Category Archives: Tunisia

Al Jazeera owned the Tunisia story

Reuters reports:

As events unfolded in Tunisia, a country where Al Jazeera’s bureau had been closed, the channel again innovated among Arab broadcasters by using mobile phone footage and social media.

It no longer has a news monopoly in the Arabic satellite TV space. And some viewers say it treads a fine line between reporting and taking sides. But they stay glued regardless.

“Al-Jazeera is like a media brigade,” said Jordanian Maisara Malass, an opposition activist. “By its coverage of events it has helped far more than any other outlet such as Facebook to spread the revolution from one city to the other.”

From its very early days, Al Jazeera stunned the Arab world with heated debates and tough questioning of Arab officials, until then virtually unheard of. It won broad international attention, and U.S. grumbles, with its 2003 Iraq war coverage.

Tunisia may prove another defining moment. Al Jazeera was swifter than most to grasp the enormity of the protests that delivered what many Arabs thought impossible — an Arab autocrat hurled out of office by ordinary people.

“This marks the maturity of Jazeera television as a political force that can play a role in changing political orders,” Beirut-based analyst Rami Khouri wrote, saying that the channel’s avid viewers “may want to launch their own protests.”

When Tunisia’s Mohamed Bouazizi, who set himself on fire because police seized his vegetable cart, an act that spurred the protests, Al Jazeera was one of the first outlets to broadcast pictures of his self-immolation.

“Al Jazeera’s strength has been that it ‘owned’ the Tunisia story,” said Firas Al-Atraqchi, a former senior editor for an Al Jazeera website and now at the American University in Cairo (AUC). “Others had to catch up and try and ride its coat-tails.”

The channel relied on mobile footage for 60 percent of its material to circumvent an official media blackout, a channel executive said. To some, that made it seem part of the revolt or that it was siding with protesting Tunisians.

“Al Jazeera was like one of those protesting in the streets of Tunis and made people live with the events,” said Zeid Abu Oudeh, founder of Jordan Days, a Jordanian website and blog styled after YouTube.

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Islamists and the democratization of the Middle East

Olivier Roy notes that there was no visible Islamist dimension to the uprising in Tunisia.

Instead, the protesters were calling for freedom, democracy and multi-party elections. Put more simply, they just wanted to get rid of the kleptocratic ruling family.

At the end, when the real “Islamist” leaders returned from exile in the West (yes they were in the West, not in Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia), they, like Rached Ghannouchi, spoke of elections, coalition government and stability, all the while keeping a low profile.

Have the Islamists disappeared?

No. But in North Africa, at least, most of them have become democrats. True, fringe groups have followed the path of a nomadic global jihad and are roaming the Sahel in search of hostages, but they have no real support in the population. That is why they went to the desert.

Nevertheless, these highway robbers are still branded as a strategic threat by Western governments at a loss to design a long-term policy. Other Islamists have just given up politics and closed their door, pursuing a pious, conservative, but apolitical way of life. They put a burqa on their lives as well as on their wives.

But the bulk of the former Islamists have come to the same conclusion of the generation that founded the Justice and Development Party in Turkey: There is no third way between democracy and dictatorship. There is just dictatorship and democracy.

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The role of Al Jazeera and the internet in the Tunisian revolution

Marc Lynch talks about the role of Al Jazeera, the internet and social media, as facilitators supporting the Tunisian revolution.

Laila Lalami writes:

What is striking about the Tunisian revolution is how little attention it received in the mainstream American press. The Washington Post mentioned the protests for the first time on January 5, two and a half weeks into the unrest, when it ran a wire report about the burial of Bouazizi. Time ran its first piece about the protests later yet, on January 12. Even those who, like Thomas Friedman, specialize in diagnosing the ills of the “Arab street” did not show much interest.

When the mainstream press finally paid attention, it was often to explain the success of the Tunisian revolution in terms of technology. “Tunisian Protests Fueled by Social Media Networks,” read one typical headline, from CNN. Was it Twitter, which allowed activists to communicate swiftly and widely with one another? Was it YouTube, where videos of protesters and police abuse were posted? Or was it WikiLeaks, whose cables revealed that Ben Ali and his entourage were mind-bogglingly corrupt? But Twitter seemed to be most helpful in keeping those of us outside the country informed, since few in the Western media were reporting the story; YouTube was censored in the country; and WikiLeaks didn’t reveal anything that the Tunisian people did not already know.

In contrast, the Iran uprising of 2009 captured much of the American media’s attention. The Atlantic‘s Andrew Sullivan posted videos, tweets and eyewitness accounts during the weekend following the Iranian elections. William Kristol took to the pages of the Washington Post to applaud the brave protesters. In The Weekly Standard Michael Goldfarb urged the president to speak up for the Iranians on the street. Although Twitter, YouTube and Facebook were used widely to disseminate information, Ahmadinejad remained in power, highlighting the limits both of social networks and foreign media in affecting internal developments.

The Tunisian revolution occurred thanks primarily to the men and women who protested despite the intimidation, beatings, tear gas and bullets. The death of Bouazizi, the refusal of Gen. Rachid Ammar to obey Ben Ali’s orders to shoot, the arrest of dissident Hamma Hammami and the solidarity of trade unions and professionals with college students—all these factors played an incremental role in keeping the momentum going. In this modern revolution, the protesters had access to Internet tools that made it easier for them to get the word out, but those tools on their own could not topple a dictator.

