Promoting Democracy: Is Exporting Revolution a Constructive
Strategy?
Mark R. Beissinger
Dissent, Volume 53, Number 1, Winter 2006 (whole No. 222), pp. 18-24 (Article)
Published by University of Pennsylvania Press
DOI:
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POLITICS ABROAD
when an upheaval took place in November:
Labor Party chair Shimon Peres was defeated
and replaced by Amir Peretz. This transformed
the sleepy party, for Peretz, a dovish, social
democratic trade unionist of Moroccan origins,
was critical not only of the Ashkenazi
elite and the neoliberal manifesto of the party,
but also of the security ethos so dominant in
Israeli culture at large. But will his call for
the adoption of a civilian discourse win the
hearts of the electorate in this warring society?
Although the split within the Likud Party,
initiated by Prime Minister Sharon's turn to
the center, enhances this possibility, the answer
will be known only after the next general
election. •
YORAM PERI is a professor at Tel Aviv University.
His book Generals in the Cabinet Room: How the
Military Shapes Israel's Policy will be published this
winter. He was an adviser to Prime Minister
Yitzhak Rabin in the 1970s.
Promoting Democracy
Is Exporting Revolution a Constructive Strategy?
Mark R. Beissinger
0
VER THE PAST five years, four successful
revolutions have occurred in Serbia,
Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan,
overthrowing pseudodemocratic regimes and
bringing to power new coalitions expressing
commitment to democratic reform. There is
now enormous interest in revolution among
democratic activists throughout the region. The
"colored revolutions" (so named for their adoption
of "people power" tactics of nonviolent resistance
and their symbolic use of colors to
identify supporters) have inspired oppositional
groups in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus,
Kazakhstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, and
Uzbekistan. Oppositions in places as distant
as Lebanon, Egypt, Togo, and Zimbabwe have
been emboldened by these developments. Like
European monarchs after 1848, post-Soviet
strongmen are now concerned about the
transnational spread of revolution to their
fiefdoms. Some have already taken countermeasures
to stave off such a possibility. PostSoviet
Eurasia today is a region consumed by
the hope and fear of revolutionary change—
and of its aftermath.
"Colored revolution" has come to the attention
of the U.S. government as well—as a
18 n DISSENT / Winter 2006
strategy for promoting democratization. In November
2003, as the Georgian Rose Revolution
was just getting underway, President
George W. Bush spoke before the National
Endowment for Democracy, where he redefined
(once again) the purpose of the American
invasion of Iraq, calling it the beginning
of a "global democratic revolution." Since then,
we have seen active efforts by the United
States and a number of American-based nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs such as
Freedom House, the National Endowment for
Democracy, the National Democratic Institute,
the International Republican Institute, and the
Soros Foundation) to support democratic revolutions
within the post-Soviet region and elsewhere.
In October 2004, Bush signed the
Belarus Democracy Act, which authorizes assistance
to pro-democracy activism in Belarus,
with the intention of overthrowing the
Lukashenka regime. And in May 2005, Bush
traveled to Tbilisi, where he praised the Rose
Revolution as an example to be emulated
throughout the Caucasus and Central Asia.
Democratic opposition leaders in Armenia and
Azerbaijan (both countries plagued by extensive
electoral fraud and both allies of the
United States) took heart from Bush's speech,
seeing in it the possibility that they too might
receive support for efforts to topple their corrupt
regimes—although senior administration
POLITICS ABROAD
officials were quick to deny that the United
States was in "the revolution business." Nevertheless,
neoconservatives have lauded the
Bush administration's readiness, in Max Boot's
words, to "apply the lessons of Ukraine"
throughout the world. As Boot has argued, "The
triumph of the Orange Revolution should dispel
the quaint notion still prevalent in many
Western universities and foreign ministries that
democracy is a luxury good suitable for rich
countries with a tradition of liberalism stretching
back centuries. . . . These revolutions reveal
the hollowness of the cliché that 'democracy
can't be imposed by outsiders.' . . . Sometimes,
when dealing with an entrenched dictatorship,
this requires military intervention of
the kind that occurred in Iraq and Afghanistan.
More brittle regimes can be brought down by
their own people, but even they often need a
little extra shove."
