Tunisia’s president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali abandoned his post on Friday after 23 years, and has reportedly landed in Saudi Arabia. To retire from the position of president-for-life is an exceedingly rare move for an Arab regime chief. Indeed, no modern Arab ruler before Ben Ali has ever willingly stepped aside. Most transfers of power in the region are either through inheritance or coup, bloodless or otherwise.
Ben Ali’s accession to the presidency was a relatively peaceful affair, when he replaced Habib Borguiba whom Ben Ali, then the prime minister, deemed no longer capable of ruling. Borguiba is regarded as the father of modern, and secular, Tunisia—he’s the Tunisian Ataturk. The paradox is that the reforms that led to Tunis’s pro-Western orientation were earned through oppressive and extreme—i.e., non-democratic, non-Western—measures at the hands of the country’s security services. If in the past these intelligence agencies had done the lion’s share of their work behind closed doors (most likely torturing the Islamist opposition since the fundamentalists are always those most likely to oppose Westernizing reforms and challenge any Muslim regime’s political legitimacy), they’ve spent the last few weeks in the open daylight cracking open the skulls of protestors in the streets. Pictures and videos taken from the emergency rooms holding wounded and murdered demonstrators have been circulating the last few days, which likely helped turn the international consensus against the Tunis government and hastened Ben Ali’s downward spiral. The question is, did Washington play any role in toppling an Arab strongman?
