The World

Soviet allies fell too: in Ethiopia in 1984–5, Mengistu’s atrocities, along with a drought, had caused a famine that affected over seven million people. He deliberately restricted food supplies to Tigray and Wollo, where resistance to his rule was most effective. Over a million died. Now in May 1991 Mengistu, abandoned by Gorbachev, fled into exile, leaving a civil war that was swiftly won by an alliance of ethnic rebels led by the Tigrayan Meles, who had rejected Hoxhaite Marxism and formed an alliance with the Eritrean Maoist Isaias Afwerki, which captured Addis. Meles embraced the zeitgeist, promising liberal democracy but ruling as autocrat for twenty years. He soon fell out with the demented Isaias, who converted Eritrea, an independent state for the first time, into a regimented personal domain, in which the entire population were conscripted and terrorized by secret police, a system the UN called a form of slavery: Afwerki ruled into the 2020s. After Meles’s death, the Tigrayans lost power to an Oromo, and the country again dissolved into ethnic fighting.

There was only one Mandela, but another gifted African leader, much less well known outside the continent, rescued his country after almost destroying it. JJ Rawlings, ruling from the Castle for a decade, was the dictator who in 1979 had shot his generals on the beach in front of the press. Now he reacted to the fall of the Wall. Economically he took advice from the World Bank, while politically he fostered a liberal democracy. The showman Rawlings, sporting fancy suits or traditional robes, founded his own political party and ran for president. On 3 November 1992, he won a free election with 60 per cent of the vote, winning a second term in 1996. Succession is the test, but when he had served his permitted two terms he retired at fifty-four, leaving Ghana as a thriving democracy and economic force – one of the successes of Africa. ‘At the risk of sounding immodest,’ reflected Rawlings, ‘Ghana wouldn’t have been brought out of the abyss without a visionary’ – a very flawed one for sure.

In Russia, the fall of Communism was also the work of a visionary – but it wasn’t Gorbachev. In March 1990, Gorbachev’s election to a post, the presidency of the USSR, sparked a cascade of new aspirations in the most surprising places: in Alma Ata, a former steelworker, now first secretary, Nursultan Nazarbayev,^*

had himself elected president of the Kazakh republic. ‘I thought we’d agreed there’s only to be one president,’ said Gorbachev.

‘People in Kazakhstan,’ explained Nazarbayev, one of the key movers in what happened next, ‘say can’t we have a president too?’

Nazarbayev switched patrons, following the flux of power to a different source. On 29 May 1990, Yeltsin was elected chairman of Russia’s Supreme Soviet. Gorbachev could not understand it: ‘Here and abroad he drinks like a fish. Every Monday his face doubles in size. He’s inarticulate … but again and again the people keep repeating “He’s our man” and forgive him everything.’ On 12 July, Yeltsin stormed out of a Communist Congress, resigned from the Party and then claimed sovereignty in Russia. Hated by Communist diehards and despised by frustrated liberals, undermined by a collapsing economy and raging nationalism, Gorbachev saw his power wither as he ranted about the ‘scoundrel’ Yeltsin: personalities matter and their rivalry helped destroy the state. In August, Gorbachev negotiated the price of German reunification in return for billions of dollars in loans to the USSR which, grumbled Gorbachev, were instantly stolen: ‘It’s just gone.’ President Bush was delighted that ‘The day of the dictator is over, the totalitarian era is passing, its old ideas blown away like leaves from an ancient, lifeless tree,’^* but he was alarmed by Soviet turbulence. Now the adventure of a real suicidal nationalist – Moscow’s closest Arab ally – would further undermine Gorbachev.