Behind every strong man is a good woman; behind every corrupt man is a more corrupt woman.
Behind every strong man is a good woman; behind every corrupt man is a more corrupt woman.
Leila Ben Ali, nee Trabelsi, the former hairdresser is the fuse that lit the fire burning in North Africa. Anyway one looks at it, she is a perfect symbol of what pushed millions of nameless, and faceless pesky “little fellows” over the edge. She was the modern day Marie Antoinette of Tunisia. Because she was born poor, and grew up never expecting to matter much in the scheme of things, she figured she better lad up on the gold dump she stumbled upon when her happy go lucky husband took over from the senile octogenarian Habib Bourguiba over two decades ago.
That grandpa of Tunisian politics was so out of touch that he became something of joke at the tail end of his long reign. For years before he was gently shoved aside by Ben Ali in what was euphemistically labeled a “palace coup,” a small group of men ruled Tunisia in his name. Later, it emerged that the old pa had ceased to be ruler long before the clock formally stopped on his watch. Most close observers had suspected as much. A man who had a hard time telling the difference between his sun rise and sun set cannot run a country.
Leila’s party began almost as soon as she married Ben Ali. She literally spent her entire married life to Ben Ali (since 1992,) trying to compensate for her poor start in life. She became known for everything we progressives love to hate in modern rulers. She was at once Tunisia’s Imelda Marcos because of her obsession with expensive shoes. Yet no shoe is expensive enough for Leila to wear twice. So she racked up tens of thousands of them. Then shoes became too boring for her.
Everywhere else in the world – even in climes where elections are routinely rigged, there is some semblance of democracy and the rule of law. Not in the Arab world. There is no other region of the world where medieval rules and mores hold as much sway as they still do in the so-called Middle East. And like their medieval forebears, present day Arab rulers see no contradiction in running their countries in barbaric totalitarian fashion. Every president in the Arab world is a de facto king; every First Woman is a de facto queen; and every First child is a de facto prince or princess.
And what’s a modern queen without expensive jewelry? So Leila Ben Ali showed Tunisian women How To Do It. Tunisians were forced to watch the former hairdresser in stunned disbelief as she lived her fantasy at their expense without any sense of shame or moderation for close to twenty long years. If there is expensive gold or diamond jewelry merchant somewhere on the planet, they know that their Leila Ben Ali is bound to be a permanent fixture on that seller’s clientele list.
Like all depraved people, Leila quickly gets tired of any one particular type of deprave hobby. So she threw in some more money-burning hobbies. When she watches western TV and spots a fast sports car, she simply orders it. When she’s shopping around Dubai, Monaco, or Monte Carlo, and sees the same? Same behavior, same reaction. Like she does for shoes, she just collects cars. Very expensive cars. Never mind she won’t ever drive most of those cars herself.
And villas (deceptive names for what are in fact palaces?) Leila cannot be outdone. She built mind-boggling palaces all over Tunisia. Bought others in Europe, and Dubai. She stocked them with anything that catches her fancy. Most human beings will thank god and stay put if they had the chance to live in one of Leila’s palaces. After all, the houses have – to paraphrase that most pugnacious of British literary figures Samuel Johnson, all the best “that life has to offer.” But not the lucky former hairdresser. Even her own personally designed heaven-on-earth palaces were not enough to keep her home happy.
So Leila liked to hit the road: breakfast in Tunis; lunch in Dubai; dinner in Paris, or Monte Carlo.
It isn’t an accident or a coincidence that now that the die is cast for her family, she is believed to be holed up in one of her choice destinations: Dubai. I suppose the madam is due for a vacation from her famous and endless shopping trips. Like an addict, Leila had to get her shopping groove on.
And that wasn’t all there was to her madness. Leila Trabelsi-Ali turned her husband’s government into a family affair. She made no bones about getting her relatives into government positions where the state is seen as the cash cow. And of course no government contract got anywhere without Leila and her family getting their huge commissions, if they did not care to hijack the whole enchilada.
Like many other thieves around the globe, in reaction to the loud criticisms of her lifestyle by mainly expatriate Tunisians, Leila dabbled in several charitable endeavors – almost all of them very commendable on the surface. Note the operative word “on the surface.” Her Arab Women Organization seeks to fight domestic abuse, and helping the Arab female become independent through her high profile support system. Her Basma Association offers a helping hand to the physically challenged in terms of employment opportunities. This, in a society where such conditions often spell doom for such people. And her SAIDA organization seeks to help cancer patients. Wonderful initiatives on the face of it.