Recent developments in the four countries
that experienced "colored revolutions," however,
raise questions over whether the promotion
of democratic revolution from abroad significantly
advances the long-term prospects for
democracy—or, alternatively, has unanticipated
and sometimes deleterious effects for democratic
development. There are real dangers in
the export of revolution as a strategy for democratization:
first, the danger that democracy
could come to be viewed as a tool of external
statecraft rather than an indigenous development;
second, that human rights organizations
could compromise their ability to act as independent
monitoring organizations if they involve
themselves with specific political movements
or come to be identified as "revolutionary
organizations"; third, that efforts to promote
democratic revolution could produce intensified
ethnic conflict and even civil war; and finally,
that giving democratic revolution "a little
extra shove" could lead to postrevolutionary
situations in which democratic development is
highly vulnerable to reversal.
T
HE EMERGENCE of the American government
as a "revolutionary state" within the
world system is, of course, a novelty and
marks a departure from its traditional role
within the cold war order. Growing conflict
between the United States and a number of
post-communist governments (Serbia, Belarus,
Ukraine, Russia, and Uzbekistan) over their
foreign policy orientations and internal human
rights practices together with the Bush
administration's embrace of unilateral efforts
to reshape the world in America's interest have
been responsible for a more aggressive approach
toward democratization. New as well
is the use of third-party, democracy-promoting
NGOs to channel aid to revolutionary causes.
Such organizations in the past acted mainly as
monitors and informational clearinghouses,
mobilizing transnational support in order to
sanction offending behavior, rather than as the
financiers and trainers of revolutionaries. Direct
external financial and organizational aid
from third-party countries or from foreign
NGOs was not a significant element in earlier
waves of democratic revolution—as in Portugal,
for example, or the "People Power" revolutions
of East Asia, or the 1989 revolutions in
Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.
Some of the NGOs involved enjoy close relationships
with the U.S. government. The National
Endowment for Democracy, for instance,
was established by the Reagan administration
as a private, nonprofit organization that channels
federal funding to pro-American civil-society
groups throughout the world. Others,
such as the Soros Foundation, have independently
embraced more confrontational modes
of fostering democratic change out of frustration
with the progress of democracy in the postcommunist
region and under the influence of
the civil-society communities they serve.
For the most part, the post-communist "colored
revolutions" were not engineered from
abroad. They relied on local dissatisfaction and
replaced corrupt regimes that maintained
themselves in power through electoral fraud
(and in the cases of Milogevic and Kuchma,
regimes that also occasionally practiced political
murder). Few advocates of democracy could
deny the euphoria felt in Serbia, Ukraine, and
Georgia as hundreds of thousands of citizens—
in Kyiv, up to a million people—incensed by
massive electoral irregularities, braved the
threat of violent repression (and inclement
weather) to reclaim their right to free and fair
elections.
But while the sources of these revolutions
DISSENT / Winter 2006 n 19
POLITICS ABROAD
may have been indigenous, support provided
by the American government and Americanbased
NGOs was critical to their materialization
and spread. The U.S. government, for instance,
spent $41 million promoting antiMilogevic
civil society groups such as Otpor,
the student group that spearheaded the
Serbian Bulldozer Revolution in 2000. The
Clinton administration even erected a series
of transmitters around the periphery of Serbia
to provide alternative news coverage, and it
established a special office in Budapest to coordinate
assistance to Milogevic's opponents.
Georgian social movements first formed links
with Otpor in spring 2003 (six months before
the Rose Revolution), when civil-society activists
from Georgia visited Belgrade on a trip
sponsored by the Soros Foundation. With financial
and logistical help from abroad, Otpor
activists trained Georgian activists in techniques
of nonviolent resistance. The local
Georgian branch of the Soros Foundation
helped support Kmara (the Georgian version
of Otpor) out of its $350,000 election support
program, and Kmara and other opposition
groups received significant financial and
organizational aid from the National Democratic
Institute. In Ukraine, the U.S. government
spent $65 million promoting democracy
in the years immediately preceding the Orange
Revolution—most of it channeled to
Ukrainian NGOs and social movements that
opposed Kuchma—through third-party NGOs
such as Freedom House or the National Endowment
for Democracy. The United States
Agency for International Development
(USAID), for instance, granted millions of
dollars to the Poland-America-Ukraine Cooperation
Initiative (PAUCI), administered by
Freedom House. PAUCI then sent these
funds to Ukrainian NGOs associated with the
anti-Kuchma opposition.
