By Sohrab Ahmari and Nasser Weddady
The Tunisian people broke the fear barrier -- will the West follow suit?
By now, the story of Mohammad Bouazizi has become the stuff of legend in Tunisia and on the Arab street. Despite his university education, the 24-year-old Tunisian had for months been unable to secure employment. So to provide for his family, Bouazizi was forced to sell fruits and vegetables on the streets of Sidi Bouzid, some 150 miles to the south of the capital Tunis. But municipal officials bent on cracking down on street vending would not allow him even this small modicum of opportunity. They confiscated his goods repeatedly and, when the young man showed up at city hall to protest, he was insulted and driven out. Bouazizi set himself on fire just outside city hall. He died two weeks later.
The next day, 26-year-old Hussein Nagi Felhi, another unemployed university graduate, found a quicker way to end his desperation. "No to unemployment! No to misery!" Felhi cried before electrocuting himself by grabbing hold of an electricity pole coursing with some 30,000 megawatts of energy.
The two back-to-back suicides sparked a month of protests in normally serene Tunisia - beginning with the economically-depressed Sidi Bouzid region, where trade unionists, students, and jobless youth poured into the streets to voice their frustration with a corrupt and nepotistic regime that has misruled Tunisia for some two decades. Caught off-guard, the authorities in Sidi Bouzid responded to the demonstrations with predictable violence. A mathematics teacher was shot and killed by police - triggering further rioting by the youth, who hurled stones at police positions and set fire to a municipal building.
As protests spread from Sidi Bouzid to Tunis, the government of Zeine Elabidine Ben Ali directed his feared "BOP" units to open fire on protestors, and to shoot to kill. Security forces were seen shooting demonstrators at point blank range using 12-gauge ammunition. Opposition forces reported as many as 50 protesters killed, with a majority of them dying of head and chest wounds. One particularly disturbing video making its away around the Arab blogosphere showed doctors at a hospital in Kasserine treating wounded demonstrators. A man was seen lying on a gurney with half of his skull missing. The familiar and chilling sound of Arab mothers wailing punctuated the scene. A nurse collapsed in shock. "Allah-u-akbar!" the videographer whispered in horror. In these "martyrs" -- not to mention Bouazizi himself -- the antigovernment movement found its Neda Agha Soltans and Sohrab Arabis. The Kasserine massacre became a symbol and a rallying cry for opponents of Ben Ali.
As events were heating up, Tunisian cyberactivists -- the region's most skilled -- stepped up their game like never before. An all-out electronic rebellion broke out against the Ben Ali regime. Tunisia's was one of the most sophisticated net censorship and control apparatuses in world. (In the lead-up to the uprising, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Tunisian cyberspace apparatchiks had been running massive phishing campaigns to harvest passwords and crush social media-based dissent.) Nevertheless, the Tunisian cyberactivist community became the main source of information for the better part of the uprising.
Nawaat, a central pro-democracy and human rights website, has been running photographs and news of protests around the clock. This was no accident, Sami Ben Gharbia, Malek Khadraoui, "Astrubaal," and "Centrist" -- the brains behind Nawaat -- have been for years playing a vicious cat and mouse game with the Tunisia's online censorship machine - practicing for the day when North African dissent would spill from the Internet into the streets.
Impressively deploying the full gamut social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube), the Nawaat crew managed to evade aggressive attempts to block access to their site in Tunisia. Thanks to its longstanding reputation for reliability, Newaat's reporting -- and on-the-spot analysis -- was circulated widely across the Mideast and North Africa region. Other North African activists, who had either been trained by the Nawaat team or had collaborated with it on other campaigns, relayed their information. An electronic pan-Arabism 2.0 of sorts emerged, breaking Ben Ali's firewall. (The "hactivist" collective Anonymous, too, lent a hand by defacing government sites. This, in turn, led the mainstream media to finally notice something going on in Tunisia.)
Early last week, Ben Ali finally broke down under the intense internal pressure he was feeling. He fired key cronies, such as his adviser and former foreign minister Abdelwahab Ben Abdallahand and interior minister Rafik Belhaj Kacem, and promised to end to the bloodshed. Anybody familiar with the behavior patterns of faltering Mideast despots fighting for their political lives recognized these gestures as designed to buy Ben Ali time and room to maneuver. Finding himself simultaneously vilified and humiliated on the Arab street, Ben Ali also reportedly tried to hire top Arab journalists to manage his crumbling regime's image problem -- but to no avail.
Last Thursday, he took to the airwaves to grovel before his people -- an unprecedented event in Arab history. In a widely-ridiculed television appearance, he sought to portray himself as a misunderstood, benevolent dictator, and once again scapegoated his underlings for the violence. (To appear "authentic," he even used the local dialect as opposed to fosha, or classical Arabic, and dropped the usual demigod gravitas.)
