Seeds of democracy in Tunisia

Gwynne Dyer is the author of "Future Tense: The Coming World Order" and, most recently, "Climate Wars."

The analogy might be with the chain of nonviolent revolutions that drove the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe from power in 1989.

Or then again, it might not.

Many people in the Arab world hope that the popular revolt in Tunisia will become a genuine democratic revolution that inspires people in other Arab countries to do the same. Others, notably most of the existing regimes in the Arab world and their foreign allies, hope fervently that it will not. But the current situation is fraught with possibilities.

It's not yet clear whether the street demonstrations that drove the Tunisian dictator, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, into exile after 23 years in power will lead to a genuine democracy. The prime minister he left behind, Mohammed Ghannouchi, promised free elections soon, but it was still the old regime, minus its leader, that was making the promises. Demonstrators this week have been carrying signs saying, "Get out."

Last week's protests were a spontaneous uprising, an outburst of sheer exasperation with the corruption and incompetence of the Ben Ali regime. The rebels seem to have little plan for what happens next, and several hundred thousand people with guns and good communications facilities have a lot to lose if the old regime just vanishes.

On the other hand, miracles sometimes happen. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, the East German Communist regime, after 44 years in power, just decided not to start killing its own people. No matter how loyal officials were to Communist ideals, they understood that their time was up.

If the time is up for the Ben Ali regime, the question arises: If the Tunisian revolt turns into a real democratic revolution, could its example spread?

The neighbors certainly think so. Moammar Gadhafi, Libya's ruler for the past 41 years, was almost comical in his public dismay at Ben Ali's fall. "You (Tunisians) have suffered a great loss," he said in a speech broadcast on Libyan state television. "There is none better than Zine (Ben Ali) to govern Tunisia." Or more precisely, none better to keep Gadhafi safe from his own people.

Tunisia's neighbor to the west, Algeria, is even more vulnerable to popular revolt than Libya. The president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, has only been in office since 1999, but he was put there by the army, whose senior generals have run the country from behind the scenes since the mid-1960s. Algerians have been demonstrating publicly against the high price of food, and the regime's response has turned violent.

The social and economic conditions that made Tunisia such a tinderbox also prevail in many other Arab countries: widespread poverty, huge unemployment and great popular anger - usually carefully hidden - at the brutal authoritarianism and endemic corruption of the regimes.

Egypt, Syria, Morocco - in fact, almost all the Arab countries except the oil-rich Persian Gulf states - are potentially vulnerable to a Tunisian-style revolt. Not all or even most of them are likely to have one, nor would every attempted revolt succeed. Some of the regimes are much more capable of using massive force than Ben Ali's ramshackle dictatorship.

But some revolts may succeed. In Tunisia, if all goes well, the successor regime could be a secular democracy, but in many other places a strict Islamic regime would be much likelier. The old leftist and secular liberal parties, beaten and bribed into submission, have long since lost credibility in most Arab countries. Only the Islamic parties have not been co-opted.

There are as many flavors of Islamic politics as there are of ice cream. Some are retrograde and hostile to all opinions but their own; others are open and reasonable. In the coming years we may well have the opportunity to observe all of those varieties in action. The most important thing that non-Arabs can do, especially in the West, is not to panic. Knee-jerk assumptions that such regimes would be implacably hostile to non-Muslims would become self-fulfilling prophecies. It doesn't have to be so.