Silver Lining, or How I Got to Love the Virus

PARIS

With half of mankind under house arrest and the global economy in a tailspin, not mentioning tens of thousand of deaths, it is hard to feel anything good about the invisible enemy which we are told should go by the politically correct Covid-19 or Coronavirus name, rather than by what everybody would instinctively call it: the Chinese virus, just like a century ago we referred to the Spanish flu - although back then the flu had nothing to do  with Spain whereas this one clearly originates from China.

And yet, there are quite a few unexpected positive developments from the global pandemic.

Finally, pollution is down 

With millions of cars off the roads and plants shut down in many countries, it is hardly surprising that air pollution has come down, as the two below shots reveal. Some might even think that the current pandemic is nature's way to get revenge against man's constant abuse for decades. Can't blame it, to tell you the truth.

From bad to better

Drug traffic and crime down
As some police have been forced to recognize, it is humiliating that an invisible virus, by keeping dealers and customers off the streets, has drastically  reduced the illegal drug trade, thus succeeding where governments all over the world have failed consistently for decades. Home burglaries have basically disappeared for obvious reasons. In my beloved Rio de Janeiro, street mugging, a common occurrence, has been reduced by more than 60% this month versus March 2019. 

The Wonder City is getting even more
wonderful...if a bit empty

Digital Transformation is here to stay
Your IT team? Not yet. Your Agile coach? Not really. Your HR department? Yeah, right. Your Change Management team? Who are these people, anyway? Never seen them. 

And suddenly Covid-19 lands on us and we are all working from homing, using technology at full throttle to communicate/engage/get things done. As someone whose professional life entails helping corporate clients' digital transformation, this pan(da)demic is a godsend.

Migration and tourism are halted

Now, some of you might think that the endless waves of migrants landing on Europe's shore is a blessing but many might beg to differ, and now that the EU has closed its borders to all non-Europeans and residents, the flow of millions of illegal immigrants has come to an abrupt end. Hss it? 

Another category of migrants, short-term and illegal, a.k.a. tourists, are also being rebuffed and considering the damage these hordes inflict on sites and places like long-suffering Venice, Covid-19 is definitely a blessing in that respect. Maybe we'll go back to the 1950s where mass tourism was unknown and traveling the globe was truly a unique, sometimes once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Market volatility offers great opportunities
Stock gyrations can offer great overnight gains. Some stocks go up and down several times in the same trading day. If you have some money saved which you don't need in the short term, pick a couple of stocks at the lower end of what they have been trading and a quick buck is almost a sure thing. One piece of advice: pick dividend-paying stocks so that in the unlikely case all the stocks you bought suddenly go south and stay there at least you get a steady income stream.

All that goes down ends up going back up...and vice versa!

Some jobs are coming under strong demand
 Last December's general strike in France which lasted a good month and a half (no metro, no bus, no trains) , saw some unemployed people suddenly sign up for Uber and with ride fares tripling many of them became a rags-to-riches story. Even people with a  day job took to using their car for additional income, proving the old adage that one should never let a good crisis go to waste. Now, that restaurants are closed, and many people are scared to go to crowded supermarkets UberEats, and Deliveroo delivery men are enjoying brisk business. Macy's may be shedding gallons of tears along with rivers of red ink, but Amazon is on a roll.

Quality time with your family
Those of you whose rat-race lifestyle meant spending too little time with your spouse and/or children, here's your once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make things right. That is, if spending so much time at work wasn't a way to get away from your  family in the first place...

Extra reading and movie-watching time
Great time to (re)read all  those books and watch (again) those movies you always wanted to and never had time for

BOOKS

History: If you think the current pandemic is bad, read Barbara Tuchman's Distant Mirror on the Black Death, or how the plague pandemic in the Middle Ages was called: Some countries like England lost half of their population. Feels almost like a relief, doesn't it?