Indeed, fostering democratic revolution has
now become an international business. In addition
to the millions of dollars of aid involved,
numerous consulting operations have arisen,
many of them led by the former revolutionaries
themselves. Since the Serbian revolution,
for instance, Otpor activists have become, as
one Serbian analyst put it, "a modern type of
mercenary," traveling the world, often in the
2,0 n DISSENT / Winter 2006
pay of the U.S. government or NGOs, in order
to train local groups in how to organize a
democratic revolution. A number of leaders of
the Ukrainian youth movement Pora were
trained in Serbia at the Center for Non-Violent
Resistance, a consulting organization set
up by Otpor activists to instruct youth leaders
from around the world in how to organize a
movement, motivate voters, and develop mass
actions. "They taught us everything we know,"
one leading member of Pora told a Deutsche
Welle correspondent. After the Rose and Orange
revolutions, Georgian and Ukrainian
youth movements began to challenge Otpor's
consulting monopoly. Pora activists even joked
about creating a new Comintern for democratic
revolution. In fact, Vladislav Kaskiv, the leader
of Pora, met with President Bush at the
Bratislava summit and received the president's
support for creating a center to aid the spread
of democratic revolution to Russia, Belarus,
Moldova, and Azerbaijan. Ukrainian, Georgian,
and Serbian activists have developed modules
for teaching the art of nonviolent revolution.
These modern professional revolutionaries
have turned up with increasing frequency in
Belarus, Russia, Kazakhstan, and Azerbaijan.
S
OME DEMOCRACY-PROMOTION NGOs such
as Freedom House have embraced nonviolent
resistance as the most promising
path for promoting democratic change around
the world. A March 2005 Freedom House report
by Adrian Karatnycky, senior scholar at
Freedom House, and Peter Ackerman, chair of
its board of trustees, argues that the greatest
long-term gains in democratization have occurred
as a result of nonviolent "people-power"
movements rather than "pacted" democratic
transitions from above. They base their findings
on a simple correlational analysis of Freedom
House scores over the last several decades.
Karatnycky and Ackerman call for a
"paradigm shift" in democracy-promotion that
would target aid to those groups that make
nonviolent civic resistance a priority, encourage
broad-based coalitions among opposition
forces, transfer knowledge about civil resistance
to opposition groups, invest in alternative
media networks, and wield external sanctions
to constrain the repression of democratic
POLITICS ABROAD
opponents. Ackerman himself is a major expert
on nonviolent resistance and founder of the International
Center on Nonviolent Conflict,
which conducts training workshops on promoting
democracy and human rights. His film
Bringing Down A Dictator, a PBS documentary
detailing the overthrow of Milogevic, has become
something of a best-seller among wouldbe
democratic revolutionaries.
T
HE PROBLEM WITH the Karatnycky/
Ackerman argument (and with Boot's
wholesale embrace of democratic revolution
for export) is not that revolution is an
inappropriate mode of democratization or that
the strength of civil-society movements and
popular mobilization are unimportant for successful
democratization. On the contrary, a
large body of literature in recent years has
documented how mass movements and pressure
from below have played a more critical
role than is usually recognized in democratization.
Rather, the problem lies in the consequences
of packaging, exporting, and spreading
democratic revolution like a module across
a broad array of settings, irrespective of local
circumstances.
For one thing, as those who study revolution
know, the outcomes of revolutionary upsurges
are highly unpredictable and just as often
lead to failure and prolonged civil war as
to democratic success. Failed revolution can
in fact be worse for democratic development
than the protracted evolution of civil society—
because widespread repression can lead to the
decimation of democratic forces. Some observers,
for instance, attribute the Uzbek
government's radically repressive response to
the May 2005 protests in Andijan, where
Uzbek government troops by some accounts
killed more than five hundred people, to the
panicky sense that the spread of revolution in
Central Asia had to be stopped. Andijan lies
immediately across the border from the Osh
valley, where the Kyrgyz revolution originated.
By inflicting an overwhelming blow against dissent,
Karimov sought to demonstrate that he
would not tolerate the same outcome as in
Kyrgyzstan, where President Askar Akaev was
overthrown in part because of his refusal to
apply significant force against his opponents.
