By Paul Reynolds
World affairs correspondent, BBC News website
As the Nepalese Lambeth Conference due to begin ...
British PM meets Israeli - Palestinian leaders ...
Syria's Assad says Mideast peace a matter of time ...
Will on Obama ...
S America nations found union ... Maoist guerrilla leader Prachanda is appointed prime minister, two years after giving up a bloody insurgency, our world affairs correspondent Paul Reynolds look at how other revolutionaries have fared as democratic political leaders.
It used to be said, in the last days of the British Empire, that nationalist leaders branded by the British as "terrorists" would in due course take tea with the Queen at Buckingham Palace.
Robert Mugabe did, in 1982, a year after he had been elected for the first time as president of Zimbabwe. He came to power after a long war waged against the white minority regime of Ian Smith, who had declared unilateral independence from Britain in 1965.
At the time, and for many years afterwards, Robert Mugabe was generally viewed as an ideal revolutionary turned democrat. He allowed Ian Smith to live on quietly in Harare, renamed from Salisbury, and white farmers continued to work their land.
Nelson Mandela
The same thing happened in South Africa under Nelson Mandela - with one big difference. Having been elected as president in 1994 at the age of 77, Mandela stood down after only one term. Nelson Mandela remains the most widely admired modern revolutionary who understood that a democratic leader must be something else. George Washington did likewise in another era.
But even Nelson Mandela had to overcome the "terrorist" label, which was used not just by his South African opponents. In 1987, at a Commonwealth Conference in Vancouver, the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher dismissed his African National Congress as a "typical terrorist organisation."
Jomo Kenyatta
A classic case from the end of Empire days was that of Jomo Kenyatta. He formed the Kenya African National Union which was dedicated to ending colonial rule. It was eventually successful and Kenyatta became the country's first president in 1963.
He too showed flexibility and allowed old colonial civil servants to stay on. Many settlers remained as well. But Kanu became the only political party, and in the last election before his death, Kenyatta ran as the only candidate.
There were signs in Kenya of the phenomenon that is evident in a number of countries where a popular revolutionary figure takes power - the dividing line between democracy and dictatorship becomes a fine one.
Archbishop Makarios
Another figure who trod the path from anti-colonialist to revered statesman was Archbishop Makarios of Cyprus. The British (one of whose ministers once declared that Britain would "never" leave Cyprus) were fighting the Eoka guerrillas wanting union with Greece.
Makarios was to Britain a suspicious and untrustworthy priest. But years later, in 1974, when Turkish troops were invading the island, Makarios, then the respected president of Cyprus, was whisked to safety by the RAF.
Begin and Shamir
Israel provides a couple of examples of fighters who later became democratic political leaders. One of them, Menachem Begin, won world fame as the Israel prime minister who made peace with Egypt. In an earlier time, he had been a militant fighting the British in Palestine, as a leader of the Irgun (the National Military Organisation).
The other, Yitzhak Shamir, was in an even more hardline group, the Lehi (Fighters for the Freedom of Israel, dismissed by the British as the Stern Gang after its first leader Avraham Stern).
Yet years later, Mr Shamir took it in turns to become Israeli prime minister with Shimon Peres when Israel's exact proportional representation system failed to produce a clear enough result.
Grandaddy Castro
I also remember the revolutions in Central America, once (bizarrely when looking back) seen by the White House as the front line of the Cold War. This was on the grounds that the uprisings were left-wing, and were supported by the granddaddy of all revolutionaries, Fidel Castro, who was in turn supported by the Kremlin.
There was a particularly nasty dictator (elected of course, and not without personal charm) in Nicaragua called Anastasio Somoza who ran it like a family business.
One of the young revolutionaries who fought against Somoza in the Sandinista National Liberation Front was Daniel Ortega, now serving a second term as the president of Nicaragua. He still shows sparks of his old revolutionary instincts, but his democratic commitment is not in doubt.
Bishop of Grenada
One revolutionary I cannot leave out, because I knew him, is Maurice Bishop, from the beautiful Caribbean island of Grenada. In 1979, Bishop and his Marxist colleagues from the New Jewel Movement, took advantage of the absence in New York of prime minister Eric Gairy (who believed in black magic and flying saucers and who had an Imelda Marcos-sized collection of shirts) to overthrow his government.
Bishop welcomed reporters who flew down to his tropical paradise and who were puzzled by his ideological reverences to the "masses" when all they could see were people in the markets or playing cricket on the beach. They just seemed pleased that a dictator had gone and who did not appear to want another.
Bishop was eventually the victim of his own side, who had him shot. The US invaded not long afterwards.
Paul.Reynolds-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk
(BBC)
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