The initial lack of interest by the American press in the Tunisian protests may have something to do with the fact that there was no Islamic angle: the Tunisians were not trying to oust an Islamic regime, nor were they supporters of a religious ideology. In other words, this particular struggle for freedom was not couched in simple terms that are familiar to the Western media—Islam, bad; America, good—so it took a while for our commentariat to notice.

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Tunisia’s Islamist democrats

The New York Times reports:

Ali Larayedh was imprisoned and tortured for 14 years for his role as a leader of the outlawed Islamist movement here, then hounded for the past six years by the omnipresent Tunisian secret police.

But six days after the ouster of this country’s dictator, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, Mr. Larayedh now basks in a singular celebrity. He is one of the few remaining leaders of the only credible opposition movement in Tunisia’s history. And in the aftermath of Mr. Ben Ali’s flight, that movement’s potential reincarnation is perhaps the most significant variable in Tunisia’s post-revolutionary future — yearned for by legions of working-class and rural Tunisians, viewed with just as much apprehension by the cosmopolitan coastal elite.

In an interview in the lobby of the Africa Hotel here, Mr. Larayedh insisted that his party posed no threat to Tunisians or to tourists sipping French wine in their bikinis along the Mediterranean beaches. Years of contemplation in prison and exile had helped his party, known as Al-Nahda, or the Renaissance, to “enlarge our views to encompass Western values,” he said. The result, he said, is a uniquely liberal version of Islamist politics, though one that remains unapologetic about its past calls for violence against American interests in the region.

“We are still against the political agenda of American interference in Arabic countries,” he said. “America is still supporting some dictatorships in Arabian countries, for example Ben Ali.”

But on other matters, Mr. Larayedh struck a conciliatory note.

“We are Muslim, but we are not against modernism,” he said. And he cited his party’s strong embrace of women’s rights, even to the point of advocating a quota to ensure a minimum representation of women in Parliament, “until they get their voices.”

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Mahmoud Abbas fears the same fate as Tunisia’s ousted president

It seems natural that residents in the occupied West Bank where two intifadas failed to drive out the Israelis would want to celebrate Tunisia’s successful uprising — but that isn’t allowed under Mahmoud Abbas’ watch. He, it would seem, identifies more strongly with Tunisia’s ousted president, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali.

When Palestinians gathered in Ramallah on Wednesday to rally in support of the revolution in Tunisia, the Palestinian presidency ordered the police to prevent any demonstrations or flying of the Tunisian flag, Le Monde reports [h/t Ali Abunimah].

The incident provides further evidence, that as Aisling Byrne writes below, the West Bank under Mahmoud Abbas’ rule is being turned into a police state.

“If we are building a police state — what are we actually doing here?” So asked a European diplomat responding to allegations of torture by the Palestinian security forces. The diplomat might well ask. A police state is not a state. It is a form of larceny: of people’s rights, aspirations and sacrifices, for the personal benefit of an élite. This is not what the world meant when it called for statehood. But a police state is what is being assiduously constructed in Palestine, disguised as state-building and good governance. Under this guise, its intent is to facilitate the authoritarianism which creates sufficient popular dependency — and fear — to strangle any opposition.

The transition from the lofty aspiration of statehood to a scheme intended to usher West Bank Palestinians into a new alleviated containment — a new form of remotely-managed occupation — is not some unfortunate error. The roots of this manipulation of the Palestinian aspiration into its opposite — cynically dressed up and sold as statehood — were present from the outset. Professor Yezid Sayyigh has shown how U.S. and EU rhetoric “promoting democratic development and the rule of law is pious at best, at worst disingenuous”. Both America and Europe bear responsibilities for this betrayal.

The seed of this deception which was to grow into a new police state in the region was the US and European acquiescence to Israel’s self-definition of its own security needs — and by extension, Israel’s definition of the requirements for Palestinian security collaboration. This Faustian pact, which prioritized Israel’s security-led criteria as the boundaries for negotiations — above any principles of justice — set the scene for the inevitable inflation of Israeli demands of security collusion by the Palestinian leadership — demands on which America’s ‘war on terrorism’ poured fuel. [Continue reading…]

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Tunisia: “The Islamists want democracy”

The Guardian reports:

Tunisia’s interim president, Foued Mebazaa, yesterday vowed “a complete break with the past” to calm fears that the revolution was being hijacked by the presence of the dictatorship’s ruling party in the interim government.

In his first televised speech, Mebazaa promised a “revolution of dignity and freedom” following the ousting of Tunisia’s dictator president, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, after four weeks of street protests. Mebazaa promised to honour “all the legitimate aspirations of the uprising”.

Yesterday, as the interim cabinet held its first meeting, around 500 protestors, mostly the radical left and trade unions, took to the streets in central Tunis demanding that the ruling RCD party be excluded. But the mood in the capital was lightening.