In view of the unpredictable outcomes of
revolutionary crises, promoting a wave of democratic
revolutions is a form of brinkmanship—
the equivalent of playing a high-stakes game
of poker with democracy. And where sharp cultural
differences are embodied in state institutions,
the political crises provoked by mobilized
civic groups may easily flow over into ethnic
violence. For instance, civil war was only
narrowly averted in the Georgian, Ukrainian,
and Kyrgyz cases. There was nothing inevitable
about their felicitous outcomes. They depended
on the political restraint of the actors
involved—including the restraint of the dictators
themselves, none of whom ordered widespread
repression. As the Uzbek case demonstrates,
that same restraint is not likely to be
evident in most places where dictatorial regimes
are entrenched. Thus, one of the unintended
consequences of the attempt to export
democratic revolution could be the inadvertent
stimulation of repression, ethnic conflict,
and even civil war.
Of course, Karatnycky and Ackerman most
definitely do not advocate the violent seizure
of power. They are consistent proponents of
nonviolent resistance. Their correlations show
that when movements turn to violence, the
long-term prospects for democratic development
sharply decline. The catch lies in the
unpredictability of violence within revolutionary
crises. In the Kyrgyz "Tulip Revolution" of
March 2005, for example, ten thousand opposition
enthusiasts, drawing inspiration from
recent revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine and
responding to fraudulent parliamentary elections,
violently seized a number of towns in
southern Kyrgyzstan. When they attempted to
spread their revolt to the capital Bishkek, thugs
associated with the regime attacked them,
leading to the storming of the presidential palace
and subsequently to riots that decimated
much of central Bishkek. The Tulip Revolution
occurred almost accidentally and in contradiction
to the plans of opposition leaders.
And, though it was inspired by the example of
nonviolent revolution in Serbia, Georgia, and
Ukraine, it succeeded only because it was violent,
because the structural conditions for a
successful "people power" revolt were lacking.
The Kyrgyz opposition was at most capable of
DISSENT / Winter 2006 n 21
POLITICS ABROAD
turning out fifteen thousand people in demonstrations—hardly
enough to force Akaev's
resignation through nonviolent disruption.
Nor were the results of the Tulip Revolution
particularly democratizing. It was more a
shift in power among clans than a democratic
breakthrough. The seizure of power occurred
several days after the new, fraudulently elected
Parliament was sworn in. In a deal brokered
by the provisional government's leader,
Kurmanbek Bakiyev, the fraudulently elected
parliamentarians were allowed to remain in
place, thus undermining the original rationale
for the revolution. Bakiyev subsequently ran in
a presidential election in which he captured
89 percent of the vote. Corruption and the penetration
of organized criminal groups into the
Kyrgyz government remain prevalent under the
Bakiyev administration, and efforts to pursue
official wrongdoings led recently to the dismissal
of the country's chief prosecutor.
The Kyrgyz experience suggests the possible
consequences of stimulating revolutionary
democratic change where the conditions
for civic activity are weak. Karatnycky and
Ackerman are aware that their statistical association
between the strength of nonviolent civic
movements and long-term gains in democratization
was not controlled for the influence of
levels of income, education, or other factors
widely known to be associated with stable
democratic development. But these factors
may be, as Boot contends, less important in
the making of democratic revolution when democratization
is given "a little extra shove" from
outside or when it occurs in significant part as
the result of modular change—due, that is, to
the cross-national influence of successful examples
elsewhere. The result, however, is likely
to be a "democratic" revolution in contexts
where the structural conditions for democracy
are lacking.
Even in Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine the
long-term stability of democratic change produced
from these revolutions is in doubt. Political
freedoms improved in all three of these
countries in the immediate wake of revolution.
That is to be expected whenever a repressive
regime is overthrown. According to Freedom
House's own ratings, the progress has been
more evident in Serbia and considerably less
22 n DISSENT / Winter 2006
so in Ukraine and Georgia. But we don't know
what the long-term prospects for democracy
are in any of these countries, and recent trends
have raised doubts about democratic stability.
Vojislav Kogtunica returned to power in
March 2004 as prime minister, after slightly
less than four years as president of Serbia, by
forming a coalition with Milogevic's Socialist
Party of Serbia—the very political force that
the Bulldozer Revolution aimed to overthrow.
