TUNISIA: Which Way Is The Wind Really Blowing?

The brutal truth about Tunisia

Bloodshed, tears, but no democracy. Bloody turmoil won’t necessarily presage the dawn of democracy

By Robert Fisk, Middle East Correspondent

Monday, 17 January 2011

AP - What's left of the face of ex-president Zine el- Abidine Ben Ali stares out from a torn poster in Tunis yesterday

    The end of the age of dictators in the Arab world? Certainly they are shaking in their boots across the Middle East, the well-heeled sheiks and emirs, and the kings, including one very old one in Saudi Arabia and a young one in Jordan, and presidents – another very old one in Egypt and a young one in Syria – because Tunisia wasn't meant to happen. Food price riots in Algeria, too, and demonstrations against price increases in Amman. Not to mention scores more dead in Tunisia, whose own despot sought refuge in Riyadh – exactly the same city to which a man called Idi Amin once fled.

    If it can happen in the holiday destination Tunisia, it can happen anywhere, can't it? It was feted by the West for its "stability" when Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali was in charge. The French and the Germans and the Brits, dare we mention this, always praised the dictator for being a "friend" of civilised Europe, keeping a firm hand on all those Islamists.

    Tunisians won't forget this little history, even if we would like them to. The Arabs used to say that two-thirds of the entire Tunisian population – seven million out of 10 million, virtually the whole adult population – worked in one way or another for Mr Ben Ali's secret police. They must have been on the streets too, then, protesting at the man we loved until last week. But don't get too excited. Yes, Tunisian youths have used the internet to rally each other – in Algeria, too – and the demographic explosion of youth (born in the Eighties and Nineties with no jobs to go to after university) is on the streets. But the "unity" government is to be formed by Mohamed Ghannouchi, a satrap of Mr Ben Ali's for almost 20 years, a safe pair of hands who will have our interests – rather than his people's interests – at heart.

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    For I fear this is going to be the same old story. Yes, we would like a democracy in Tunisia – but not too much democracy. Remember how we wanted Algeria to have a democracy back in the early Nineties?

    Then when it looked like the Islamists might win the second round of voting, we supported its military-backed government in suspending elections and crushing the Islamists and initiating a civil war in which 150,000 died.

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    No, in the Arab world, we want law and order and stability. Even in Hosni Mubarak's corrupt and corrupted Egypt, that's what we want. And we will get it.

    The truth, of course, is that the Arab world is so dysfunctional, sclerotic, corrupt, humiliated and ruthless – and remember that Mr Ben Ali was calling Tunisian protesters "terrorists" only last week – and so totally incapable of any social or political progress, that the chances of a series of working democracies emerging from the chaos of the Middle East stand at around zero per cent.

    The job of the Arab potentates will be what it has always been – to "manage" their people, to control them, to keep the lid on, to love the West and to hate Iran.

    Indeed, what was Hillary Clinton doing last week as Tunisia burned? She was telling the corrupted princes of the Gulf that their job was to support sanctions against Iran, to confront the Islamic republic, to prepare for another strike against a Muslim state after the two catastrophes the United States and the UK have already inflicted in the region.

    The Muslim world – at least, that bit of it between India and the Mediterranean – is a more than sorry mess. Iraq has a sort-of-government that is now a satrap of Iran, Hamid Karzai is no more than the mayor of Kabul, Pakistan stands on the edge of endless disaster, Egypt has just emerged from another fake election.

    And Lebanon... Well, poor old Lebanon hasn't even got a government. Southern Sudan – if the elections are fair – might be a tiny candle, but don't bet on it.

    It's the same old problem for us in the West. We mouth the word "democracy" and we are all for fair elections – providing the Arabs vote for whom we want them to vote for.

    In Algeria 20 years ago, they didn't. In "Palestine" they didn't. And in Lebanon, because of the so-called Doha accord, they didn't. So we sanction them, threaten them and warn them about Iran and expect them to keep their mouths shut when Israel steals more Palestinian land for its colonies on the West Bank.

    There was a fearful irony that the police theft of an ex-student's fruit produce – and his suicide in Tunis – should have started all this off, not least because Mr Ben Ali made a failed attempt to gather public support by visiting the dying youth in hospital.

    For years, this wretched man had been talking about a "slow liberalising" of his country. But all dictators know they are in greatest danger when they start freeing their entrapped countrymen from their chains.