Literature: You may have heard of, but never read, A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. This is the perfect time to read this picaresque novel whose counter-hero Ignatius Reilly's adventures are simply hilarious. If you read French, Céline's Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night), L'élegance du hérisson (The Elegance of the Hedgehog), the full 6-volume set of  Les rois maudits (The Accursed King)  are a must. In Spanish, I highly recommend Mario Vargas Llosa's La tia Julia y el escribidor (Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter) and  political page-turner La fiesta del chivo (The Feast of the Goat).

For sheer comic relief, anything by P.G. Wodehouse, especially the Bertie series, is a must read. In the same vein, Frasier sitcom writer Joe Keenan's Blue Heaven and Putting on the Ritz will have you laugh uproariously.

P.G. Wodehouse at his best

If you have a soft spot for thriller/crime/spy stories: John Le Carré's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is the mother of all spy novels (I'm not crazy about most other Le Carré novels that I find a bit on the dull side). France's Pierre Lemaitre's Robe de marié and Alex are excellent, as is the unique dual-story line La caverna de las ideas, a virtuoso Spanish-language historical mystery novel published in English as The Athenian Murders. Another even more unique whodunit is perfectly titled The Daughter of Time aiming at discovering whether Richard III was the real murderer of his nephews five centuries ago. Of course, you can't say "whodunit" without mentioning the Queen of Crime, Agatha Christie herself: Curtain, published posthumously, will shock you. Of course she spawned many spoofs, my favorite being The Act of Roger Murgatroyd, written in the vein of the grand dame's novels including idioms and contemporary references.

MOVIES
I'll avoid some obvious classics and focus on lesser-known films that will enchant, shock, surprise and amuse you. Starting  with the film noir genre, Laura  is as brilliant now as it was 75 years ago. Hitchcock's 1964 The Birds will still amaze you with special effects that will put current computer wizardy to shame. No Way Out's ending will shock you. French-language L'assassin habite au 21 (1942) is sheer brilliance (interestingly, I discovered in a Rio de Janeiro second-hand bookstore, or sebo, Hotel Brasil which seems to be inspired by the Clouzot film.)

Don't get distracted or you might miss
a dialogue gem

For wit, brilliant dialogue, great story line and flawless performances by the full cast, Woody Allen's Bullets over Broadway is a joy to watch again and again (I must have done so close to 20 times.) Little Miss Sunshine and A Fish Called Wanda are two other brilliant comedies. Mockumentary Thank You for Smoking may not make you kick the habit, but it will have you convulsed with laughter, as will the Coen Brothers' Intolerable Cruelty.

If you're into musicals, Victor Victoria is a gem with its fine performances, brilliant script and great score. Almost 90 years old, The Most Dangerous Game hasn't aged a bit (and no, it's not a musical, just had to wedge it somewhere.)

Feeling like a Roman epic of yore? I have little doubt you'll enjoy Quo Vadis with an amazing Peter Ustinov as the Emperor Nero, as well as Samson and Delilah starring Hedy Lamarr, the most beautiful woman ever to have graced the silver screen.

The citizen of the world I am cannot but mention great movies from Brazil (Central Station, City of God), India (Salaam Bombay), the Arab World (The Yacoubian Building which also doubles as a great novel by Egypt's best writer, Alaa Al Aswany), Germany (Goodbye Lenin, The Downfall with its companion reading piece, Hugh Trevor-Roper's The Last Days of Hitler, one of the best historical works ever written), Italy (Rocco and his brothers, I soli ignoti, Lo scopone scientifico), Japan (Spirited Away) and in Spanish little-known thriller The Hidden Face and Almodóvar's farce Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.

The Yacoubian Building: Succeeding

in the jump from great literature to

great moviemaking

With this last title, I cheated on my promise to go with little-known movies, so in for a penny, in for a pound, let me add two more in the same vein: Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (picture me taking a bow, as I do every time I mention the master's name) and Mankiewicz's All About Eve: If the former is the best movie made by Hollywood on Hollywood, the latter is a sui generis tribute to Broadway


So, now that you can breathe a cleaner air, see bluer skies, made a quick buck playing Wall Street, feel safer that crime is down, enjoyed (re)discovering great reads and movies, be honest: Aren't you going to miss the big bad virus?

