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CHAPTER 1

TUNISIA SPRING

Saturday, 15 January 2011

IS IT A REAL REVOLUTION?

Is it a real revolution in Tunisia or will another member of the ruling elite succeed in replacing President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali who took flight yesterday? It is a crucial question for the rest of the Arab world where other corrupt police states face the same political, social and economic problems as Tunisia.

A striking feature of the whole Middle East for more than 30 years has been the unpopularity of the regimes combined with their depressing ability to stay in power. Most have found ways of preventing revolutions or military coup d'etats through ferocious security services protecting rickety state machines that mainly function as a source of jobs and patronage.

In Tunisia, Mr Ben Ali, along with other Arab leaders, presented himself as an opponent of Muslim fundamentalism and therefore won tolerance if not plaudits in Western capitals.

But the revolution that is brewing across the Middle East is of a traditional model springing from high unemployment, particularly among better educated young men, and a ruling class unable to resolve any of their countries' economic problems. The most obvious parallel with Tunisia is Egypt where the sclerotic regime of President Hosni Mubarak clings to power.

Will the present so-called "soft coup" work whereby Prime Minister Mohamed Ghannouchi takes power and calms down protesters by promises of reform and elections? It does not look very likely. The declared State of Emergency is not working.

There is not reason to suppose that a political leader so closely associated with the old regime will have any credibility with people in the streets.

Conditions vary across the Arab world but there is plenty in common between the situation in Tunisia and that in Algeria, Jordan and Egypt. Economic and political stagnation is decades old. In some states this is made more tolerable by access to oil revenues, but even this is not enough to provide jobs for educated youths who see their path blocked by a corrupt elite.

There are echoes of the Tunisian crisis in other countries. In Jordan the security forces have been battling rioters in Maan, a traditional site of unrest in the past where the government has difficulty coping. In Kuwait there was an attack by security forces in December on academic and members of parliament. Food prices have been going up.

Yet all these regimes that are now in trouble had a carefully cultivated image in the west of being "moderate" and anti-fundamentalist. In the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, President George Bush and Tony Blair made much of their democratic agenda for the Middle East, but when one of the few democratic elections to take place in the region produced victory for Hamas among the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank, the US did everything to thwart the outcome of the poll.

The Middle East still has a reputation for coups but a striking feature of the region since the early 1970s is how few of the regimes have changed. The forces behind the Tunisian events are not radically new but they are all the more potent for being so long suppressed.

Western governments have been caught on the hop because explosions of social and economic frustration have been long predicted but have never happened. The extent of the uprising is yet to be defined and the Tunisian army evidently hopes that the departure of Mr Ben Ali may be enough for the government to restore its authority. The generals could be right, but the shootings over the last month failed to work. There is no particular reason why the same tactics should start to work now.

Patrick Cockburn

Monday, 17 January 2011

DEMOCRACY, BUT NOT TOO MUCH DEMOCRACY

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 sheikhs 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? Tunisia was feted by the West for its "stability" when Zine el-Abdine 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 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 youth 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 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 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 Britain 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 (a friend called me from Cairo yesterday because she knew what I wanted to know - "No, we won't," she said). 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 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 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 staples of the masses. So prices will come down in Tunisia and Algeria and Egypt and Jordan. 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 wretched 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.

Robert Fisk

Friday, 21 January 2011

‘I AM PROUD OF WHAT HE DID’

The street vendor who set himself alight, sparking an uprising which swept away 23 years of dictatorship in Tunisia and triggered protests across North Africa, had been beaten down by years of poverty and oppression by the authorities, his family told The Independent last night.

Mohamed Bouazizi - whose desperate act, copied in countries including Algeria and Egypt, has become a symbol of injustice and oppression - had lost his land, his living and had been humiliated by local officials.

In an interview yesterday at his home, his mother Mannoubia said she was proud of her son and of his role in changing the regime. His cries for help had been ignored by banks and officials, his family said. "The government drove him to do what he did; they never gave him a chance. We are poor and they thought we had no power," his mother said. "My son is lost, but look what is happening, how many people are now getting involved."

What made Mr Bouazizi's desperation and sense of hopelessness so real to those who were to rise up afterwards was that it mirrored many of their experiences. The 26-year-old lived in Sidi Bouzid, in the poor interior of the country, which is economically and culturally different from the capital Tunis and the northern coastal areas where then president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, his wife Leila Trabelsi and their venal courtiers enjoyed a life of opulence.