Unlike previous days, the protesters on Bourguiba Avenue were not teargassed or beaten but were instead allowed to stand peacefully protesting until nightfall. Political prisoners, including a key dissident journalist, began to be released, the curfew was shortened, cafes reopened and people milled to work. In the narrow streets of the old medina, tourists were bartering over bags.

On Bourguiba Avenue, Azizi Tej stood in the crowd of demonstrators chanting “Tunisia is free”. An activist in the once banned Islamist Ennahda party, he had been imprisoned three times, tortured, had staged a series of hunger strikes, and had now taken to the streets with the secular radical left. He wanted the remnants of Tunisia’s old regime, the RCD party, to be excluded from the temporary caretaker government.

“The Islamists want democracy,” Tej said. “Lots of us were tortured, it was our Guantánamo Bay. We’ve paid a high price and now some people want to paint us as monsters, we’re not. My religion teaches that I must accept others. We’re proud to share the same God, Jews and Christians are our brothers. We don’t refuse women’s freedoms, we don’t refuse tourism – people would die of hunger if we didn’t have tourism.”

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Could Egypt follow Tunisia?

Investors are often among the most sober of political analysts — after all, their single interest is in finding the safest and most profitable places to put their money and right now, Egypt does not look like such a location.

Reuters reports, “Cairo’s stock index tumbled to an 11-week low on Wednesday on fears of a contagion from the unrest that toppled Tunisia’s president and further volatility is expected as investors eye Egypt’s 2011 presidential election.”

At the same time, analysts say that the greater political freedom enjoyed by opposition groups in Egypt — relative to their Tunisian counterparts — serves as a pressure valve that can release political tension without undermining the Mubarak regime.

Even so, The Guardian now reports:

The Egyptian dissident Mohamed ElBaradei has warned of a “Tunisia-style explosion” in his country as self-immolation protests proliferated and anti-government activists announced plans for a nationwide “day of anger” next week.

But the former UN nuclear weapons chief stopped short of calling on his supporters to take to the streets, prompting scathing criticism from opposition campaigners who believe ElBaradei is squandering a rare opportunity to bring an end to President Hosni Mubarak’s three decades of autocratic rule.

Today Ahmed Hashem el-Sayed, 25, from the Mediterranean port city of Alexandria, died in hospital after setting himself alight on the roof of his home. It was the latest in a series of self-immolation incidents that have spread through Egypt over the past two days, after the Tunisian vegetable trader Muhammad Bouazizi’s self-immolation provided the catalyst for the toppling of his country’s president last week.

“What has transpired in Tunisia is no surprise and should be very instructive both for the political elite in Egypt and those in the west that back dictatorships,” ElBaradei told the Guardian. “Suppression does not equal stability, and anybody who thinks that the existence of authoritarian regimes is the best way to maintain calm is deluding themselves.”

Within hours of Elbaradei refusing to throw his weight behind street protests as he told The Guardian “I would like to use the means available from within the system to effect change, such as the petition we are gathering demanding political reform,” he expressed a different sentiment on Twitter: “Fully support call 4 peaceful demonstrations vs. repression & corruption. When our demands for change fall on deaf ears what options remain?”

Swiftly and sarcastically, Demagh MAK in Cairo responded: “@ElBaradei Are u going to join us in the streets or you just supporting on twitter #Egypt #Jan25?”

Not withstanding pro forma expressions of support for “democratic reform,” it seems unlikely the Obama administration would welcome the prospect of democracy in Egypt.

When President Obama addressed the Muslim world from Cairo in 2009 he did so without a murmur of criticism directed at his dictator host, Hosni Mubarak. If Mubarak was to fall from power or fail to successfully pass the presidency to him son Gamal, the inevitable result would be an Egyptian government in which the Muslim Brotherhood would wield significant power — a prospect that both Washington and Israel fear.

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The promise of a progressive popular revolution

Issandr El Amrani writes:

The elation felt across the Arab world over the Tunisian uprising is deep and palpable. It is not simply that, like most people, Arabs are pleased to see a long-repressed people finally have a shot at gaining their freedom. It is also that many recognise themselves in the Tunisian people and share their hopes, their fears, and also their guilt.

Living in a dictatorship is not simply about shutting up and putting up. It is a humiliation, an abasement of the human spirit, that is reinforced on a daily basis. Every time you lower your voice when mentioning a political leader, every time you shrug off rampant corruption as a fact of life that has no redress, every time you bend the rules in a country where connections systematically trump the rule of law, every time you consider emigration simply to get away from the ambient mediocrity and stasis, you forfeit a little piece of dignity.

Tunisians lived this way for decades, and the Ben Ali regime, which inspired such dread, turned out to be rotten and hollow. This small, well-educated and relatively prosperous country of 10 million – despite the rioting, looting and score-settling that has taken place over the past week – has a real chance at making an unprecedented breakthrough for this region and become genuinely democratic. And if successful, this breakthrough will have been made in spite of western support for the Tunisian regime, and without palace plots and military adventurism. It may yet turn out to be the genuine item, a progressive popular revolution.

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Tunisian dissident blogger takes job as minister

The Guardian reports:

Only last week, the dissident blogger Slim Amamou was handcuffed to a chair in the notorious interrogation rooms of Tunisia’s interior ministry being psychologically tormented by the dictator’s henchmen and led to believe that the screams he could hear from neighbouring rooms was his family members being tortured.

