At The Rendez-vous Of Victory: Prosecuting A Gangster,
His Concubine, And Their Regime
By Mustapha Marrouchi
02 February, 2011
Countercurrents.org
In memory of Mohamed Bouazizi
Like everyone else of Tunisian origin and beginnings, someone who has been living in the West for most of his adult life, I watched the fall of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali from a distance. I watched his shadow, a few feet long, jerking like a spider’s over a glowing thorn scrub. I felt happiest that day. The timid glare of noon in Pau (France), where I happened to be at the time, had gone but the event-al day (January 14) was not yet over, even though it was night time. Staring at that shadow image of a broken man in isolation, I said “good riddance” to a potentate and an era full of shame and mortification; shame at not being able to say what one felt or thought for a long time about the country I have always called “home,” even if the very idea of home has become fragmented, multiple, messy. I consider myself lucky in that I had avoided the tentacles of the octopus by walking like a crab, sideways.[1] Still, there were times when I experienced a fragile coincidence of mind about my country, its hopes and impediments, which made me aware of a certain horrid reality. I would look at a hill where I used to camp in my youth, accompanied by my father, who died and is buried there; a meadow where my footsteps left rootprints in the land of my ancestors, the Berbers, stretching back to Hannibal and Carthage. I was conscious of the breadth of the sheltering sky, the angle of the ridges falling away. I would gaze at the geometry of the desert thorns curling in on themselves like wicker balls, or the traces of footsteps of an old Berber woman crossing the fields carrying a load of something on her back. I always made sure I was inaccessible and alone, for inaccessibility and solitude were my delight in a country where neighbors informed on neighbors and so-called friends on friends as people did in the former USSR. There, in Tunisia, every summer when I migrated south for a short holiday in the High Atlas, I would face questions that other decent Tunisians, who never left Tunisia, refined and expressed to me. I would attempt an answer to each one. Still, I experienced a kind of “negative capability”—a helplessness of sorts at striking a fine balance. The questions varied, but all of them dealt with oppression.. A sample: What does America think of the Ben Ali regime? Do Americans know about him and his coterie? How long will he hold on as president? What about his wife, Leila, a mangeuse d’hommes of sorts? Spending a lot of time on my own in the countryside, I was unsettled by the consistency of the questions. As a stranger twice displaced, the Adam of two Edens, confronting the harsh reality every evening, I knew that the only way to compensate for the narratives that other fellow Tunisians created for me was to re-invent my own some day. Today, that narrative is in the open..
Ben Ali and his concubine, Leila Trabelsi, an “ex-coiffeuse de talent,” and indeed their ring numbering about a hundred thieves left Tunisia after nearly a month of rioting, followed by the massacre of innocent people, whose sole reason for being was to live peacefully and with dignity in a free society. Ben Ali and his ring of pimps, clients, and courtisanes neither laughed nor jeered as they suppressed freedom and maligned their fellow citizens for years. The “BenAvie” era, as the dissident writer and outspoken journalist, the untamed intellectual in opposition, Taoufik Ben Brik, who was not only degraded and imprisoned but also beaten and tortured by hyenas and scavengers, aptly called it, came suddenly to a pathetic end after nearly a quarter of a century of ruthless oppression marred by injustice, nepotism, and corruption. It is said that the debauched general’s wealth is valued at $5 billion to-date. Add to that a ton and a half of pure gold his femme fatale stole from the central bank under orders from her husband on January 13, 2010 before she fled the country for Dubai, and whatever Tunisia is losing in trade and tourism on a daily basis since the uprising began, probably many more billions of dollars.