A wedding in the Land of White Moors

The groom (and blogger's brother) with his bride who is
dressed, hand-hennaed and bejeweled according to
centuries-old traditions 

NOUAKCHOTT
Apart from the gift of life, I shall always be grateful to my parents for having brought me up in a multicultural family. And you can't get any more wildly multicultural than my family: my mother was born in Paris into a Romanian family and at age 2  was taken to the old country when WWII broke out. My grandmother left her daughter behind with her parents to go back to France (and  my Hungarian grandfather.) Little could my grandmother suspect that the war would separate her from her daughter for 6 years and then the Communist-imposed Iron Curtain for another 12 years. Only at age 21 did my by-now Romanian-speaking mother go back to France where she met my father, an Arab from the large but little known country of Mauritania (if you don't know where it is located on the map, you'll find it in the northwestern corner of Africa, just south of Morocco - interestingly enough my father himself had a half sister, whose father was French, and she too was lost to her mother from her childhood until her mid-20's. You can call my family many things but boring isn't one of them!) I then grew up between France and Mauritania with summer breaks spent in Romania, in particular the northern region of Transylvania. Such varied cultures and languages helped me become more open to other societies and people, different ways of doing things as well as learn other languages more easily.

When my Mauritania-based brother asked me if I wanted to attend his wedding in  the country known to locals in their Arabic dialect as Trab el Bidan or Land of White Moors, I enthusiastically accepted. So it was that last Thursday, after a 15-year absence, a 6-hour Air France flight from Paris disgorged me  into the diminutive airport of Nouakchott, the largest city in the Sahara desert and Mauritania's capital. It was the day of the wedding and I had barely changed into the traditional men's garb (see picture below) when I repaired to the bride's family 's home in the northern sector of the sprawling city that is relentlessly expanding from the Atlantic Ocean into the desert in all three directions (the view from the sky with the bluish hues of the ocean and the dusty white of the desert makes quite a contrast.)

We were greeted by the bride's parents and shown into a large rectangular room decorated in the typical low mattresses and colorful woven-wool carpets where male relatives of the bride's and groom's were assembled. It was quite entertaining to play the recognition game, an uncle here, a cousin there, and a nephew, a handsome young man in his mid 20's and recently married himself. When I last saw him he was barely two years old and it was in dramatic circumstances: his mother, my older half-sister, had just committed suicide in one of the family's highest profile dramas. The women sat in a separate  room but this segregation didn't last long as one of  my aunts was too excited to stand the protocol and waved at me to join her outside where other aunts and female cousins, close and distant ones, joined me, hugging and kissing me with with full theatrics. After this breach with protocol I went back to the men, some of the elders shaking their hands while muttering in their beards something about how Moorish traditions are lost to people living in the West.

I later heard that there was another etiquette violation, this time courtesy of my father who brought his own cleric. According to tradition since the Day 1 ceremony (known in Arabic as 'aqd or contract signing) takes place at the bride's place, it is her family's cleric who should officiate. Maybe my father felt that our tribe, the Laghlal, who for centuries had vied with my future sister-in-law's tribe of Idewaali for the control of our joint town, Chinguetti, Islam's seventh Holy City, should assert itself in a show of tribal power politics.  Anyway, things went smoothly, the cleric called on the representatives of both groom and bride to get closer to him, the conditions were read out ("the husband shall not raise his hand on his wife nor take another one, otherwise the marriage will become null and void immediately"), the audience were asked if they had any reason to object to the matrimony (I felt like raising my hand saying that as my younger brother, wasn't it bad form that he would get married before I did, but then thought otherwise) and the most noble son of the even noblest family of a  greatest tribe got married to a lady who was no less grand in her titles than he was. Of course, as befits tradition, neither bride nor groom were present. A short prayer that involved our whispering verses from the Koran hands raised skywards followed and we then proceeded  to partake of the meat, dates and drinks served on a cloth set right on the carpet, while steaming hot cups of tea were circulated around. As soon as the food was dispatched, everybody got up, slipped into their shoes and left the place leaving it to the female relatives  who were going to celebrate throughout the evening.

