By Patricia H. Kushlis
The Boston Globe's Boston.com recently posted 40 news photographs of the revolution in Tunisia. These professional shots were likely edited for clarity and focus made easy by digital photography. They’re almost too clean and too beautiful in their strange way. Included are two photographs which tell a story that I’ve not seen portrayed elsewhere: one was taken at the hospital bedside of Mohammed Bouazizi, the 26 year old Tunisian whose immolation sparked the revolt, then swathed in bandages being visited by a group of Tunisian officials including the now deposed dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali.
The second photograph is of a picturesque and deserted waterfront city street with its wrought iron street lamps, palm trees and outdoor cafes. It could have just as easily been taken along France’s Cote D’Azur. Maybe that was part of the problem: the vast discrepancy between the good life for a minority in Tunisia's capital and along the country’s Mediterranean coast and the poverty of inland dust-belt cities shown in amateur cell phone videos uploaded to the Internet seemingly minutes after the demonstrations they depicted occurred.
Tunisia, although a non-oil producing Arab state, is far from the Arab world’s poorest or least educated. Its per capita income (PPP) was over $9,000 per year in 2009. Most Tunisians have completed elementary school and many have graduated from high school. The country’s birthrate dropped from 6.6 babies per couple in 1970 to just below replacement level by 2010 helped along by the availability of contraceptives.
What went wrong?
First and foremost, the Tunisian revolution had nothing to do with radical Islam or with militant Islamists lurking beneath the surface. Unlike in much of the rest of the Arab world, Islamic fundamentalism was kept at bay – crushed by the country’s now former leader. Rather, the straws that broke the Tunisian camel’s back were high unemployment and a corrupt political regime.
As in Moscow in 1991 and Manila in 1986, when push came to shove, Rachid Ammar, Tunisia's senior military commander, sided with the protestors and reportedly refused orders to fire on them although Ben Ali’s complicit security forces and Tunisian police had previously killed at least 78 demonstrators in the events leading up to his final days in office.
The lid of repression can only be kept on a society for so long – especially a literate one with close connections to Europe where its dissidents lived, wrote and talked.
Some analysts suggest that the lack of political outlets helped spur the rebellion against this entrenched one-man dictatorship that allowed zero press freedoms, censored the Internet (even Whirled View has been blocked in Tunisia), monitored phone and e-mail communications, and sported a token opposition in a powerless parliament. The state run media that helped produce a cult of personality and the daily torture of dissidents rounded out the picture.
The Ben Ali dictatorship which governed the country for 23 years until January 14 had made a pact with the Tunisians that if they submitted to his iron-fisted rule, the regime would provide them with the good life. But beginning in 2008 two things went wrong: 1) the decline in the country’s economic prosperity which was tied closely to the European economic downturn and 2) the ever increasing corruption and ostentatious life style of Ben Ali, his family and their cronies at the expense and in view of everyone else.
The discrepancies between life in Tunisia’s interior and its capital are huge. Moreover, unemployment throughout the country is rife. It runs at an official rate of over 14%. Younger men in search of jobs have been the most affected and youth in their twenties are the population’s largest cohort. The global financial crisis as it affected Europe combined with Tunisia’s population bulge struck the country simultaneously.
A fragile system
That a single vegetable seller’s decision to immolate himself in a desperate act of protest in front of a provincial government house in an inland city would spark a national revolt with regional and international repercussions indicates just how fragile the system had become. Whether it was a unique circumstance that took place in a single country or a harbinger of the future elsewhere is a question only time will tell.
In early January four days of riots over rises in food prices in Algeria forced the Algerian government to use some of its $150 billion in gas export cash to boost subsidies to the people.
Libya, Sudan and Jordan are also vulnerable for future outbursts of popular unrest. Egypt, perhaps the most vulnerable of all, is already wracked with anti-government demonstrations. Six Egyptian young men have set themselves on fire copying Bouazizi’s act of despair over the past few weeks, 60% of the population is under 30, 40% lives on less than $2 a day and one-third of Egyptians are illiterate.
Egypt, of course, is far less prosperous than Tunisia but its long term dictator Hosni Mubarak has not kept as tight a reign on the political opposition, the Arab street, or the media as Ben Ali did in Tunisia. Perhaps as a consequence, Egypt’s far more numerous security forces have had much greater experience and success in staunching anti-government demonstrations over the years.
Once begun, the demonstrations in Tunisia spread like wildfire not just internally but throughout the Arab world. Words and pictures traveled by cell phones and the Internet. Twitter and Facebook were among the protesters organizing tools. The Internet helped fuel the rage of demonstrators and disgruntled Arabic-speaking youth throughout North Africa and the Middle East.
The broader question – and this is what is most important to the US because American interests in Tunisia are themselves limited – is whether the Tunisian revolt will set off a chain reaction threatening governments from Morocco to Yemen including the Persian Gulf. This is what happened as Communist regimes in Eastern Europe fell like a pack of dominos during the winter of 1989. Yet each country in the Arab world is different and each suffers from a different form of repressive leadership.
Anger and frustration: a wake-up call
The Secretary General of the Arab League opened an economic summit just last week with the following admonition: “The Tunisian Revolution is not far from us; the Arab citizen entered an unprecedented state of anger and frustration.” This is the second such League Summit held to encourage Arab leaders to put aside political differences and address the entrenched social and economic problems that plague their countries. Whether the fear engendered by the events in Tunisia will result in anything more than rhetoric remains debatable. But it should be a wake- up call.
In June 2005 Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spoke at the American University of Cairo and pleaded with President Mubarak to allow free elections in Egypt. Just as Obama did on Tuesday night, Rice publically gave US support for democracy throughout the Middle East. Rice’s speech occurred more than five years ago. It was ignored. Authoritarian Middle Eastern governments soldiered on. They may well continue to do so as long as possible – some more successfully than others.
Tuesday night in his State of the Union Address Barack Obama said that the US “stands with the people of Tunisia, and supports the democratic aspirations of all people.” But how this translates into action - hopefully in cooperation with the Europeans - remains to be seen. The US, after all, has funded democracy buiding projects in various African countries including Morocco and Sudan.
More importantly, how can this lofty rhetoric square with America’s more pragmatic interests in the Arab world and elsewhere? Or can it? This is the US's dilemma.
On the one hand, our rhetoric encourages the expansion of human rights and democratic governance worldwide. This, after all, includes the conduct of fair and free elections, the free media and honest judiciary systems. Yet on the other, the US has long supported despotic Arab rulers for reasons of real politick and these dictators still control most of the Arabic North African and Middle Eastern governments.
It’s one thing to offer a helping hand to a government like the fledgling one in Tunisia that has successfully expelled a hated tyrant on its own, stated its desire for freedom from tyranny and its desire for democracy. This country also possesses a reasonably well educated population and decent economy that will help sustain a pluralistic form of government. But how realistic is it for the US to call for autocratic regimes to turn into democracies overnight? Where can and should American support for democratic government beyond our shores begin?