Ben Ali ran away on January 14 at night. What a coward! A general who slips away like a dog that slips out its collar is quite telling about the man and the stuff he is made of. Say what you will about Saddam Hussein, at least he refused to leave Iraq, remained there, and faced the storm up to the very end. Unlike Saddam, however, Ben Ali may be said to resemble a fat chicken. If that is the case, and I am sure it is, then Leila is the rooster. When the rooster left the country, the chicken had no choice but to follow. After much deliberation and aimlessness, his private jet headed for that medieval fiefdom called Saudi Arabia, a society in disarray, ruled by a dumb and filthy-rich theocracy. That he despised Islam did not matter by one iota. The Saudi kingdom may be less festive than the beaches of Carthage, but at least it offers the immense advantage of being a place where he and his retinue can avoid prosecution. Moreover, it has no extradition policy. I am glad that an international warrant for his arrest has been issued. One thing is certain today: Ben Ali can no longer lecture his fellow men and women about the motherland he pillaged and abused while branding anyone who criticized him “unpatriotic,” as if only he had the monopoly on how to love Tunisia, a country and a people that got the better of him in then end.
It is no exaggeration to say that Ben Ali was the most heinous, most odious, and indeed most repugnant ruler the Arab world had ever knew. At times he looked like a pimp. At other times, he resembled Pablo Emilio Escobar, former Napoleon of Medellín, the Colombian drug lord who was killed in 1993, the menacing and dangerous. Ben Ali was more than just a dreadful bogeyman, an untrustworthy presence that bred unbearable terror in the country. There were rumors that his “spirit” walked at night, haunting Tunisia, climbing into the bedrooms of double-locked bungalows—a kind of Djinn sucking the blood of young beautiful brunettes late into the night. During his tenure, he ruled with an iron fist and with tantrums too, conducting a policy of horrorism thanks to the generous help of his mignons, who tortured, confiscated, imprisoned, and at times, simply killed many fellow Tunisians. All this was done with the complicity of a morally defunct West—France and Italy in particular—that in the end dropped him faster than a burning coal. Paris stood by the Ben Ali regime to the very end—the quintessence of corruption, murder, and coercion. The Italian government, led by another gangster—namely, Silvio Berlusconi, went so far as to award him an honorary doctorate when he visited Naples in 2002. At 74, Berlusconi, like Ben Ali, looks like a straw dog seeking a place to hide. The greater contradiction, however, is the notion that it is fine to preach the universality of the declaration of human rights at the UN and at home while venturing to “give a hand” to Ben Ali to quell the uprising in Tunisia. The French reaction led by the frigid grasshopper, Michèle “Tarnac” Alliot-Marie, who benefitted from his largesse, comes to mind.[2] The sheer absurdity of it all should have unveiled long ago the real intentions of the West—belligerent, corrupt, and above all, condescending not only toward Tunisia but also the rest of the developing planet.
Ben Ali was, of course, more self-indulgent than the average dictator in the Arab world, and certainly had more fun than any one of them, but unlike them he spent much time pruning his image as a governor who cared for his country on the outside, while savaging it on the inside. He did it quietly. When the US government instructed him to bow to Israel, a Zionist State that bombed his own country in 1986, he did not object. In fact, he went farther afield and invited the war criminal and bloody butcher Ariel Sharon to visit Tunisia. For Ben Ali, every trade was licit as long as it brought money to his entourage, led by his femme vitale—an ugly piece of rubber, an accomplished thief, a dame devoid of all humane feelings, a piece of shit, really; a mixture of Imelda Marcus and Elena Ceausescu. It was reported that a gold-framed portrait of this virgin ironpants hung over the bed where her pimp slept for the last time before he fled the country. It is also said that he was devoted to his family in the properly unconditional Arabian fashion. Whether his concern for his children, or better, monsters, who pillaged the wealth of the nation in all sorts of manners, would overcome his sheer greed is not clear. What is certain, however, is that his beloved