According to Moorish tradition, the bride has to remain
unseen  for three days. The smiling girl is the blogger's
(and groom's) sister, a management consultant based
in Brittany, western France

The next evening saw the wedding reception (known in Arabic as marwah) being organized in the palatial home of a cousin, in another neighborhood (which didn't exist last time I was here), closer to the ocean but at a safe distant since Moors (as Arab Mauritanians are known) have from time immemorial turned their backs on the salty body of water, even if fishing now represents one of the country's main exports. Day 2 was slightly different from the previous religious-cum-legal day with guests definitely on the younger side and men and women mixing and, to my utter surprise, dancing freely. But it is true that Mauritanians are unique among Arabs in that women are equal to men, they run their own businesses, work and travel freely, get married and divorce at a dizzying rate (a young cousin of mine who was there had already gone through a fourth marriage and counting), something unheard of in neighboring Algeria and Morocco where divorcees and widows are damaged goods with no hope of any further social life. And I'm not speaking of retrograde Saudi Arabia where they can't even show their faces or drive their own cars.

(You will notice from the top picture and the one right above, that, unlike what is customary in the West and other Arab countries, Mauritanian brides wear black while grooms are dressed in white. This is an old Beduin tradition that has survived the ages.)

A thoughtful blogger watches
the proceedings

Once all the guests had assembled, my brother accompanied by male friends and relatives set out in a car convoy to pick up the bride at her family home. Amid a pandemonium of car horns being blown insistingly they arrived at the party where everybody was craning their necks to get a  glimpse of the bride. They didn't see much as, according to tradition, the bride is to remain covered from head to toe, face unseen, for three days until the elaborate hair braiding is undone and jewelry that is part of it removed. The newlyweds had to sit under a dais for the whole evening without drinking or eating anything nor go the bathroom, while the rest of us drank and ate and danced. The music was provided by a Moroccan Sahara band who played a catchy mix of traditional and modern tunes. I could hardly believe my eyes seeing my aunts dancing the night away, with even more energy than younger girls. Highly entertaining was the parade of marriageable girls whose mother shamelessly pushed them  my way, most of them close or distant cousins or from the same tribe: as in 1950's America, in this traditional society a girl's highest ambition is still to land a good husband, such weddings are golden opportunities for mothers to catch somebody in their spider-like web. Must say that some of the girls were stunningly beautiful.

Dancing the night away, Mauritanian-style

We thus spent the rest of the evening under a starlit sky, dancing, laughing, gossiping, flirting, eating, drinking, bursting into sudden exclamations of recognition ("oh, my God, it's you!") until jetlag got the better of me and it was time to go to sleep. I discreetly slipped out, avoiding the hundreds of hands to shake, hugs to give and foreheads to kiss if I had taken formal leave of everybody. As I pulled away in my rental car, I couldn't help but be amazed at how centuries old traditions are still being kept alive by the cell phone-toting, Chanel #5-smelling, Mercedes-driving and Rolex-carrying descendants of nomadic Arabs who a millennium ago came from distant Arabia, some of them via Spain and Sicily. In an an era of all-out globalization, this is no small feat.

(To watch the above video of the party, made from a cell phone - sorry for the quality- you may have to play with different readers such as VLC or DivX to get the sound since, for some reason, Windows Player mutes the audio track)


(For those curious to read more about Mauritania, there are unfortunately no titles I know of in English. 

In French I highly recommend Le tambour des sables (Drum of Sands), the splendid memoirs of a French colonial administrator, Gabriel Feral. General Gouraud, another colonial administrator, wrote a unique document from my family's region, Adrar: Mauritanie, Adrar: Souvenirs d'un Africain published in 1945. Famed transcontinental pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Terre des Hommes (Land of Men) is probably the most famous novel written on Mauritania (not all the action takes place there, though.) Another famous Mauritania lover, Théodore Monod who crossed the Sahara many times over a half century, the last time in his old age, wrote Méharées. Odette du Puigaudeau's  account of her travels through the Land of White Moors in the 1930's (Pieds nus à travers la Mauritanie)  is a great, authentic read. 