It’s a sign of the dizzying speed of change in Tunisia that today he was being sworn in by the prime minister as minister for youth and sport, live-tweeting that the first clash between members of the ruling RCD party was over the fact that “I’m not wearing a tie.”.

Amamou is the CEO of a web development company and calls himself a “partisan of the neutrality of the net”. A member of the Pirate party, inspired by the Swedish movement, he has been active on the underground blogger’s circuit for many years. In a brutally repressive dictatorship, with the world’s most advanced internet censorship technology, rivalling that of China or north Korea, Amamou and his fellow bloggers circulated news and videos in the name of protesting against the repressive regime.

It’s wrong to call the Tunisian uprising a Facebook revolution, but there was no doubt that a cyberwar raged during the four weeks of protests that led to Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali’s fall. While Amamou and his fellow bloggers, such as “A Tunisian Girl”, spread news of the protests and brutal police repression, the state clamped down with its sophisticated counter-technology. The regime hacked into Facebook accounts, swiped passwords and codes and deleted entire pages. This led to a huge international hacking offensive called “Operation Tunisia” in which state sites were targeted, apparently by the collective known as Anonymous.

On 6 January, Amamou was at his office when he was arrested by Ben Ali’s police and accused, along with another key Tunisian blogger, of being part of the operation to “destroy” government sites.

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The brutal truth about Tunisia

Robert Fisk writes:

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.

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Change without change in Tunisia’s “unity” government

Before it was even clear it was a revolution, the Tunisian uprising had been dubbed the Jasmine Revolution — as though revolutionary change was about to sweep the Arab world as rapidly as color revolutions transformed former Soviet states.

That might still happen, but the name most fitting for what has happened in Tunisia is the name used on the streets of Tunis: intifada. The eventual outcome of the uprising remains unknown.

The Guardian reports:

There was little sign of jubilation in Tunisia today when the prime minister announced his new “unity” government. Even though several opposition figures were included, Tunisians who had spent the past few weeks battling to oust the president, Ben Ali, expressed disappointment. There were too many old faces in the “new” regime, especially in key ministries such as defence, interior, finance and foreign affairs.

The prime minister himself, 69-year-old Mohamed Ghannouchi, is a Ben Ali loyalist of long standing, having served since 1999. In Tunisia, he became known as “Monsieur Oui Oui” for always saying yes to the president.

To many ordinary Tunisians, these are worrying signs. In the words of a trade unionist quoted on Twitter: “Tunisia has got rid of the dictator but hasn’t got rid of the dictatorship yet.”

The veteran Tunisian dissident and journalist Taoufik ben Brik writes (in French — translation provided by Issandr El Amrani):

In Tunisia, as elsewhere, a tyrant can hide another. Mohamed Ghannouchi, Ben Ali’s prime minister, and Fouad Mebazaa, the speaker of parliament (unelected) and right hand of Ben Ali have taken over a vacant presidency. Change without change. We’ve cut off the duck’s head, but the body continues to move. Ben Ali ran off, but left behind a whole system that relies on three Ps: Police, Profiteers and Party. Here, everything depends on the karakouz, the Turkish shadow puppet theater. And we know all too well who is puppeteer and who is puppet. No one is fooled. Power is still in the hands of Ben Ali’s old stalwarts. “A bloodbath would not make them back down” is the general opinion. The police, the ruling RCD party and the profiteers won’t let go that easily. They are not a charity.

Power is never relinquished without a struggle and in Tunisia the struggle continues.

AFP now reports:

The resignation of three ministers rocked Tunisia’s fledgling unity government on Tuesday as protesters vented their anger at the new leadership just days after the ouster of the Arab state’s strongman.

The ministers, representing Tunisia’s main trade union, announced their withdrawal after the union refused to recognise an administration that contains eight ministers from president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s discredited regime.

“We are resigning from the government after a call from our union,” said Houssine Dimassi, training and employment minister in the transitional unity government unveiled only on Monday.

Dimassi said the two other ministers resigning were Abdeljelil Bedoui, a minister working in the prime minister’s office, and Anouar Ben Gueddour, a junior transport minister.

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In the Middle East, no one thinks Obama is serious about democracy

In Washington, when a cabinet level official is facing calls for his resignation, he is likely to take cover behind that regal phrase, “I serve at the president’s pleasure.” Most of the Arab world’s autocratic leaders could use the same expression since most would find their positions untenable without American support.

Last Wednesday, when Hillary Clinton said “we are not taking sides,” as demonstrators clashed with Tunisian security forces, she could have dispensed with protocol and said with more honesty, “we are no longer taking sides.”

Up until that moment the United States had unequivocally taken sides with Tunisia’s dictatorial ruler, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, but thereafter he knew he was on his own. He rapidly lost his grip on power.

The Obama administration’s relationship with the Tunisian regime was mirrored on a smaller scale by that of the Washington Media Group, a consulting firm that severed its contract with the Tunisian government on January 6.

