From barracks to palace: Soldiers who led military coups to become state leaders

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JOHANNESBURG (AP) — Weeks of nationwide Gen Z protests in Madagascar sparked by power and water shortages escalated and led to a military coup that forced President Andry Rajoelina into exile. Army officer Col. Michael Randrianirina has been sworn in as the new leader of the Indian Ocean nation.

The colonel is not the first in history to rise from the barracks to the presidential palace.

Here are five other famous military leaders who followed a similar trajectory:

After decades of a gradual, deliberate ascent through the Myanmar military, Min Aung Hlaing was appointed joint chief of staff of the army, navy, and air force, the military’s third-highest position, in 2010. A year later, he was appointed commander-in-chief and would spend the next decade consolidating his power and influence.

Facing mandatory retirement in July 2021, Min Aung Hlaing seized power through a military coup in February that year, declaring a state of emergency, transferring all state power to himself and establishing a military government, the State Administration Council (SAC). Since then he has ruled Myanmar under various titles. The military government has announced plans to hold a general election by year’s end.

Idi Amin began his military career as a cook and served in the British colonial army. After Uganda's 1962 independence, he rose quickly through its military ranks under President Milton Obote’s guidance to become commander of the army. In January 1971, Obote was in Singapore for a Commonwealth summit when Amin took control in a military coup. Obote fled to neighboring Tanzania after the coup, which was the result of the two men’s growing political and personal animosity.

Ugandans initially welcomed Amin’s rise to power, as he promised to release political prisoners and restore democracy. However, his regime rapidly descended into a brutal dictatorship characterized by violence and human rights abuses.

Amin was himself overthrown in April 1979 by an invasion force composed of the Tanzanian military and Ugandan rebels.

Kenan Evren began his military career as an officer from a military academy, rising through the ranks over several decades until he reached the highest rank of general, serving as the chief of the general staff. He led a military coup in Turkey in September 1980 after months of violence between left-wing and right-wing militants that nearly brought the country to civil war.

The leader of the coup took over the presidency and then rewrote the constitution to guarantee the military’s political power. The military dissolved Parliament and ruled through a National Security Council, which Evren was the head of, effectively running the country as a dictator.

His period of sole military rule ended when he formally assumed the title of the seventh president of Turkey in November 1982, after a new constitution was approved by referendum, and he served until November 1989.

In 2012, he was put on trial for leading the coup and later sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against the state.

Jerry Rawlings rose to power through two military coups, first in June 1979 and then in December 1981, before transitioning to a democratically elected president.

Rawlings, a pilot in the Ghanaian Air Force, became well-known for the successful first coup he led. He briefly held the position of ruler of Ghana before ceding it.

In a second coup in 1981, he toppled the civilian government and commanded the Provisional National Defense Council military dictatorship in the early 1990s. Following the drafting of a new constitution in 1992, he was democratically elected as president and held office for two four-year terms, from January 1993 to January 2001.

His legacy is complex, with both praise for his economic reforms and criticism for human rights abuses, including arbitrary detentions and forced disappearances.

Augusto Pinochet was a career military officer who had risen through the ranks and was appointed commander-in-chief of the army by Chile President Salvador Allende in August 1973. The following month, Allende, the democratically elected socialist president, was overthrown in a bloody military coup led by Pinochet. The military surrounded and bombed the presidential palace, La Moneda, where Allende remained until his death by suicide.

In the aftermath, the military imposed a junta where Pinochet emerged to establish himself as its single head before instituting a cruel, 17-year dictatorship. Until 1990, Chileans lived in a period marked by systematic human rights abuses and the implementation of radical free-market economic policies.