YOUSSEF IBRAHIM, Special to the Sun |
“Freedom does not come in ‘Home Delivery.’”
This is one of multiple quotes, jokes, and bitter commentary, lighting up the Arab blogosphere ever since the outbreak Friday of the revolution in Tunisia that threw out president-for-life Zein El Abedine Ben Ali, who now resides in a royal palace somewhere at Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
In its short lifetime of less than one week, the uprising emerged as a challenge to the remaining 21 potentates holding onto their seats across the League of Arab States with their people asking: Who’s next? Another affront carried on protesters’ placards denounces Saudi Arabia as “La poubelle des dictateurs et tueurs” (trash can of dictators and killers) a reference to the many assorted dictators and Islamists given refuge there, starting with Uganda’s Idi Amin in 1978 all the way to Osama Bin Laden, the scion of a leading Saudi family who conceived Al Qaeda in his homeland.
A hint of how rough this has been on the various dictators came in a rambling speech Sunday by Colonel Qaddafi of Libya, who described Tunisians as ‘’stupid’’ and advised them as a ‘’brother and doyen of Arab rulers’’ to take Ben Ali back. Egyptian, Moroccan, Algerian, and Saudi propagandists went into overdrive stressing the ‘‘different’’ characters of Arab nations. Revolutions, Jasmine or otherwise they reassured one another, are not contagious.
Or are they?
This is the third popular uprising in the Greater Middle East in three decades that throws rulers out. The first domino to fall was the Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi, who in in 1978 and 1979 faced a street uprising of the same scale and like Mr. Ben Ali fled the country, in the shah’s case to die of cancer, alone, in another palace, in Egypt, after being refused entry into several countries including America. Mr. Ben Ali now sits alone and ignored after being refused entry into the colonial motherland of France and even tiny Malta.
The Iranian domino collapsed to a truly popular revolt in 1979 but its leaders erred in handing power over to the Ayatollahs, who transmogrified their dream of a democracy into a belligerent Islamist theocracy akin the competing Sunni model at nearby Saudi Arabia.
The second domino that fell was Syria’s occupation of Lebanon. This happened during a splendid ‘’Cedar Revolution’’ in 2005 and 2006. It was provoked by the assassination of Lebanon’s Sunni prime minister, Rafik Hariri, in 2005, by all accounts at the hands of the Shiite militia of Hezbollah and its paymasters in Syria and Iran.
That revolution also relapsed, largely due to benign neglect by America. A relatively new president, Barak Obama remained aloof, as he was anxious back then to tender olive branches to Islam, Muslims, Iran, and Syria. America got nothing from Syria nor Iran. The Lebanese got the message and folded their revolt. Syria is returning.
Now we have the third domino: Tunisia, a breath of fresh air blowing over a sclerotic Arab world. What shall be its fate?
Going the ‘’Islamist’’ way is one possibility, albeit a tiny one. Tunisia is unique in the sense of having a small population of 10 million, largely francophone, highly educated, close to France, and versatile in using the Internet (3 million, or 30% of the population, do so). It is unlikely to accept a regime imposing the call to prayer five time a day, and few of its women are willing to wrap themselves in chadors.
But Tunisia is also disordered in the ways of freedom, having been gutted by 65 years of tyranny last by Mr. Ben Ali and before him by his predecessor, Al Habib Bourgheba. Just as important it senses, in Mr. Obama, an unenthusiastic leader in Washington, one who is still under some infatuation with the world of Islam, fearful of offending Muslims by supporting them against their tyrannical rulers.
Tunisians know also that less than two years ago this American leader chose to abandon Iranians when they rose up in anger against forged elections. Tunisians are the first to tell that secular, liberal Islam of the 1950s in Indonesia and Egypt, the one that continues to beguile our president, has long ago been displaced in the vast world of 1.2 billion Muslims by the Saudi-Iranian models of intolerant politicized Islam.
And they know the greatest danger their new revolution faces is a double header of an inexperienced American president with few convictions in foreign policy coupled with a European continent that long ago abdicated its role in foreign policy.
Yet this Tunisian revolution remains a treasure, a perfumed Jasmine treasure, in need of nurturing because what it offers is new: an alternative to tired old models of either army generals or fanatical Islamist fundamentalists.
The Tunisian revolution broadcasts this: Between autocrats on one hand and Islamists on the other, we are civil society democrats. We stand for a separation of mosque and state. We want the American dream of true liberty and freedom and the right to choose. We shall pursue modernization in peace regardless of whether we wear trousers and dresses — or even chadors. Can you help us?
Would you protect us in this neighborhood, they ask?
Certainly no one in the neighborhood wishes them well — not the generals and their families who rule Algeria, not the feudal lords of the Moroccan monarchy and certainly neither the army colonel of Libya, brother Qaddafi, nor the Pharaoh of Egypt Hosni Mubarak, who transformed their revolutionary republics into monarchies — a la Ben Ali style — where they reign absolute and plan on passing the baton to siblings into a dynasty.
The question is whether America will step up.
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