If Tunisia can become the Arab world’s Turkey, a functioning democracy where Islamism is part of the electoral mosaic rather than a threat to it, the tired refrain of all the Arab despots that they are the only bulwark against the jihadists will be seen for the self-serving lie it has become.
Roger Cohen has been an overseas based writer for the NY Times for many years, following previous work with the International Herald Tribune. In the wake of the recent democratic uprising in that country, he has gone to visit, and today offers a column titled Tunisian Dominoes in which he explores not only attitudes within that nation - which as he notes in its 54 year history as a 'democracy" had known only 2 presidents - but the impact of events elsewhere in the Arab world. When I read the paragraph with which I began, I decided to take the time for a diary to bring this column to people's attention - I think it that worthwhile.
Join me as I explore a bit further and offer some commentary of my own. Because I think this may be the moment when Obama can justify his Nobel Peace Prize. Can justify - and can also totally discredit his having received it.
Cohen tells of meeting two high school teachers, of hearing that there is still frustration because "the thieves must go, blood had not been shed only for some of the same ministers to endure." There are at least some clear diffrerences, for now, in how the government operates: Police are not yet breaking up demonstration, but the government is headed by a holdover, Mohamed Ghannouchi. He has promised a "clean break" from the policies of the Ben Ali government, and there are investigations of the wealth accumulated by that man's family. The press operates freely, the curfew is later. But because there no new set of leaders, there are still questions as to the willingness of the people to accept the interim leadership.
What has happened poses a real threat to neighboring strongmen. In one paragraph, Cohen summarizes for us the implications for the two largest and strongest neighbors of Tunisia:
No wonder the Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi has lost it, raving about Bolshevik and American revolutions in the streets of Tunis. No wonder anxiety is high in Egypt, where the distinguished Nobel prize winner and potential game changer, Mohamed ElBaradei, tweeted on the lesson of Tunisia: "Regime in Egypt must understand that peaceful change is only way out."
Peaceful change - words from Egypt's Nobel Peace Laureate. Cohen warns that Egypt would face turmoil similar to that of Tunisia should Mubarak attempt to hand over the reins of power to his son. And in one sentence he both gave both of us our titles and lays out the real implications:
There’s more than a touch of "We’re all Tunisians now" among misruled Arabs right now. They’re talking Tunisian domino effect.
misruled Arabs - for too many years too many Arab countries have suffered under strong-man rule. Here's a partial list:
Tunisia - Ben Ali
Libya - Qaddafi
Egypt - Mubarak
Saudi Arabia - the Saud family
Syria - the Assad family, father and son
and for a long time
Iraq - Saddam Hussein
Cohen reminds us of the danger of simply junking the existing strong-man architecture of governance - we all remember the forces of disorder and chaos unleashed in Iraq despite the hundreds of thousands of Western troops occupying the nation:
The hundreds of thousands of people affected don’t disappear; they nurse vengeance. And Tunisia, like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, if with milder veneer, was a police state under Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, as subtly ferocious as Syria.
Cohen is willing to have patience with the care-taker government, "so long as his government works for rapid presidential and then legislative elections." He cites experts from Europe, and famous dissidents from Tunisia, a blogger! That man is now a minister, but warns that not everyone can be a novice in government as is he. And there is no infrastructure of political parties, as the most important of the parties not part of the previous government has only 1,000 members.
Cohen lists the positives for Tunisia at this moment:
high levels of education, emancipated women encouraged over decades to use birth control, manageable size, and an Islamist movement that Michael Willis, a North Africa expert at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, described as "perhaps the mildest and most pragmatic around."
That Islamist movement is lead by a woman. Ponder that for a moment.
He sees the possibility of a nation like Turkey, clearly Islamist, but tolerant, able to function without repression. Although here I raise this question - in Turkey you have the military as a stabilizing force. It is not clear to me who or what can play that role in Tunisia.
Let me offer Cohen's last paragraph, and then a few words of my own, about our nation, about our President.
There will, in coming weeks, be agents provocateurs bent on the worst, and the usual Muslim-hating naysayers. Arab democracy is threatening to a host of vested interests and glib clichés. It is also the only way out of the radicalizing impasse of Arab klepto-gerontocracies and, as such, a vital American interest.
Tunisia is not a major oil or gas producer. Our primary connection in recent years has apparently been to use their repressive regime as a place to do our dirty work with "terrorist" suspects. But if Tunisia demonstrates that a real democracy is possible within an Islamist framework, that is very threatening to what Cohen describes as the Arab klepto-gerontocracies, a term that clearly applies to the Saudi regime with its oil wealth. The term is equally applicable to Egypt, Libya, Syria, some of the Gulf States (although many of their leaders have grasped that they do far better by allowing a certain modicum of at least economic freedom and development even if criticism of the domestic regime is still a no-no).
One of the reasons Obama was initially so popular overseas is because he appeared to be very different, and that is not just a matter of race and name. It is also that he had lived in a Muslim country, showed respect for Islam as a religion. He spoke differently than people were used to hearing from most American leaders. The sense of hope that helped propel Obama to the presidency was felt almost as strongly across much of the world. The young people of other nations could be as inspired as many of our own.
Those of us who are progressives often express our frustration with things this administration does. My sense from talking with students whose families are recent arrivals in this country from overseas is that there is a similar level of frustration across the world, most especially in that belt that stretches from North Africa to Indonesia, an area with more than a billion Muslims. Remember, Arabs make up a small part of that population, but for Muslims in non-Arab countries a successful transition of an Arab nation to true democracy would demonstrate once and for all the Islam is not in opposition to the democratic aspirations of many, and would serve to undercut the appeal to some of movements like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Al Qaeda and its affiliates across the region.
There will be some within our government, and many within our energy sector, who will argue against allowing the spread of democracy in the oil and gas rich Middle East, because it might threaten our access to those crucial resources. Perhaps, but we are economic competitors with China yet we and other nations find ways to obtain raw material from that nation, which itself has been ever so slowly moving away from its own history of repression.
For all our concerns about domestic issues - health care, the Republican move to further restrict if not outright ban abortion, the issue of regulation of business - we cannot forget that we are an important player in world stability and still a model for the democratic aspirations of other peoples. The democracies they create will not look like ours, but that should not be a problem.
If Obama can have our nation functioning to help the nascent move towards democracy in Tunisia, he will do more for world peace than almost anything else imaginable. If instead we do little to help, or worse - undercut the possibilities for democratic transition - then I really think Obama will have betrayed the promise of his Nobel award.
One more thought, and this is strictly mine. Tunisia is moving in the direction of less repression, less government control. Perhaps we can learn something from them, especially at a time when some in this government seem willing to exercise more control, either directly or by allowing corporations to restrict our expression by their control of the various media of communication?
I read Cohen.
I thought others should read.
I thought I would share a few of my own reactions to reading.
Peace.