Indeed, Serbian president Boris Tadic has recently
accused the Kogtunica government of
reviving the political atmosphere of the 1990s,
and many leading liberals have expressed dismay
with the direction in which the country is
moving. Kogtunica's government, for example,
has dropped criminal charges against
Milogevic's son and lifted an international warrant
against his wife. It has failed to live up to
its obligations to turn over war criminals such
as Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic to international
authorities. Human Rights Watch
has documented a wave of violence against minorities
in Serbia since 2003 (including physical
assaults, attacks on religious and cultural
buildings, and cemetery desecration) to which
the authorities have turned a blind eye. Another
report by the Organization for Security
and Cooperation in Europe singled out Serbia
for its high levels of corruption and lack of judicial
independence, lumping it together with
Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan.
A
SIMILAR THERMIDORIAN reaction appears
to have taken shape in Ukraine
in September 2005 when the coalition
that had sustained the Orange Revolution unraveled
completely. Yushchenko's chief political
adviser, Oleksandr Zinchenko (head of
Yushchenko's 2004 election campaign), resigned,
claiming that corruption "is now even
worse than before." Stunned by the resignation,
Yushchenko fired his entire cabinet, which
had been consumed by behind-the-scenes
fighting between populist prime minister Yulia
Tymoshenko (Yushchenko's ally during the Orange
Revolution) and chocolate magnate Petro
Poroshenko (head of the National Security
Council) for control over key media and industrial
assets. In an astounding reversal,
Yushchenko then forged an alliance with his
POLITICS ABROAD
erstwhile rival Viktor Yanukovych (whose electoral
manipulations had prompted the Orange
Revolution in the first place) to ensure the election
of his choice for prime minister. Part of
the deal with Yanukovych included formal
promises by Yushchenko not to open criminal
cases against those involved in perpetrating
electoral fraud in 2004 and to expand parliamentary
immunity to local deputies, thereby
protecting criminal structures. The achievements
of the Orange Revolution have today
been placed in doubt. Yushchenko's popularity
has plummeted, and many of those who
helped to make the revolution now find themselves
in opposition. Of course, revolutionary
coalitions are always fragile formations and
typically begin to disintegrate once the revolutionaries
take power. As the Serbian and Ukrainian
cases suggest, a strategy of external encouragement
for a broad coalition among opposition
forces may indeed aid the overthrow
of dictators. But it does not promote stability
or predictability in the democratic evolution of
postrevolutionary governments.
In Georgia, democratic revolutionaries have
been attempting to transform what amounts to
a failed state into a functioning democracy
within a short period of time—a daunting task
in a society where, in many areas, electricity
functions for only an hour a day, and large
swaths of the country remain outside the
government's control. More than a fifth of the
population has abandoned Georgia due to the
dire conditions there, and most live below the
poverty line. President Mikhail Saakashvili has
engaged in a concerted campaign against corruption
and contraband, initiated a major roadbuilding
effort, and overthrown the local satrap
in the enclave of Ajaria, bringing the region
back under Tbilisi's sway. But this has
hardly solved the deeper problems of the
country's territorial integrity, ethnic division,
rampant lawlessness, and corruption.
Saakashvili's increasingly authoritarian drift and
his emphasis on ensuring territorial integrity
over civil liberties (opposition figures and independent
journalists have been harassed, a
subtle censorship operates, and police torture
is still practiced) have spawned fears among a
number of his erstwhile revolutionary allies
about the potential "Putinization" of Georgia.
Some, like human rights activist Davit
Zurabishvili, who ran Tbilisi's Liberty Institute
(a human rights center that played a critical
role in making the Rose Revolution), have left
Saakashvili's parliamentary group over concerns
about the direction in which the country is
evolving.
I
N SHORT, democratic development remains
under serious question in all of the countries
that experienced "colored revolution."
