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

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foreign policy • revolution in the arab world • Tunisia cized his rule. A cautious journalism professor who had declined to meet me in 1999, explaining that such a meeting would bring police interrogation, began receiving me openly and attending the little gatherings organized by the beleaguered human rights community. This outer circle also included families of political prisoners. In the mid- 1990s, these families had hung up on me in fear, but five years later they decided they had nothing more to lose. So, too, did some former political prisoners, who had concluded that remaining silent got them nowhere because the state’s policy was not to rehabilitate but rather to crush them, through harassment, surveillance, and effective bans on employment and travel. Long before street-cart vendor Mohamed Bouazizi immolated himself on Dec. 17 in the town of Sidi Bouzid, setting off weeks of protests that led to Ben Ali’s ouster, more than one former political prisoner had sat down in public holding a sign that (ironically) offered to sell his children because the government had kept him from working to support his family. One, Slaheddine Aloui, an agricultural engineer from Jendouba, left prison in 2004 after serving 14 years on political charges, only to face a 16-year term of administrative restrictions that crippled his chance to resume a normal life. Joining this outer circle was the occasional member of the business elite who had discovered that it wasn’t only dissidents who could fall victim to the regime’s strong-arm tactics. Mohamed Bouebdelli, the founder of a group of respected private schools in Tunis, is a dapper entrepreneur who had no interest in politics—until presidential cronies demanded special treatment for their children, which he refused to give. Facing their reprisals, Bouebdelli publicly criticized the regime’s strong-arm tactics—only to have a court seize, on spurious grounds, a private university he had built and operated. Bouebdelli, who had educated many of the country’s elite and their children, was thus transformed overnight into an impassioned dissident. But beyond this somewhat widening circle there still seemed to be a politically neutered majority of Tunisians who lived in relative comfort—and in keen awareness of the power of the secret police and of the ruling-party apparatus that dispensed or withheld services and favors. Tunisians had always told me that their country was ripe for democracy because its people are moderate, tolerant, educated, and middle class. This self-image explains 68
foreign policy • revolution in the arab world • TUnisia in part why Bouazizi’s self-immolation after the police confiscated his vending cart proved such a galvanizing event. Bouazizi was no ordinary street peddler—he was a university graduate forced to accept this menial job and the harassment it brought him from local officials. This was hard to swallow for Tunisians proud of the once exemplary educational system nurtured by their first president, Habib Bourguiba, whom Ben Ali ousted in 1987. And in a part of the world where public suicides are usually associated with zealots who blow up as many innocents as they can along with themselves, Bouazizi took only his own life, dramatizing his plight and that of others like him. His was an act of desperation that, true to Tunisians’ moderate self-image, harmed no one else. This added to its potency as a catalyst for revolt. If I did not foresee Tunisians rising up against Ben Ali, I knew he was finished the minute he appeared on television on Jan. 10 promising to create 300,000 jobs. Ben Ali ruled by fear, and when he thus implied that his government would respond to the Tunisian street, he was no longer Ben Ali. He was an emperor wearing no clothes. With that, the silent majority—or at least a healthy slice of it—poured into the streets to oust him. Many factors helped fuel and sustain the protests, including Al Jazeera’s saturation coverage and footage shot by ordinary Tunisians on cell-phone cameras and then posted on YouTube and Facebook and promoted on Twitter, even the WikiLeaks cables that signaled growing U.S. discomfort with Ben Ali as an ally. But the bottom line remains, and should serve as a warning to other autocrats and the Western states that back them: A government that crushes dissent and censors the media might preside over relative prosperity and make the trains run on time, but its real stability remains in doubt as long as its citizens cannot express grievances through peaceful and open channels. My Tunisian friends were right: A police state looks stable only until the day it is not. Eric Goldstein is deputy Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch. 69
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