wife, that is to say Fair Leila, had plans, sophisticated plans, to extend her rule over Tunisia once he became incapacitated. She was determined to orchestrate another medical coup d’état. Remember that Ben Ali was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2000. She would have done it, had it not been for the will of a certain Mohamed Bouazizi, an anti-hero in the Nietzschean sense of the word, a graduate who challenged and radically changed the status quo like no other in a land as old as Carthage. After all, Leila was always able to bewitch Zine as she had done when she was his mistress. Today they are despised, pursued, and rightly hunted by what might be called poetic justice and history, and until they are arrested and tried in a court of law Tunisia and its Jasmine Revolution are not safe.[3] This much we know. That they treated their fellow Tunisians like indentured laborers rather than creative contributors to the prosperity of the country became clear when they fled Tunisia for Saudi Arabia where they may be welcome, but not for long. Usually, that wretched kingdom does not like to be in the spot light. In fact, Zine and Leila may be able to live anywhere on the planet, except perhaps in Tunisia where the revolution has taken root. After all, there are first-class plastic surgeons, who will produce better new faces, and officials who will sell genuine identity cards and passports to fit them—Saudi Arabia being one of them, Libya another. But neither he nor she will abandon their circle of close friends because they rely on a network of gunslingers, useful idiots, publicists, money-men, and vigilante criminals to make their world. (Think of ugly Muammar Gaddafi who keeps threatening the people of Tunisia and their revolution as if he owned the country).
So much for Ben Ali the fortress against Islamism, an honor bestowed upon him by a West bankrupt of all merciful feelings, a West that coddled, cajoled, and babied him for nearly a quarter of a century, a West that thinks Arabs understand only the language of force, and therefore deserve to be ruled by an impotent potentate. During the revolution, it came as a shock to hear the C-grade Raïs, that is to say Ben Ali, speak of the decent demonstrators who began the uprising as “terrorists” when, in point of fact, the one terrorist and thief to boot is Ben Ali himself. He stole the presidency from the enlightened and brilliant Habib Bourguiba when he deposed him in 1987. He appropriated without right and with intent the wealth of the nation while taking away by force and unjust means our liberty, he also surreptitiously annexed our pride. It took the most elaborate, spontaneous, and costly revolt in modern Tunisian history to rid Tunisia of the scourge that came to be known as “BenAvie.” It would have been delicious if he had been lynched on the spot, but that did not happen. That would have been too easy. The frozen moment of his escape in the middle of the night has now become a commonplace for all to see: He is homeless, humiliated, and despised today is a joy, bliss, a delight of the first order.
As I said, money played a crucial role in the life of Zine and his schätzchen. Both came from destitute backgrounds. And so money was enough to provide for everything including murder, whether it was hashish, vanilla or brown sugar; but there is much more to them than just money. The entertainment organized around the presidential couple ranged all the way from the upper reaches of folklore to experiments in ugly Postmodernism: Ferraris, Porsches, Bentleys, yachts, freshly-baked brioches, croissant, pains au chocolat not to mention foie gras, caviar, truffles, and Champagne diligently wrapped in golden boxes in Paris and flown to Tunis in private jets. All the orgies took place in Leila’s several residences—well kept thanks to an army of servants, maids, chauffeurs, cleaners, and other unlettered, poor, decent people—which, along with the several RCD institutions,[4] included the university, the chamber of commerce, and the central bank. They served as venues for a great many Basma and so-called 26/26 humanitarian associations large and small, not to help the poor but to tax them even further. Many rulers elsewhere in the world envied Mr. President and the First Lady, who led a carefree life in a Tunisia, where il fait bon vivre for the rich like them but not for the harragas who risk their lives to cross the sea for a better life, many of whom do not make it to Italy and instead end being devoured by sharks or vultures.
