Jasmine?s Sweet Breath and the Stench of Corruption
Jasmine?s Sweet Breath and the Stench of Corruption
Feisal G. Mohamed: Jasmine?s Sweet Breath and the Stench of Corruption
What do we make of Tunisia?s ?Jasmine Revolution,? now inspiring a second day of courageous demonstrations in Egypt? It?s difficult to tell. In her excellent column for the Nation, Laila Lalami chided Western inattention to this uprising:
What is striking about the Tunisian revolution is how little attention it received in the mainstream American press. The Washington Post mentioned the protests for the first time on January 5[;]…Time ran its first piece about the protests later yet, on January 12. Even those who, like Thomas Friedman, specialize in diagnosing the ills of the ?Arab street? did not show much interest.
When the mainstream press finally paid attention, it was often to explain the success of the Tunisian revolution in terms of technology….In contrast, the Iran uprising of 2009 captured much of the American media?s attention.
The Tunisian revolution occurred thanks primarily to the men and women who protested despite the intimidation, beatings, tear gas and bullets. The death of [Mohamed] Bouazizi, the refusal of Gen. Rachid Ammar to obey Ben Ali’s orders to shoot [protesters], the arrest of dissident Hamma Hammami and the solidarity of trade unions and professionals with college students?all these factors played an incremental role in keeping the momentum going….
The initial lack of interest by the American press in the Tunisian protests may have something to do with the fact that there was no Islamic angle: the Tunisians were not trying to oust an Islamic regime, nor were they supporters of a religious ideology. In other words, this particular struggle for freedom was not couched in simple terms that are familiar to the Western media?Islam, bad; America, good?so it took a while for our commentariat to notice.
The inability to fit the Tunisian revolt into familiar categories also afflicts diplomatic responses, Lalami observes, with France and the United States reluctant to voice support of a revolution in a ?moderate Arab country??a pernicious euphemism for dictatorships malleable to Western directives.
But even as she rightly critiques simplistic Western anti-Islamic sentiment, Lalami herself advances a too-easy dichotomy between dictatorship and democracy. In her telling, events in Tunisia are a blow to dictatorship and a victory for democracy. The inattention of the West reveals yet again its uneven and self-interested application of the democratic principles it claims to champion.
That seems as much a familiar narrative of the Western soft left as social media triumphalism is a familiar narrative of the gadgetophile. What?s striking about the uprising in Tunisia is its indifference to political science. It is not dictatorship that is the target, so much as the kind of corruption whereby elites maintain a stranglehold on the means of living, bullying and harassing the everyday efforts of citizens wishing simply to sustain themselves. That kind of corruption flourishes especially under dictatorship, but it can also thrive with the introduction of democratic reform. The circulation of ballots does not of itself effect egalitarian reformation of the means of production.
That these are the chief lessons of Tunisia is suggested by the life of Mohamed Bouazizi, the vendor whose self-immolation, in Zvi Bar?el?s phrase, ?ignited the entire nation.? The picture emerging in Al?Jazeera?s profile of Bouazizi is of a young man frustrated in his attempt to make the simplest of livings: selling fruits and vegetables from a wooden cart in his local souk. Providing for his family from the age of ten, he managed to eke out enough of a living to allow his sisters to pursue the education of which circumstances deprived him.
Doing so required him to steel himself against the petty tyrannies of his local police, with their extortionist fines and permit fees, and their confiscation of his scales and produce. In the last confrontation of this kind, he refused to hand over his scales to the police, who then forced him to the ground and seized all of his goods. Seeking to reclaim his property, he went to the offices of his local municipality, where he was denied a meeting with an official. He left only to return to the street outside of the building carrying the fuel with which he set himself ablaze.
What a powerful symbol. Powerful enough to launch local revolts that would spread to a national revolution, as well as to prompt other acts of self-immolation and protest in Tunisia and elsewhere. But if we read this aright, we see it is much more personal than political. To introduce my own reading through the lens of a Western narrative, it is reminiscent of the deep humiliation and utter impotence in the face of capricious deprivation felt by Shakespeare?s Edgar and King Lear in the hovel scene, which leads each to resort to actions equivalent to madness in the world at large. Bouazizi?s act is an external expression of being reduced to a ?nothing? by the deeply corrupt world around him. Its defiance resides in taking to its horrifying conclusion, and playing in rapid motion, the slow and callous deprivation of life that corruption inflicts. ?We want to live! We want to live! We want to live! That?s all,? cried one of yesterday?s protesters in Cairo.
Elections supervised by the United Nations will not force pomp to take physic and feel what wretches feel. In Egypt, ?democratization? would likely increase the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood, already the country?s strongest opposition party despite thirty years of martial law aimed squarely at stanching its influence. And the ?liberalization? that has led to cozier relationships with Western powers, as Alaa Bayoumi observes, has taken the form of a free marketeering that creates elites ever more arrogant and self-serving?a tendency we can also see playing itself out in India, which styles itself the world?s largest democracy.
The Jasmine Revolution seems at this point to be an outpouring of resistance defying interpretation. It is the revolution of a pure vanguard, sweeping away the old without the intention of itself settling into power. The question is what form power will take when the dust settles. One irrationally hopes it can avoid the ?Gaza effect??where ham-fisted introduction of democracy brings war-making zealots to power?and the ?Iran effect??where the revolutionary moment creates a power vacuum exploited by well-organized religious radicals. But only time will tell.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Rais67/2011
