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By Fire
The Spark Tunisia December 2010–January 2011
The Tunisian national anthem by poet Aboul Qacem Echebbi ends with these four lines:
When the people will to live,
Destiny must surely respond.
Oppression shall then vanish.
Fetters are certain to break.
The demonstrators sang this verse, as had their grandparents, during the fight for independence in 1956.
Ben Ali’s regime could be compared to a colonial occupation; that is to say, illegitimate and cruel. He spent more than twenty years assembling networks and structures that rendered the country at his mercy. Using the pretext of protecting the country from the Islamist peril, he allowed himself anything that pleased him, all under the watchful and encouraging eyes of European nations.
Revolutions and resistance often inspire a surge of creativity in poets. After Tunisia embraced new ways of living and working, Egypt followed with a revolt that subverted the idea that the Arab region is cursed and doomed to dictatorship and regression. Some writers devoted their lives to denouncing this curse. Always visionaries, poets foresee what absolutely must change. Dictators would do well to read the poets, whom, in general, they hate. A day always arrives when people’s resistance itself becomes a kind of poem. We saw it in the streets of Tunisia and then in Egypt.
Today, we’re still talking about the collapse of Berlin’s immense wall. Other walls, other taboos, and other oppressions continue crumbling at this moment. Poets were among the first to see what might happen: the Russian Vladimir Mayakovski, the Turk Nazim Hikmet, the Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish, the Iraqi Shakir al-Sayyab, the Egyptian Ahmed Chawki — each in his own way raised his voice during the last century to reveal the intolerable and the vital need for freedom and justice. Yet, no authoritarian regime took seriously what a poet or an artist had to say about society.
Everybody knew what the police were doing in Arab countries; the international media often spoke about the repression whose victims were the common people, the destitute, the forgotten, and all those who suffered from injustice but couldn’t speak for or defend themselves. Many journalists or exiled militants wrote books that denounced dictators, yet these dictators were “acceptable” for Western leaders, who were too tolerant. But isolated voices can never bring down dictators; it took many incidents, clashes with the police, glaring injustices, and intolerable acts for the spark to finally ignite.
This is how people live in developing countries. This is how they die in countries where, in the eyes of the West, stability and security are guaranteed, although the people are denied their freedom and rights.
Everyone supported Ben Ali’s takeover in the late 1980s. They even called it a “medical coup d’état.” On a beautiful morning on November 7, 1987, the person whom Habib Bourguiba had named minister of interior, and then prime minister, entered the palace and forced the sick old man out of his bed and informed him that he was no longer the president. The day before, Ben Ali had assembled seven doctors at the Ministry of Interior and obliged them to sign a certificate attesting to “Bourguiba’s incapacity to govern.” It is said that one of the doctors who didn’t want to sign, as he hadn’t seen Bourguiba for ten years, was ordered by Ben Ali: “Sign. You don’t have a choice.” For some time, Ben Ali had placed his own henchmen in the ministries. He got rid of a great man and shamelessly took his place. Bourguiba, of course, could have decided to leave power on his own if his health condition didn’t allow him to govern anymore. But once one has tasted power, one acts as though infected by a virus. Only Léopold Sédar Senghor, president of Senegal, left office voluntarily, to dedicate his time to writing, poetry, and reading. To say the least, not all heads of nations are poets — far from it!
Let’s now remember Bourguiba’s audacity and sense of modernity. Above all, he negotiated with France for his country’s independence. Straightaway, he led Tunisia on a path to modernity that was rare in the Arab world at that time. He changed the personal status code — Tunisia was the first, and, for a long time, the only Muslim and Arab nation to recognize women’s rights: polygamy was forbidden, divorce was authorized, and abortion legalized (long before France!). It was revolutionary. Bourguiba was the only leader to publicly advocate secularism: on a day during Ramadan in March 1964, he gave a live television presentation during which he drank a glass of orange juice in front of amazed viewers. He justified his gesture by invoking economic reasons. He said he couldn’t tolerate the country’s economy going to sleep for an entire month, because by fasting, workers have neither the strength nor the energy to do their work well. During the decades in which Bourguiba ruled, Tunisians were free to fast or not to fast. Cafés and restaurants remained open. People could eat in peace. No one reproached or bothered those who fasted due to religious convictions.
Bourguiba gave a visionary speech on March 3, 1965, in Jericho, but no one could accept it at that time. He advised Arabs to “normalize their relationship with the state of Israel,” claiming “the politics of everything or nothing brought the Palestinians nothing but defeat.” He antagonized all the Arab heads of state, especially Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, whom he criticized for his fanatical nationalism. The people in Arab countries protested in the streets against the capitulation of a “traitor to the sacred cause of Palestine.” This didn’t dissuade Bourguiba from demanding that the United Nations “create a federation among the Arab states in the region and Israel.”
Two years later, on June 5, 1967, Israel launched a sudden war against Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq. Naqba, meaning catastrophe, is the Arabic name they gave to their defeat. Today, the Palestinians might dream of getting back their territory from before June 1967… but Israel will never give them even a square meter.