Remember that we, Third-World people, are good at blindly mimicking the “White Man.” A case in point: We stop wearing our local colors on our sleeves and adopt yellow instead because America says so. Our cabs are as yellow as the ones you find in New York City. And if America calls the wife of the president the First Lady we must also call ours the First Lady. A Brit or German or French would never do the same, would they! That Leila was called “First Lady” is a misfortune in that there is hardly anything first or worthy about her. If this sounds too extreme, you ought to read V.S. Naipaul and his concept of “half-made men/women,” and the case will be clear enough. As he eloquently put it, the words “garden,” “parliament,” democracy,” “citizen,” “election” do not have the same ring in London or Paris as they do in Algiers or Lagos. Let’s hope that Tunisia is about to prove him wrong. It has the potential to do it.
It is a fact that Ben Ali was a first-class thug is not new. In less than a decade at the helm he became the richest, most powerful criminal in Tunisian history is not a surprise in a land where he became a cult figure. After all, he was lionized by those around him, and he took full advantage of the situation. A sinister man, he never should have acceded to high office in the first place. It really was the fault of Habib Bourguiba, who created a political vacuum around himself instead of following the example of one of his peers—namely, Léopold Sédar Senghor of Sénégal, who left the presidency after two terms in office. That Ben Ali was incompetent and corrupt mattered little to the people he ruled with an iron fist as long as he kept them safe from Islamism, which tore neighboring Algeria apart. In the end he used and abused a country where people are competent, educated, kind, generous, and pleasant is true. How did he do it is a question in time answered. As for corruption, his entourage, made of the Kallals, the Ghannouchis, the Rouissis, the Chiboubs, the Seriaties, is more often venal than not, if only because the oligopolistic wheeling and dealing trade could afford much higher bribery overheads than legitimate business. But in focusing on the vices in all that concerns the little res publica, we may miss the local res private virtues, ranging from the family lives suffused with love, which raise the income/happiness ratio quite a bit, to a macho courage that also emboldens the imagination. We may therefore entirely miss the point about Leila and her Majnūn, reporting a great many facts in detail but always from the viewpoint of the operatives. Take the salaried mediocrities who prudishly approved of his sexual appetites while envying his ability to satisfy them at will, or those half-made ministers who in private ridiculed him as a fatso, but did not dare do it in the open. They also failed to comprehend the whims of an old patriarch who took time off from running the affairs of the state to play with his son while his concubine lectured them as if they were her pupils. In the end the patchwork of Ben Ali/Trabelsi perversity brought us round to see many versions of the inevitable luxurious palaces which transcended the usual white marble columns and such with their multiple artificial lakes, petting zoos with lions and tigers, elephants and hippos, and the equally unimaginative entertainments for many guests, who included the Strauss-Kahns, the Sarkozies, the Mitterands, the Séguins, the Cardinales, the Raffarins, to name but a few—bona fide beauty queens racing naked for a prize Ferrari. One should have never underestimated the greed of a bunch of ignorant gangsters parading as gentry cradling endangered shares. The crocodiles would gather for asparagus feasts until dawn while the people in the streets of Tunis froze to death is an insult to the whole nation and indeed to the world we all live in and are supposed to share together.
In the upshot, Tunisians may wish to avoid what is necessary. We (all the people) may believe that concerns about presidential lawbreaking are naïve. After all, many presidents commit crimes is a naked fact, after all. We may pretend that Ben Ali and his concubine and indeed senior officers could not have committed crimes significantly worse than those of their predecessors. We may fear what it would mean to acknowledge such crimes, much less to punish them. But avoiding this task, simply “moving on,” is not possible. The Ben Ali/Trabesli gang did more than commit heinous crimes. It waged war against the law itself. It transformed the state apparatus into a vehicle for vampirism, and it also summarily dismissed anyone who attempted to investigate its wrongdoings. It issued juicy contracts to substandard vendors and companies with inside connections, and it also imposed tariffs on everything that could be sold and/or bought inside as well as outside the country so that it could roll in money. It taxed the poor to the bone. It spied on innocent people and political protestors; it introduced sweeping surveillance programs so clearly and cruelly illegal that virtually the entire echelon of the nation was under the radar. It waged an illegal and disastrous social plan by falsely representing to a blinded West nearly every fabricated piece of all deals made by the regime. And through it all, as if to underscore its contempt for any authority but its own, the gang issued more than a hundred thousand carefully crafted statements that raised pervasive doubt about whether the monster-like president would even accede to bills that he himself had signed into law—bills concerning prime land, real estate, trade, and even education. The École Internationale de Carthage, another baby spawned by Leila, who made sure no other school competed with her own, including the landmark, Lycée Carnot, is one example among many.