Mr Bouazizi had passed his baccalaureate but had found no skilled job in a region suffering from chronic underinvestment; the family land had been taken back by the bank, and his only source of income, from selling fruit and vegetables from a cart, was about to be lost because he could not get the required permit from the local council. The act which drove Mr Bouazizi over the edge, it is claimed, was the humiliation of being slapped on the face in public by a female official of the municipality, Feyda Hamdi, during an altercation when she had attempted to impound his cart. Leila, 24, one of Mohamed's six siblings, acknowledged that the blow from an official, especially a woman, had undoubtedly shamed his brother. But what happened was the culmination of a series of events which had made him, and the family, feel they were the victims of a cruel and unfeeling system.

"It was always difficult. The worst thing was what happened to the land," she said. "We owned it with our neighbours and we grew olives and almonds. It was earning good money, but then things turned bad for a lot of people, our sales went down and the bank seized our land. I went with Mohamed, we appealed to the bank, we appealed to the governor, but no one listened. Other families had the same problem; people just ignored us."

Asma Gharbi, a hydraulic engineer who lives nearby, said: "Just look at this town, how everything is falling apart, there is no money. I have lived in Tunis and I can tell you the high-up people there don't care. Everyone is fed-up here, but Mohamed did something that forced people to take notice."

At the municipality headquarters, a junior official, Hassan Raidi, admitted shortcomings of the past. "But we were all afraid of Ben Ali and his people. So no one could make any criticism. Now things will change."

After his argument with Ms Hamdi, Mr Bouazizi walked off, came back with a can of patrol and set himself alight in front of the regional governor's residence.

That was on 17 December. There were protests locally, unheeded calls for an investigation and for officials to be held to account. But there was very little wider publicity in Tunisia's censored and cowed media.

"The unions got involved, teachers, lawyers, doctors, all sections of civil society, and set up a Popular Resistance Committee to back the people of Sidi Bouzid and back the uprising. The uprising continued for 10 days in Sidi Bouzid, but with no support from outside," said Lazhar Gharbi, a head teacher. But then the news of the self-immolation by the fruit seller began to spread through the online social network - Facebook, Twitter and blogs, raising an outcry unexpected in scale for some-thing that happened in a small town. Mr Bouazizi was moved to a hospital in Tunis. Among the visitors was the president, who declared an inquiry would be held. He said Sidi Bouzid and surrounding areas would get grants and jobs. But the mood in the area was one of anger, fuelled by aggressive action by the police. After Mr Bouazizi died on 4 January, his funeral was attended by several hundred people chanting "Farewell Mohamed, we will avenge you. We weep for you today, others will weep tomorrow for what they did to you."

Since then Tunisia has changed, with Ben Ali forced into exile by protesters, many of whom cried out the name of Mohamed Bouazizi. He has been mentioned in blogs written by some of the others who burned themselves to death in Algeria, Egypt and Mauritania. Street clashes continue between protesters and police, as the country faces an uncertain future.

Sitting at the family home, a three roomed house, surrounded by her children, 48-year-old Mannoubia talked about how her son's death has politicised her: "I now know how Ben Ali had been stealing from the country. How the relations of Leila Trabelsi have been stealing. We do not want them back. But the situation is not just bad in Tunisia. I remember my husband used to talk about Libya, poor people there suffered as well. She continued: "I have a lot of people who come up to me now to say it is not just me who has lost a son, but the whole village that has lost a son. I am proud of what he did. I would like to go up to Tunis and take a look at these demonstrations. It is good to know that my son had played a part in changing things."

Whether any real changes come to Tunisia through the "Jasmine Revolution" remains to be seen. In Sidi Bouzid's central square a group of young men sit around on a wall with no job to go to.

Walid Ben Sanai, who trained as an engineer, sees no change for the better in sight. "Ben Ali has gone, but the government ministers are still the same. We are not seeing any real improvement, and unless there is some real improvement there will be real trouble. "But we think about Mohamed Bouazizi. I hope he will be remembered."

Kim Sengupta

Tuesday, 21 June 2011

FIRST DESPOT TO FLEE

The ousted Tunisian President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali was convicted in absentia on embezzlement and other charges yesterday after £16.6 million in jewels and public funds were found in one of his palaces.

Mr Ben Ali and his wife were both sentenced to 35 years each in prison, and fined 50 million dinars (£22m) and 41 million dinars respectively.

The conviction of Mr Ben Ali and Leila Trabelsi followed a day-long trial before the Tunis criminal court. Mr Ben Ali, 74, vigorously denied the charges in a statement through his French lawyer, calling the proceedings a "shameful masquerade of the justice of the victorious".

The trove of jewels, some which the court said had "historic value," and the money were found in a palace in the picturesque town of Sidi Bou Said, outside Tunis, following Mr Ben Ali's departure in the face of widespread demonstrations and riots against him and his extended family over allegations of corruption and abuse of power. Further details of that departure were revealed yesterday, as Mr Ben Ali said through his lawyers that he had been tricked into leaving his country.

