“The number one priority is the prevention of Islamic extremism and the embryos of terrorism.” This is what Italy’s Foreign Minister Franco Frattini has been repeating for weeks, ever since the winds of democracy started to blow through the Arab world from the streets of Tunisia. This statement seems copied from the official speeches made by Arab dictators who for years have blackmailed everyone using bearded extremists as scarecrows ready to transform themselves into terrorists. It is no novelty therefore that Colonel Gaddafi has blamed protests in his country on Bin Laden in person.
Nowadays, luckily, people are more aware and attentive, and do not easily fall into the trap of fear. As my friend the author Kamel Riahi writes, “Young people in Tunis yearn for freedom and certainly do not wish to hand it over to extremists. Look at the photographs of the protests. There are no images of Che Guevara or Mao Tse-Tung, none of Gandhi or Khomeini. They took to the streets to demand a secular state based on tolerance, legality and freedom.” The reality shown in these past weeks is that the apolitical and a-denominational discontent of young Tunisians has revealed the gap separating them for the generation of 40-year-olds who were mesmerized by the Islamist political discourse. The largest Tunisian Islamist party, Al-Nahdha, whose leader Rached Ghannoushi is now about 70, experienced extremely harsh repression, after which, not only did it vanish from the Tunisian political-cultural scenario, but also lost its youth base.
The generation gap has also been observed among intellectuals, with most of them over the years attracted by flattery or threats to side with Ben Ali, singing his praises on every occasion and signing a document supporting his candidature in the last presidential elections. Unlike these personalities from the regime’s world of culture and entertainment, also of a certain age, who kept a low or non-existent profile throughout the uprising, young artists and intellectuals made their voiced heard clearly, as in the case of the rapper “El General”, the author of a song entitled “Ya rayyes el Bled” (Commander of the Country), who was arrested immediately after posting the video online.
The symbols chosen by the young people in the streets are now others, such as Mohammed Bouazizi, the young Tunisian fruit-seller, an unemployed university graduate who set fire to himself in public to protests against injustice, preceded in Egypt by Khaled Said, a boy who died due to the beatings inflicted on him at a police station in Alexandria on June 12th, 2010. In both cases accusations fell on the brutality of a regime where the police has been trained for decades not to respect even the most elementary rights of citizens. The symbolic prestige that in the past was available to regimes capable of appearing in the elegant drawing-rooms of international diplomacy has no value for the people, especially for the young, and especially when those appearing were the same people who led the country to the social collapse. The “either me or chaos” ultimatums proclaimed by Ben Ali and Mubarak in their speeches to the people could never have worked in squares filled by young people shouting, “The people want the regime to fall.”
In many ways, what happened in Tunisia and in Egypt and is happening now in Libya, Algeria, Bahrain and in Yemen is something never seen before, that could indicate that an era is over in the Arab world and a new one is beginning. There is no longer the excuse of a war on terrorism and extremism, used by Arab regimes and their western supporters to keep totalitarian regimes in power that are extremely harsh on their citizens. Thus, the famous “Arab exceptionalism” is over, according to which Arabs are allegedly not ready for democracy and dictatorships are a necessary, lesser evil. Young Arabs are proving that democracy and human rights do not tolerate exceptions.
Translated by Francesca Simmons