Traditional Moorish architecture.
(From the blogger's own copy)

The beautiful coffee table book Mauritanie: Aux confins du Maghreb is a must-read: not only does it boast splendid photography but the research and writing are first rate. 

More recent titles include Nouakchott: Au carrefour de la Mauritanie et du monde, by an academic (2009) and Bienvenue à Nouakchott (2011) by French spy/thriller writer Gérard de Villiers who has sold 150 million copies of his books, mainly in the French-speaking world.) Finally, from researcher Aline Tauzin, published in 1995, is a collection of Moorish tales in a bilingual edition (French/Mauritanian Arabic) under the title Contes arabes de Mauritanie (Arab Tales from Mauritania) which holds special appeal to me as many were told to me, as a child, by my grandmother and the aunt who lived with her. 

There are several books in Spanish due to the links between Spain and the western part of the Moorish lands, a Spanish colony under the name "Rio de Oro" and now occupied by Morocco. Fernando Pinto Cebrian, probably the Spaniard who best knows the Western Sahara, wrote Adivinanzas Saharauis and Proverbios Saharauis. There is also a compendium of lovely Moorish tales from the Sahara edited by Ramon Mayrata and published under Relatos del Sahara Español, the Spanish-language counterpart to the Aline Tauzin book.

If you are, like me,  a  movie buff, I am afraid Mauritania is unlikely to beat Hollywood as a source of great cinematic creativity, at least not in the short run. This being said, there are a couple of respected directors - literally: I only know two, Med Hondo and Abderrahmane Sissako, the latter being of mixed Moorish-African heritage. The best movie yet made in Mauritania is Sissako's delightful autobiographical comedy-drama Waiting for Happiness (2002, in French and Mauritanian Arabic). Here's a good French-language review .  

Arab Revolution - Phase 2: Pharaoh Falls

BOGOTA
Even from the other side of the world there is no escaping the momentous news, which explains why for the second time in a row I am posting on political developments in the Arab world. Last time, a month ago, when I wrote on the  Tunisian uprising which ended the dictatorial rule of Ben Ali, I predicted that Egypt, the heart of the Arab world, would be next. Last Thursday I emailed an old friend of mine: "This is the end of the game for Mubarak.  Following his refusal to leave power, the Egyptian people will mount an even bigger rally and protests after Friday prayers in now world-famous aptly named Liberation Square  and there is no way the military will allow him to stay. So by next week, and maybe even this weekend, he'll be gone." I was gratified to see I was right: the next day, as the weekend started, Hosni Mubarak, the last pharaoh, the absolute ruler of 80 million Egyptians for 30 decades, resigned in ignominy and fled to his home in the Red Sea resort of Sharm-al-Sheikh probably on his way to Saudi Arabia where, like an elephant cemetery, dictators retire to die.

What does this purport for the region, the world and US foreign policy? Well, much has been written, said, pontificated, hollered about by more knowledgeable people than I, so I don't need to expostulate at length. I would just like to lay to rest some myths.

Myth # 1. A lot is being said about the respect in which the Egyptian armed forces (which are taking over  during a transition period) are held. Well, if respect it is, it is the respect spawned by fear, not admiration. What is respectable or admirable about the Egyptian army? Abroad, they waged war against Israel three times, and were defeated three times. At home, they have been the backbone of the dictatorship for decades. Mubarak himself was a general, as have been all Egyptian presidents since the military (yes, they again) overthrew the monarchy in 1952 in what was a coup and not a popular uprising. How ironic that they got rid of King Farouk because he was too subservient to British interests (the power of the day) and they ended up just doing America's bidding.

Myth # 2: Don't believe a single word of all the lofty talk of Obama and Clinton about "the voice of the Egyptian people". Until this week they were backing newly appointed Vice-President Oman Suleyman to take over a vaguely defined transition. But Suleyman is as bad as Mubarak: as head of the intelligence services he has overseen every repressive policy of the last decades including torture, brutal crackdown, censorship, arbitrary arrests, rigged elections and stifling dissent. How can that be a change? Well, it isn't, and that's what America was/is after: to keep the same regime in place under a veneer of pseudo-democracy so that it can continue to implement America's policies in the region. But Vox populi, vox dei. Sometimes you just can't go against the people when they rise in their millions.


