When the very institutions tasked with defending the people instead defend political power, they trade their legitimacy for temporary favor. When the dust settles after a change in government, these forces, the police and the military, face an unavoidable reckoning.
You cannot serve two masters: the Constitution or the politicians. And when law enforcement and the military choose loyalty to a regime over allegiance to the people, they forfeit the trust that gives them any right to wield authority.
This is the grim reality facing any country where police badges became shields for corruption, and army uniforms became weapons against citizens.
There are consequences. And they must be faced.
No serious democracy can tolerate a security sector compromised by political servitude. Officers who acted as enforcers for a fallen regime must answer for their actions. Blind loyalty is no defense when the cost is human rights, public trust, and the very soul of the nation.
The Path Forward Is Clear — and It Is Hard:
- Purge and rebuild. Not for revenge, but for survival. Institutions that protect only themselves are no longer public.
- Prosecute where necessary. Crimes committed under the guise of “following orders” are still crimes.
- Professionalize and depoliticize. Security forces must be retrained, reoriented, and rebuilt around the principle that their loyalty belongs to the law and the people, never again to a party or a leader.
- Honor the public’s memory. The pain and anger citizens feel cannot simply be brushed aside in the name of “stability.” Stability without justice is a fantasy.
The alternative, ignoring this betrayal and papering over deep wounds with empty slogans, will doom any new government before it begins. It will guarantee that the cycle of abuse, corruption, and anger continues.
There is no shortcut to rebuilding trust.
Every officer who wore a badge or carried a weapon while committing injustice helped tear the nation’s fabric. Now, with the old order fallen, that fabric must be stitched back together, thread by painful thread, or it will unravel completely.
In the end, a country’s true strength is not measured by the size of its armies or the number of its police. It is measured by the trust between its people and those who claim to protect them.
Betray that trust, and the consequences are inevitable.