The Ben Ali/Trabelsi cabal has been compared to the Ceausescu circle insofar as no prior administration had been so systematically and so brazenly lawless. Yet it is no simple matter to prosecute a former dictator or his senior officers. There is no precedent for such a prosecution, at least in the Arab world, except the one dealt Saddam Hussein. And even if there was, the very breadth and audacity of the newly-formed government would make the process so complex as to defy systems of justice far less fragmented than anyone found in the Third World, but that only means that choices must be made. The revolution and future of the country is at stake. Indeed, in weighing the enormity of the clan’s abuse against the realistic prospect of justice, it is possible to determine not only the crime(s) that calls most clearly for prosecution but also the crime that is most likely to be successfully prosecuted. In both cases, that crime is ransacking the wealth of the country and depriving the people (the poor in particular) of their dignity. Even so, we ought to be careful as we look ahead. We fear that the criminal prosecution of all RCD members would wreck the fragile political consensus that is being used to stabilize the country and establish peace and a legitimate democracy. We should set up a fair-minded commission of inquiry that will allow us to move toward accountability in a steady but careful way. We may strike a bargain under which the truth about past misconduct is divulged in exchange for a pardon, on the premise that establishing a record of historical truth is more important to democracy and to the next generation than punishing individual malefactors—the Ben Ali/Trabelsi camp excluded. We could also form a commission whose intention, indeed method and fact-finding process, gradually build a public consensus that prosecutorial action is needed. We may proceed the way things were done in South Africa, Chile, and Argentina, where the commission process served one function especially well: The public was educated about the abject practices of the prior regime, and demands for a clear separation from these practices—often including the rehabilitation of victims and the punishment of perpetrators—changed the landscape of public opinion. Given the political situation in Tunisia today, it seems clear that the last option is the most suitable. As to the question: From what source would the commission draw its authority? The most obvious place would be the new executive branch itself (I mean the one that will be elected by the people in six months) and a mixed segment of the population: A university professor, a shop keeper, a cab driver, a medical doctor, a mother, a journalist, an actress, a farmer, a peasant, a helper . . . . If this were to succeed, justice would prevail. In the process, we must not forget that it is a general principle of strategy that even effective tactical conduct will turn out to be counter-productive if the ultimate goal is mistaken.
Writing about the country where I was born, grew up, and went to school up to the age of 18, makes me feel apprehensive about its aspirations and stumbling blocks. I have Tunisia, its fauna, flora, sweat, laughter, and tears in my blood and soul. What a joy to see it as an event-al site of resistance in the Alain Badiou sense of the formula. Such an event reminds one of Yeats’s narrator who languishes to pull the trigger and set his energy free. I hope Tunisia will do the same in the days and weeks to come. There is no point going back to the past now that we have achieved a relatively bloodless revolution, even if the unfortunate few who died to free it from oppression paid a high price. For now though, the question to be raised is: Did they really die? The answer is a flat no, to the extent that they do live and will always live in our memory, they breathe, hope, dream, laugh, cry in us, and we must carry on with their desires. Never again will we allow ourselves to be fooled, manipulated, oppressed or excluded from the political process. It is an irony that in writing this piece I find myself not in the US, where I teach and live but in France, where I went to university and where my father, among many others from The Maghreb, fought the Germans to liberate this country. I am glad to say that my being here and now, at this critical juncture in history, has enabled me to follow the events more closely. I would like to think that Tunisia is about to take off, to look to the future, to a new dawn, to a new way of seeing and/or telling. It is with emotion that I write about the affective aspect of this very consciousness, a kind of psychic and physical reaction (both of anger/fear and joy/elation), subjectively experienced as strong feeling and physiologically involving changes that prepare both my little big country and all those who fought for its freedom for immediate, vigorous action. That is my prayer for my homeland, a country where most people are poor but jolly, joyous, and jovial; full of high spirits and given to conviviality; a people who inspire gaiety; in fine, cheerful and extremely pleasant, agreeable and splendid and merry folks.