“We felt on principle that we could not work for a government that was shooting its own citizens and violating their civil rights with such abuse,” said WMG’s President Gregory L. Vistica. Was he claiming that his client’s record had suddenly taken a turn for the worse, or that his firm had only just discovered it had principles?

The point is that WMG, just like the US government, prefers to blur the distinction between statements of principle and actions of self-interest.

On Friday, when President Obama said, “I applaud the courage and dignity of the Tunisian people,” observers across the region might have appreciated the sentiment yet seen no reason to attach much gravity to his words. After, Ben Ali had already fled.

“No one thinks Obama is serious about democracy,” says Shadi Hamid from Brookings Doha Center. “In some ways they have given up hope. And that I think is one of the key post-Cairo Speech stories: that after a lot of optimism about Obama’s election, people realized that when it comes to the issue of democracy-promotion in the Arab world — and that is a very important one for many Arabs — Obama’s really not on board.”

What more damning an indictment could be made against an American president than to say that he does not support democracy?

Hamid is joined in conversation with fellow Middle East analyst Issandr El Amrani from The Arabist, for a fascinating discussion on the implications on the people’s uprising in Tunisia.

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Social media and the internet as an arena for revolutionary fantasy

On Friday, Andrew Sullivan — who heralded Iranian unrest 18 months ago as the Twitter revolution — was quick to dub the popular uprising in Tunisia a “WikiLeaks revolution” :

There seems little doubt that the Wikileaks-released cable describing the opulence of now former president Ben Ali’s lifestyle played a key part in bringing him down.

But what did WikiLeaks reveal?

In a July 2009 cable published by The Guardian on December 7, US Ambassador Robert F. Godec wrote:

The problem is clear: Tunisia has been ruled by the same president for 22 years. He has no successor. And, while President Ben Ali deserves credit for continuing many of the progressive policies of President Bourguiba, he and his regime have lost touch with the Tunisian people. They tolerate no advice or criticism, whether domestic or international. Increasingly, they rely on the police for control and focus on preserving power. And, corruption in the inner circle is growing. Even average Tunisians are now keenly aware of it, and the chorus of complaints is rising. Tunisians intensely dislike, even hate, First Lady Leila Trabelsi and her family. In private, regime opponents mock her; even those close to the government express dismay at her reported behavior. Meanwhile, anger is growing at Tunisia’s high unemployment and regional inequities. As a consequence, the risks to the regime’s long-term stability are increasing.

Average Tunisians were keenly aware of the corruption of their rulers, hated the president’s wife and his family and were expressing growing anger about unemployment — and all of this put the regime at risk. And yet — here’s the inexplicable element — somehow, all of these observable facts once encapsulated in a cable from the US embassy and then leaked by WikiLeaks became a “revelation” confirming what the average Tunisian already knew.

Tunisia is a small country that usually garners little international attention, so WikiLeaks can be given some credit for enlightening the rest of the world about the political instability of this Arab backwater, but to claim that WikiLeaks “played a key part” in bringing down the Tunisian president seems a bit of a stretch.

If the cable did include an important revelation, it was one unlikely to fuel Tunisians’ revolutionary fervor: that the Obama administration was being advised by it embassy to be less openly critical of the regime than the Bush administration had been.

For several years, the United States has been out in front — publicly and privately — criticizing the GOT [Government of Tunisia] for the absence of democracy and the lack of respect for human rights. There is a place for such criticism, and we do not advocate abandoning it. We do recommend a more pragmatic approach, however, whereby we would speak to the Tunisians very clearly and at a very high level about our concerns regarding Tunisia’s democracy and human rights practices, but dial back the public criticism.

In other words, the United States under Barack Obama’s presidency, would not stray from the longstanding American approach which attaches a higher value to stability than democracy — that sees US interests deeply invested in the continuity of autocratic rule in most of the Arab world’s so-called “moderate” states.

If dictators in the Middle East are seen as the bulwark preventing the rise to power of Islamists, then the US will nod in the direction of the oppressed by making calls for “democratic reform” even if the prospect of democracy is nowhere in sight. Indeed, democratic reform rather than being a stepping stone towards democracy is more likely seen as a preferable substitute, since democracy itself opens the door to those dreaded Islamists.

If the current administration preferred a “pragmatic” approach towards Tunisia and the instrumental role of WikiLeaks has been overstated, what about the influence of social media? Yesterday, Ben Wedeman from CNN tweeted: “No one I spoke to in Tunis today mentioned twitter, facebook or wikileaks. It’s all about unemployment, corruption, oppression.”

Jamal Dajani, who was in Tunis at the beginning of the month, writes:

It is very easy, but over-simplistic and naive to decide on a social media interpretation for the Jasmine Revolution, as we have been witnessing by many bloggers and self-appointed Middle East experts, many of whom neither speak Arabic nor have spent an extended period of time in the Middle East. They desperately want to convince us that Tunisians needed an external technological Western invention in order to succeed. A Twitter revolution of some sorts, as they previously labeled the Iranian Velvet Revolution, as though Arab masses were not capable on their own of saying “enough is enough.”

Certainly social media was used as a communication tool for Tunisians to air their frustrations with the economy, unemployment, censorship, and corruption. But many factors lead to its success, such as a well organized trade unions movement, and the most potent weapon in the Arab world, the youth.