    And the Arabs behaved accordingly. No sooner had Ben Ali flown off into exile than Arab newspapers which have been stroking his fur and polishing his shoes and receiving his money for so many years were vilifying the man. "Misrule", "corruption", "authoritarian reign", "a total lack of human rights", their journalists are saying now. Rarely have the words of the Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran sounded so painfully accurate: "Pity the nation that welcomes its new ruler with trumpetings, and farewells him with hootings, only to welcome another with trumpetings again." Mohamed Ghannouchi, perhaps?

    Of course, everyone is lowering their prices now – or promising to. Cooking oil and bread are the staple of the masses. So prices will come down in Tunisia and Algeria and Egypt. But why should they be so high in the first place?

    Algeria should be as rich as Saudi Arabia – it has the oil and gas – but it has one of the worst unemployment rates in the Middle East, no social security, no pensions, nothing for its people because its generals have salted their country's wealth away in Switzerland.

    And police brutality. The torture chambers will keep going. We will maintain our good relations with the dictators. We will continue to arm their armies and tell them to seek peace with Israel.

    And they will do what we want. Ben Ali has fled. The search is now on for a more pliable dictator in Tunisia – a "benevolent strongman" as the news agencies like to call these ghastly men.

    And the shooting will go on – as it did yesterday in Tunisia – until "stability" has been restored.

    No, on balance, I don't think the age of the Arab dictators is over. We will see to that.

     

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    Crossroad for Arab Dictators

    by Bruce Riedel 

     Bruce Riedel

     

    The revolution portends trouble for nearby regimes, from Egypt to Libya. Ex-CIA officer Bruce Riedel on why other dominoes may fall—and how U.S. policy just got more complicated.

    Something amazing and remarkable happened in Tunisia this week which is sending a tidal wave of expectations throughout the Arab and Islamic worlds. The Tunisian people overthrew a dictator who had been in power for 23 years. No Arab country has done so before. Other Islamic countries, Iran in 1978 and Pakistan in 2008, have seen dictators overthrown by civil unrest but never in the Arab world. The big question is who is next? And the answer may be Egypt. Zine al Abidene Ben Ali was Tunisia's secret police boss when he orchestrated a bloodless coup in 1987. He had been the power behind the scenes for some time before the coup. During his tenure he brought stability and some economic growth but ruthlessly suppressed dissent and labeled almost all opponents as Islamic extremists.

    Photos: Tunisia's Uprising

    HP Main - NC Tunisia Overthrow

    Thierry Roge / Reuters

     

    After his ouster, Ben Ali apparently wanted to find refuge and exile in France, which has a large Tunisian émigré population. But Paris said no thanks, fearing his presence would exacerbate tensions with the country's large Muslim population. So Ben Ali is in Saudi Arabia, which has a long tradition of offering asylum to ousted Muslim leaders. The kingdom takes them in on the proviso that they stay out of politics.

    Is Tunisia a harbinger of change elsewhere? Certainly the problems that brought down Ben Ali can be found elsewhere in the Arab world. High unemployment and even higher underemployment—especially among restless young men—in a period of rising food and energy prices and global economic downturn characterize virtually every major Arab country from Morocco to Yemen. Several are also led by regimes that are long in the saddle. Tunisia's immediate neighbors Algeria and Libya both fall into this category.

    The joke in Cairo this weekend was whether Ben Ali's plane would stop in Cairo to pick up Mubarak.

    But the big question mark is Egypt. With the Arab world's largest population and biggest intelligentsia, Egypt has been run since 1981 by Hosni Mubarak. Mubarak, 82, came to power in a hail of bullets when his much more flamboyant and charismatic predecessor Anwar Sadat was assassinated by a band of four jihadists in the Egyptian army during a parade marking the anniversary of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. I was the chief of the Egypt desk in CIA that day and assured a worried Reagan administration that Mubarak would hold onto power. I was right for thirty years.

    Mubarak has held on to power ever since that October day and has never appointed a Vice President to be a successor. He has brought remarkable stability to Egypt despite fighting a bitter and bloody battle with jihadist terrorists led by Ayman Zawahiri, the number two in Al Qaeda, in the 1990s. But stability has led to lethargy and stasis. Egypt, once a leader in the Arab world and the Islamic world, has fallen to a being a backwater.

