example of a thuggish leader in a major country is Vladimir Putin of Russia. Allying himself with robber barons, secret service men and the Russian Orthodox Church, he has managed to crush Russian democracy beneath his feet. Opponents of his regime, including several journalists, have either experienced mysterious deaths or disappeared entirely. He has confiscated the assets of media organizations that dared to voice any criticism of his regime. He has used his military assets to intimidate the governments of Georgia and Ukraine and was guilty of a major breach of international law with his invasion and occupation of the Crimean Peninsula. He has used his cyber assets to disrupt the communications of at least one small Baltic republic and to meddle in the electoral politics of the United States, Great Britain and France. And he has been instrumental in the poisoning of his political opponents, including Alexei Navalny in Russia and the Skripals in Great Britain. These and other examples of his willingness to use his power unscrupulously in pursuit of his political ends have shown him up to be the brute he is.
Another thuggish leader who has come to world attention in recent weeks is Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus. After running his country as a one-man dictatorship for over 25 years, he finally overstepped the bounds in rigging a presidential election in August of this year. When the official results of the election showed him to have won with 80 per cent of the vote, this proved too much for the people of Belarus. Claiming massive electoral fraud, they descended into the streets of the capital, Minsk, and other cities. Literally hundreds of thousands of people joined in the anti-government demonstrations. When confronted with this, Lukashenko unleashed his security forces on essentially peaceful demonstrators and thousands were arrested and carted off to jail. His actions have been widely condemned by countries around the world, and the European Union is threatening to impose sanctions on Belarus, a country with an already faltering economy. Lukashenko’s only friend in the world is Putin, who recently promised to help bail out the country to the tune of $1.5 billion. What Putin will demand in return for this remains to be seen. In the meantime, the demonstrations and their repression carry on unabated in Minsk and beyond.
The Middle East has more than its fair share of thuggish regimes. Four of them stand out. The worst by far is that of Bashir Al Assad in Syria, who in nine years of war against his own people has produced 500,000 dead and millions of refugees. Syrian forces routinely target schools and hospitals and have launched chemical weapons attacks against civilian populations. And tens of thousands of Syrians languish in fetid jails, where they are frequently subjected to torture. Another such regime is that of Mohamed Bin Sulman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. Not only has he suppressed the rights of women in his country, he also engineered the murder and dismemberment of the opposition journalist Jamal Kashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Even more reprehensible is his involvement in the civil war in Yemen. There, his air force has attacked schools, hospitals, mosques and wedding parties resulting in hundreds, if not thousands, of civilian deaths. And his blockades of Yemeni ports have reduced millions of Yemenis to living on the brink of starvation. Then there is the regime of Gen. Abdel Fatah al Sissi in Egypt. He has not only totally muzzled the media in his country but has thrown tens of thousands of political opponents into jail, where they are routinely tortured. Finally, there is the regime of the Ayatollahs in Iran, which has totally suppressed freedom of expression and of religion and which has dealt with extreme brutality with peaceful demonstrators. All four of these regimes feature thugs in high office.
In Asia, there are the generals in Myanmar. They have repeatedly committed crimes against humanity in the course of their campaigns against ethnic minorities. Their campaign of murder, rape and arson against the Rohingya people, forcing 700,000 of them to flee the country, has been deemed a genocide by well-respected international authorities. Somewhat less spectacular, but nevertheless horrendous, in its human rights abuses is the regime of Kim Jong Un in North Korea. It has turned the country into a virtual concentration camp, where hundreds of thousands of political prisoners and their families are detained in appalling conditions. Kim has also deprived his people of the basic necessities of life, including food and medicine, so that he can devote resources to the armed forces, which support him politically, and to his vainglorious nuclear weapons and missile programs. Imprisoned and starving North Koreans cry out for justice, but none is forthcoming from a leader preoccupied primarily with his status and his desire to stay in power. Finally, there is President Roderigo Duterte of the Philippines, who in a campaign supposedly designed to combat drug trafficking has given his security forces permission to kill at will anyone suspected of being involved in the drug trade. Thus without benefit of trial or due process, some 5,000 mostly innocent civilians have been killed in recent years. Yet another populist thug on the march.
The continent that has shown some improvement in putting thuggery behind it is Africa. The current presidents of Uganda, Zimbabwe, South Africa and other countries are certainly not models of good governance, but they represent a vast improvement on what went before. Long gone are such brutal and corrupt dictators as Idi Amin of Uganda, Jean Bedel Bakassa of the Central African Republic, Mobutu Sesc Soko of Congo, Sani Abacha of Nigeria and Charles Taylor of Liberia, But the cult of the “Big Man” continues to exist in parts of Africa, and the risk that similar monsters could reappear is very real.
In the Western Hemisphere, we are at present largely spared the phenomenon of thugs in power. While leaders such as Nicholas Maduro of Venezuela and Raul Castro of Cuba are in many ways thoroughly reprehensible, they do not fully meet the criteria. There is no doubt that U.S. President Donald Trump will fall into the category were he not constrained by the constitution and institutions of the United States. Let us all be thankful for small mercies and pray for the demise of the thugs who continue to rule in other parts of the world.
Louis A. Delvoie is a retired Canadian diplomat who served abroad as an ambassador and high commissioner.