Likewise during the 2009 summer uprising in Iran, Twitter only had a very minor role. In the London Review of Books, James Harkin notes:

In 2009, according to a firm called Sysomos which analyses social media, there were 19,235 Twitter accounts in Iran – 0.03 per cent of the population. Researchers at al-Jazeera found only 60 Twitter accounts active in Tehran at the time of the demonstrations, which fell to six after the crackdown.

Also, to the extent that the internet and social media did serve as revolutionary tools in Iran, they also served as a means to thwart the revolution.

Evgeny Morozov writes:

As we know from the post-protest crackdown in Iran, the Internet has proved a very rich source of incriminating details about activists; the police scrutinized Facebook groups, tweets, and even email groups very closely. Furthermore, the Iran government may have also analyzed Internet traffic and phone communications related to the opposition.

Now, Tunisia is no in Iran. Its long-ruling dictator is now gone and the new government is unlikely to engage in repressions on the same scale. Yet if Ben Ali’s regime didn’t fall, it appears certain to that the authorities would be brutally going after anyone who has ever posted a damning Facebook post or an angry email. As we have seen in the few weeks leading to Ali’s exit, the Tunisian cyber-police have proved to be far more skilled in Internet repression than their counterparts abroad: it’s safe to assume they would have dug as much evidence as the Iranians.

This brings me to a somewhat depressing conclusion: if the dictator doesn’t fall in the end, the benefits of social mobilization afforded by the Internet are probably outweighed by its costs (i.e. the ease of tracking down dissidents – let alone organizers of the protests).

It’s easy those of us in the West to celebrate a distant revolution from the comfort of an armchair, facing no risk of getting shot or being imprisoned, yet experiencing an illusion of participation through the immediacy of social media.

Swiftly named the Jasmine Revolution and now viewed as a domino that might lead to the collapse of authoritarian regimes across the region, it’s too early to know whether this is indeed a revolution.

AFP reports that Prime Minister Mohammed Ghannouchi:

… held consultations with the leaders of the main opposition parties in Tunis on the formation of a national unity government to fill the power vacuum left by Ben Ali’s abrupt departure after 23 years in power.

Two parties banned under Ben Ali — the Communist party and the Islamist Ennahdha party — have been excluded from the government talks.

Whatever the eventual outcome of the turmoil now raging in Tunisia, it may end up causing as much alarm on the Arab street as it does among the autocratic rulers. As Stephen Walt warns:

Tunisia’s experience may not look very attractive over the next few weeks or months, especially if the collapse of the government leads to widespread anarchy, violence and economic hardship. If that is the case, then restive populations elsewhere may be less inclined to challenge unpopular leaders, reasoning that “hey, our government sucks, but it’s better than no government at all.”

Brian Whitaker notes the fallout from Tunisia has already spread to Libya where demonstrators have clashed with security forces.

Will it develop into anything bigger? A month ago, I would have said the likelihood of that was zero. Post-Tunisia, though, it’s difficult to be quite so sure..

We can expect to see many more incidents like this over the coming months in various Arab countries. Inspired by the Tunisian uprising, people are going to be more assertive about their grievances and start probing, to see how far they can push the authorities. In the light of Tunisia we can also expect a tendency, each time disturbances happen, to suggest (or hope) that they are the start of some new Arab revolution. The reality, though, is that almost all of them will quickly fizzle out or get crushed. But one day – who knows when? – another of them will grow wings and bring down a regime.

Contrary to what many people imagine, protests and even large-scale riots are not uncommon in the Arab countries. They occur mostly in marginalised regions or among marginalised sections of the population and, normally, they pose no great threat to the regime.

Last month – one day before the trouble started in Tunisia – there was a Sunni-versus-Shia riot in the Saudi city of Medina. Eight hundred people are said to have taken part; windows were smashed and dozens of cars damaged or destroyed. Outside the kingdom, hardly anyone noticed.

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Who grows thorns will reap wounds

Peter Beaumont writes:

One of Tunisia’s most famous poets, Abou al-Kacem Echebbi, whose face adorns the 30-dinar note, is best known in the wider Arab world for several verses that warn tyrants they will face bloody insurrection. “Who grows thorns will reap wounds,” Echebbi wrote – a line that the country’s dictatorial president, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, might be reflecting on in his place of exile, Saudi Arabia.

He may not, however, be the only leader in the region to be doing so. For what has happened in Tunisia, a country which Ben Ali and his cronies controlled since he seized power in 1987, has a message for other regimes whose democratic credentials are less than shining. While it is not clear what Tunisia’s path will be after Friday’s insurrection, the complaints of the protesters are familiar across the region and have also, in some cases, prompted demonstrations. Algeria, home to an often restless young population, has seen protests about unemployment and food prices which began on 5 January and prompted a harsh crackdown. In Jordan, which saw demonstrations last week in five cities, the calls were very similar. There, too, the country’s leader was assailed with demands to resign.

Nowhere has the link between the removal of Ben Ali and other countries been clearer than in Cairo, where on Friday night protests were held by opposition members outside the Tunisian embassy. Their message was explicit: President Hosni Mubarak should follow Ben Ali’s example and leave his country, too.

