Revolution in the Arab World - Observation of a lost soul Blog

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foreign policy • revolution in the arab world • Tunisia Introduction The Wages of Arab Decay By Marc Lynch A Month Made for Drama By Christopher Alexander The Rise and Fall of Ben Ali By Christopher Alexander Where Have All the Islamists Gone By Michael Koplow Did WikiLeaks Take Down Tunisia’s Government By Tom Malinowski What Tunisia Will Mean for Arab Democracy By Steven Heydemann A Middle-Class Revolution By Eric Goldstein 40
foreign policy • revolution in the arab world • TUnisia Introduction The Arab revolt began in a place nobody expected: Tunisia, a pleasant Mediterranean enclave long thought to be a model for the rest of the region, where the Islamists were kept out, unemployment was kept down, and test scores were kept up. Sure, President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali was brutal, but, unlike his neighbors in Algeria and Libya, he built a functioning education system, a thriving middle class, and a relatively efficient public sector. Wasn’t that better than the alternative It turns out that Tunisia suffered from the same ills as many of its brother Arab countries, not least the staggering corruption of its ruling family and its massive youth unemployment. As Eric Goldstein succinctly puts it in this chapter looking back on Tunisia’s stunningly swift revolt, “A police state looks stable only until the day it is not.” Tunisia was indeed a model for the region, but only in the sense that its young revolutionaries inspired others across the Arab world to launch their own uprisings. It was Tunisian youth who first used the uncompromising phrase that can now be heard all the way in distant Yemen: “The people demand the removal of the regime.” It was Tunisian youth who devised innovative tactics, such as spray-painting the windows of security vehicles, to overwhelm police forces. And the “Tunisia Effect”—a term coined by FP’s own Marc Lynch—showed that waiting for dictators to bestow reforms from above was a fool’s game; if Arab regimes refused to change, they would be changed from below. Of course, Tunisia is also a cautionary tale. It was ultimately the military’s refusal to fire on its own citizens, not three days of demonstrations in Tunis, that precipitated Ben Ali’s harried flight to Saudi Arabia. Ben Ali’s prime minister, Mohamed Ghannouchi, remains in power, and the army’s intentions remain opaque. Wave after wave of demonstrations and labor strikes has paralyzed the country. As Christopher Alexander warns, it’s not hard to imagine Tunisia sliding back to autocracy as its citizens clamor for order. The final chapter of this story is yet to be written. 41
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