Analysis: For Arab leaders, a lesson in Tunisia

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Hours after President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled Tunisia on Friday, a Lebanese broadcaster, in triumphant tones, ended her report on the first instance of an Arab leader to be overthrown in popular protests by quoting a famous Tunisian poet.

"And the people wanted life," she said, "and the chains were broken."

The day's seismic events in Tunisia, the broadcaster, Abeer Madi al-Halabi, went on, would serve as "a lesson for countries where presidents and kings have rusted on their thrones."

Tunisia's uprising electrified the region. The most enthusiastic suggested it was the Arab world's Gdansk, the birthplace of Solidarity in Poland that heralded the end to Communist rule in Eastern Europe. That seemed premature, particularly since the contours of the government emerging in Tunisia remained unclear — and because Tunisia is on the periphery of the Arab world, with a relatively affluent and educated population.

Yet the street protests erupted when Arabs seemed more frustrated than ever, whether over rising prices and joblessness or resentment of their leaders' support for American policies or ambivalence about Israeli campaigns in Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza in 2009.

Tunisia's protests were portrayed as a popular uprising, crossing lines of religion and ideology, offering a new model of dissent in a region where Islamic activists have long been seen as monopolizing opposition. Even if they serve only as inspiration, the protests offer a rare example of success to activists stymied at almost every turn in bringing about change in their own countries.

"A salute to Tunis, which has opened the road to freedom in an Arab world devastated by years of waiting on the curb," said Burhan Ghalioun, a political-science professor at the Sorbonne in Paris.

The spectacle of crowds surging into the streets and overwhelming decades of accumulated power in the hands of a highly centralized, U.S.-backed government, seemed an antidote to the despair of past years: carnage in Iraq, divisions among Palestinians and the yawning divide between ruler and ruled on almost every question of foreign policy.

The protests' success gripped a region whose residents have increasingly complained of governments that seem incapable of meeting their demands and are bereft of any ideology except perpetuating power.

The combustible mix that inspired them — economic woes and revulsion at corruption and repression — seemed to echo in so many other countries in the Middle East, U.S. allies like Egypt foremost among them.

Al-Jazeera headlined its broadcasts: "Tunisia ... the street creates change."

Mohammed al-Maskati, a blogger in Bahrain, put it more bluntly on Twitter. "It actually happened in my lifetime!" he wrote. "An Arab nation woke up and said enough."

Through the eight years of the Bush administration, democratization was at least a rhetorical priority of U.S. policy in the Middle East, even as the United States maintained its support for Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other authoritarian governments in the region.

On Thursday, as the protests in Tunisia were escalating, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton issued a scathing critique of Arab leadership and the region's political and economic stagnation. Her comments seemed one attempt to reposition the United States, which had backed Tunisia's dictatorial leader as a partner against terrorism.

In the end, the most dramatic change in the old Arab order in years was inspired by Mohamed Bouazizi, 26, the university graduate who could find work only as a fruit and vegetable vendor. He set himself on fire in a city square in December when the police seized his cart.

A Facebook page hailed him as "the symbol of the Tunisian revolution." "God have mercy on you, Tunisia's martyr, and on the all free martyrs of Tunisia," it read. "One candle burns to create light and one candle beats all oppression."

Tunisians' grievances were as specific as universal: rising food prices, corruption, unemployment and the repression of a state that viewed almost all dissent as subversion.

Smaller protests, many over rising prices, have already taken place in countries such as Morocco, Egypt, Algeria and Jordan. Egypt, in particular, seems to bear at least a passing resemblance to Tunisia: a heavy-handed security state with diminishing popular support and demands from an educated, yet frustrated, population.

"It's the creeping realization that more and more people are being marginalized and pauperized and that, increasingly, life is more difficult," said Rami Khouri, director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut. "You need little events that capture the spirit of the time. Tunisia best captures that in the Arab world."