Brexit: a lesson from literature

Another book I read on my holidays was Snow by the Turkish Nobel prize winning novelist, Orhan Pamuk. 

Published in 2004, it tells the story of a coup in the city of Kars, mounted by a demagogic but rather past-it actor. Pamuk writes about how local people support him because they believe he will stop immigrants coming in, working for low wages and stealing their jobs.

A lot of folk in Kars are disappointed with life, and different people have different views of the land of milk and honey that will follow the coup. Some think it will end immigration, others that the unlicensed slaughter of animals will be stopped; others still that corrupt politicians and business people will be called to account.

They do not understand that those mounting the coup do not have the slightest interest in these things, and just want to stop political parties they dislike from winning an upcoming election. In the end, the coup fails.

* Fact. Leading Brexiter Boris Johnson used to campaign unsuccessfully for Turkey to be admitted to the EU. Then he discovered he was anti-EU, and started to say it would be a very bad thing for Turkey to be let in, claiming this was about to happen, even though he knew it wasn't.

Coups d’état; what is the chance of succeeding?

Last month’s coup d’état against Turkey’s President Erdogan failed, but between 1950 and 2010, on average a coup had a 50-50 chance of succeeding.

Jonathan Powell and Clayton Thyne from the University of Kentucky examined 450 from that 60 year period, and found that 227 – 49.7% – were successful. And the plotters seemed to be improving, because those mounted since 2003 had a 70% success rate.

But coups have become less common. Their heyday was the 1960s, when there were about 15 a year. By the first decade of the new millennium that was down to 5 a year. One reason may be that the world is getting richer. Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler of Oxford University found that if people’s average incomes doubled, the risk of a coup fell by more than a quarter.

As to the ingredients of a successful coup, there seems a fair degree of consensus – detain key leaders, take over key media outlets, control key transport arteries. The Turkish plotters failed to  implement these properly, but perhaps a new factor was at play – social media, which President Erdogan used very effectively to rally support.

Burundi - forgotten tragedy

Burundi is in the throes of an attempted military coup. Trouble started when President Pierre Nkurunziza announced he was seeking a third term. Opponents said this breached the constitution, and now rival groups of soldiers are vying for control.

While everyone has heard of the genocide in neighbouring Rwanda, in which 800,000 people, mainly Tutsis, were killed by Hutu extremists in 1994, less well known is Burundi’s civil war, which raged from 1993 to 2005, and in which up to 300,000 died.

Before the country got independence in 1962, Belgium, the colonial power, had ruled through a Tutsi elite, and after independence, a series of Tutsi military regimes held power. In 1993, the country’s first democratically elected president, a Hutu, was assassinated by Tutsi extremists.

As many as 150,000 Tutsi were killed in retribution. In 1994, another Hutu president, Cyprien Ntaryamira, died in the same plane crash that killed President Habyarimana of Rwanda, the event that triggered the genocide there.  The Burundian civil war dragged on for another decade, until a power-sharing agreement was reached in 2005 with President Nkurunziza, a Hutu, taking charge.

For Rwanda genocide, see my blogs of 29 May 2011, 31 March and 1 June 2012, 1 June 2013, and 15 March 2014.