Bouazizi’s
Revolution Antoine Walter Alan W. Dowd
ime magazine’s Person of the Year has been an The humiliation and hopelessness—caused by T annual tradition since 1927. Winners have been government interference in his life and livelihood— P199 peacemakers (Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.) and overwhelmed Bouazizi to the point that the young mer- warmongers (Adolf Hitler), heroes (Winston Churchill) chant set himself on fire. He died on January 4, starting and villains (Joseph Stalin), liberators (Dwight D. a people’s revolution that toppled Tunisia’s dictator Eisenhower) and dictators (Ruhollah Khomeini), mo- less than a fortnight later. As the authors of the Fraser guls (Ted Turner) and machines (the personal comput- Institute’s report on economic freedom in the Arab er), pop stars (Bono) and politicians (Bill Clinton). world concluded, Bouazizi’s defiant act “highlighted in By selecting “The Protester” for 2011,Time ’s edi- the most dramatic way the desire for, and benefits of, tors lived up to their own standard for determining economic freedom in the region” (al Ismaily, Cervantes, Person of the Year—the person or persons “who influ- and McMahon, 2011: 3). enced the news most, for better or worse.” As the maga- The shockwaves have spread across the Arab world. zine explains, “from the Arab Spring to Athens, from However, it should be noted that just as the Arab world Occupy Wall Street to Moscow… the protester once is not a monolith, neither are the revolutions of the again became a maker of history” (Anderson, 2011). so-called Arab Spring: In some instances, there has But Time could have—and arguably should have—gone been a Sunni-Shiite undercurrent; in others, corrup- one step further and chosen the man who inspired tion has fueled the revolt; in still others, government the Arab Spring protests and consequent revolutions, indifference has been the driving force. Some of the Mohammed Bouazizi. No single person influenced revolutions have been spurred by the lack of economic global events or global news—or the political fortunes freedom, others by the lack of political freedom. of so many leaders and the political future of so many Though the triggers may have been different, the people—as much as he did. targets were all the same: autocrats. On January 17, 2011, an Egyptian man, over- whelmed by the grinding poverty and lack of opportu- Target: Autocracy nity in his homeland, imitated Bouazizi’s horrific act of civil disobedience. Massive anti-government protests If the name doesn’t ring a bell, don’t worry. Bouazizi then broke out in Egypt. Cairo’s Tahrir Square became was not a famous inventor or philosopher, military the new epicentre of the political earthquake. And in strongman or freedom-fighter. In fact, he wasn’t known the span of three weeks, Hosni Mubarak was toppled— at all until his death. But his death triggered a geopo- after three decades in power. (A year later, spasms of litical earthquake that is shaking the Middle East and unrest continue in and around Tahrir Square.) reshaping how the rest of the world interacts with this As Mubarak’s one-man rule collapsed, Libyans in vital region and its people. Benghazi began protesting Moammar Qaddafi’s 41-year Bouazizi was a Tunisian street vendor who finally reign. But unlike his neighbouring dictators, Qaddafi had enough of government regulation and humilia- would not go peacefully. Instead, his regime vowed to tion last December after a police officer confiscated his crush the Benghazi rebels, triggering a Libyan civil war. vegetable cart because he didn’t have a proper permit. A range of factors—Libya’s oil wealth, concerns over a When Bouazizi tried to pay the fine, the police of- tidal wave of refugees washing onto Europe, the ghosts ficer slapped him and spat in his face. He attempted of Srebrenica and Rwanda—compelled NATO leaders to appeal to the officer’s higher-ups for relief, but was to support the rebel force with air and sea power. By dismissed and denied a hearing (Abouzeid, 2011). June, Qaddafi’s reach had shrunk to the city limits of
www.fraserinstitute.org Fraser Forum January/February 2012 21 Tripoli. By August, the rebels had taken Tripoli. And a condemnation of capricious, by October, Qaddafi was dead. The Arab Spring had intrusive government; it was Countries claimed its third dictator. also a declaration in defense of affected by Although Morocco wasn’t scarred by civil war, the freedom—and specifically, eco- protests forced Morocco’s reform-minded king to agree nomic freedom. It pays to recall the Arab Spring to a new constitution. that Egypt, Syria, and Bouazizi’s The unrest wasn’t quarantined to North Africa, Tunisia were in the bottom half however. Fueled by social media and satellite televi- of the 2011 Economic Freedom sion, Bouazizi’s revolution jumped across the Red Sea of the World rankings. Libya and and onto the Arabian Peninsula. Yemen was rocked Yemen weren’t even ranked. (Gwartney, Lawson, and by violence that spiraled toward a full-blown civil war. Hall, 2011: 9). Ensconced as Yemen’s autocrat for 33 years, Ali Abdul- Bouazizi may have never