Still, all this and much more is marred by an irony that leaves a bitter-sweet taste in the mouth. It is no joke. The Jasmine Revolution, as it has been dubbed, must be watchful of any intruders who want to highjack it for personal gain, those who see themselves as the legitimate inheritors of the old regime. We must be aware of their intentions. After all, every sensible person who has followed the events of the uprising knows that the machination of a counter-revolution, what Michel Foucault referred to as the “micro-physics of power,” may already be at work to destabilize “la révolution citoyenne” in which the people are claiming their right to exercise their duty to vote for our next president. Beware Tunisia! The other let down can be found in the French attitude toward Tunisia and its revolution: Paternal, racist, ethnocentric, ugly, xenophobic, and aberrant. Many people in France and elsewhere in the West think only they are capable of having a revolution. What matters in France today, a country in sharp decline, a society sandwiched between an incredible Germany and a powerful Anglo-Saxon world led by the US, a country where what Roland Barthes termed “le français moyen” is still bigoted, simple-minded, closed-in, and provincial, is not the success of the revolution in Tunisia, an ex-colony, but how are we (Westerners) to deal with Islamism were it to raise its ugly head again as it did in Algeria in the 1990s. How can we build a wall to stop it? Note how the Arab can only be fanatic, terrorist, and bloodthirsty. From a Western perspective, he or she is able to be revolutionary, constructive, secular, and peaceful goes against the very grain of his or her making).
Here, one can only feel disgust at the perversity of the French ruling elite and the so-called intelligentsia, who have not uttered a peep about the revolution, except for the brilliant and daring Sophie Bessis and Jean-François Kahn, who speak and write back with a vengeance about Tunisia and its future. Others like the Franco-Tunisian, quasi-intellectual, Abdelwahab Meddeb, are more interested in self-fashioning than in the revolution, they keep blabbering about Islam and/or Islamism as a sick patient badly in need of intensive care. Meddeb has been preaching the same line for a long time to the delight of a Zionist lobby and paranoid West, who think rather highly of him. No wonder that monsieur “le poète et écrivain,” as he calls himself, is held in high esteem in Israel and elsewhere. That he was part of the delegation led by Jean-Pierre Raffarin that was highly entertained by Ben Ali and his suite in Tunisia during their visit there in 2005 matters little in these trying times.. Call it the pleasures of intellectual safety! Today he is elevated to hold the envious post of the mouthpiece of the Jasmine Revolution in French periodicals like Marianne, Le Monde, and Le Nouvel Observateur—an attitude that reeks of intellectual poverty.[5] Inevitably, his fame is on the rise. After all, he panders to the basest Western emotions. This would have been an impressive leap for the nascent revolutionary had it not been for one tiny shortcoming—namely, from his fortress in Paris where he continues to follow the events with sang froid, a certain denial followed by hypocrisy about wanting to be part of the melée. In the meantime, he is at liberty to spew all sorts of theories, including the lumpy, semi-dorky, slouchy, smarmy fantasies of ways of knowing about Islam, The Maghreb, the Arab world, Islamism, which are extended into a space that is not his own in the first place. The simple, personal meaning of the revolution led by the wretched of Tunisia, if not the precise conviction that says one must be candid about what one can and cannot say about an extraordinary event that achieved in a few days (the Fall of Ben Ali) what took the French three years—notably, the Fall of the Bastille, still evades Meddeb, who was incommunicado in Egypt working on a new book while Tunisia was burning. Another Flaubert in the making! He, one imagines, would not in the least appreciate being mentioned in the same breath as those postmodern savages, who rose against oppression to claim their freedom, even though his new book, one hopes, will be more about the Rest than the West, where he lives in the relative safety and comfort of postmodernity.