Adla Massoud writes:

Abdel Bari Atwan, editor of the London-based Al-Quds Al-Arabi, says Tunisian people deserved to be thanked twice: “for proving that the Arab street is not dead as many had expected and is capable of waging an intifada and making sacrifices for change, and for exposing the Arab regimes that claimed to care about human rights and the values of justice and democracy.”

With the emergence of a large layer of educated youth who have no job prospects and no future, the Arab people have reached a boiling point.

They have had enough of chronic unemployment; economic deprivation; rising food prices; insufficient public investment; rampant corruption; and an authoritarian political system that gave Ben Ali twenty three years of corrupt rule.

In Egypt, the President Hosni Mubarak will have held power for three decades this year, and is getting set for another term. In Libya, Muammar Gadaffi has been in power since 1969. The Assads have ruled Syria since 1970.

“The widespread demonstrations in Tunisia” writes political analyst Rami Khouri “mirror a universal pattern of change by citizens who reach a breaking point and go out into the street to brave the bullets of the eternal ruler’s military and security services. When citizens are no longer afraid of the ruler’s bullets, the ruler’s days are numbered.”

Chatham House’ Middle East expert Nadim Shehadi says, “It was an unsustainable economic and political model that has survived for over 30 years and with numerous equivalents in the region. Its persistence has done countless damage and its demise will hopefully serve as an example.”

The biggest challenge facing the Arab world today is youth unemployment. The region has the highest unemployment rate in the world. The current unemployment rate stands at sixteen per cent, eighty per cent of that figure is made up of a youth population of 130 million. A staggering twenty five percent of youth between the ages of 15 and 29 are unemployed.

Describing the path through which Ben Ali rose to power in a bloodless coup in 1987, Paul Legg writes:

In the months leading up the coup, Tunisia watchers could see that Ben Ali was the darling of the western embassies. Well known to the French and American militaries, he was someone the diplomats believed could be trusted to maintain Tunisia’s secular, pro-western policies and keep the country out of the orbit of its dangerous, larger neighbour, Gadaffi’s Libya. Ben Ali had no need of outside support to plan and carry out his seizure of power, but he did so confident in the knowledge of western support.

Ben Ali took power with the familiar promise to move Tunisia towards democracy, but when he organised the country’s first multi-candidate election in 1999, he won with a farcical 99.44% of the vote. This earned him the nickname Mr 99%, although he was also known as Ben A Vie (president-for-life). His own giant posters were soon replacing Bourguiba’s on street corners. Ben Ali’s offer to the Tunisian people was stability, foreign investment, jobs and improved living standards. The price was near-zero tolerance of dissent, a slavish media and an all-inquiring police force. His supporters say the crushing of the Tunisian Islamist movement at the start of the 1990s spared Tunisia the type of conflagration soon to engulf neighbouring Algeria. Critics point to the thousands of human rights activists, politicians and journalists caught up in the crackdown, many of whom were tortured and sentenced to back-breaking labour.

Most Tunisians were prepared to accept Ben Ali’s tradeoff of economic progress in return for total control. The recent downturn in the Tunisian economy with rising joblessness and higher prices showed that Mr 99% was no longer able to deliver his side of the deal. The added toxic ingredient was allegations of personal and family corruption focused on Ben Ali’s second wife, Leila Trabelsi. Loathed by many Tunisians and dubbed by some as the Imelda Marcos of the Maghreb, she allegedly helped her extended family to acquire huge economic holdings across Tunisia. Ben Ali is not the first former dictator to have learned the danger of having a deeply unpopular spouse.

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Will Tunisia be a turning point for Arab democracy?

Michael Hanna writes:

For observers throughout the Arab world, the significance of the Tunisian uprising is near-impossible to understate. During this era of retrenchment by aging descendants of revolutionary regimes, the prospect of democratic change had long-ago vanished as a believable possibility. The closest point of reference to the civil unrest in Tunisia is the protest movement that erupted in Iran following the contested presidential elections of June 2009. But the significance of Iran’s post-election events has been minimal in the Arab world, reflecting the Arab-Iranian cultural chasm and the ingrained sense of Arab chauvinism that guides Arab perceptions of international affairs. The Shiite theocracy established in the wake of the 1979 Iranian revolution has always been something of a curiosity for the Arab world and its heavily Sunni population. While the chimerical dreams of Arabism are long gone, events within the Arabic-speaking world – such as Tunisia’s protests – carry special resonance. Since Arab nationalism’s heyday under the 1950s and ’60s stewardship of Egyptian president Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser, that collective identity has remained, held together by shared media and culture. The role once played by the radio broadcasts of Sawt al-‘Arab (Voice of the Arabs), the Egyptian-run radio station established during the Nasser era, is now filled by the saturation coverage of such Arab satellite stations as al-Jazeera and al-‘Arabiyya. The networks often focus on intra-Arab issues. The protests on the streets of Tunisia were seen far and wide, in real time, by millions of Arabs, with no need for translation or cultural filtering.