Myth #3: The free and responsible media. Yeah, right! I was mesmerized by CNN's coverage  which turned shrilly anti-Mubarak referring to him as the dictator at the height of the protests. And yet for decades you never heard anything like that. Had the Egyptian people not risen against the oppressive regime, CNN would have been glad to continue reporting on "Egyptian elections won by the president's party" and leave it at that when it was obvious that last November's elections had been rigged beyond belief. But that didn't seem to bother CNN unduly nor the US government who was quite happy as long as their buddy stayed in power. It was mind-boggling to hear US Vice-President Joe Biden refer to Mubarak as "not a dictator" and this ...as recently as two weeks ago when he was sending his armed thugs against peaceful demonstrators. Just like French minister Frédéric Mitterand protesting on TV channel Canal+ Sunday program that "Ben Ali is not a dictator" when his police was shooting his own people, and five days before he was to flee. The hypocrisy and duplicity of both mainstream media and politicians are seemingly endless. (Do I need to remind my readers about the New York Times endorsing Bush's Iraq war?)


Myth # 4: The Arabs are happy with their lot and never rise up. True, the last major Arab uprising was almost a century ago, in 1916 when they rose against their Turkish overlords in what was to be known as the Arab Revolt (with the help of legendary Lawrence of Arabia) and would lead to the creation of the modern Arab states that we know today and which are in deep crisis. Tunisia then showed the way and the Egyptians were so shamed by this little country to have done what they hadn't dared do that it galvanized them into taking their fate into their own hands. After all, don't Cairenes call their city Umm-ad-Dunia, center of the world? How could they fail where a small Arab country succeeded, they the heart of the Arab world, its most populous country?


Three more points are worth mentioning:



- Technology and especially social media were instrumental in mobilizing protesters and getting the word and pictures out. When Zuckerberg created Facebook in his dorm room several years ago I guess that if he never suspected it would quickly be worth billions of dollars, it is a safe bet to say that it never crossed his mind that it would have such political impact in countries on the other side of the globe. In the tug between the immovable object represented by Mubarak and the Egyptian protesters' irresistible force the latter won because it has Facebook on its side. 


- US foreign policy in the region is in complete disarray. It tried under Bush to foment democracy (or so it pretended) for nothing. So when Obama came to power he soon went realpolitik accepting Arab autocrats (but then did he really ever want that to change?) and, bang, Arab democracy explodes in his face. It is too early to make a definite judgment, but I believe that the maturity and commitment of the Egyptian people have shown that they will not accept anything less than a free society and democratically elected leaders. And representative government in Egypt means that US policy (especially as regards Israel) will never be the same, because "Egypt will never be the same again" in Obama's words. 
  
- So, who's next? As (bad) luck would have it, the longest ruling dictator in the Arab world, buffoon Qaddafi (he came to power two months after Armstrong walked on the moon, that is 42 long years ago) just happens to be wedged between Tunisia and Egypt, the two countries  which have just chucked their dictators. You can bet that the Libyan dictator is not getting much sleep these days. And today Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, announced presidential and legislative elections for next September. Considering that his term ended in January 2009 and he decided to stay on without bothering to ask his people how they felt about it, not too soon you might think. And yet CNN has yet to call him a dictator nor does the US administration criticize him for not being elected. Algeria is another low-hanging fruit with its explosive mixture of emergency laws, repressive gerontocratic single-party government and economic. The Saudi king who rules like a medieval monarch supported Mubarak to the hilt until his last moments in office understanding very well what it would mean for his family's shocking and continuing  control of a major and wealthy Arab country if Egypt went democratic. Another same-name Middle Eastern monarch, Jordan's Abdallah II, would be well advised to stop appointing the Prime Minister and leave it to elections to decide the makeup of a government. Of course, that means that the Palestinian majority in his country and probably the Islamists would come to power, something the US (as a sponsor of  Israel) would hate to happen. But isn't democracy about letting the people choose freely their leaders, whether you like them or not?


