THANKS, WIKILEAKS:

Democratic Movements (Steve Coll, January 31, 2011, The New Yorker)

“President of the Country,” a searing Arabic rap song, served as a soundtrack for the revolution. The week before Bouazizi’s death, Hamada Ben Amor, who is twenty-two and goes by the name El Général, used a handheld camera to tape himself singing the song, a baseball cap pulled over his eyes. “Mr. President,” he exclaimed, “your people are dead!” Al Jazeera and various social media picked up the video. The secret police arrested Ben Amor, inflaming his followers, and hastening Ben Ali’s exit.

Since then, diverse protesters have immolated themselves in Egypt, Algeria, and Mauritania. Muammar Qaddafi, in Libya, lamented the role of WikiLeaks, which, he said, “publishes information written by lying ambassadors in order to create chaos.” But the impact of the disclosures is impossible to measure, and unlikely to have been decisive. Tunisians hardly required the U.S. Embassy to inform them that their government was corrupt.

In any event, the Tunisian case is striking less for its origins than for its outcome. It presents a rare triumph of people power in the Arab world. (Lebanon’s anti-Syrian Cedar Revolution, of 2005, is the only comparable example in recent years, and it was incomplete because it could not overcome Hezbollah’s influence in politics.) Of importance now is how Tunisia’s revolution is interpreted and implemented, within the country and outside it. Ben Ali’s fall may prove to be an isolated event—each unhappy country is unhappy in its own way. Still, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Yemen, Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia all contain political and demographic ingredients at least as perilous as those that combusted in Tunisia: youthful populations, high unemployment, grotesque inequality, abusive police, reviled leaders, and authoritarian systems that stifle free expression. There is ample reason for the leaders of those countries to worry.

The ascendant Tunisian opposition may fail. Corruption in the country is systemic, and the revolutionaries lack unifying political principles. The exiled founder of the relatively moderate Islamist party, Al-Nahda, seeks to return, raising anxieties in some quarters. There are, however, encouraging models in the Muslim world that could aid and inspire the country’s forthcoming political experiments: Turkey and Indonesia, for example, are gradually forging stability through peaceful, pluralistic politics that include nonviolent religious parties.