Didier Ratsiraka
Didier Ratsiraka was president of Madagascar for twenty-three years in two stretches, the naval officer of thirty-eight whom the military directorate chose in June 1975 after the assassination of its head, who wrote a Little Red Book, the Charter of the Malagasy Socialist Revolution, nationalised the banks, the plantations and the French companies, closed the French bases and the American tracking station, aligned with Moscow and Pyongyang, and ran the country into the ground for a decade before the IMF came in 1982 and the crowds of 1991 sat in front of his palace for seven months until he conceded a transition and lost the election of 1993. He came back in 1996 by a few thousand votes, refused to accept defeat in the election of December 2001, fought a six-month war of roadblocks against the mayor of Antananarivo, Marc Ravalomanana, who had won it, and fled to France in July 2002, from which he returned in 2011. He was born in 1936 at Vatomandry on the east coast, the son of a colonial official, trained at the French naval academy at Brest, and was military attache in Paris when the first republic fell in 1972. The general who replaced it made him foreign minister, and it was as foreign minister that he renegotiated the agreements with France that took the country out of the franc zone and the French out of Diego Suarez. The Red Admiral's revolution made Madagascar a democratic republic under a supreme council with him at its head, elected by referendum with ninety-five per cent, and the results were a foreign debt that quadrupled, a rice ration, and the withdrawal of the peasants from the market into subsistence. A country that had exported rice imported it. He was reelected in 1982 and 1989 in votes his opponents did not accept, and the Forces Vives movement of 1991, with the churches behind it, brought half a million people into the streets. His guard fired on them on 10 August 1991 outside the palace at Iavoloha and the killing broke his authority. He lost to Albert Zafy in 1993, and when the parliament impeached Zafy in 1996 he won the election that followed against a divided field. The second term was a federalist constitution and the crisis of 2002, in which two governments, two capitals and two central banks existed for half a year. He was sentenced in absentia to ten years for embezzlement and pardoned, ran for president again in 2018 at eighty-two, and died in Antananarivo in March 2021.
- Lived: 1936 CE – 2021 CE
- Nationality: Malagasy
- Roles: president, admiral, politician