- A lesson for US foreign policy is to accept Islamist parties, realizing that (a) the US can't anymore force its will on the Arabs, an ancient and proud people (b) that just like not all Socialist governments in democratic Europe or Latin America mean rabidly anti-American policies, some Islamist parties such as the Muslim Brotherhood may well turn out to be people the US can do business with (along the lines of the AKP government in Turkey.) And remember, most of these opponents of the US became so only after the US engaged in anti-Arab policies. Be more friendly to the Arabs, and the Arabs will be friendly to you. 


Finally, to close my thoughts on this truly remarkable and historical achievement, let me share with you  three jokes making the rounds in Cairo.


1. Why did it take Mubarak three decades to appoint a vice-president? − Because he couldn't find anybody as stupid a he is.

2. Where does the $1.5 billion in US military aid to Egypt go? − Half is spent on military equipment and half on black dye for Mubarak's hair.

3. As Pharaoh-Mummy Mubarak lies on his (political) deathbed, his counselors gather by and tell him: "Excellency, the Egyptian people are here to bid you farewell." − "Farewell?", the dying man says, "but where are they going?" 

After the Tunisian Revolution, which Arab country is next?

PARIS
In the late 1970's, I was a teenager spending part of the summer in my mother's hometown in Romania when the inhumanity of the Communist regime of the self-styled Danube of Human Thinking, Nicolae Ceausescu, hit me. The paucity and bad quality of goods in stores; the weird cat-and-mouse game we had to play in Bucharest when staying with a cousin so that the resident man from the Securitate (Ceausescu's answer to the Gestapo) wouldn't see us spending the night with her (yes, you've heard right, my mother, as a foreigner, was not allowed to spend the night at her cousin's house!); my great-aunt spending time in jail, after the Communists took over, because she had grown up in France where her sister (my grandmother) still lived thus making her a dangerous counter-revolutionary and Western agent; my mother not being allowed to inherit the house built by her grand-parents (because she was born in Paris and had left Romania); nobody allowed to travel abroad - it all struck me as too weird and inhuman to last. "Maman, this can't go on. Sooner or later the system will collapse," I exclaimed. My mother shook her head and replied with a sad voice, "Look around. Has any Communist regime that has taken over ever lost power?  Why do you think your grandmother insisted that I go back to France?" It was true that at the height of the Cold War the Communist-bloc dictators seemed unassailable.

And yet, at the end of the next decade, while pursuing my master's degree in the United States, I was mesmerized by a scene on my TV screen, a scene I never thought would happen. In December 1989, during a speech at the soon-to-be-renamed Revolution Square in Bucharest, something unthinkable took place: Ceausescu, who among his self-granted titles used "Genius of the  Carpathians", was booed by thousands of Romanians. Yes, the docile Romanian people who had put up like sheep for decades finally said, "That's enough, we can't stand this anymore. Go!" and rose against the tyrant. Vox Populi, Vox Dei. Three days later, on one of my most memorable Christmas Days, the hated dictator and his wife Elena were executed. Justice and democracy had finally come to long-suffering Romania. But too late for my great-aunt who had died a few years before of a lung disease contracted while in Communist jails.

In the next two decades democracy would soon conquer all of Eastern Europe, Latin America (with the exception of the Castro-engineered hell in Cuba), many Sub-Saharan African countries, part of East Asia including Chinese Taiwan. Only one region held out: the Arab world. From the (Persian) Gulf to the (Atlantic) Ocean, as the phrase in Arabic goes,  feudal monarchies, military-backed single-party regimes and presidents-for-life hold sway, impervious to the winds of freedom blowing all over the world, and often actively aided and abetted by Western democracies (now that is an irony.) It was absurdly claimed that Arabs were not wired for democracy, that Islam was the reason, forgetting that many Muslim countries such as Turkey and Indonesia had embraced multi-party democracy quite successfully, some of them even electing female rulers. But Arab countries were still the exception. No velvet revolution there, sheepish Arab citizens just seemed willing to accept their sad lot forever.

