What's Happening in Tunisia Explained— By Nick Baumann| Fri Jan. 14, 2011 9:30 AM PST
Reports just emerged around 12:30 p.m. Eastern time that the Tunisian dictator, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali (Ben Ali), has fled the country and the Army has taken power. (Also: We have a scoop about how Washington Media Group, the DC public affairs firm that Tunisia hired to rehab its image, abruptly booted the country from its client roster last week.)
Want to know what's happening in Tunisia? Let me explain:What is Tunisia? Tunisia is a mostly Arab, mostly Muslim country in North Africa. It is on the south side of the Mediterranean sea, east of Algeria and west of Muammar Gaddafi's Libya. Its capital is Tunis, and it has been ruled by dictators since it won independence from France in 1956. The current ruler, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali (Ben Ali), has ruled since 1987. He is the kind of ruler who gets re-elected with 90 percent of the "vote."
What's happening? Violent riots and protests have spread across the country over the past four weeks. Now Ben Ali's totalitarian government seems to be collapsing. (Elliott Abrams, a former Bush administration official who unfortunately is rarely right about anything, thinks that if democracy can take hold in Tunisia, it could spread elsewhere in the Arab world, too.)
Why are Tunisians unhappy?
Well, they don't have much freedom. But there also just aren't enough jobs. Official unemployment is 13 percent, but it's probably actually much higher. The combination of a repressive regime and a faltering economy is often bad news for the regime. Plus, the regime has diverted a lot of the country's wealth to Ben Ali's family and friends, so people are really upset about official corruption.How did it all start? On December 19, authorities in the small, central city of Sidi Bouzid seized the produce cart that 26-year-old Mohamed Bouazizi was using to make a living. So Bouazizi set himself on fire. Young people in the small, central city of Sidi Bouzid rioted, and police moved to seal the city. In early January, Bouazizi died, becoming an early martyr for the cause. Brian Whitaker, the Middle East editor of the Guardian and a Tunisia expert, has a good article explaining how Bouazizi and Sidi Bouzid got the ball rolling on revolution.
What's the WikiLeaks connection? Foreign Policy's Christopher Alexander explains:
Shortly before the December protests began, WikiLeaks released internal US State Department communications in which the American ambassador described Ben Ali as aging, out of touch, and surrounded by corruption. Given Ben Ali's reputation as a stalwart US ally, it mattered greatly to many Tunisians—particularly to politically engaged Tunisians who are plugged into social media—that American officials are saying the same things about Ben Ali that they themselves say about him. These revelations contributed to an environment that was ripe for a wave of protest that gathered broad support.
Hackers affiliated with Anonymous, a vaguely defined, loosely organized group that has defended WikiLeaks, hit Tunisian websites in early January.
What's the latest news? A visibly shaken Ben Ali appeared on national television Thursday night, promising reforms and indicating that he would step down in 2014. But protests only grew larger on Friday. The very latest—i.e., what happened Friday afternoon—is that Ben Ali has fired his cabinet and promised legislative (but not presidential) elections in six months. Then he declared a state of emergency. He's trying to buy time. But the regime is clearly reeling, and there are unconfirmed reports of gunfire in the capital. Police are definitely shooting at protesters, according to an American quoted in this New York Times report. Whatever is going to happen could happen soon. The very very latest is that Ben Ali has fled the country, according to Al Jazeera, and the Army has taken power.
How do I follow what's happening in real-time? Your best immediate resource is the Twitter feed of Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi, a columnist for The National, the United Arab Emirates' leading English-language newspaper. The hashtag to follow (or "feed," as the Times mistakenly dubbed it) is #sidibouzid, after the city where the first riots took place. #tunisie is another good option. Al-Bab, a blog written by Brian Whitaker, the Guardian Middle East editor mentioned above, is indispensable. Whitaker's latest posts—"Tunisia: Double or Quits," and "Tunisia: The Last Days of Ben Ali" are must-reads. If you're looking for a more US-centric view, you should also check out "Tunisia on the Brink of Revolution?" and "When Pro-Western Regimes Fall: What Should the US Do?" over at Democracy Arsenal.
http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/01/wha ... oJoBlog%29*
How a man setting fire to himself sparked an uprising in TunisiaA relatively minor incident has become the catalyst for a wave of protests that may end the presidency of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali
Brian Whitaker
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 28 December 2010 15.00 GMT
Watching events in Tunisia over the past few days, I have been increasingly reminded of an event in 1989: the fall of the Romanian dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu. Is the Tunisian dictator, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, about to meet a similar fate?
