LETTER FROM EUROPE

LETTER FROM EUROPE

Rule No.1 for Dictators: Don't Blink

By ALAN COWELL Published: January 22, 2011


PARIS - If they want to survive, dictators don't blink. If they seem vulnerable, they are lost. In unforgiving times, when international courts seek to bring miscreant leaders to justice, simply walking away is not an option.In 1989, Nicolae Ceaucescu of Romania took a startled step backward in the face of a hostile crowd. The iron grip that had kept him in absolute power for 24 years dissolved. Within days, he and his once-powerful wife, Elena, were dead, summarily executed by soldiers whose loyalty had simply evaporated.This month, in Tunisia, President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali suffered a less terminal but comparable fate. Confronting protests and demonstrations, and with at least 78 people killed on the streets, he first offered to leave office in 2014 - a symbolic step backwards - then fled, his 23-year rule brought to an astonishingly rapid end. He had not wanted to go, the Arabic news channel Al Arabiya reported, but the head of his security detail told him the presidential palace in Tunis was about to be stormed by the hostile masses. If a contrast were needed, consider Ivory Coast, where President Laurent Gbagbo, backed by his military, has utterly refused to leave office despite an election awarded to his opponents. He did not blink.In the welter of coverage and the tumult on the streets following Mr. Ben Ali's departure, many analysts have ruminated on where the next domino might tumble among the autocratic, embedded elites of the Middle East; where the deadly cocktail of discontent, deprivation and access to the digital-era weapons of protest and communication might once again coalesce again in this forlorn region."The Arab soul," said Amr Moussa, the secretary general of the Arab League, "is broken by poverty and unemployment."



 But, as Mr. Ben Ali's flight into exile in Saudi Arabia showed, revolutions are not only the consequence of the protesters' resolve, or of their access to the stirring imagery of Al Jazeera television, or calls to arms on Twitter or Facebook. They are a question, too, of a regime's readiness and ability to push back, to meet opponents with resistance, maneuver and firepower.Just along the coast from Tunisia, the Libyan strongman, Muammar el-Qaddafi, said he was "very pained" by the ouster of his neighbor. Many regimes in the region held their silence but pursued cautious steps to ease economic strains for their restive people. Perhaps the most telling and - on the face of it, baffling - reaction came from Tehran, where 228 of the 290 members of the Iranian Parliament offered strong support to "the revolutionary movement of the brave Tunisian people."That might have given some observers pause. In the decades since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Iran has hardly seemed an exemplar of regime change. After the disputed 2009 presidential elections, when protesters took to the streets in much larger numbers than those in Tunis, insisting that the vote had been stolen, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad offered what seemed a textbook model of determination not to blink. Security forces flooded the streets; comprehensive measures to stifle, punish and undercut dissent, from censorship to show trials, reinforced physical repression.It was taken as an indication of Tehran's self-confidence in recent weeks that, while turmoil in Tunisia inspired several regional governments to lower food and other prices, Iran proceeded with a broad array of measures to cut subsidies on fuel and essential goods. While there have been fissures within the elite of the Islamic Revolution, there never seemed to be any question - at least not one acknowledged in public - of wavering in the face of revolt.




 Of course, there are many differences, perhaps most significantly in the loyalty and firepower of the Iranian security forces compared to Tunisia's much smaller army. And there were many other lessons from Tunisia's rapid change, perhaps most notably relating to the role - or lack of it - played by such key outsiders as France, the former colonial ruler, or the United States. Both had seen Mr. Ben Ali's regime as a bulwark against Islamic militancy, and that evoked old memories.In the long years of the Cold War, the West routinely buttressed unsavory regimes from Africa to Asia in its ideological contest with the Soviet Union. Now, Islamic terrorism has supplanted Communism as the global adversary.In Tunisia, diplomatic cables released by the WikiLeaks anti-secrecy organization revealed that, much as American diplomats were aware of the self-enrichment of the country's first family, and the resentment it inspired among the populace, they also cherished Mr. Ben Ali's resolve to suppress Islamic dissent in the name of confronting terrorism.Now, though, in the clamor for new elections in Tunisia, Islamic leaders, once banned, are talking of returning from exile. The country's political direction is up for grabs - perhaps giving pause to Western geopolitical players as they look to the autocratic giants the Arab world, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, to react kindly to their regional ambitions. As the conflict in Iraq showed, the abrupt unraveling of dictatorships unleashes forces that cannot be predicted.In the end, iron rule comes down to power and guile, to the ability to install a protective coterie of loyalists and outwit nascent opposition. In the struggle against democracy, fear works best in tandem with co-option.




 As Rami G. Khouri, a prominent writer and commentator in Beirut put it, "Tunisia exposed exactly how thin was the police-based rule of the Ben Ali regime, which crumbled rapidly when it met sustained domestic resistance. "Some other Arab leaders, whether monarchs or lifelong presidents or something in between, would not flee the country so quickly, but instead would put up a fight to stay in power, partly because they have stronger organic links to major constituencies in society that Ben Ali did not." Contemplating the fragile crust of the southern Mediterranean, Ian O. Lesser of the German Marshall Fund wrote: "A new revolt in Algeria, should it come, holds the potential for another protracted and bloody conflict between extremists and a military-backed state." In Libya, too, "the prospects for relatively nonviolent change are not good."For the powerful, this is not the time to blink at all.