Excerpt
From the crowded, run-down streets of Cairo to the oil-financed halls of power in Kuwait, Arab leaders appear increasingly rattled by the unfolding events in Tunisia and elsewhere in the Arab world, where men continued to set themselves on fire — two more in Egypt on Tuesday, and a third who was stopped.
Though the streets of Cairo, Algiers and other Arab cities around the region were calm, the acts of self-immolation served as a reminder that the core complaints of economic hardship and political repression that led to the Tunisian uprising resonated strongly across the Middle East.
“You have leaders who have been in power for a very long time, one party controlling everything, marginalization of the opposition, no transfer of power, plans for succession, small groups running the business, vast corruption,” said Emad Gad, a political scientist at the Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies. “All of this makes the overall environment ripe for an explosion at any second.”
But while there is widespread anticipation about a revolutionary contagion, particularly in Egypt and Algeria, where there have been angry and violent protests, political analysts said that each country is different, making such conclusions premature. Egypt lacks the broad and educated middle class of Tunisia, while in Algeria the middle class failed to join the angry young men in rioting, regional experts said.
In Jordan, an Islamist opposition party, the Islamic Action Front, issued a demand that the offices of prime minister and other high officials be made elective instead of appointive, as they are now. But like the other outbursts, it quickly died away.
“For all the sound and fury, it doesn’t look like much political dividend will come out of what happened in Algeria, in the short term,” said Hugh Roberts, an independent scholar and a specialist on North Africa based here. “It looks like it has gone quiet. It was a big blast of angry, hot air, but in an unfocused way, which leaves most things the same.”
So for now, the most pronounced impact from the unexpected Tunisian uprising is a lingering sense of uncertainty.
"Tunisian Blogger Joins Government" by ROBERT MACKEY, New York Times 1/18/2011
Excerpt
Less than two weeks ago, Slim Amamou, a Tunisian blogger and activist, was using his @slim404 Twitter feed to let friends know that the police had been to his house. Later the same day, after he was arrested, the 33-year-old computer programmer managed to turn his phone on and log on to Google Latitude to broadcast his location: inside the country’s feared ministry of the interior.
On Tuesday, five days after he announced his release from custody on Twitter, and one day after he used the same tool to say that he had accepted an offer to join Tunisia’s new transitional government, Mr. Amamou’s status update on the social network said simply: “in a ministerial meeting.”
The pace of Mr. Amamou’s sudden transformation from dissident prisoner to secretary of state for youth and sports has been matched by the speed of the backlash against his decision to serve in government alongside senior members of the old regime. Soon after his new role was announced, he was fielding congratulations from one of the organizers of Nawaat — an influential Tunisian group blog.
At the speed of light....
No comments:
Post a Comment