On 7 January 1979, Vietnamese armoured columns rolled into Phnom Penh and ended the rule of the Khmer Rouge, whose leader, Pol Pot, fled west toward the Thai border as his nearly empty capital fell. In three years, eight months, and twenty days, the regime he led had killed an estimated 1.5 to 2 million Cambodians — roughly a quarter of the country’s population — through execution, starvation, forced labour, and untreated disease. It remains one of the worst state crimes of the twentieth century, and its victims are the measure of everything that follows.
Pol Pot was born Saloth Sar in 1925 in Kompong Thom province. A Paris-educated communist who returned to a Cambodia convulsed by the wider Indochina war, he rose to lead the Communist Party of Kampuchea — the movement the world came to call the Khmer Rouge. When his forces seized Phnom Penh on 17 April 1975, ending the US-backed Lon Nol republic, they did not consolidate a government so much as attempt to abolish the existing society. Within days they emptied the cities at gunpoint, drove the entire urban population into the countryside, declared “Year Zero,” and set out to build a pure agrarian collective. Money, markets, schools, courts, private property, and religion were abolished. The country was sealed off and renamed Democratic Kampuchea.
What followed was death on an industrial scale, administered by a secretive party that called itself only “Angkar” — the Organization. Families were broken up and worked to exhaustion on irrigation projects and rice fields under impossible quotas; the sick went untreated; the hungry starved while rice was exported. The regime hunted “enemies” defined ever more widely — former officials, the educated, ethnic Vietnamese, Cham Muslims, monks, and, in waves of paranoid purges, its own cadres. At the Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh, code-named S-21, some 14,000 to 16,000 people were tortured into confessions and sent to the killing fields; only a handful survived.
The regime fell not to internal revolt but to the neighbour it had attacked. After repeated bloody Khmer Rouge raids across the border, Vietnam invaded on 25 December 1978 and took Phnom Penh in two weeks, installing a new government of Cambodian defectors. Pol Pot was not captured. He retreated to the Thai frontier and waged a guerrilla war for almost two more decades, sheltered by Cold War alignments that left his ousted regime, grotesquely, holding Cambodia’s United Nations seat. He died in 1998 in a jungle hut, under house arrest by his own movement, never tried for what he had done.
In the early hours of 1 January 1959, Fulgencio Batista boarded a plane at Havana’s military airfield and fled Cuba, carrying a looted fortune and a small circle of family and cronies, bound for the Dominican Republic. His departure was sudden and secret; he had spent the night at a New Year’s party and slipped away before dawn, leaving his officials to learn of it as they woke. The flight ended seven years of dictatorship and opened the way for Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement, whose columns entered Havana within the week. The Cuban Revolution had won.
Batista was no newcomer to power. A former army sergeant who had risen through the 1933 “Sergeants’ Revolt,” he had dominated Cuban politics for a quarter century — first as the strongman behind a series of presidents, then as elected president from 1940 to 1944, and finally as a dictator after seizing power in a bloodless coup on 10 March 1952. That coup, which canceled an election he was expected to lose, destroyed Cuba’s fragile constitutional order and stripped his rule of any democratic claim. He suspended the 1940 constitution, muzzled the press, and governed for the benefit of a narrow elite, American corporations, and the organized-crime syndicates that turned Havana into a casino.
The cost fell on ordinary Cubans. Beneath the glittering tourist capital lay deep rural poverty, vast inequality, and a police apparatus that answered dissent with torture and killing; estimates of those killed in the regime’s final years range widely, into the thousands. That repression radicalized a generation. After his 1953 assault on the Moncada Barracks failed, Fidel Castro returned in 1956 aboard the yacht Granma and built a guerrilla movement in the Sierra Maestra mountains. Over two years it grew, while Batista’s larger, better-armed army proved corrupt, demoralized, and unwilling to fight.
The regime did not so much fall as evaporate. After rebel columns under Che Guevara took the city of Santa Clara at the end of December 1958, Batista’s commanders concluded the war was lost, and the dictator chose flight over a last stand. He spent his exile in the Dominican Republic, Madeira, and finally Spain, where he died in 1973, never tried for the regime’s crimes. The revolution he fled would reshape Cuba, and the Cold War, for decades.
On the evening of 14 January 2011, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who had ruled Tunisia for twenty-three years, boarded a plane and fled the country he had governed as a personal police state. After weeks of nationwide protest that his security forces had answered with live ammunition, the army would no longer guarantee his survival, and the man whose face had stared down from billboards across Tunisia abandoned his presidential palace and flew, by way of Malta, into exile in Saudi Arabia. He never returned. His flight was the first fall of the Arab Spring — the moment that proved an entrenched Arab autocrat could be driven from power by his own people — and it set off uprisings from Cairo to Damascus.
The spark had come from a town few outside Tunisia had heard of. On 17 December 2010 in Sidi Bouzid, a 26-year-old street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi, humiliated by a municipal official who confiscated his cart and produce, set himself on fire outside the local governor’s office. His act of desperation crystallized the grievances of a generation: unemployment, poverty, the petty tyranny of corrupt officials, and the suffocating repression of a regime that brooked no dissent. Bouazizi died of his burns on 4 January 2011. By then the protests his death ignited had spread across the country, and the regime’s bullets only swelled the crowds.
Ben Ali had seized power in a bloodless “medical coup” on 7 November 1987, deposing the aging founding president Habib Bourguiba on grounds of incapacity. He promised democratic opening and delivered the opposite: a one-party state under his Constitutional Democratic Rally, elections he won with margins as high as 99 percent, a pervasive security apparatus, censored media, and a ruling family — above all his wife Leïla and her Trabelsi relatives — whose greed became a national grievance in itself. For a time the regime was praised abroad as a model of stability and economic growth, but the growth masked deep inequality, regional neglect, and youth unemployment, and the stability rested on fear.
The fear broke in a month. As protests engulfed Tunisia, the army commander, General Rachid Ammar, reportedly refused to order his troops to fire on the demonstrators, and without the army’s loyalty the regime had nothing left to hold it up. Some 338 people were killed in the uprising. Ben Ali fled, was convicted in absentia of corruption and of complicity in the killing of protesters, and died in Saudi exile on 19 September 2019. The Tunisia he left became, for a time, the one genuine democratic success to emerge from the Arab Spring.