    Mubarak has flirted with the idea that his son, Gamal, might succeed him—but has also suggested he might run for reelection again this year himself despite age and failing health. For a long time there was really no viable alternative, but now the former head of the IAEA Muhammad al Baradei has emerged as a spokesman for change and has forged an informal alliance with the country's largest opposition movement, the Muslim Brotherhood. Even before Tunis erupted, smart experts were suggesting scenarios in which change could come to Egypt.

    Behind the scenes, power in Egypt remains with the army and secret police as it has since Gamal abd al Nasir seized power from a decrepit monarchy more than a half century ago. After Sadat's assassination—and in the face of Zawahiri's challenge—Mubarak vastly expanded the size and power of the mukhabarat, or secret police, and the Ministry of the Interior. The internal security police force has one and half million men under its command, four times the size of the regular army, with a budget of one and a half billion. As any tourist knows the police are everywhere. Every Egyptian knows an informant is everywhere, too. Estimates suggest 80,000 political prisoners are in jail. While the population has doubled since Sadat died, the number of prisons has quadrupled.

    Mubarak has relied for decades on his secret police Chief Omar Suleiman, 75, to keep order and maintain control. Suleiman is an accomplished counterterrorist fighter well known in Western capitals and highly respected by intelligence services around the world. He has often been Mubarak's go-to political operative, handling delicate negotiations like dealing with Hamas in Gaza.

    Mubarak and Suleiman have doubtless been rattled by what they have watched on al Jazirah television coming from Tunis. The joke in Cairo this weekend was whether Ben Ali's plane would stop in Cairo to pick up Mubarak. But Egyptians have been making jokes about Mubarak and his longevity for years now—and he is still there.

    The stakes are enormous for America in Egypt. Transit through the Suez Canal is vital to our navy and our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The peace Sadat made with Israel is vital to Jerusalem, which every Israeli leader knows. A stable pro-Western Egypt has been the bed rock of our Middle East policy since Henry Kissinger. U.S. assistance—both economic and military—has averaged about $2 billion a year since 1979.

    Barack Obama's challenge in Egypt will be to avoid tying America to Mubarak and trying to hold back the winds of change that are coming while not destabilizing a critical ally. The United States has a poor track record of pulling off that difficult balance. In Pakistan, George Bush hung by his man Pervez Musharraf far too long. The result is that Pakistanis hate America.

    What has just happened in Tunisia is a revolution in Arab politics. No one knows now if it will be a one-off or the beginning of a trend. For President Obama and Secretary Hillary Clinton, the region just got a whole lot more complicated.

    Bruce Riedel, a former long-time CIA officer, is a senior fellow in the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution. At Obama's request, he chaired the strategic review of policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2009. He's also the author of The Search for Al Qaeda: Its Leadership, Ideology and Future

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    TANGLED WEB

    Tunisia: Can We Please Stop Talking About 'Twitter Revolutions'?

    January 15, 2011
    While the tear gas was still hanging in the streets of Tunis, many pundits were quick to christen Tunisia’s revolution. Andrew Sullivan has asked (again) whether it’s a Twitter Revolution. Elizabeth Dickinson, among others, speculated in “Foreign Policy” that it might be a “WikiLeaks revolution.” Anonymous, the online activists who recently attacked targets perceived to be against WikiLeaks,claimed it as their own after their DDOS attacks on various government targets. For cyber-utopians, the unfolding events in Tunisia and the role of social media, was a cause célèbre, a knockdown to the naysayer Malcolm Gladwell. (See my critique of Gladwell’s argument here.) 

    First off, it looks like social media did have an important role to play here. An estimated 18 percent of Tunisia’s population is on Facebook and, left unblocked by the government, it was a place where many Tunisians shared updates pertaining to the protests. As Ethan Zuckerman has pointed out, the video-sharing sites Dailymotion and YouTube were also important. And with a paucity of on-the-ground media coverage, Twitter excelled as a medium in getting the message out, in driving mainstream media coverage, and in connecting activists on the ground with multipliers in the West.

    Revolutions, of course, are notoriously slippery customers to evaluate. As Juan Cole writes, "Revolutions are always multiple revolutions happening simultaneously." It's difficult enough looking at revolutions from years ago and attributing relative importance to each of the many factors, let alone when people are still on the streets and chaos reigns. When you look at the complex mix of factors in Tunisia -- the economy, a frustrated over-educated, unemployed middle class, the trade unions, rampant censorship and government corruption, and, yes, social media -- establishing a single cause for the revolution, especially for something as marginal for most Tunisians as WikiLeaks, seems preposterous. If there is a need to apply a single cause and moniker for the events in Tunisia, it would make as much sense to call this the “Mohamed Bouazizi Revolution,” after the man who set himself on fire a few weeks ago to protest the government. But that too would be overly simplistic.

