five scenarios for exile – Liberation

The Syrian dictator is not the first satrap forced to pack his bags. Welcomed by Vladimir Putin, what will become of him?

By settling in Moscow after being expelled from Syria, where he had ruled since the death of his father Hafez in 2000, Bashar al-Assad joins a long cohort of dictators (or elected autocrats) who have been unable to go at the end of their “life” mandate and were forced to emigrate. What future awaits the “butcher of Damascus”? Liberation looked at the fate of his predecessors and drew five possible scenarios.

Spend peaceful days abroad, like the Ethiopian Mengistu in Zimbabwe

In May 1991, Lieutenant-Colonel Mengistu Haïlé Mariam left Addis Ababa in a hurry. It is the fall of thederg», the Marxist revolutionary regime that he imposed in July 1974, after overthrowing (and executing) Emperor Haile Selassie, the “king of kings”himself very little focused on democracy. The hunt for opponents and minorities, launched in 1977, took the name “red terror”. Supported militarily by the USSR and Cuba, the regime repressed with cruelty but suffered attacks from one side of neighboring Somalia, and on the other from the separatists of Eritrea, the region of the country formerly occupied by Mussolini’s troops. The wading effort