Word: rule
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History is full of revolutionaries who failed to make the switch. Most promised people's rule but, once in power, embraced a permanent state of revolution - some, like Robert Mugabe and Hugo Chávez, conjuring up fantastical foreign enemies to fight. (To those ranks, now add the leader of the influential ANC Youth League, Julius Malema, who told the East London rally that the young would "never allow them to donate this country to Britain, to the hands of the colonizers.") To their people, this never-ending war is generally experienced as dictatorship. Too many liberation leaders leave office...
...Middle East, after helping broker a historic peace deal with Israel in 1993, Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement quickly lapsed into authoritarianism and corruption. As a young man, Henning Melber, executive director at the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation in Uppsala, Sweden, fought in Namibia against white rule. Watching his fellow liberators turn on their own people once the war was won taught him that revolution and democracy are "incompatible," he says. (See pictures of China doing business in Africa...
...where Mandela was born 90 years ago into a small gathering of huts on a narrow, windswept spur, the Mandelas' immediate neighbors are outspoken about their disillusionment with the ANC. "My life was better during apartheid," says Vincent Ntswayi, 53, who held a steady job in Johannesburg during white rule but has only been intermittently employed since. "Freedom turned out to be just a word. Real freedom, real power, that comes from money - and I haven't got any money...
...learned by revolutionary groups before it. Fatah's loss to Hamas in the 2006 Palestinian elections was a boost for militancy, sure, but also a testament to Hamas's superior social-service delivery. Mugabe's efforts to hold onto power, trying to alter the constitution to allow him everlasting rule, was the spur for the formation of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change...
...international community was hopeful in March when Kenya agreed to try suspected pirates in its courts. That, experts said, would provide a deterrent and at least impose some sense of rule of law off Somalia's coasts. Yet the threat of arrest has done nothing to dissuade the pirates. "Not even 0.2% of the total pirates are arrested, so anybody who is at all intelligent can understand that arrest does not bring fear," says Maryam Jama, a pirate recruiter in Bossaso. "If you get arrested, in prison the others will say, 'Do not worry, you will be out and then...