After 22 years in power, Ceausescu's end came suddenly and somewhat unexpectedly. It began when the government harassed an ethnic Hungarian priest over something he had said. Demonstrations broke out but the priest was soon forgotten: they rapidly turned into generalised protests against the Ceausescu regime. The Romanian public, to put it mildly, had had enough.
The riots and demonstrations that have swept through Tunisia during the past 10 days also began with a small incident. Twenty-six-year-old Mohamed Bouazizi, living in the provincial town of Sidi Bouzid, had a university degree but no work. To earn some money he took to selling fruit and vegetables in the street without a licence. When the authorities stopped him and confiscated his produce, he was so angry that he set himself on fire.
Rioting followed and security forces sealed off the town. On Wednesday, another jobless young man in Sidi Bouzid climbed an electricity pole, shouted "no for misery, no for unemployment", then touched the wires and electrocuted himself.
On Friday, rioters in Menzel Bouzaiene set fire to police cars, a railway locomotive, the local headquarters of the ruling party and a police station. After being attacked with Molotov cocktails, the police shot back, killing a teenage protester.
By Saturday, the protests had reached the capital, Tunis – and a second demonstration took place there yesterday.
Reporting of these events has been sparse, to say the least. The Tunisian press, of course, is strictly controlled and international news organisations have shown little interest: the "not many dead" syndrome, perhaps. But in the context of Tunisia they are momentous events. It's a police state, after all, where riots and demonstrations don't normally happen – and certainly not simultaneously in towns and cities up and down the country.
So, what we are seeing, firstly, is the failure of a system constructed by the regime over many years to prevent people from organising, communicating and agitating.
Secondly, we are seeing relatively large numbers of people casting off their fear of the regime. Despite the very real risk of arrest and torture, they are refusing to be intimidated.
Finally, we are seeing the breakdown of a long-standing devil's compact where, in return for submitting to life under a dictatorship, people's economic and welfare needs are supposedly taken care of by the state.
Officially, unemployment levels in Tunisia are around 13% though in reality they may be higher – especially among university graduates. According to one recent study, 25% of male graduates and 44% of female graduates in Sidi Bouzid are without jobs. In effect, they are victims of an educational system that has succeeded in providing them with qualifications that can't be used and expectations that can't be met.
The regime also seems to have overdone its trumpeting of Tunisia's economic progress. If those claims are true, people ask, what happened to the money? One answer they give is that it has gone into the pockets of the Ben Ali family and their associates."The First Lady," Dr Larbi Sadiki of Exeter university wrote the other day, "is almost the Philippines' Imelda Marcos incarnate. But instead of shoes, Madame Leila collects villas, real estate and bank accounts". Then there's the president's son-in-law and possible successor, Mohamed Sakhr el-Matri whose OTT lifestyle and business interests were eloquently described, courtesy of WikiLeaks, by the US ambassador.
The defining moment in the Romanian revolution came when President Ceausescu and his wife held a rally – televised live – to drum up support. But instead of cheering as they had always done before, the crowd booed and heckled. Visibly stunned, the Ceausescus disappeared inside the building and the whole country knew their game was up.
President Ben Ali has so far avoided that mistake and continues to be extolled by the official media. But there was a telling straw in the wind when his Constitutional Democratic Rally party called a meeting in Sidi Bouzid last week. "The meeting, which was supposed to deliver a strong political message and calm things down, was feeble," one journalist was quoted as saying. In the event, very few party members turned up
The regime's claim that (unspecified) sinister forces lie behind the riots and demonstrations also sounds half-hearted. By hastily finding $15m (£10m) in economic aid for Sidi Bouzid it has, after all, acknowledged that the protesters have a point.
The crucial question is what members of the security forces, members of the ruling party and government officials – all those who have helped to keep the Ben Ali show on the road for the past 23 years – really think. How many of them have family members among the unemployed? And, more important, how many really believe Ben Ali is the man to lead the country out of its problems?
Most Arab regimes rely on patronage networks to keep themselves in power but Ben Ali's support base looks comparatively small and increasingly fragile, as the US ambassador noted last year in one of the WikiLeaks documents. He described a regime that has lost touch with the people, a regime that tolerates no advice or criticism and whose corruption has become so blatant that "even average Tunisians are now keenly aware of it".
Ben Ali may try to cling on, but his regime now has a fin de siècle air about it. He came to power in 1987 by declaring President Bourguiba unfit for office. It's probably just a matter of time before someone else delivers that same message to Ben Ali.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... ia-ben-ali*
When Pro-Western Regimes Fall: What Should the U.S. Do? Posted by Shadi Hamid
This is the second in a series of posts on the ongoing Tunisian uprising. You can read the first here.
