The New Middle East (7 page)

Despite the best efforts of the culture club at the US embassy, it wasn’t fiddlers from the Appalachian mountains who finally brought real democracy to the Middle East, though the leaking a few years later of many of the embassy’s more candid cables would help to poison the well for the regime. It was actually a couple of home-grown fiddlers performing in the Tunisian capital Tunis who created the mood music for the revolutions of 2011.

Middle-class people don’t riot, or at least they didn’t before the Arab revolts. Middle-class people, by definition, have something invested in the system. It might not be much but it is theirs. So when trouble breaks out their instincts are normally to moan, not to march. But nothing upsets the middle classes like a show-off. And if the flashy neighbours are showing off with your money, the gardening gloves come off. Tunisia’s urban population prided themselves on their worldly sophistication, but when the social contract broke down the country had been reduced to a Mafia state. Sitting at the top, running the show, was a lower-class, badly educated former ladies’ hairdresser who had connived her way into everyone else’s pockets.

It was ‘easy to hate’ Leila Ben Ali, agreed the American ambassador to Tunis between 2006 and 2009, Robert F. Godec.
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Mrs Ben Ali, or Leila Trabelsi, to use her maiden name, was indisputably the most loathed of the regional First Ladies Club. It had been that way for years. The crown was only snatched from her by Asma al-Assad when it was revealed, as Syria began its descent into chaos, that she had spent the early days of the crisis shopping online for Ming vases and luxury goods at Harrods.
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Until then though, Leila Trabelsi was in a class all of her own. She had married President Ben Ali in 1992, five years after he ousted the Republic’s first president, 84-year-old Habib Bourguiba, by announcing his medical ‘incompetence’ on national radio.
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When it was widely reported that Mrs Ben Ali’s last act before leaving Tunisia and going into exile had been to fill her private jet with one and a half tonnes of the central bank’s gold in handbag-size ingots, worth almost sixty million dollars, it was readily believed by everyone even after the bank swore its assets were still intact.
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It wasn’t that she and her extended family took the occasional backhander. It was that they had had their snouts in every trough in town. This was all catalogued in some wonderfully undiplomatic cables from Ambassador Godec in which he excoriated ‘The Family’ as he called them. The cables were released by the WikiLeaks site from 28 November 2010. Less than two months later Mr and Mrs Ben Ali were gone.

Ambassador Godec described how:

President Ben Ali’s extended family is regularly cited as the nexus of Tunisian corruption. Often referred to as a quasi-mafia, an oblique mention of ‘the Family’ is enough to indicate which family you mean. Ben Ali’s wife, Leila Ben Ali, and her extended family – the Trabelsis – provoke the greatest ire from Tunisians. Along with the numerous allegations of Trabelsi corruption are often barbs about their lack of education, low social status, and conspicuous consumption.
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In another cable he described having dinner with the Ben Alis’ son-in-law Mohamed Sakher El Materi, who served him ‘ice cream and frozen yoghurt he brought in by plane from Saint Tropez’ and who ‘has a large tiger (“Pasha”) on his compound, living in a cage [which] consumes four chickens a day’.
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Perhaps if ‘The Family’ had spent less time feeding the tiger and more throwing a few scraps to its loyalists within the ruling Democratic Constitutional Rally (RCD) its world would not have collapsed so quickly. Instead the party at the centre of what was still effectively a one-party state found it was no longer being invited to sit at the top table. And not only did Ben Ali and his wife suck all the graft out of the system, leaving very little for those lower down the food chain, they also divested the party of any real political power. ‘It was not only the Tunisian political space that had been clamped down on all of these years, it was the RCD, and the apparatus of the state,’ said Kamal Morjane, a few weeks after his old boss had fled the country. Mr Morjane was once part of the inner circle and served as defence and foreign minister, posts which he said over time became irrelevant. ‘Leila Trabelsi controlled everything, the media publicising his foreign and interior policy positions, everything. The ministers were completely stripped of their powers. Even access to the president was totally controlled.’
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The Americans even had her down as a ‘dark horse candidate’ to take over formally when her already ailing husband finally died.
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All the regimes that fell during the Arab Spring, and all of those that didn’t, attempted the same ruse when they thought the street protests were sapping their power. They organised ‘spontaneous’ rallies of support for the leader. I was present at many of these in various countries. The most amusing one was in Tripoli, when our official driver accidentally took a short cut and we arrived to find the protesters idling around a housing estate, leaning up against their cars, chatting and smoking. Only when we got off the minibuses did they realise that we were early and they were late. They hurriedly pulled their posters off the back seats and started the usual performance, but we both knew this one had not gone well for them, so our minders quickly ushered us back on the bus and drove off.

This sort of thing didn’t happen in Tunisia, because the RCD couldn’t find enough supporters willing to go through with the pantomime. The party’s last effort to mount a show of support was held on 14 January, just hours before Ben Ali and his clan began making their way to the airport. Some RCD supporters did turn up in 7 November Square, named for the day of Ben Ali’s coup, but at the same time there was also an anti-government rally. The pro-government protesters promptly swapped sides.
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The RCD claimed one million members, but it could not organise a single decent demonstration in its support when the country rose up against it.
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Everyone, it seemed, had had enough of ‘The Family’ and its culture of corruption, which had permeated deep down into Tunisian society. As the ambassador said:

Whether it’s cash, services, land, property, or yes, even your yacht, President Ben Ali’s family is rumored to covet it and reportedly gets what it wants. Beyond the stories of the First Family’s shady dealings, Tunisians report encountering low-level corruption as well in interactions with the police, customs, and a variety of government ministries.
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Despite the stupendous wealth ‘The Family’ flaunted around the Tunisian capital, it would eventually be the ubiquitous low-level corruption which spewed from the regime that would bring them down.