Even so, Ben Ali continued to lay the ultimate blame for the violence on "thugs" and "terrorists," who prevented "our children from attending school" - forgetting that it was he who ordered schools closed indefinitely. Still, the speech was a massive retreat. Ben Ali went as far as promising not to run for the 2014 elections and to lift censorship. Pathetically, he ordered for sugar and milk prices to be lowered right then and there. This last bit was an attempt to emulate his Algerian neighbor, who understood that provoking a hungry and repressed population was not a smart crowd-control method. For Ben Ali however, the gesture was too little too late.
On Friday, he was forced to leave the country for Saudi Arabia.
The Tunisian regime had for years tried to brand itself as a tourist-friendly, "moderate" Arab government and a source of stability in North Africa. Its willingness to violently repress Islamists of all stripes and fully cooperate in the War on Terror had made Tunisia a favorite in Washington and Brussels, which had been willing to entertain autocracy to stave off Islamism. So it had been easy to forget, for example, that Tunisia was also one of the region's most efficient and effective enemies of free speech. Or that the Tunisian security forces -- with an unhealthy penchant for arbitrary detention and torture - were one of its most feared.
Yet as the events unfolding in Tunisia demonstrate, the bargain struck by the West with autocrats sitting atop social pressure cookers ready to erupt at any minute is a bad one. For stability based solely on naked power is short-lasting. (As his regime was crumbling before his eyes, Ben Ali himself all but openly conceded this point.) For more than a decade, many of these autocrats have been promising to commence cycles of democratization to introduce political freedom and civil rights. Their promises are broken. Sensing that the free world under President Obama is even less inclined to press them on rights, they have reprised the one role they know best: that of absolutist dictator.
Washington and Brussels have for the most part been oblivious, content to reduce the entire Middle East to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and ignore a much more important conflict: that between citizens and absolutist dictators of all stripes. But history in Middle East and North Africa is not going to wait for a peaceful way out of the Arab-Israeli impasse. After two years of new management in the White House, and much treasure and prestige expended by both the United States and its European allies on solving the Israel-Palestinian problem, Middle East autocracies remain sinking ships that no power on earth can save from their own people.
So far, the Western response to the Tunisian uprising has been limited to shy condemnations replete with vagaries, suggesting that we may be doomed to learn the same lesson over and over again. Particularly nauseating has been the position of France. At least two ministers in the Sarkozy government went on the record endorsing Ben Ali. "To say unequivocally that Tunisia is a dictatorship strikes me as completely exaggerated," the French culture minister bloviated, while the agriculture minister stated that "[i]t's not to [him] to judge the Tunisian regime... President Ben Ali is someone who's frequently judged badly, [but] he's done a lot of things." Those "things," of course, include the killing of Hatem Bettahar, a French-Tunisian dual citizen and professor at the Université de Compiègne, by (French-trained) Tunisian security forces.
Had something like the Kasserine massacre occurred in Tehran, there would be mass demonstrations in downtown Paris led by Bernard Henri-Levy. And rightly so! Yet when it comes to North African democrats getting brutalized and killed in cold blood, the French and other Western elites and publics alike too often assume an arrogant and dismissive attitude out of a fear of undermining anti-Islamist bulwarks like Egypt's Mubarak, Morocco's Muhammad VI, and Tunisia's Ben Ali. The Obama administration exemplified this stance in the worst possible way. While Obama's response to Iran's Green Movement was inadequate and coldblooded, his response to the plight - and victories - of North African reformers was even worse: it was simply nonexistent, right up until Ben Ali finally packed his bags.
Partly, these "realist" fears are driven by skepticism regarding the leaders driving Mideast pro-democracy forces. If we cannot "pin down" the democrats ideologically, the thinking goes, we may as well stick with the tired dictators we know - lest we open the gates to another Iran-style disaster. Yet one would certainly wonder whether anybody foresaw a camera-shy Czech dissident novelist one day becoming the president of a democratic Czech republic before the implosion of the Soviet Union. No one did, as, indeed, few foresaw the collapse of the iron curtain. As it is, no one could have predicted a month ago that the people of Tunisia would have spontaneously taken to the streets to hold their ruler to account.
Mohammad Bouazizi and the Tunisian nation, then, burned away the myth -- so persistent in the corridors of Western power -- that there is no third way between Islamist theocracies and sclerotic autocracies -- as one WikiLeaks cable described the Ben Ali regime. Democracy remains that third way.
Co-author Nasser Weddady is civil rights outreach director at the American Islamic Congress and co-editor of Re-Orient, Palgrave Macmillan's forthcoming anthology of essays by young Arab and Iranian reformers.
