Jun 8, 2011
A Brief History of Exile
Exile, meaning to be away from one’s home state while either being explicitly refused permission to return and/or being threatened with imprisonment or death upon return, has become in vogue once more for heads of state. The departure of Tunisian President for exile in the Saudi city of Jeddah (the same city where former President Idi Amin of Uganda lived in exile until his death on 2003 after being removed from power on 1979 at end of the Ugandan-Tanzanian War) in February has been followed by the departure of Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh to the same country, ostensibly for medical treatment following a rocket attack on his presidential palace on Friday, but which many speculate may become permanent. Though the government rejected an opposition proposal to prepare for the transition from the rule of President Ali Abdullah Saleh and for the election of his replacement and though his spokesmen said no decisions on Yemen’s future could be taken until he returned from Saudi Arabia, the US and EU have pressured Sana’a to initiate what US secretary of state Hillary Clinton called an “immediate transition” to a new regime. Saleh’s departure, if it becomes permanent, will inevitably have an impact on any process of accountability for crimes committed during the recent spike in repression – Saudi Arabia has not signed the Rome Statute.
Exile has a very long history, stretching back to Greek tragedy. Euripedes’ Medea made herself and her family exiles in Corinth because of her actions in Iolcus. She talks of her exiled state in Corinth: ‘I, a desolate woman without a city… no relative at all’. The exile of Medea, like that of Pol Pot in Cambodia and Hosni Mubarak in Sherm-al-Sheik, is internal in form. The more usual form in recent history is external. It is unlikely that Saleh and Ben Ali will be as desolate as Medea, though the recent history of the phenomenon shows a variety of outcomes. Typically, modern exile is permanent in the form of asylum, though Charles Taylor’s deportation from Nigeria for face trial before the Special Court for Sierra Leone in 2005 presents an exception which may one day constitute the rule. While 2011 may yet turn out to be an annus mirabilis for exile, it is worth nothing that Jean-Claude Duvalier, nicknamed “Baby Doc”, who was the President of Haiti from 1971 until his overthrow by a popular uprising in 1986, unexpectedly returned to Haiti on 16 January 2011, after two decades in exile in France due to a popular uprising on 7 February 1986. The following day, he was arrested by Haitian police, facing possible charges for embezzlement. On 18 January, Duvalier was charged with corruption, and is expected to be held before a judge in Port-au-Prince for his trial. It may prove a happier ending that some of the other exiles the international community has tolerated in the interest of regime change or peace, as the following survey demonstrates.
Idi Amin
After an eight-year rule (1971-79) characterized by human rights abuse, political repression, ethnic persecution, extrajudicial killings, nepotism, corruption, and gross economic mismanagement (the number of people killed as a result of his regime is estimated by international observers and human rights groups to range from 100,000 to 500,000), internal dissent within Uganda and Amin’s attempt to annex the Kagera province of Tanzania in 1978 led to the Uganda–Tanzania War and the demise of his regime. Amin’s army retreated steadily in the face of Tanzanian counter-attack, and, despite military help from Libya’s Muammar al-Gaddafi, he was forced to flee into exile by helicopter on 11 April 1979, when Kampala was captured. He escaped first to Libya, where he stayed until 1980, and ultimately settled in Saudi Arabia, where the Saudi royal family allowed him sanctuary and paid him a generous subsidy in return for his staying out of politics. Amin lived for a number of years on the top two floors of the Novotel Hotel on Palestine Road in Jeddah. In 1989, he attempted to return to Uganda, apparently to lead an armed group organised by Colonel Juma Oris. He reached Kinshasa, Zaire, before Zairian President Mobutu forced him to return to Saudi Arabia (exile throws up some very colourful characters). Amin died in 2003 and is buried in Jeddah.
Erich Honecker
Honecker led the German Democratic Republic as General Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party from 1971 until 1989, serving as Head of State from1976. Following the definite end of the Cold War, Honecker refused all but cosmetic changes and was ousted by the party in late 1989 and removed from power. After the GDR was dissolved in October 1990, the Honeckers stayed in a Soviet military hospital near Berlin before later fleeing the republic to Moscow, to avoid prosecution over charges of Cold War crimes. He was accused by the German government of involvement in the deaths of 192 East Germans who tried to leave the GDR in violation of anti-Republikflucht laws. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991, Honecker took refuge in the Chilean embassy in Moscow, but was extradited by the Yeltsin administration to Germany in 1992. He was officially expelled from the reformed SED-PDS before the trial opened. He then joined the very small new Communist Party. When the trial formally opened in early 1993, Honecker was released due to ill health and on 13 January of that year moved to Chile to live with his daughter who was married to a Chilean.
