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28 January 2011 By Saeed
Qureshi The loud and clear message from
Tunisia is that despotic or
authoritarian dispensations in the
Middle East
and beyond are destined to disappear sooner than
later. Barring
Iraq, all the governments in the
Middle East and Sahara are family fiefdoms, sham
democracies and hereditary possessions. The countries
like
Egypt
have fake democracies as the same potentate returns
again and again, through contrived and controlled
elections, with intimidations, tampering of results
and bogus votes. People of Tunisia,
Algiers,
and Egypt are outraged against the tin pot yet
ruthless rulers who have harassed their people for
decades. These heads of governments or states are
foreign quislings and mercenaries promoting the agenda
of imperialist forces in their respective countries.
In return they are assured all benedictions and
security to their diabolic lordship over their people.
These despicable potentates and suzerains inflict
maximum possible brutalities and miseries over their
own people and themselves live luxurious lives along
with the morally and humanly bankrupt family members.
Zine El Abidine Ben Ali from
Tunisia, Hosni Mubarik from Egypt and
Abdelaziz
Bouteflik from Algiers have usurped the empowerment of
their own people for decades together. They have been
ruling their impoverished countries under the garb of
sham democracy but they are nothing short of despots
or dictators who have suppressed their own people
whenever they clamored for equality, democracy, fair
and free ballot, accountability and socio- economic
justice. All
these three heads of state have had the blessings and
patronage of their foreign patrons. Their role has
been like puppets dancing at the command of neo
colonialists and imperialist who create outpost
supervised by their chosen lackeys in order to get
their hegemonic agenda implemented and enforced
without dissent. While
the Tunisian president has already fled his country,
in Cairo tens of
thousands of protestors have demanded the ouster of
President Hosni
Mubarak. Protests also broke out in most of
Egypt including Alexandria,
the cities of
Mansura and
Tanta, Aswan and Assiut. This massive revolt of the
Egyptians is hugely incredible and a defiant
counterpoise to the iron-clad and intelligence-based
governance by
Hosni Mubarak.
Hosni
Mubarak has been the president of Egypt for thirty
years now and even in the latest elections he won with
blatant rigging and by adopting most intimidating and
coercive methods to silence the detractors and
critics. His stay in power has been with the studied
and tacit approval of the West whose duplicity and
penchant for selective democracy is not a mystery to
be unraveled. If it is Iraq, it should be a truly
democratic polity: if it is Egypt or
Saudi Arabia,
they can be authoritarian and despotic to any limit,
provided they keep dancing to the tunes of their
masters. The
people of these countries as also in other similar
states, have been captives in their own lands of both
the indigenous rulers and their string pullers from
distant lands. These cronies would be ruthless and
most oppressive to their own people but would be tamed
and docile surrogates for the foreign masters.
These
supreme bosses of their own countries do not feign any
shame for their anti-people and treacherous role of
serving the foreign masters but not their own people.
The populaces of these three Muslim countries suffer
from sub human living conditions and woeful
degradations for decades while their rulers live in
safe palaces with lavish lifestyle that characterizes
a sharp contrast between the rulers and the ruled. And
yet they call themselves Muslims and talk of Islamic
virtues of justice, freedom, tolerance, equality and
social welfare. There can't be more sinister swindling
and a more brazen dacoity on the rights of their own
people. The protestors are out in the
streets against the unemployment, the lack of housing,
unbearable food prices, corruption, and freedom of
speech, against rampant corruption, for justice and
for rule of law. These societies have kept closed and
brutalized under most
draconian laws
and police crackdowns in the past. But that barrier of
fear seems to have been lifted once a single man
Mohammed Bouazizi's in Tunisia gave his life through
self immolation, an act of immense bravery, courage
and self sacrifice. The days of foreign agents, the
local tin pot rulers, the mercenaries, the autocrats,
plutocrats and political thugs in the dormant Middle
East, slumbering for centuries first under foreign
dominations, then by local tyrants, are numbered. The
system of exploitation sustained on the supremacy of
police and army, of aristocracy, of the elitist
mafias, and sheikhdoms is now fighting its last losing
battles. The surging spirit of democracy,
egalitarianism, the popular representation, the
ascendency of general will, rule of law, freedom and
humanism is dawning on the horizon of these societies
that remained stifled and stagnant for ages. There has come a new trend in the
paradigm and format of protests taken to by the
outraged citizens of these Islamic countries. It is
giving one's life by self-immolation pioneered by
Mohammed of Tunisia, now spreading like wildfire all
over
North
Africa and spilling over to the
mainland Middle East. The brave and unusual act of
self immolation
in that suppressed part of the world, set off a wave
of self-immolations in
Algeria. Dozens of Algerians have
so far set themselves on fire in front of the
government buildings to protest against the wretched
and subhuman living conditions. These uprisings of the masses
against a decadent, discredited, ruthless and
oligarchies emit a clarion call for a gubernatorial
transformation and an amazing revolution knocking at
the doors of these societies enslaved and shackled by
their tyrannical ruling cliques. The old order is
shaking under the seismic vibrations and the loud
rumblings of the new order resplendent with
progressiveness, modernism, the supremacy of the
people, the nationalism based on patriotism and spirit
of advancement. And that would be in accord with
the immutable rules of nature and the irresistible and
unalterable imperatives of change. If a society like
we find in the Middle East is still bedeviled by
tribal culture then this abominable system cannot stay
any longer. There can't be islands of obscurantism,
despotism, hierarchical dispensations and blood
dynasties in a world that is turning into a global
village with human conscience, intellect and vision
growing as wider as the horizon. It would be well in time that
these imperious, myopic and self serving ruling
cliques perceive the irrepressible wind of change and
instead of blocking it become catalysts for it. Thus
they might get some reprieve. Otherwise they are
doomed. Saeed Qureshi is a Dallas-based journalist
and a former diplomat. Email: qureshisa2003@ yahoo.com |
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