    As the events in Tunisia continue to unfold they will be ripe for study by academics and experts, but in so quickly applying our theories of social mobilization, or our frameworks of revolutionary change, we become blind to what is really happening. As Evgeny Morozov’s makes clear in his http://www.amazon.com/Net-Delusion-Dark-Internet-Freedom/dp/1586488740" style="text-decoration: none; color: #1b73a4; text-align: left;">recent book,by over-focusing on the technology, we lose sight of what’s really important. 

    The problem is that we so desperately want there to be a Twitter revolution. In a 24-hour news cycle, we don’t just seek instant news but instant answers, clear explanations and narratives that can be book-ended with events and wrapped up into a three-word headline. At first it is just a catchy headline beloved of journalists in need of page views, but quickly that moniker becomes a narrative, an established truth that is often wildly divergent with the reality on the ground.

    In our search for a single cause, we're much more likely to settle on an "new technology" explanation rather than something as dull as a great many of the participants were unemployed or wearing socks. Not only do "Twitter revolution" explanations mean more page views, but they fulfill some deterministic urge within us -- the dual promises of technology and modernity. There was as much breathless enthusiasm about the power of the telegraph to do good as there is the Internet. InTom Standage’s wonderful book on the growth of the telegraph he says these reactions are amplified by what he terms "chronocentricity," "the egotism that ones own generation is poised on the very cusp of history." 

    More than that, Twitter revolution narratives are popular because rather than being about Tunisia, they are often really about ourselves. When we glorify the role of social media we are partly glorifying ourselves. Some of us are not only praising the tools we know and love and use every day, but also the tools we build and have stakes in. To proclaim a Twitter revolution is almost a form of intellectual colonialism, stealthy and mildly delusional:  We project our world, our values, and concerns onto theirs and we shouldn’t. We use Twitter and so must they. In our rush to christen the uprising, did we think to ask Tunisians what they wanted to call their revolution?

    I've been to Tunisia a few times, the last time to a town called Tabarka close to the Algerian border. I went with my wife, lured by the promise of a jazz festival and a decent-enough hotel. It was a slightly unnerving, windswept place, with a decayed colonial grandeur, very different to the more modern resorts along the coast. In the hotel there was a gym, but the ancient machines were covered with dust. A Jacuzzi, but with no water. A lot was broken. The hotel reminded me of the scene in Empire of the Sun where the young Jim comes back to his family’s abandoned home at the end of the war. A reminder of past lives, as if the wrong people (in this case sun-seeking Eastern European tourists) had been transplanted there. 

    With the hotel being no great shakes, we often wandered into the town. From traveling a little bit in the Arab world, I was used to seeing a lot of men on the streets. But I had never seen anything like Tabarka. With the tourism industry in that part of the country on the wane, it was full of angry young men with no jobs. 

    People hissed at us in the streets (my wife was careful to dress appropriately); a boy in a group of children made a throat-cutting sign to us when we walked out of the town to visit a fort. People made pig noises at us. While it wasn’t particularly pleasant, it wasn't the end of the world. (I’ve been much more fearful in London pubs at closing time and many other Tunisians were lovely to us during our stay there.)

    I’m not making excuses for unpleasantness, but if I lived in Tabarka without any chance of work under a corrupt regime and saw Western tourists throwing their money around, I might feel the same. Nor do I claim to know anything about Tunisia because I’ve been there on holiday several times. But when, as a tourist, you can feel that street-level anger and aggression, and see the hopelessness many of the town’s young men felt in trying to sell a few pieces of pottery to a few lousy tourists, then it does seem rather ridiculous and narcissistic to talk about the role of WikiLeaks and Anonymous. 

    So when I hear about Tunisians rising up, I think of the men of Tabarka, and hope that they'll get a better deal and a government they finally deserve.

    About This Blog

    Luke Allnutt

    Written by Luke Allnutt, Tangled Web focuses on the smart ways people in closed societies are using social media, mobile phones, and the Internet to circumvent their governments. It also covers the efforts of less-than-democratic governments to control the web. Now and then, it might also cover shiny new gadgets.