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DUN RULIN'

Political exiles
The Independent on Sunday, September 2006

“AN exile,” mourned Byron in “The Prophecy Of Dante”, “[is] saddest of all prisoners, who has the whole world for a dungeon strong, seas, mountains and the horizon’s verge for bars.” Considering the circumstances surrounding the poet’s flight from England in 1816, a reasonable person might have responded by suggesting that he cease snivelling into his lacy sleeves and in future make an effort to keep his pantaloons buttoned. Byron’s wider point holds, though. Of all the ways a person can be punished, banishment, or exile, imposed by oneself or by others, is one of the cruellest, which is probably why it is a constant of human history. The Ancient Greeks did it, so did the Romans. It was, if inadvertently, how Australia and the USA were founded.
  Exile is an especially melancholy state for those delivered into it from positions of power. “Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever,” observed Napoleon, who learnt the difference between the two states the hard way, spending his last six years as a British prisoner on the remote Atlantic rockpile of St Helena. The latest in a long line of potentates to have found themselves persona non grata is Thaksin Shinawatra, the billionaire prime minister of Thailand, who nipped out to the UN to give a speech a couple of weeks ago, only to suffer the ignominy of having his own military change the locks in his absence. With charming ingenuousness, he reacted by announcing plans to “take a deserved rest” from politics, as if he had much choice, and retreating to his apartment in London. Mr Shinawatra’s show of equanimity is commendable, and his lodgings are doubtless comfortable, but as Byron discovered, it doesn’t matter how large or gilded your cage, if it’s keeping you out of the one place you want to be most.
  “It’s not easy,” says Nadir Chaudri, “to be cut off from your roots and thrown away.”
  Chaudri, 46, is the spokesman for former Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif, who was deposed in 1999, in a coup d’etat, orchestrated by Pakistan’s present dictator, General Pervez Musharaff. Chaudri was an advisor to Sharif at the time – and, like his boss, left the country following the overthrow of Sharif’s government. While Sharif went initially to Saudi Arabia before arriving in London in January, Chaudri came straight to the UK. He has not been back to Pakistan since. He says that for both himself and Sharif, the deprivation of home is far worse than the deprivation of power.
  “Those who understand,” says Chaudri, “the limits and nature of power won’t be affected so much by losing it. To be displaced from your hometown and home country is much more difficult to cope with. You can lose power. You can’t lose your home.”
  This patriotic anguish is possibly more of an issue for Mr Sharif than for most of his fellow exiles. Mr Sharif was an elected leader, and therefore understood, as elected leaders should, that he had an inbuilt redundancy, even if it is supposed to be triggered by the voters rather than by a disgruntled army officer. Mr Sharif also preserves a democrat’s optimism, networking furiously from an office on Duke Street, and harbouring hopes of returning to Pakistan to contest elections due next year – Chaudri calls his boss’s present status “a temporary setback”. Most former leaders who have been obliged to flee the places they dominated, however, were dictators – and former dictators are rarely permitted a pension and a comfortable retirement in which to work on their memoirs.
  In 2002, the Italian journalist Riccardo Orizio published a brilliant, mordantly hilarious book called “Talk Of The Devil”, in which he set out to meet former tyrants, some of whom he found in exile, and all of whom cut gratifyingly woebegone figures. Idi Amin, former President for Life of Uganda and Conqueror of the British Empire, among many other self-awarded titles, lived in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, drifting between the gymnasiums and swimming pools of local hotels (he died an unlamented death in 2003). Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, who’d inherited the family business of tyrannising Haiti from his ogrish father, Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, had been living in Paris since being tipped out in 1986; Orizio found a meek, bewildered man wittering about returning to power and establishing Haiti as a centre of solar energy. Colonel Mengistu Haile-Mariam, whose rule over Ethiopia from 1977 to 1991 turned it into the sort of place people made charity records about, scowled, bored and lonely, at an ungrateful world from suburban Harare. Valentine Strasser had become the world’s youngest head of state in 1992, when he’d led a coup d’etat in Sierra Leone at the age of 26, then the world’s youngest former head of state when overthrown and exiled four years later. When Orizio met him, Strasser had dropped out of a UN-sponsored law degree at Warwick University, and was drifting in London, existing on the kindness and couches of friends (Strasser is now back in Sierra Leone, living with his mother). These men were, at least, lucky to escape the fate of a new form of exile – the leader dispatched by machinations of international justice to a foreign prison, like Serbian arch-gangster Slobodan Milosevic, former Liberian warlord Charles Taylor, and Rwandan prime minister and genocidaire-in-chief Jean Kambanda.
