<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?><oembed><version><![CDATA[1.0]]></version><provider_name><![CDATA[Occupied Palestine | فلسطين]]></provider_name><provider_url><![CDATA[https://occupiedpalestine.wordpress.com]]></provider_url><author_name><![CDATA[occupiedpalestine]]></author_name><author_url><![CDATA[https://occupiedpalestine.wordpress.com/author/hajarhajar/]]></author_url><title><![CDATA[ei: Revolution is an export Tunisia can be proud&nbsp;of]]></title><type><![CDATA[link]]></type><html><![CDATA[<p><span class="text14">Nouri Gana, <em>The Electronic Intifada,</em> 8 February 2011</p>
<p><span class="content"> </span></span></p>
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<td><span class="text11">Grafitti in Tunis reads &#8220;Democracy, proud to be Tunisian.&#8221; (Fethi Belaid/AFP)</span></td>
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<p><span class="text14"><span class="content"><br />
I am not a big fan of Tunisia&#8217;s Prime Minister Mohammad Ghannouchi. His  name is reminiscent of deposed President Zine El Abedine Ben Ali&#8217;s  autocratic regime, and of the interim government&#8217;s riot police&#8217;s recent  attack on sit-in protestors in Tunis&#8217;s Qasbah Government Square when all  eyes were focused on Egypt (&#8220;<a href="http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/500/lets-not-forget-about-tunisia">Let&#8217;s not forget about Tunisia</a>,&#8221; <em>Jadaliyya</em>, 30 January 2011).</p>
<p>Yet, I very much appreciated some of what Ghannouchi had to say last  Friday, 4 February 2011, to journalist Piers Morgan on his new CNN show <em><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bW3Tcq2l3Y4">Piers Morgan Tonight</a></em>. Here is an excerpt:</p>
<blockquote><p>Morgan:  Mr. Prime Minister, can I ask you, have you been surprised by the  events in Egypt and do you believe that President Mubarak should now go  immediately?</p>
<p>Ghannouchi: We are worrying about our own country. Our revolution is  unique. It was caused by the young. Facebook and Twitter were the  levers. It&#8217;s been held in a peaceful way. Today we were able to break  with the past thanks to what we have in our DNA. Tunisia, as you know,  is an exporting country, but we do not pretend that we export  revolutions.</p></blockquote>
<p>Clearly, Ghannouchi deserves credit for his  funny evasion of the question. His tactful reluctance to comment on  Egypt&#8217;s internal affairs, however, matches only the condescending  dismissal with which both Hosni Mubarak and his newly appointed vice  president, Omar Suleiman, commented on Tunisia&#8217;s glorious revolution.</p>
<p>In his late night speech on 28 January 2011, following the popular  demonstrations in Egypt, Mubarak pointed out that &#8220;Egypt is the biggest  country in the region in terms of population, leadership role and  weight. It is a state of institutions, governed by the constitution and  the law.&#8221; After establishing Egypt&#8217;s regional superiority, he briskly  moved on to dwarf, at least by implication, the grassroots revolution in  Tunisia: &#8220;We should guard against the many examples around us in which  nations slid into chaos and suffered setbacks. They neither achieved  democracy nor maintained stability.&#8221;</p>
<p>While this is an obvious jab at the otherwise laudable process of  homegrown democratization in Tunisia, Mubarak&#8217;s stance on Tunisia  remains confused and confusing. On the one hand, he seems to maintain  that Egypt is impervious to regional unrest because of its  well-established democratic governance; on the other, he warns against  the contagiousness of the grassroots democratic process in Tunisia  because it neither brought democracy nor assured stability. The  implication is twofold: first, deep down Mubarak does not believe Egypt  is a democracy; second, he urges Egyptians to forego democracy for the  sake of stability.</p>
<p>Like many Arab despots in the region, Mubarak wants to belittle  Tunisia&#8217;s revolution, not because he did not recognize its influence,  which would be inexcusable, but because he apprehended its exemplarity  and potential repetition in Egypt. Hence his staunch desire to tarnish  it and thus guard against the revolutionary course it set in motion in  the whole region.</p>
<p>This attempt to smear and contain the Tunisian example became even more  vocal and explicit recently at a time when the Egyptian revolution has  been well underway.</p>
<p>In an interview with ABC&#8217;s Christiane Amanpour on 3 February 2011,  Egypt&#8217;s Vice President Omar Suleiman doubted that what happened in  Tunisia would ever happen in Egypt. &#8220;No, Egypt will not be anything like  Tunisia,&#8221; Suleiman told Amanpour before he went on to add: &#8220;This is  different. You know that our president is a fighter. He lived on this  soil and he will die on this soil.&#8221;</p>
<p>While every Arab is proud and envious of what Tunisians achieved, and  while Egyptians have been actually inspired by the Tunisian example and  are clamoring for freedom and democracy in their own way, Mubarak and  Suleiman are warning us and reassuring themselves that Egypt is not  Tunisia.</p>
<p>They may be in a state of denial or disavowal; they may be simply  inebriated by wishful thinking or fantasies of omnipotence, but they do  not realize yet that the Tunisian revolution has more of a chance of  defeating them than they have of defeating the course of history it set  in motion.</p>
<p>Egypt is not Tunisia, Mubarak is not Ben Ali &#8212; yes, but who is being  insulted and who is being exalted here? Mubarak and Suleiman may be  insulting Ben Ali and Tunisia and undermining Tunisians as well as  Egyptians, but they cannot do that unless they have already, at least  subconsciously, elevated themselves to the real embodiments of Egypt and  Egyptians.</p>
<p>If, however, Egypt wants to become Tunisia and the will of Egyptians is  to do what Tunisians did, then Mubarak and Suleiman are just mollifying a  consuming anxiety by exposing it in public. They could even be enjoying  their symptoms, one might argue, given their callous disregard for  Egyptian lives in the wake of Mubarak&#8217;s latest speech, in which he vowed  to remain in power till the end of his term. If so, the debacle in  Egypt might better be resolved by a psychiatric intervention rather than  by the Egyptian army, whose stance so far has neither been decided nor  decisive. All the more so given that General Hassan Ruweini is simply no  Rachid Ammar: while the latter is famous for having refused orders from  Ben Ali, the former failed even to protect the protestors when they  were attacked by Mubarak-sponsored gangsters.</p>
<p>At any rate, what Mubarak and Suleiman have said about Tunisia is a  travesty of diplomacy, irresponsible and disrespectful to both Tunisians  and Egyptians alike as well as to the memory of the martyrs of freedom  and democracy in both nations. Mubarak and Suleiman are not worthy of  the bright page of history that both Tunisians and Egyptians are  writing. When all is said and done, they will undoubtedly be thrust into  the dustbin of history.</p>
<p>What Ghannouchi said to Piers Morgan, however, constitutes a diplomatic  lesson and, possibly, a subtle slap on the faces of both Mubarak and  Suleiman. What I would have wanted him to say is that &#8220;Tunisia is known  for exporting olive oil and <em>deglet nour</em> dates but is pleased to  add revolution as one of its principal items of export.&#8221; Revolution  will be Tunisia&#8217;s only around-the-clock and never-out-of-stock,  free-of-charge export item. It is its only Marshall Plan for fostering  homegrown democracy across the Arab world. Let it be so.</p>
<p><em>Nouri Gana is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Near  Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los  Angeles. His book,</em> Signifying Loss: Toward a Poetics of Narrative Mourning, <em>was just published by Bucknell University Press, 2011.</em></span></p>
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