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COMMENTARY
January 19, 2011
Tunisia
In a startling development, the "Arab Street" has exerted itself, spontaneously -- all previous exertions, usually demonstrations against Israel or against Danish cartoonists and the like, having been methodically orchestrated for the benefit of world media. But the explosion in Tunisia -- of all places, with its reputation for stability, and only two presidents since independence from France more than half a century ago -- runs off the chart of precedent.The Tunisian people, or at least the younger ones in what is demographically a very young country, seem to have risen nearly as one in rebellion against their aging autocracy, typical of modern Arab states in which we find strongmen such as Moammar Ghadafiof Libya (in his 42nd year of power), Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen (33rd year), Hosni Mubarak of Egypt (30th year), to say nothing of the formally hereditary monarchs. All of these men have long feared the fate of Tunisia's "president for life." Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali was in his 24th year of absolute power when he flit the country in a dreadful hurry at the end of last week. He is now trying to make himself comfortable in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, with the ton and a half of gold bars his wife thoughtfully withdrew from Tunisia's national bank before leaving home (according to French and other sources, naturally denied in Tunis). Jeddah has long offered a retirement village for select Muslim politicians, "fallen from grace." It was the last home of Idi Amin, who may have seemed merely a clown from this distance, but was a bloody monster to the people of his native Uganda. Some other denizens of the palace complexes of that Red Sea port, such as Pakistan's Nawaz Sharif, merely took a few years' rest break there, in "Club Med on the Red," before heading back into the fray. Ben Ali's regime was incidentally successor to the "legendary" Habib Bourguiba's. I am so old that I can remember when Bourguiba (president-for-life until he took ill) was among the darlings of my parents' fashionably "liberal" friends and in the Time-cover short list of shining hopes for what Mao Tsetung called the "Third World." Alas, that generation of nice, self-flattering, progressive intellectuals have themselves passed on and cannot be shown the consequences of their fatuous judgments. It is thanks to WikiLeaks that we know the U.S. State Department cannot be completely surprised by the sudden collapse of order in Tunisia. They'd been trying to observe discreetly, and had been so successful, that the rest of the world didn't suspect a thing. We should not now assume there will be any fundamental changes in Tunisia, no matter how much blood is shed. The new "president for life" -- whether for minutes or decades -- is one of Ben Ali's flunkies, just as Ben Ali was one of Bourguiba's. Mohamed Ghannouchi is working on consolidating his power and will succeed or fail. Even without being able to read his mind, I can assure my reader that he isn't fantasizing about some new dawn of representative democracy and a limited government of laws, not of men. Nor is any potential rival. For the dictators of Third World countries would not be so if they did not appreciate another of Chairman Mao's memorable apophthegms, that: "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." To gloss this: Democracy happens when the preponderance of guns is on the democratic side. There is no such side in places like Tunisia. In my view, perhaps jaded by the recent historical experience of Iraq, it would be false to hope for anything but the appearance of a new strongman, wherever in the Arab world an old strongman falls. This is because the conditions for constitutional government have not developed in any of these countries; and where there was promise of a responsible opposition, it was thoroughly erased. Today, Islamist fanatics guarantee the failure of any emerging regime that might be humane, throughout the region. But more deeply, and sadly, the conditions for escape from perpetually backward and barbaric rule were more advanced in the later 19th century than they are today. One's heart genuinely goes out to the young of countries like Tunisia who, thanks to global village media, see the gleaming trophy of western freedom and material success, through the bars of their cages. Either through violence, or through emigration, they hope to make their escape. But in the first case they hurt only themselves, and in the second carry the cages with them. The western powers, and the Middle Eastern "experts" whom I myself despise, are being criticized for having pursued "realism," which consists of propping up despicable Arab regimes in the hope that even worse won't follow. But those who condemn must propose something better. George Bush tried to "change history" in Iraq. What is the next brilliant idea? David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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