In his first detailed account of how he hurriedly left Tunisia on 14 January for Saudi Arabia, where he is in exile after 23 years in power, Mr Ben Ali claimed he only went there to bring his family to safety after being told of an assassination plot against him by a "friendly" foreign intelligence service. He was persuaded into taking his wife and children to Jeddah but had intended to return immediately.

Mr Ben Ali denied that he had deliberately fled the country. A statement by his lawyer said: "He boarded the plane with his family after ordering the crew to wait for him in Jeddah. But after his arrival in Jeddah, the plane returned to Tunisia, without waiting for him, contrary to his orders."

Mr Ben Ali's story shows how his former allies, such as the US, were eager to get him out of the country without a confrontation between him and the hundreds of thousands of demonstrators who were demanding he step down. His flight, the first of the Arab despots in charge of police states to flee at the start of the Arab Spring, was followed by popular uprisings in Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen and Syria.

The trial of Mr Ben Ali is the beginning of a process by the Tunisian government to punish those responsible for killings and torture under the old regime. It is also the start of an attempt to gain control of the 30 to 40 per cent of the Tunisian economy estimated to have fallen under the sway of Mr Ben Ali's family and that of his wife, Leila Trabelsi, whom he married in 1992.

Hatred of the Ben Ali regime was fuelled by tales of their unbridled greed and gargantuan wealth. In US embassy cables released by Wiki-Leaks, the American ambassador expressed shock at how Mr Ben Ali's extended family was a "quasi-mafia" and the "nexus of Tunisian corruption".

The ambassador gives an account of having dinner at the villa of one of the Ben Ali's daughters, Nesrine and her husband, Sakhr el-Meteri, where frozen yogurt was flown in from St Tropez, and four chickens a day were fed to a pet tiger. Not only did the Ben Ali and Trabelsi families take over profitable businesses, but they made it impossible for anybody else to do business without cutting them in for a share. One entrepreneur who went to see Mr Ben Ali with his plan to start a university was told by him "OK, but its 50:50" according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. The entrepreneur dropped his proposal.

One of the President's brothers-in-law, Belhassen Trabelsi, suggested to a car importer, who intended to import Citroën cars, that he join him in a partnership. When the importer turned him down he was promptly subjected to 17 tax inspections and his cars were stopped at customs for having 10 seats. "There is no such thing as a 10-seat car," the importer told the newspaper.

Mr Ben Ali, who came to power in a coup in 1987, ran a tightly controlled police state similar to that in other parts of the Arab world. The ruling family cherry-picked the most profitable enterprises and bought up privatised businesses at rock-bottom prices. Mr Trabelsi's business interests included the Bank of Tunisia, Karthago Airlines and radio and television companies.

Mr Ben Ali, born in 1936, had made his career in the Tunisian military and was a graduate of American and French military training schools. In Tunisia he was head of national security from 1977 and was well placed to take over from his ageing predecessor President Habib Bourguiba He always revelled in the costly trappings of office and ignored the way in which the pervasive corruption and creeping economic domination of the ruling families fuelled furious resentment among all classes of Tunisians. This exploded last December after a 26-year-old street vendor burnt himself to death when his vegetable cart was confiscated by the police because he did not have the required licence. Mr Ali is likely to face a further trial by military tribunal, the date for which has not been set, at which he will be charged with ordering the police to open fire on protesters, hundreds of whom were killed. Tunisia was typical of the era of Arab police states which developed from the 1970s and were very similar, regardless of whether or not they were republics or monarchies. Absolute power was held through multi-layered security agencies, tight censorship and control of information and communications, and state domination of all independent organisations such as trade unions and political parties. The wave of privatisations of public property became plundering expeditions for predatory ruling families.

In Tunisia popular loathing for Leila Trabelsi, a former hairdresser, was particularly acute. No part of the economy was immune from seizure or interference by the ruling families. They took over banks, insurance companies, tourist venture, property, distribution and agencies of big foreign firms. As Mr Ben Ali was being toppled, the cars and villas of his relatives and in-laws were ransacked by angry crowds. It is not known how much of their assets had been moved abroad.

Such was the grip of "The Family" on the economy that government officials say they are moving cautiously in dealing with their many businesses and, instead of closing them down, the courts have appointed managers.

