‘Dictators have same fate’
the fool is not the one who commits the mistake, but who commits it again and again. i had a distinctive car in 1966, and perhaps the only one of its kind in kuwait, and i borrowed for the first time in my life a sum of money to buy it. i was a teenager and loved it so much.
i was later appointed as bank manager of the branch in jleeb als h u y o u k h . the road to the branch was full of potholes, and in order to protect my car, i memorized the places where there were potholes and avoided them later. one day it rained heavy and the potholes were filled with water and it became difficult to see and avoid them.
on the way back from the office, and the continued bad state of the road, i decided to follow a taxi driver who used the road all day in the belief be may remember the potholes and will help me avoid them, but it looks like he had not learned from his mistakes and my car also fell in one of them.
when people or rather individuals do not learn from their mistakes, the curse and the backwardness shall be their destiny. the iraqi officer bakr sidqi, the fi rst to organize a military coup in the history of the region in 1936 under the reign of king ghazi was followed by rashid aali in another coup in 1941, followed by the coup of syrian offi cer al-hinnawi in the same year.
in 1949, the other syrian, husni al-zaim staged a coup in which he overthrew shukri al-quwatli who staged coup d’etat months later. in 1952, naguib and nasser of egypt carried out the most famous military coup d’état in the region, followed by the fall of shishakli two years later in syria by al-atassi, and the qasim coup in iraq in 1958.
this was the beginning of the destruction of iraq which coincided with the coup of abobud in sudan, then coup of abdullah al-sallal in yemen which brought yemen to ruins after the ruins of the “hamid al-din family.” then a second coup took place in iraq in 1963 which overthrew qasim, and boumediene’s coup in 1965 against ben bella of algeria.
then the coup of al-bakr and saddam of the ba’ath party in iraq in 1968 against aref. then came gaddafi to the rule in the beginning of september 1969, and libya witnesses continued tragedy. the same year the offi cer jaafar nimeiri came to rule sudan through a military coup, and a year later hafez al-assad in syria, overthrew al-atassi. the wave reached mauritania when a coup overthrew the president mokhtar ould daddah.
then the sudanese fi eld marshal suwar al-dahab came with the strangest of arab coups in 1985 when ja’far al-nimeiri was deposed and al-dahab voluntarily handed over the rule to the civilians in an unprecedented phenomenon.
but omar al-bashir sabotaged the dream in 1989 and turned against the civilians and ruled the impoverished sudan for thirty years, before the army overthrew him a few days ago to replace him with awad ibn ouf who stepped down after 24 hours. sudan and most of our countries are still abundant with events and here we did not deal with the coups of our region, and they are many, and the list is long.
we do not forget the miserable ends of saddam and gaddafi and ben ali and mubarak, and the same fate awaits bashir and abdelaziz bouteflika of algeria.
no one has learned from all these experiences. the history repeats itself, in a tragic and funny way, and no one wants to believe that any dictatorial rule is inevitably vanishing.
