Monday, January 17, 2011

The brutal truth about Tunisia

The brutal truth about Tunisia

 

Monday, 17 January 2011

 

By Robert Fisk, Middle East Correspondent

 

The Independent

 

It's the same old problem for us in the West. We mouth

the word "democracy" and we are all for fair elections

- providing the Arabs vote for whom we want them to

vote for.

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/the-brutal-truth-about-tunisia-2186287.html

 

   

The end of the age of dictators in the Arab world?

Certainly they are shaking in their boots across the

Middle East, the well-heeled sheiks and emirs, and the

kings, including one very old one in Saudi Arabia and a

young one in Jordan, and presidents - another very old

one in Egypt and a young one in Syria - because Tunisia

wasn't meant to happen. Food price riots in Algeria,

too, and demonstrations against price increases in

Amman. Not to mention scores more dead in Tunisia,

whose own despot sought refuge in Riyadh - exactly the

same city to which a man called Idi Amin once fled.

 

If it can happen in the holiday destination Tunisia, it

can happen anywhere, can't it? It was feted by the West

for its "stability" when Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali was in

charge. The French and the Germans and the Brits, dare

we mention this, always praised the dictator for being

a "friend" of civilised Europe, keeping a firm hand on

all those Islamists.

 

Tunisians won't forget this little history, even if we

would like them to. The Arabs used to say that

two-thirds of the entire Tunisian population - seven

million out of 10 million, virtually the whole adult

population - worked in one way or another for Mr Ben

Ali's secret police. They must have been on the streets

too, then, protesting at the man we loved until last

week. But don't get too excited. Yes, Tunisian youths

have used the internet to rally each other - in

Algeria, too - and the demographic explosion of youth

(born in the Eighties and Nineties with no jobs to go

to after university) is on the streets. But the "unity"

government is to be formed by Mohamed Ghannouchi, a

satrap of Mr Ben Ali's for almost 20 years, a safe pair

of hands who will have our interests - rather than his

people's interests - at heart.

 

For I fear this is going to be the same old story. Yes,

we would like a democracy in Tunisia - but not too much

democracy. Remember how we wanted Algeria to have a

democracy back in the early Nineties?

 

Then when it looked like the Islamists might win the

second round of voting, we supported its

military-backed government in suspending elections and

crushing the Islamists and initiating a civil war in

which 150,000 died.

 

No, in the Arab world, we want law and order and

stability. Even in Hosni Mubarak's corrupt and

corrupted Egypt, that's what we want. And we will get it.

 

The truth, of course, is that the Arab world is so

dysfunctional, sclerotic, corrupt, humiliated and

ruthless - and remember that Mr Ben Ali was calling

Tunisian protesters "terrorists" only last week - and

so totally incapable of any social or political

progress, that the chances of a series of working

democracies emerging from the chaos of the Middle East

stand at around zero per cent.

 

The job of the Arab potentates will be what it has

always been - to "manage" their people, to control

them, to keep the lid on, to love the West and to hate Iran.

 

Indeed, what was Hillary Clinton doing last week as

Tunisia burned? She was telling the corrupted princes

of the Gulf that their job was to support sanctions

against Iran, to confront the Islamic republic, to

prepare for another strike against a Muslim state after

the two catastrophes the United States and the UK have

already inflicted in the region.

 

The Muslim world - at least, that bit of it between

India and the Mediterranean - is a more than sorry

mess. Iraq has a sort-of-government that is now a

satrap of Iran, Hamid Karzai is no more than the mayor

of Kabul, Pakistan stands on the edge of endless

disaster, Egypt has just emerged from another fake election.

 

And Lebanon... Well, poor old Lebanon hasn't even got a

government. Southern Sudan - if the elections are fair

- might be a tiny candle, but don't bet on it.

 

It's the same old problem for us in the West. We mouth

the word "democracy" and we are all for fair elections

- providing the Arabs vote for whom we want them to vote for.

 

In Algeria 20 years ago, they didn't. In "Palestine"

they didn't. And in Lebanon, because of the so-called

Doha accord, they didn't. So we sanction them, threaten

them and warn them about Iran and expect them to keep

their mouths shut when Israel steals more Palestinian

land for its colonies on the West Bank.

 

There was a fearful irony that the police theft of an

ex-student's fruit produce - and his suicide in Tunis -

should have started all this off, not least because Mr

Ben Ali made a failed attempt to gather public support

by visiting the dying youth in hospital.

 

For years, this wretched man had been talking about a

"slow liberalising" of his country. But all dictators

know they are in greatest danger when they start

freeing their entrapped countrymen from their chains.

 

And the Arabs behaved accordingly. No sooner had Ben

Ali flown off into exile than Arab newspapers which

have been stroking his fur and polishing his shoes and

receiving his money for so many years were vilifying

the man. "Misrule", "corruption", "authoritarian

reign", "a total lack of human rights", their

journalists are saying now. Rarely have the words of

the Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran sounded so painfully

accurate: "Pity the nation that welcomes its new ruler

with trumpetings, and farewells him with hootings, only

to welcome another with trumpetings again." Mohamed

Ghannouchi, perhaps?

 

Of course, everyone is lowering their prices now - or

promising to. Cooking oil and bread are the staple of

the masses. So prices will come down in Tunisia and

Algeria and Egypt. But why should they be so high in

the first place?

 

Algeria should be as rich as Saudi Arabia - it has the

oil and gas - but it has one of the worst unemployment

rates in the Middle East, no social security, no

pensions, nothing for its people because its generals

have salted their country's wealth away in Switzerland.

 

And police brutality. The torture chambers will keep

going. We will maintain our good relations with the

dictators. We will continue to arm their armies and

tell them to seek peace with Israel.

 

And they will do what we want. Ben Ali has fled. The

search is now on for a more pliable dictator in Tunisia

- a "benevolent strongman" as the news agencies like to

call these ghastly men.

 

And the shooting will go on - as it did yesterday in

Tunisia - until "stability" has been restored.

 

No, on balance, I don't think the age of the Arab

dictators is over. We will see to that.

 

Like Robert Fisk on The Independent on Facebook for updates

 

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