Moreover, the effects of the "colored revolutions"
on other countries so far have been far
from positive, as authoritarian regimes have
cracked down on democratic opponents, closed
down or monitored more closely relations with
human rights NGOs, and attempted to isolate
themselves from transnational influences. In
the Russian case, the emergence of youth
movements favoring "colored revolution" inspired
the Putin regime to organize its own
countermovement—Ours (Nashi)—which is
strongly anti-American and attacks the influence
of foreign ideologies (particularly liberalism)
on Russian society. The role of NGOs
such as the Soros Foundation and Freedom
House in aiding democratic revolutionaries has
precipitated a backlash in a number of postSoviet
states, which have begun to view them
as revolutionary organizations. The Soros Foundation,
for instance, no longer operates in Belarus,
Russia, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan
precisely because of growing hostility from host
governments; in other countries their ability to
work effectively has been undermined. In the
wake of the latest revolutionary wave, the transnational
NGO presence within the Eurasian
region is waning. Rather than active engagement
with nondemocratic societies in order to
encourage the emergence of democratic forces,
what we see is the increasing isolation of
authoritarian regimes, even where the prospects
are remote for successful democratizing
revolution. This is not likely to be a recipe for
promoting the long-term prospect of democ-
racy.
Perhaps the United States would do well to
learn a lesson from its rival in the cold war,
which also tried to export revolution, though not
of the democratic variety. The attempt by professional
revolutionaries to stimulate global revoDISSENT
/ Winter 2006 n 23
POLITICS ABROAD
lution and provide "a little extra shove" to what
they envisioned as the march of history, and
even to engage in externally induced regimechange
through military means, transformed
their movement into a tool of state power, perverted
its goals and meaning, generated a series
of unstable postrevolutionary regimes, and
ultimately unleashed forces that it did not understand
and could not control. Having already
entered the democratic revolution business, the
United States finds itself facing similar dilemmas.
Let us hope, for the sake of democracy,
that the results prove better. •
MARK R. BEISSINGER is a professor of political
science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
From Real Estate to Nation-State
Who Will Lead Afghanistan?
Charles Norchi
K
HANS, KINGS, and conquerors—these are
the leaders Afghans have mostly known.
The legacies of Alexander the Macedonian,
Genghis Khan, the Soviet Army, the
Mujahadin, and finally the Taliban and Osama
bin Laden share one feature: leadership
based on power and divorced from authority—
or with only the Qur'an as the authorizing symbol
of governance. Invariably, the outcomes
have been cumulative human rights abuses and
what I call disvelopment, that is, the unraveling
of the little development that existed. A
common denominator in the repetitive failures
of governance, human rights, and economic
development in Afghanistan has been bad lead-
ership.
As a journalist in Peshawar, Pakistan, on
the rim of the Afghan war of the 1980s, I was
fortunate to spend time with the late anthropologist
Louis Dupree, whose book Afghanistan
had become required cold war reading.
"This place has always been more real estate
than nation-state," he said. "They are wonderful
people, with a rich history and culture, and
often below the surface, some fine leaders—
the glue that holds the thing together." The fine
leaders could not operate above the surface because
this land was on everyone's way to someplace
else; it was a pawn in the games of external
powers that imposed leaders. Afghan
24 n DISSENT / Winter 2006
leaders were nurtured and empowered by a
Kalashnikov culture.
Crossing the Khyber Pass, the young commander
Abdul Haq, who had left Kabul University
to oppose the Soviet occupation, said,
"Afghanistan can be a democracy when the
occupiers are gone, and when we have a new
generation of leaders who can lead without the
gun alone, and without the Qur'an alone." In
October 2001, even as an American air strike
attempted to rescue him, Abdul Haq was captured
and executed by the Taliban while on an
ill-advised secret mission—killed by the
Kalashnikov culture that he could not escape.
Through the 1980s, for many in the West,
Afghanistan held a romantic image of a land
of Kipling and Kim, where turbaned freedom
fighters crossed deserts, mountains, and Central
Asian steppes to fight the foreign occupiers.
So long as the Soviets were in Afghanistan,
it was the good jihad. It was on the battlefields
of Afghanistan that our cold war was won. But
a price was paid in human dignity—by the poor
and marginalized who became refugees, the
many victims of torture, the innocent villagers
who were massacred, and by every Afghan who
has since stepped on a land mine.
During that period, Commander Ahmad
Shah Massood, who became known as the Lion
of the Pansjhir Valley, was an enlightened
statesman as much as a military leader. He
built schools and clinics, implemented a tax
system in the region under his control, and occasionally
negotiated truces with the Soviets.