Patrick Cockburn

Tuesday, 9 July 2011

A DICTATOR’S TRIAL

How do you defend a dictator who's been around for years and years and years when he's accused of - well, being a dictator for years and years and years? When I mention the "trials" of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, the former Tunisian autocrat's lawyer throws his hands in the air, an expression of cynicism and laughter on his face. "These weren't judgements, they weren't even real cases - they were a joke," Akram Azoury says of the Tunis courts which last month, after just one-and-a-half hours of deliberations, sentenced Ben Ali and his wife Leila Traboulsi to 35 years' imprisonment and the equivalent of £48m in fines, and then, this week, to another 15-and-a-half years. "The speed of the first trial - the length of time between the opening of the trial and the judgement - was closer to a Formula One race than to a classical judicial procedure."

Oddly, Ben Ali's first farcical trial - with no witnesses and no lawyers chosen by the defendant - enraged both his lawyer and the ex-dictator's most vehement opponents. They wanted charges of high treason and crowds of tortured ex-prisoners to testify to the brutality of the Ben Ali regime. Azoury, a Lebanese Christian who acted for Ben Ali with his French colleague Jean-Yves Le Borgne and who runs a family legal practice in Beirut - his two daughters are also lawyers - wanted a fair trial. "No lawyers were invited to the court," Azoury says with quiet fury. "I had power of attorney, certified by the Tunisian embassy in Beirut. I applied for a visa - but I was not granted a visa. I applied to the Tunisian Bar for authorisation - and I was not granted authorisation." In the end, the Tunisian Bar appointed two lawyers of its own to "defend" Ben Ali.

"This trial, it violates each and every criteria of the 1966 Fair Trial pact that preceded the pact of civil rights of the European Union," Azoury says.

"After 1966, the Human Rights Committee was set up in Geneva. This court hearing in Tunis was not eligible to qualify as a trial - so the verdict is not a verdict. No European country can extradite Ben Ali to Tunisia based on this verdict. Should he be free in France, England, Germany, especially if he was in England and the Tunisians wanted to extradite him, no court in England would accept to do this." I forbear to suggest that no immigration officer in England - let alone France - would allow Ben Ali or his wife to enter the country, although Mr Azoury does believe his client should leave Saudi Arabia.

"Ben Ali described the judgements as 'the wording of the justice of the victors'. Don't forget that the mere fact that President…" - and here I note Azoury can still call his client 'President' - "…Ben Ali hired me as his lawyer is a precedent in this part of the world. It means he wants to play by the rules. He doesn't care about a political trial. He governed Tunisia for 25 years and it's the right of the Tunisian people to judge him. In his opinion, these accusations are not made innocently. If you look at the substance of these accusations, they are shameful. They want to kill him morally. Don't forget that all this stuff in the second trial - the drugs and weapons - were 'found' in his official residence two or three months after Ben Ali left. After seven months now, you might 'find' nuclear weapons in his residence!" The second "trial" of Ben Ali this week - for possession of drugs and illegal weapons - also added another fine of £50,000. Even his Tribunal Bar-appointed lawyers objected that the hearing was unfair. "The only purpose," Azoury says, "was to brand President Ben Ali as a drugs dealer and weapons dealer before the Tunisian elections."

But why did the old dictator hire a Lebanese lawyer to act for him? Azoury has an interesting legal pedigree. In 2000, he defended Lebanese petroleum minister Barsoumian and secured his acquittal before the courts after 11 months of imprisonment; in 2003, he prosecuted board members of the Medina Bank; in 2005, he represented General Jamil Sayed of the Lebanese General Security when he was accused by the UN tribunal of possible involvement in the assassination of ex-prime minister Rafiq Hariri. After four years of false imprisonment, Sayed was released by the UN who admitted it had no evidence against him.

"A lawyer can only perform his job in a court of law," Azoury says. "Law and politics cannot be present at the same time. My job was to take the politics out of the courtroom. Because if they wanted a political judgement in Tunis, it has already been issued and executed. The guy (Ben Ali) is not going to Tunisia any more. I respect this. But if the Tunisian authorities want to start a real judicial process, they should abide by the principles of a fair trial."

But Akram Azoury is no patsy. "It is an excellent thing to judge heads of state," he says suddenly.

"It will help to implement a culture of justice - because the responsibility of the new regime in Tunisia is also to implement due process of law. If these rulers were that bad, there should be no difficulty in convicting them after a fair trial." Azoury lived in Tunis for a month in 1989 when he was consultant to the company building the new Arab League headquarters, but never met Ben Ali. "I wasn't involved in politics," he says.

But he clearly thinks a lot about it. When we talked of the Tunisian revolution, Azoury spoke of the street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi - whose death by self-immolation started the revolt against Ben Ali - in words that I am still pondering. "The body of Bouazizi will either be a light in this part of the world," Azoury says. "Or he will be the fire that will consume it."

Robert Fisk