The tide begins to turn: First Tunisia and then?

By
Hassan Al-Haifi
Published:17-01-2011
Yemen Times
Time and again, this column has often stated that the kind of events that unfolded in Tunisia are bound to occur in any of the Arab States, which have witnessed sufficient grounds for a mass unfavorable public reaction that certainly would make most of the rulers in the Arab World from Mauritania to Yemen wish they had another chance to see just where did they go wrong? Of course, they forget the underlying fact that the reins of authority have been in their hands for at least two decades. This is bound to be enough cause for uprisings by the public, who feel that their democratic right to a peaceful transfer of authority has been ripped off the ballot box, in one way or another. On the other hand, all of these regimes have their ground roots in distant lands; i. e., they originated under suspicious plots engineered outside of their home turf. The overriding cause of their rise emanates from a desire by autocratic regional powers (at least they regard themselves as powers – although they have proven to be weaker than lambs) to do away with any hopes of democratic practice in the Arab World.

We have seen this kind of regional chess time and again. It happened in Yemen on more than one occasion starting in 1973, when the civilian government of Qadhi Abdul-Rahman Al-Iriani was toppled in a bloodless coup d>état that returned the military to the helms of authority after a seven year tryout with civilian democratic rule. Needless to say, what Yemen was given in return apparently meant perpetual military rule. We certainly could have done better without the change. However, the matter was repeated again in Egypt, in Sudan, Tunisia, Algeria and in Mauritania, where military or totalitarian rule was either confirmed or reinstated, in most cases with the support and prodding of the rich oil magnates of Saudi Arabia. The saddest cases as such are in the Sudan and Mauritania, in which genuine democratic government duly elected by their people after genuinely serious military coups, which were exceptional to the common military coups of cutthroat generals we have seen otherwise. But nevertheless, this was disagreeable to certain autocracies in the region and thus you have regimes like Yemen>s current totalitarian regime, the failed state regime of Sudan, which is now disintegrating rapidly, the failure manifested by the Bin Ali regime in Tunisia, etc.

It is quite clear that governments that insist on stepping on the necks of their constituencies forever are doomed to collapse, sometimes in a violent and disagreeable way, but nevertheless almost unavoidable.

Regimes that rely on sheer gut power and oppressive means of maintaining their hold on authority are bound to witness the kind of healthy erratic civil uprisings that unfolded last week in Tunisia, whether they liked them or not. In Tunisia (as is the case in all the autocratic regimes in the Arab World), we had all the maladies of most of dictatorial states. These include a reliance on family or clan rule, nepotism and favoritism, not to mention the misallocation of fiscal and natural resources to suit political and business ambitions of the icons of the dictatorial regimes and their bought puppets along the socio-economic spheres, so as to guarantee the longevity of these monstrous regimes.

Tunisia now represents for many of the large masses of the population in the Arab World a symbolic stimulus for unfavorable, but nevertheless mass public reactions to sloppy government that characterize Yemen, Egypt, Sudan, and Mauritania. These latter states have a common denominator, in that the regimes of these countries have brought on a hopeless aura of poverty, deprivation and corrupt administrative systems that have bled not only the resources of the countries mentioned, but also the will of the people to carry on with the hope that relief is bound to come. They will obviously eventually reach a boiling point when these people realize that they have reached the pit of hopelessness and despair, brought on by the autocratic corrupt regimes that rule them.

In conclusion, this observer would like to reiterate the memorable words of Rejib Tayyib Erdogan, the Mahathir Mohammed of Turkey, who has worked very hard over the last five years or so to catapult Turkey into a dynamic political and economic giant in the region after having done away with an aging military establishment that froze all chances of Turkey to come out of its stagnation. In an interview with Al-Jazeera program, «Without Limits» the outspoken Turkish leader summed up the situation well in the Arab World, when he analyzed it as follows: «Oppressive rulers are bound to be failure in governance, no matter how many laws a state has. Just rulers are the only guarantee for success, even if a state has the worst laws in the world.»