SPECIAL REPORT: These Kings Leave No Heirs

By Miren Gutierrez Reprint | | Print |

Miren Gutierrez*

ROME, Nov 6 2004 (IPS) - Some ageing rulers seem destined to die among rumours of ill health and the nervous murmur of behind-the-scenes negotiations. From Portugal’s Antonio de Oliveira Salazar to former U.S. president Woodrow Wilson, history is full of them.

The disabilities of a leader can directly affect political decision-making. Take the current guesswork around the physical condition of Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat and Cuban President Fidel Castro.

Arafat (75) emerged as the principal Palestinian leader in the late 1960’s. He symbolises the Palestinian quest for statehood even to his critics. No other Palestinian can approach his stature. But he never designated a successor.

The Palestinian Authority, Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia and the legislative council have together assumed leadership in his absence, but no clear successor has emerged.

The state of Castro’s health after a fall that left him with a fractured knee and arm is uncertain. There have been rumours about Castro’s health for years, particularly after he fainted while giving a speech in June 2001. He re-emerged with longer speeches to prove his stamina.

How will their inner circles respond to the eventual absence of their paramount leaders? Will their reactions facilitate a peaceful transition, or just the opposite?

“I think it likely that Arafat has been a ‘sleeping captive king’,” says Robert S. Robins, professor emeritus of political science at Tulane University in New Orleans in an e-mailed interview. “That is, Arafat’s statements and actions are not in the control of others, but his inability to do much (due to his quasi imprisonment, likely declining health, and stalemate with Israel) has meant that others have had to stand by and wait for his fall.”

In a closed society with a partially disabled leader, the leader and his inner circle can become locked in a fatal embrace, each dependent on the other for survival, Robins and Jerrold M. Post wrote in their book ‘When Illness Strikes the Leader: The Dilemma of the Captive King,’ in 1993.

Robins has authored several books that examine the political dynamics around sick leaders. He has looked at Spain’s Francisco Franco, former Yugoslavia’s Josip B. Tito, China’s Mao Zedong and the former Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin. He has also studied U.S. presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln and Grover Cleveland.

Robins and Post acknowledge there is neither a rigid pattern in sick leaders’ relationship with their leadership circle nor “necessarily deleterious political consequences of disabling illness.” But often a “malignant interdependence” develops between the bedridden ruler and his circle.

A paradigmatic case is that of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar who ruled Portugal as a dictator from 1932 to 1968. He suffered a stroke and was replaced as prime minister. But this fact was withheld from him during the last two years he survived.

Fictitious cabinet meetings would take place at the ailing dictator’s bedside. Unable to talk or move, he would communicate through winks: one meant ‘yes’, two ‘no’, David Slavitt describes in his novel ‘Salazar Blinks’ based on the leader’s life.

Woodrow Wilson suffered a stroke while in power, and had become an invalid at the end of his administration. His wife was said to have taken important decisions on his behalf.

“It is important to remember that ill-health is almost always seen as a surprise…after it occurs, it seems obvious,” Robins said. “This pattern is occurring with Castro and Arafat. Of course they are increasingly falling ill with recovery increasingly difficult. The pattern is for those around the ill leader to stand back and wait. This is what is occurring in both instances.”

The reaction of the inner circle to uncertainty is “drift and silence”, he added. “Both are historic leaders jealous of new faces. Over time, the inner circles get smaller…Drift and perhaps secret arrangements at the transition is likely.”

Castro (78) has been in power since 1959, six years after he took up arms against the regime of President Fulgencio Batista. He remains the world’s longest-serving leader but also a divisive figure: some consider him a defender of the Third World and the “anti- imperialist” struggle, others see him as only a dictator.

“His style and all we have read indicates that he is jealous of his independence and willing to act against anyone who might threaten it,” Robins says. “He has not been ill enough to permit these characteristics to be overcome.” Castro has publicly declared that his brother Raul, only four years younger, would take over from him.

“Revolutionaries do not retire” is a favoured phrase of the Cuban leader. Or do they?

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon – a year older than Arafat – raised the possibility that new Palestinian leadership could open the door to peace negotiations. Sharon has refused to negotiate with Arafat.

In Palestinian ranks there has been a struggle between ageing ideologues who returned home with Arafat from exile in Tunis in the 1990s, and the younger leaders who grew up under Israeli occupation and organised the Intifadah, the armed struggle against Israeli occupation.

The old hands are people Arafat trusts, but many Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza regard them as corrupt outsiders. Arafat was able to rein in the younger leaders, but can anyone else impose order on Palestinian factions?

Sharon is not the only one desiring a “new leadership”. Former EU high representative Javier Solana said in 2002 that it might be wise for both Arafat and Sharon to stand aside.

“Neither is a saint, and sometimes I’m inclined to think that perhaps a new generation of persons in Israel and Palestine could in the 21st century come up with a solution to the conflict,” Solana said.

Leaders suffer from “different types of dysfunction,” says former Palestinian Authority minister Hanan Ashrawi.

“We have a president besieged by bombs, a functional dysfunction that is the breakdown of law and order and the dismantlement of the institutions, a paralysis of the national decision making, and the (Palestinian) Authority taken over by local military factions, security groups, even dictated by tribal loyalties,” she told IPS in a written interview.

Ashrawi was appointed minister in 1996 but resigned in 1998 in protest against political corruption within the cabinet. “The old guard is still holding on to power…but we need elections if we want a new leadership,” she said. The frustrated hopes of renewal within the Palestinian government and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) are a “part of the internal dysfunction,” she said.

But in the face of Arafat’s deteriorating health Ashrawi told the BBC: “We are not going to break down and fall apart. The system is functioning.”

Robins says political change is likely when the leader falls. “‘Likely’ is the important word here,” he says. “Note that there was a general expectation that North Korea would have a major shift when the elder dictator Kim died, but there has not. Politics is generally somewhat predictable, but never wholly.”

The eternal dilemma between experienced elders and irresponsible youth?

“From (the 15th century) Pope Alexander VI to Field Marshall Joseph Radetzky (who led the Austrian army against Napleon) and the Ayatollah Khomeini, one can easily compile a list of tyrannical seniors whose ‘excesses’ and ‘vehemences’ were far more destructive than all of history’s ‘youth movements’ combined,” a group of historians wrote in a letter to The New York Times in June 1989.

The letter signed by David Brion Davis, Peter Gay, John Merriman, David Montgomery and Jean-Christophe Agnew was written in reaction to an article by Prof. Seymour Martin Lipset, himself no spring chicken at the time, in which he said that youthfulness led students to radicalism and irresponsible involvement in politics.

“It is fortunate for humankind that the hopefulness and courage of young people have also on occasion challenged the arrogance, cynicism and corruption of established power, reminding older people that nothing is immune from change, that slavery and despotism need not be perpetual,” the historians wrote.

*Miren Gutierrez is Inter Press Service Editor in Chief.