Mengistu Haile Mariam
Mengistu was the most prominent officer of the Derg, the Communist military junta that governed Ethiopia from 1974 to 1987, and the President of the People’s Democratic Republic of Ethiopia from 1987 to 1991. He oversaw the Ethiopian Red Terror of 1977–1978, a campaign of repression against the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party and other anti-Derg factions. Mengistu fled to Zimbabwe in 1991 at the conclusion of the Ethiopian Civil War. He remains there, though unusually there was some degree of accountability after one of the Ethiopian court’s Red Terror trials verdict found him guilty in absentia of genocide. His charge sheet and evidence list was 8,000 pages long. The evidence against him included signed execution orders, videos of torture sessions and personal testimonies. The trial began in 1994 and ended in 2006. Mengistu was found guilty as charged on 12 December 2006, and was sentenced to life in prison in January 2007. After Mengistu’s conviction in December 2006, the Zimbabwean government said that he still enjoyed asylum and would not be extradited. A Zimbabwean government spokesman explained this by saying that “Mengistu and his government played a key and commendable role during our struggle for independence”. According to the spokesman, Mengistu assisted his country’s guerrillas during their liberation war by providing training and arms, and after the war he had provided training for Zimbabwean air force pilots; the spokesman said that “not many countries have shown such commitment to us”.
Ferdinand Marcos
Marcos, sadly most famous for his wife’s enormous shoe collection, was President of the Philippines from 1965 to 1986. His administration was marred by massive authoritarian corruption, despotism, nepotism, political repression, and human rights violations. In 1983, his government was implicated in the assassination of his primary political opponent, Benigno Aquino, Jr. The implication caused a chain of events, including a tainted presidential election that served as the catalyst for the People Power Revolution in February 1986 that led to his removal from power and eventual exile in Hawaii. A close ally of Ronald Reagan’s administration, Marcos died in Honolulu on September 28, 1989, of kidney, heart and lung ailments.
Jean Bedel Bokassa
This is perhaps the most interesting exile, incorporating return, trial, punishment and a decisive role in French elections. Bokassa was the head of state of the Central African Republic and its successor state, the preposterously named Central African Empire, from his coup d’etat on 1 January 1966 until 20 September 1979. After his overthrow in 1979, Central Africa reverted to its former name and status as the Central African Republic, and the former Bokassa I went into exile. On the date of the coup against him by David Dacko, Bokassa, who was visiting Libya on a state visit, fled to the Ivory Coast where he spent four years living in Abidjan. He then moved to France where he was allowed to settle in a suburb of Paris. France gave him political asylum because of the French Foreign Legion obligations. During Bokassa’s seven-year of exile, he wrote his memoirs after complaining that his French military pension was insufficient. But the French courts ordered that all 8,000 copies of the book be confiscated and destroyed after his publisher claimed that Bokassa said that he shared women with President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who has been a frequent guest in the Central African Republic. Bokassa also claimed to have given Giscard a gift of diamonds worth around a quarter of a million dollars in 1973 while the French president was serving as finance minister. Giscard’s next presidential reelection campaign failed in the wake of the scandal. Bokassa’s presence in France proved embarrassing to many government ministers who supported him during his entire rule. He returned to Central Africa in 1986, and was arrested as soon as he stepped off the plane. He was tried for 14 different charges, including treason, murder, cannibalism, illegal use of property, assault and battery, and embezzlement, and convicted of these offenses in 1987. He was imprisoned in 1987—1993. Bokassa lived in private life in his former capital, Bangui, until his death in November 1996.
Mobutu Sese Seko
Mobutu Sese Seko as the President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo/Zaire from 1965 to 1997, a rule characterised by authoritarianism, war and mass human rights abuses. Mobutu was overthrown in the First Congo War by Laurent-Désiré Kabila, who was supported by the governments of Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda. Mobutu went into temporary exile in Togo but lived mostly in Morocco. On the very same day he was exiled, Laurent-Désiré Kabila became the new president of Congo. He died shortly after on 7 September 1997, in Rabat, Morocco, from prostate cancer. He is buried in Rabat. In December 2007, the National Assembly of the Democratic Republic of the Congo recommended returning his remains to the Congo and interring them in a mausoleum.