However, despite all these laudable initiatives, Leila’s personal life was so depraved, and her appetite for corrupt enrichment so insatiable that, nothing she did in her charity work was able to assuage the anger most Tunisians felt towards her. The scenes we saw of looters filming themselves with cell phones as they vent their rage in destroying the Ben Ali family’s household properties including some of the very expensive cars they collected, and others riding motor cycles countless times across their well-tended lawns are all measures of the deep hatred the average Tunisian has for members of the house that Leila Ben Ali built.
But the story goes beyond her. You see, like in every depraved society, a legion of hangers-on had mushroomed around Leila Ben Ali especially in the past decade. Some “Friends of Leila” themselves became famous simply for being famous (being seen with their famous friend.) It’s a “Friends with benefit” kind of thing. They sang her praise, and rationalized her greed and madness. Yet, the Tunisian people who matter in that propaganda war, were not fooled for the most part.
Like some of us had hoped and prayed, the Tunisian tsunami seem to be moving where we wish it would. I’m personally reticent to gloat at this point, lest I jinx the good omen. All I can do is pray that it keeps on going throughout the Maghreb and much further down south. There is a lot more trash down south that need sweeping into the deepest recesses of the oceans. It is the type of man-made change that would offer us a new lease on life.
The scenes currently streaming from Egypt are gripping. Stunning. Spell-binding. Frightening. Deadly serious. Ugly. Beautiful. Inspiring. The clear winners at this point are ordinary Egyptians and the Egyptian military. The losers are Barack Obama and Hosni Mubarak. Let’s hope that the two men will care enough about their legacy to do the right thing.
What’s going on in Cairo is not just about the desperate machinations of a pharaohic dictator teetering on the brink of an almost certain ignoble exit. It is about the dirty behind-the-scenes geopolitical games that self-anointed rulers of the world play with colored people’s lives around the globe.
Hosni Mubarak would never have outlasted the 1980s had it not been for the propping of the US. The Islamic Brotherhood would have had him like a piñata two decades ago. He wouldn’t last a month without their support this time around either. And unlike at any other time in the past three decades, this is one time that neither the US nor Mubarak is in control of the ground game. They’re both struggling to get a handle on what’s going on. More specifically, the US is trying to figure who to cast their lot with. Because even they can see that Mubarak is finished.
You see, all dictators have one thing in common: ordinary people’s fear of death and imprisonment is the main weapon they have in their arsenal. The moment people lose those fears, the dictators get stumped. They lose their mojo, no longer certain what to do. Especially in cases where their foreign puppeteers are telling them they cannot unleash the savagery they’ve always relied on to force themselves on people.
Hilary Clinton’s rambling; self-contradiction on TV today confirms the dilemma of the Obama administration. And in typical US style, the concern of the Obama government is not the fate of the ordinary Egyptian: it is “Who Do We Have to Replace President Mubarak?” With particular reference to Israel. In other words, the US behind-the-scenes game is to identify someone – regardless of how despicable or unwanted by Egyptians he might be, who will maintain Mubarak’s policies towards Israel. The minute they find such a person they’re comfortable with, Mubarak would be on a plane heading for the graveyard of deposed corrupt and mad Muslim rulers. This is the only thing keeping Mubarak in power at this point.
Like with so many other issues Obama, this is another area where this brother continues to break hearts needlessly. Unlike his predecessors, he actually knows what’s right. Yet, instead of doing the right thing, he lets himself be steamrolled by neo-racists who believe and operate a foreign policy that is designed to keep colored people around the world under rulers who are beholden not to their citizens, but to the western power structure – irrespective of how hated they are by their people. They do not give a hoot about true democracy anywhere outside the Anglo-Saxon Germanic politico sphere.
It’s that policy that keeps President Aristide, a man elected with 70% of the vote, out of Haiti. It’s the same policy that got Manual Zalaya kicked out of Honduras. And there are many others. Obama is now a willing participant in all this. Even the hypocritical diplomatic nomenclature regarding Egypt continues.
In US policy, Egypt is both an African, and middle eastern country depending on US convenience. When they’re discussing serious issues, Egypt is a middle eastern country. When they’re tallying US Foreign Aid numbers by region, Egypt suddenly becomes “African” country! Just like Reagan did, Obama maintains. Egypt in fact gets more US aid than the rest of “black Africa” combined. So next time you see US “annual aid to Africa” stated at $3 Billion. Just know that literally half of that goes to Egypt alone. And it’s not for some poverty alleviation program: it’s mostly military support to reward Mubarak for maintaining pro-Israel policies.
When Baracki (his granda’s pet name for him,) finds his token, Mubarak will be toast. Let’s pray that a Leila Ben Ali type of hairdresser isn’t let loose upon Egyptians.
googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('content1'); });
googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('comments'); });
googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('content2'); });