read Friedrich Hayek lah Saleh would flee to Saudi Arabia after being badly or John Locke, but what he was seeking was eco- wounded in battles raging in the capital. Then, after nomic freedom—the freedom to use and exchange his recuperating, Saleh returned to San’a and directed his property as he deemed appropriate, the freedom from military forces for several months before finally signing arbitrary confiscation or theft of that property, and the an agreement to transfer power, hold elections, and protection of that property from physical invasions by broaden access to the country’s political process (Al- others, including the government (al Ismaily, Cer- masmari, 2011). Another autocrat had been ousted. vantes, and McMahon, 2011: 1). In Bahrain, the chaos forced the government to As Locke observed, it should be every person’s appeal to Saudi Arabia for assistance. Eager to prevent right to “preserve his property, that is, his life, liberty, any threat to friendly autocrats, the Saudis dispatched and estate against the injuries and attempts of other hundreds of troops and tanks to prop up the Bahraini men” (Locke, 1690: 50). Bouazizi understood the im- regime. It was an Arab version of the 1968 Brezhnev portance of this truth because he lived under a regime Doctrine, the brutal and blunt instrument of coercion that did not. That regime is now gone, and the regional used by the Soviet Union to justify armed intervention order that supported it is crumbling. in communist nations in order to prevent anti-commu- Reasonable people can, and do, disagree about nist revolutions. whether the Arab Spring has opened the door to a freer Jordan weathered weeks of largely peaceful protests Middle East, or to an extremist takeover of the Middle that demanded parliamentary and economic reforms. East, or simply to a time of great uncertainty and insta- In response, King Abdullah II, a much more benign bility. monarch than his counterparts in Saudi Arabia and On the positive side, the Middle East’s revolution- Bahrain, unveiled political reforms that seemed to mol- aries are demanding freedom, opportunity, justice, lify his subjects—at least for the time being. and an end to government corruption and control, not In Syria, the revolution arrived late but has lasted unlike Eastern Europe’s revolutionaries in 1989-90. the longest. The protests were peaceful at the outset, Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen have ousted their autocrats; but Bashar Assad would not permit any challenge to his Libyans, with an assist from NATO, have dethroned rule. It’s simply not in his DNA to allow for pluralism. Qaddafi; and Syria’s despot is under increasing pressure (His father, Hafez Assad, slaughtered 20,000 Syrians to from within and without. staunch a 1982 uprising). So the order came down to However, some observers understandably worry smash the protests and disperse the protesters. Assad’s about what will replace the old order in the Middle henchmen have now killed an estimated 4,000 Syrians. East. Lacking the stomach to fire on innocent civilians, thou- Mubarak’s Egypt, for instance, was a moderating sands of Syrian soldiers have switched sides and formed influence in the Arab world. It lived up to the aspira- the Free Syrian Army to defend the protesters and dis- tions for peace made at Camp David in 1978. As a lodge Assad’s regime (BBC, 2011). As a consequence, result, a once-constant source of international insta- Syria is now edging toward a Libya-style civil war. bility—war between Israel and Egypt—was taken off the table. Mubarak’s Egypt partnered with the West to promote regional stability by opening Egypt’s ports and Risks airspace to power-projecting nations like the United States, by serving as a bulwark against destabilizing It has been a year since Bouazizi became so fed up regimes in Iraq and Iran, and by keeping the vital Suez with government intrusion in his life that he concluded Canal and Suez-Mediterranean oil pipeline (SUMED) death was better. His self-immolation was more than open. It pays to recall that 15% of Europe’s oil flows
22 Fraser Forum January/February 2012 www.fraserinstitute.org Tunisia Syria hold. And it will take time for the children of Morocco the Arab Spring to learn the ways of political Jordan pluralism, to understand the importance of Libya Egypt Bahrain majority rule with minority rights, to recognize that freedom is about more than going to the polls every few years. As Mohammed Bouazizi understood, it’s also about property rights, economic liberty, Yemen and human dignity. Bigstock Notes 1 Islamist political movements advocate reordering government through the canal and that Egypt accounts for 5% of and society in accordance with a strict interpretation of Islam. the world’s liquefied natural gas trade (Ratner, 2011: 3-4). Similarly, before the Arab Spring erupted, Saleh References
had worked closely with Western intelligence agencies Abouzeid, Rania (2011, January 21). Bouazizi: The Man Who and militaries to counter al Qaeda’s new power centre Set Himself and Tunisia on Fire. Time.
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