When my father's home country of Mauritania, where I spent part of my childhood, elected Sidi Ould Cheick Abdallahi (who went to school in France with my parents) as president in 2007, I held my breath: could that tiny country teach the Arabs a lesson? In Arab League meetings, "Sidioca" (as he was familiarly known) was the only Arab leader freely chosen by his people and you could tell it grated on his colleagues. And you could hear the collective sigh of relief from Arab rulers when 18 months later Sidioca was overthrown in a bloodless coup by a general who wanted to be top dog. Things were back to normal.

So when Tunisians started rioting a couple of weeks ago (almost 21 years to the day after the fateful event in Bucharest) about their economic conditions, neither Arab rulers nor the Tunisian regime's Western backers worried too much. Nothing that a good crackdown, censorship and a few deaths can't fix. And yet day after day, week after week, the ranks of protesters kept swelling as the  nature of their demands grew: from lack of employment opportunities to disgust with corruption and, as the death toll rose, to outrage at the killings perpetrated by the police and, finally, demands that President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, whose 23 years' reign had turned the country into a police state, step down. Then last Thursday, with the whole country in full uprising,  I saw on Al-Jazeera TV  Ben Ali speak in Tunisian Arabic, to be better understood by a majority of his subjects, that " I have understood you, I will not run again in 2014." My first reaction was, "I don't think you will because you'll be gone well before that." I knew then the game was up for him and it would be just a matter of months, maybe weeks, before he was consigned to the bins of history.

I was wrong. The next day the dictator who had run Tunisia with an iron fist for so long fled the country. Vox Populi, Vox Dei.

The Tunisians had achieved something unique in the Arab world: for the first time an Arab ruler was overthrown not by the army, or a foreign invasion, or a coup, but by the people themselves. For the technology person I am, I was gratified to see that this was also the first digital revolution on record. Tunisians, especially the youth, made great use of Twitter to coordinate rallies and protests, used their iPhones to make pictures of what was happening and posted them on Facebook. With the government preventing foreign reporters from entering the country and covering the events, most of the images we first saw were amateur videos. Tunisians filmed themselves making their own revolution and shared it with the world.


I bet you anything you want that no Arab ruler slept comfortably last night. Most of them are feeling quite edgy, and several must be shaking in their boots. The military-backed FLN party-run regime next door in Algeria is wondering whether its days are counted. Ominously there were riots in Algiers at the same time as in Tunisia, but they were quickly subdued (for the time being?) The Tunisian case, however, shows that any insignificant event  can turn into the sparkle that will ignite a full conflagration (in Tunisia it all started with a college-educated street vendor setting himself to fire in protest at lack of opportunities and heavy-handedness by the police) and that no matter how long a people has been cowed there comes a moment when they conquer the fear, break their shackles and there is just no stopping them.

Tunisia's other neighbor, Libya to the east, whose buffoonish dictator has (mis)ruled it for 40 years, could be the next domino. But the biggest prize for popular overthrow of a dictatorial regime  would be the country next door: Egypt. This ancient land shares many traits with the situation in Tunisia: heavy-handed security apparatus, corrupt regime, a pauperized majority and a relatively well-educated youth who have been watching with fascination the events that their fellow Arabs have shaped in Tunisia. The current Pharaoh, Hosni Mubarak, who has maintained himself in power for an incredible 30 years (yes, you've read right, he came to power in 1981 when Reagan was president and Gorbachev had not even come to office!) through repression, rigged elections (like Ben Ali in Tunisia he claims at every election an improbable score of 90 to 99%) and support from the United States government. And once Egypt, the heart of the Arab world, falls, the other Arab countries will follow through. History is on the march and it is exhilarating to watch it.

(Tunisia also broke another record. Yesterday at noon Ben Ali was still president, in the evening his Prime Minister had officially taken over only to be succeeded this morning by the Speaker of Parliament. Three presidents in less than 24 hours, that must be  a world record, even better than the three presidents Argentina had over ten days back in the early 2000's.)