  There are, of course, those who’ve been forced to flee not because they were tyrants, but because they’d fought tyranny. Britain in particular has an honourable tradition of harbouring such deserving cases. During World War II, the UK hosted the governments in exile of Poland (the Polish government-in-exile actually persisted until 1990, in response to the Soviet occupation of their country), Czechoslovakia, Belgium, Luxembourg, Holland, Yugoslavia and France. Charles De Gaulle lived briefly at the Langham Hotel in London, following a tradition established by the overthrown Napoleon III, and later continued by the overthrown Ethiopian emperor Hailie Selassie (King Zog of Albania, unhorsed by Italy’s invasion of his homeland in 1939, preferred the Ritz, arriving with a retinue of 35, and several suitcases full of gold). The highest profile government-in-exile presently in operation, that of the Dalai Lama’s government of Tibet (turfed out by China’s annexation of the country in 1959), maintains an office in London today.
  Hans Christian Andersen had good reasons for hanging “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, his 1837 fable about the illusory nature of power on a hereditary, rather than an elected ruler. One was, certainly, that democracies were thin on the ground of 1830s Europe – Andersen’s native Denmark didn’t establish a parliament until 1849 – but he had discerned that there are few apparitions as wretched as royalty divested of their absurd accoutrements of status. Many bewildered monarchs have had to relocate their courts to less grand surroundings. Crown Prince Bao Long, heir to the long-redundant imperial line of Vietnam, served in the Foreign Legion, and lives unobtrusively in Paris. King Kigeli V of Rwanda, deposed in 1961, lives in Washington DC, and runs a charitable foundation. King Constantine II of Greece has been out of a job since his throne was abolished in 1974, and lives in London.
  Britain might also, at one point, have hosted the highest profile royal exile of the 20th century. When Tsar Nicholas II abdicated as Russia was consumed by rebellion in early 1917, George V did the familial thing – the two men were cousins – and offered him sanctuary in Britain. George V then withdrew the invitation – according to Orlando Figes’ epic history of the Russian Revolution, “A Peoples’ Tragedy”, he feared upsetting the Labour Party, who were rather redder of blood then than now. A miffed Nicholas II only had enough time left to deny his relative one Christmas card – he was shot, along with his family, the following year. Not – obviously – that George lived to see it, but it was possible to perceive karmic symmetry in the fact that the only noteworthy British exile of modern times was his son, Edward VIII, who departed the family firm to marry an American divorcee, and spent the rest of his life doing bugger all, mostly in France.
  If exiles have one thing in common, it surely the dream of a glorious homecoming to the place which they fled, or were thrown out of. As they sulk and/or plot, they have the consolation of a bountiful wellspring of inspiration. Willy Brandt left Germany for Norway and Sweden during the Nazi era, and returned to become Mayor of West Berlin and Chancellor. Ayatollah Khomeini flew from Paris to triumph in Tehran in 1979, as his erstwhile nemesis, the Shah, was exiled in the opposite direction. Thabo Mbeki schemed from the ANC’s London office in the 1960s; he is now President of South Africa. Charles II spent 11 years wandering Europe following the execution of his father, Charles I, but reclaimed the British crown on his 30th birthday in 1660. South Korean politician Kim Dae Jung survived several assassination attempts and imprisonments by his own country’s government, and exile in America, to become President and a Nobel Peace laureate. Jose Ramos Horta of East Timor has been both a foreign-minister-in-exile and a foreign minister; he is now prime minister.
  Sometimes the victory is pyrrhic. For the cabal of Iraqi exiles, many British-based (Ahmed Chalabi, Sharif Ali bin al-Hussein, Iyad Allawi), who cheered on the removal of their tormentor Saddam Hussein, the transformation of their country from “1984” to “Mad Max” must be an agonising disappointment. When the Phillipines’ former First Lady Imelda Marcos was allowed home again, she was not content with merely avoiding the fate of fellow dictator consorts Clara Petacci (lynched alongside her lover, Benito Mussolini) and Elena Ceausescu (shot with her husband, Nicolae). She ran for president twice, with conspicuous lack of success, and eventually opened a museum dedicated to her infamous collection of footwear.
  The almost universal fervour of exiles is, at least, an unbeatable illustration of the enduring grip our homelands have on all of us – it seems almost impossible for a country to treat a person so badly that they never want to see it again. Last year in Taipei, I met Peng Ming-Men, an advisor to Taiwan’s president. A twinkling octogenerian, he’d lost one arm in an American raid on Tokyo during World War II and survived the atomic obliteration of Nagasaki. He fled Taiwan in 1970 after falling out with the dictatorship of Chiang Kai-Shek, and spent 22 years in exile. He signed a copy of his 1972 memoir, “A Taste Of Freedom” for me. I asked what had kept him going, all those years he must have thought he’d never see Taiwan again. “Memories,” he said, “and the idea of my home.”

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