Being young in the Arab world was often an emotionally crippling experience. It was hard for women, who played just as big a role as men in the revolutions; but in societies as patriarchal as those in the Arab world young men saw no opportunity to step up to the role of breadwinner, that helped define their manhood. And just in case they were in any doubt about how bad their lot was, they were reminded every time they interacted with the state. That might be having to find money to pay bribes to venal officials, or random and often violent harassment by the equally corrupt police force. ‘
Wasta
’ was the only hope young men had that they might get on in life. ‘
Wasta
’ is the Arabic word for what in the West is called ‘clout’: getting something not because you deserve it or are entitled to it or have earned it, but because you have connections.
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Wasta
though is something you acquire over time; you have to be somebody to have
wasta
. So again, young men fast approaching their late twenties would find themselves going to their fathers for help instead of being able to strike out on their own. No job meant no dignity. But according to Professor Assaad:

It’s not just dignity, you cannot become an adult unless you have a job and you cannot marry unless you have a job and so there is this whole issue of transition to adulthood that is associated with having a job and being able to care for a family etc, and they considered the informal jobs that they have to do as a temporary thing that is not satisfactory in its own right and will eventually, hopefully, lead to a permanent job that they can be proud of. Even if that job doesn’t pay very much. The fact that they have it, that it’s a permanent job, that it’s a formal job, has a lot of value, so dignity is part of it, but it’s more than dignity, it’s essentially being a full member of the society, an adult, a citizen etc.

Nor, for most people, were there many diversions from these woes, because these are socially conservative Muslim societies. They could not drown their sorrows in drink. Not being able to marry often meant not being able to have sex. Using drugs was a world of trouble if you were caught. They did not even have the chance to complain. Democracy is a safety valve. The ability to get together with a bunch of like-minded people and wander down the street hurling abuse at your leaders is a good thing for society. Without it the pressure just grows.

It was the uncontrollable rage of a generation over the prospect of a wasted life that devoured Ben Ali and the other Middle Eastern dictators. It had been bottling up for years. It took a single life to release it. That was given by a young man called Mohamed Bouazizi. Mohamed was twenty-six years old and a street vendor. He sold fruit and vegetables from a wheelbarrow that he pushed along the dusty streets of the small, poor provincial Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid. He had left school at seventeen to become the sole provider for his widowed mother and his six siblings. He had light brown skin, drawn over high cheekbones that were framed by a thin face. His hair was short, gelled and jet-black. At least, that’s how he looked in his second-from-last photograph.

Around midday on Friday 17 December 2010 Mohamed walked to the regional council offices. He stood in front of the high gate, doused himself in gasoline and set himself alight. ‘On that day Mohamed left home to go and sell his goods as usual,’ said his sister Samya. ‘But when he put them on sale, three inspectors from the council asked him for bribes. Mohamed refused to pay. They seized his goods and put them in their car. They tried to grab his scales but Mohamed refused to give them up, so they beat him.’
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Bouazizi did not have a licence to sell fruit because getting any kind of official documentation in the Arab world is impossible unless you pay a bribe. It was the state’s insidious way of criminalising the entire population and leaving them vulnerable to harassment and prosecution. Bouazizi couldn’t get a licence to sell fruit because he could not afford a bribe. He could not afford a bribe because without a licence he wasn’t allowed to sell fruit. It was his individual hopeless reaction on that day to just one of the thousands of petty indignities Tunisians had all been forced to swallow their whole lives that set in motion the region’s most tumultuous change for more than half a century.

Bouazizi’s story resonated with everyone. The poor immediately saw themselves in him. And the rumour mill repackaged him to the educated middle classes as an unemployed university graduate forced into eking out an existence in a menial job. The idea of Bouazizi as ‘no ordinary street pedlar’ even gained currency in reports by international human rights groups.
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This version was key to the resonance of his case among the wider population, because while almost 90 per cent of the country was defined as ‘middle-class’, half that number were categorised as ‘living with the ever-present danger of falling into poverty’.
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The prospect of dropping off the edge had been made worse by a spike in world food prices since 2007. The Arab countries still import up to 80 per cent of their foodstuffs, and so their people are always hit hard.
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The cost of living was also a key factor in the demonstrations that followed in Egypt, while the situation in Syria was made worse by a five-year drought that destroyed local farming.
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In Tunisia the two versions of the Bouazizi myth bridged the class divide and united the people.

In his final photo, taken as a publicity shot during a hospital visit by the now increasingly beleaguered President Ben Ali, Mohamed Bouazizi was propped up in a hospital bed with his entire body swathed in bandages. This was all held together with surgical tape. All that was visible of what was left of his face were his charred lips where a gap had been left in the dressings to put the ventilator into his mouth. Ninety per cent of the surface area of his body had been melted away. He existed like this for three weeks and then he died on 4 January 2011. The old Middle East died with him.