One month ago, Tunisia seemed quiet, stable.
Quiet and stable is generally what Western governments like to see in the Middle East. But Tunisia may be on the brink of the first genuine Arab revolution in recent memory. Talk of revolution tends to get US policymakers jittery, as it should. There is a lot at stake here. I
f Tunisia falls, it will likely embolden the opposition to pro-American regimes throughout the region. It already has, with solidarity rallies in a number of capitals and, more recently, a sort of awed fascination that what last month seemed impossible is, as we speak, happening. If change is going to happen, it's probably going to happen. There's only so much the US can do now that the ball has been rolling, with increasing speed, for 3 weeks (or depending on how you look at it more than 30 years). But it still can do something. And that something may make the difference in a delicate situation.
Some might argue that this is not about America but about Tunisians fighting for Tunisia. Accordingly, Obama and anyone else should just stay out of it. But the notion of democratic transitions as organic, homegrown – a post-Bush platitude – while technically true, is also misleading.
What we know about democratic transitions suggests that Western support – in this case, the lack of it – can prove decisive. In their new book, noted political scientists Steve Levitsky and Lucan Way provide extensive empirical support to what many have long argued. They write, “It was an externally driven shift in the cost of suppression, not changes in domestic conditions, that contributed most centrally to the demise of authoritarianism in the 1980s and 1990s.”
The US may very well have limited leverage in Tunisia. But France and other EU nations have close relations with the Ben Ali regime. Tunisia depends on Europe for trade and tourism. So, first of all, the U.S. should be coordinating with its European allies. Maybe this wasn't so important yesterday. But now it is, and so it should call for serious, determined action on the part of the international community.
A phone call to President Ben Ali might be worth considering. Preferably tonight. Phone calls from American presidents to Arab autocrats do sometimes work, as the famed Bush-Mubarak call in 2005 did. What should Obama say? That, while the U.S. understands the security concerns involved, the U.S. will not tolerate the police/military shooting into crowds. And that any excessive loss of life will permanent damage Tunisia's relations with the West. For starters, the US could withdraw its ambassador in protest of mass killing (already around 50 are reported dead).
But some of this isn't about actual leverage, but optics. In the Arab world, perceptions sometimes matter more than reality. Protestors, after all, act not according some objective reality but to reality as they perceive it, in the moment. Here, the colored revolutions are instructive.
During Ukraine’s second round of elections in November 2004, President Bush sent Senator Richard Lugar as his special envoy. Lugar issued a forceful statement condemning President Leonid Kuchma’s government for election fraud. Soon after, Secretary of State Colin Powell refused to recognize the results and warned that “if the Ukrainian government does not act immediately and responsibly, there will be consequences for our relationship, for Ukraine’s hopes for a Euro-Atlantic integration, and for individuals responsible for perpetrating fraud.” The protestors in Maidan Square applauded when the Powell’s statement was read. Meanwhile, Lech Walesa, Poland’s first democratically elected president, assured the crowd that the West was on their side.
The West would be well-advised to show that, while it may not necessarily be on the side of the protestors (somewhat incredibly, Hillary Clinton already said the US won't take sides - talk about pre-emption), it will vigorously support their right to protest, assembly, and that it will not stand by while those fighting for freedom are shot to death. The protestors, who are, in fact, risking their lives, need to know that the world is watching. And that the world cares. This, presumably, is US policy, or maybe it used to be US policy. I'm not entirely sure. I do know, however, that President Bush said the following in his 2003 speech to the National Endowment for Democracy: "Militarism and rule by the capricious and corrupt are the relics of a passing era. We will stand with these oppressed peoples until the day of their freedom finally arrives.” I suppose this is the time to stand?
Of course, when Bush said this he put himself in a difficult position. How does one go about supporting both a regime and its opposition simultaneously? How does one take sides in such a fight? Morally speaking, there is a right side and a wrong side. Practically speaking, Ben Ali, however brutal, has been an "ally" for a considerable amount of time. This is why US policy in the Arab world has always struck me as fundamentally untenable in the long-run. Autocracies, to my knowledge, do not last forever. But we never took even preliminary steps of distancing ourselves from them, to prepare ourselves for the eventuality that they might fall.
So now when tens of thousands of Arabs all across the region are stating, with unmistakable clarity, that they will no longer accept the authoritarian status quo, they are forcing us to take sides, testing our so-called "moral clarity." What they are really doing, I suspect, is forcing us to fall on the wrong side of history. This is not a good place to be. January 13, 2011 at 12:49 PM | Permalink
http://www.democracyarsenal.org/2011/01 ... s-do-.html*
"Teach them to think. Work against the government." – Wittgenstein.