With Tunisia’s reputation as something of a stable but sleepy backwater, the events of recent weeks have come as a complete surprise to the world. The uprising remains in flux, its ultimate outcome unclear, and there is no certainty that the country is on its way to a democratic transition, let alone a smooth one. However, the demonstration effect of this uprising is likely not lost on the region’s aging autocrats. A pilot who refused to fly Ben Ali’s family out of Tunisia, interviewed on live television, explained that they were “war criminals.” As the region’s other autocratic rulers retire to bed, this forthright message will be a chilling reminder that their people’s quiescence is not guaranteed, nor is it the same thing as legitimacy. If nothing else, the protests have demonstrated that an Arab head-of-state can be toppled from below and, for leaders as well as activists, have expanded popular notions of the possible. While the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the protests of the “green movement” in Iran have had far-ranging regional ramifications, when it comes to promoting Arab democracy, Tunisia’s 2011 uprising may eclipse them both.

As much as democracy poses a threat to the Arab world’s autocratic leaders, it also threatens Israel. If a day ever comes that the Jewish state is surrounded by democracies, its real identity as a racist ethnocracy will be fully exposed.

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State Department clueless on Tunisia

The mystique of American power is sustained in no small measure by the ability of US government officials to convey the impression that they understand global affairs. In the last 48 hours the State Department has clearly shifted into overdrive in an effort to portray the US as being fully engaged with and attuned to fast moving events in the Arab world. “We’re ahead of the game,” the overarching message seems to be.

Hence the Christian Science Monitor provides this on-message piece of reporting under a headline emphasizing the prescience of the secretary of state: “Events in Tunisia bear out Hillary Clinton’s warning to Arab world”:

A day after Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton warned Arab states that they risked “sinking into the sand” if they did not clean up corruption and quicken their glacial pace of political and economic reform, those sands took one of the Arab world’s long-reigning leaders.

Tunisia’s President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali on Friday fled the North African country he ruled in autocratic fashion for 23 years, chased away by a month of street protests that started in provincial cities but engulfed the capital, Tunis, this week. The country’s prime minister, Mohammed Ghannouchi, assumed temporary power. [Temporary turned out to mean for a day. He’s now been ousted and replaced by speaker of parliament, Fouad Mebazaa.]

In a statement Friday afternoon, President Obama hailed the “courage and dignity of the Tunisian people,” and said the United States joined the rest of the world in “bearing witness to this brave and determined struggle.” He called on the Tunisian government to “hold free and fair elections in the near future that reflect the true will and aspirations of the Tunisian people.”

Eleven days ago, State Department spokesman PJ Crowley didn’t make it sound like the US was paying close attention to what was happening in Tunisia. This was how he covered the issue on January 4:

QUESTION: On Tunisia, there’s continued, sort of, civil unrest there, and I was just wondering –

MR. CROWLEY: What country?

QUESTION: Tunisia. Tunisia. And I was wondering what you made of the situation there.

MR. CROWLEY: Actually, I didn’t get updated on Tunisia today. So we’ll save that question –

QUESTION: When was the last time you did get updated on Tunisia? (Laughter.)

The next day, Crowley seemed surprised that questions about Tunisia were still being raised. The sum of the State Department’s concern seemed to be the extent to which unrest might affect American travelers.

QUESTION: Do you have any reaction to the recent unrest in Tunisia?

MR. CROWLEY: Tunisia makes an appearance for the second day in a row. I mean, last month, there were some demonstrations that occurred in Tunisia over a several-day period. They appeared to us to be triggered by economic concerns and not directed toward Westerners or Western interests. As we do in various places around the world where we have concerns about the safety of our citizens, we did put out a Warden Message right at the end of the year urging Americans to be alert to local security developments, but – and it’s best to avoid these demonstrations, even ones that can appear peaceful.

QUESTION: But aren’t you concerned about economic reforms in Tunisia, or –

MR. CROWLEY: That is something that is part of our ongoing dialogue with Tunisia.

I guess the first question for Crowley on Monday should be: does the US still have an ongoing dialogue with Tunisia, or is it now simply in what has so often been the Obama administration’s default position — closely monitoring the situation?

That this administration expends so much of its energy making feeble gestures to demonstrate that it is on top of the situation, reflects a bigger problem — as one former State Department official recently noted in a different context — “which is that of a dysfunctional administration in which no one is in charge.”

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Tunisia’s overthrown president flees to the ‘refuge of dictators’: Saudi Arabia

Egypt’s Al Ahram reports:

The Arab Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI) on Saturday condemned Saudi Arabia’s decision to grantasylum to Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, Tunisia’s overthrown president, in a statement entitled “Tunisia’s deposed dictator receives hospitality from Saudi Arabia’s dictator”.

The announcement said that Ben Ali should be tried in front of a Tunisian court for the crimes he committed against the Tunisian people during his 23 years in office.

The statement called Ben Ali the ‘Arab Pinochet’, in reference to Chili’s ex-president and added that Saudi Arabia’s decision to take in Ben Ali after he was refused entry to many countries including France — an outspoken supporter of the 74-year-old leader – indicated to what lengths Arab dictators would go to support each other.

The ANHRI warned that Saudi Arabia is becoming a “refuge for dictators” since it had, in the past, received Uganda’s Idi Amin and Pakistan’s Nawaz Sharif.

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