John Dramani Mahama: The Politics of Peace
Sabria Jawhar: The Violent Rhetoric of Saudi Arabia's Imams
“... When our days become dreary with low hovering clouds of despair, and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe, working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” MLK
Tunisians, this is not just your revolution but you have become a model for change for others in the region also. The hard job is ahead. Be very careful of your revolution being hijacked by the fundamentalist Islamists like what happened in Iran. Stay active and bring about a truly secular democratic change to Tunisia and by extenstion to others in the region.
MY
By the way, the biggest forces opposed to the Shah were the leftists and liberals. Khomeini had been active in opposing the Shah but was not that visible for a long time. Western countries created the myth of Khomeini to create a crescent green shield of muslim countries against the feared USSR expansion. Liberals and leftsists were very active inside and outside the country. West did not like it. Khomeini's handlers who came from US and EU recognized the strengths of the left/liberals and thought their support. Khomeini, promised that Mullahs will not be in government and he himself would be residing in Ghom, a religous center in Iran. He promised a democratic system. Obviously he fooled all the opposition. He created situations to eliminarte them one by one. Then he became the supreme leader and in control of all facets of the gov. He closed the universities, purged the liberals/leftists, banned the papers, jailed and killed opponents, etc. etc. Some leftists in the west think that since IRI is opposed to the West it must be good. It is far from the truth. IRI by its policies serves the interests of the west. IRI is one the most anti-democratic and oppressive regimes in the world. That is why I hope that Tunisians will be able to keep the religion and gov separate. All the religions, particularly Islam are inherently anti-democratic.
MY
Democracies however are an entirely different thing. Case in point: Iran/Palestine...
It's an abuse to the people of Tunisia and around the world as everyone depends on the 'dollar' to be reliable and solid as the world's reserve currency.
However too many people believe it's cute-n-funny to sacrifice the livelihoods of billions of people so Wall Street/City of London can have another record quarter of bonuses and so-on.
Then we get this constant drumbeat from corporate mass-media spewing endless excuses for why governments and leaders keep falling into chaos when we know exactly why this is happening.
It's pathetic and we should know better.
Sadly, they will hope for the emergence of someone they can support regardless of his views on democracy.
It is so much easier as well as cheaper to back a local strongman. They can be co-opted, controlled and managed behind the scenes. Should they wander from the party line, then CIA backed coups are undertaken to change the suit.
The history books are full of examples, not to mention the current league of US/Western backed dictators in Africa.
Whether it is publicly said or not, the West does not trust the individuals in these Arab states to support the correct government, given a democratic choice.
The over throw of the first Democratic leader of Iran in 1953 by the West is still being felt today. And we need look no further than the Gaza strip, where its citizens made the Democratic mistake of electing the wrong party to see a current real life example.
The invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan to install and then militarily support Western friendly governments should provide all the reminders we need as what to expect should the people of Tunisia choose wrong.
US learned from mistakes of 1979 and the Iranian revolution or at least should have learned. We cannot get rid of a dictator who we called a friend an ally literally days before the revolution and then hand the power to some religious fanatic group and completely change the balance of power in the region and be forced to rewrite the playbook for the region all over again.
We live and are in bed with many dictators and strong men out of necessity or convenience. That is the ugly truth about politics. The utopia that many are striving for is just not realistic. But we shouldn't stop trying.
Google Smedley Butler , 80 years ago this Marine officer who had led many invasions of Central America said that eventually he realized he wasn't working for the American people, he was working for corporate interests. It is similar to Eisenhower's "military industrial complex" speech.
Suggested reading: Confessions of an economic hit-man.
- Both are relevant.
That being the case, there is another aspect. Back in the 1970's, and certainly the 1950's, a fair portion of the American populace had no idea where Iran was or what it was about. The events there would likely have passed into relative obscurity were it not for the American embassy personnel being taken hostage. In this case, while the name of the country would not be unfamiliar, Tunisia certainly isn't anything like the daily news that is available about a good half-dozen other places in that part of the world.
They still don't know and frankly don't care. That stems from the fact that many Americans believe that the world starts in San Francisco and ends in New York. Partly due to our arrogance and partly due to decline of our educational system.
http://www.farhangsara.com/mosadegh.htm
He nationalized Angle Oil Company (BP), and he was very popular in Iran, and all over the world. The Time magazine named Dr. Mosaddegh Person of the Year 1951.
http://www.time.com/time/subscriber/personoftheyear/archive/stories/1951.html
Mosaddegh was removed from power in a coup on August 1953, organized and carried out by the United States CIA at the request of the British MI6 which chose Iranian Shah and General Fazlollah Zahedi to succeed Mosaddegh. The CIA called the coup Operation Ajax after its CIA cryptonym. Mosaddegh was imprisoned for three years, then put under house arrest until his death.
After 1953, we do not have any DEMOCRATIC regime in the Middle East and North Africa. Since last 60 years US supported all DICTATORSHIPS in ME and NA.
The next steps in Tunisia should be interesting. I hope that their revolution isn't hijacked by islamic fanatics, as the anti-Shah revolution was.