The President himself claimed he was the victim of an attempted coup.
When he was inaugurated in 1999—five years after the end of his own jail stint for leading an attempted coup—22, 000 inmates were crammed into prisons built for 17, 000.
The reforms were less dramatic than events in the Soviet Union—where a month later Boris Yeltsin stood on a tank and denounced an attempted coup—but also changed hundreds of millions of lives.