In the meantime, mediocre French intellectuals (like him) continue to sermonize the rest of the world about Islam and Islamism while refusing to consider instead their cowardly engagement, ambiguous detachment, impotence, denegation, and fucked-up egos. This they do from their perched offices in Paris, Lyon, and Marseille, alone with their compulsively agitated pinot noir, fromage, and petits fours, forgetting along the way that the world has changed, that they can no longer moralize the planet they once ruled, that their ship is sinking with no sign of help in sight. Think of their debt, which currently is valued at about $35,000 per person. Dripping with froideur toward not only Tunisia but also Algeria and Morocco, France continues to be blinded by its own insight, if it ever had one in the first place. Its vanity promo, unaccountably offered to the world, sold itself to the ultimate political voice of the era, that of its president, the oracle of tie-straightening and pantomimed insincerity. And how fascinating it is, after the fastidious shilly-shallying and eyebrow lifting, the heart-rending sighs over the shortcomings of the entire political and intellectual circle to be granted a snapshot of the ex-colony behind the empire, La Fouance’s short-pants induction into Tunisian political life, Virgin on a bicycle! As for Tunisia, we all know that the march is bound to be bumpy, that it will take a while to see clearly into the future, that in the end, it will tell us, by some other way of telling, that
no race holds the monopoly of beauty, of intelligence, of strength
and there is room for all at the rendez-vous of victory and we
know that the sun turns around our land shining over the plot
chosen by our will alone and that every star falls from the sky
at our limitless command.[6]
Our will alone, indeed! For The Jasmine Revolution is home-made; it is local and global, worldly and exquisite, seductive and sensuous; is fine, good, real guud!
[1] I dealt with the hazards of intellectual daring in my book, Edward Said at the Limits (New York: SUNY Press, 2004):219-44; “The Intellectual without Mandate,” The Journal of African Philosophy (March 2000): 5-25; “Maasat al-muthaqaf fi al-alam athalith: al-adib al-azil fi muwajihit a-sulta al-ghashima,” Akhbar al-Adab (Cairo, Egypt) April 13, 1995: 24-25.
[2] Free Holidays in five star-hotels in Djerba, la douce, travels with her Romeo in private jets, state of the art culinary practices, not to mention the red carpet during her numerous visits to Tunisia.
[3] Jasmine flowers are indeed fickle and ephemeral, but they have another quality: they are poisonous. A lot has been said about their fragility, but they have this quality that few people seem to know.
[4] The RCD stands for Rassemblement Constitutionel Démocratique, the party that Ben Ali created after he toppled Habib Bourguiba in 1987. In its heyday, the party had more than 1,5 million members.
[5] I would like to draw attention here to “Un printemps en hiver,” Le Monde Dimanche—Lundi 24 Janvier 2011: 28, written by Tahar Ben Jelloun, in which he praises the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia and points to the corruption and injustice in Libya and Egypt, but says nothing at all about Morocco, his country of birth where poverty and the class system are more obvious than in any other Arab country. Play it safe, Tahar, play it safe! A counter-narrative to Ben Jelloun’s essay is Boualem Sansal’s “Que se passe-t-il au sud de la Méditerranée?” Le Point 20 Janvier 2011: 78. The essay tells of the shame that has taken hold of so many French intellectuals vis-à-vis The Maghreb and its woes. It expresses a deep anxiety about what Michel aptly called aptly “le non-dit” à propos of The Maghreb and its relation to France.
[6] Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, (Paris: Pésence Africaine, 2001): 45.
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