The euphoria of victory the Arabs enjoy these days should not prevent us from paying close attention to the dictator’s speech. These speeches contain a wealth of information that may help us in the future to predict the strategy of the dictator before he makes his departure speech. As we watch Mubarak and Ben Ali’s speeches, we notice the existence of these common elements:
1.Cane and Carrot policy. The President appears on television with an angry face that indicates that he wants to exterminate all his people. He is the only person to think of his people’s interests. Therefore, after a thirty year hibernation in power, he wakes up to inform them that he will not allow the outlaws to play with the country’s security. His Excellency clings to his right to carry out his mission as drawn in the constitution. He will not give up the smallest grain of sand of his people’s and nation’s dignity. The core of his message is the total overlap between the dictator and the state. The message is clear: there is no difference between the State and the dictator’s farm.
2.Admitting the need for social and economic reforms. This is the first time in decades that the dictator admits that his country is not God’s heaven on earth. It seems that the dictator does not feel anything until he sees bloodshed. As long as the dictator and his family are fine, everyone else is fine by extension. Hundreds of corpses and thousands of wounded people were needed to wake up the dictator and make him feel in a remote corner in his heart that his people are suffering. The dictator’s answer is reducing the prices, promises of employment and for the first time a concrete plan for investment. His measures remain faithful to his reductionist conception of people’s struggle; people struggle only for bread and water. These measures show the calcification of the dictator’s thought and his inability to capture the signals emanating from his people.
3.A strong intention to impose the equation: either me or chaos. He equates his rule with the nation’s security. This is the zenith of hubris, arrogance and contempt of the dictator for the people. The issue of security plays on a very sensitive cord in the Arab culture, the cord of security and quietude. We understand the importance of honor and the sacredness of blood in the Arab Islamic culture. There have even been efforts in the past to find a legal foundation in the shari’a to legitimatize dictatorship by saying that “an unjust ruler is better than a continuous discord”. This equation is wrong because security is a collective need and a social necessity that all the components of society provide to each other, and the individual no matter how strong they are, cannot guarantee security if society refuses to cooperate. When a president equates the continuity of his regime with the provision of security for society, he turns himself into a mafia leader under the name of an organized state. We cannot see any difference between the head of a mafia and the president of a police state whose forces terrorize citizens.
4.Demonstrators are terrorists. We can decipher in these speeches a genuine effort to depict the ‘real” Egyptian and the “real” Tunisian as being peaceful. This aims to attribute the demonstrations to “terrorist members” who infiltrated them. This emotional discourse uncovers the political stupidity of the dictators because it aims to delegitimize the people and their struggle for change. If we accepted that the terrorist groups, the outlaws and the criminals were behind these demonstrations, does not this imply that all the security apparatus put in place by the governments over the years was wrong and did not manage to uproot these groups? The whole nation is an outlaw. The real citizens are the ones who stay at home, do not care about public life. If this good citizen happens to participate in a demonstration, then they have breached one of the foundations of good citizenship which means total subservience to the dictatorial regime.
5.Showing the dictator as a popular person who feels the pulse of his people. We may assume that this move aims to provide the dictator with a political virginity by bringing him closer to the people. Ben Ali resorted to Tunisian dialect – using the word “battal”’ which means jobless in the vulgar street language in order to gain some sympathy from the so many jobless young people in the country – while French was his daily communication language. We understand that language is a very strong tool to convince people and the regimes have used every bit of it to make their people feel some sympathy for them.
6.After feeling the failure of all the above-mentioned techniques in bringing any support for the dictator and his regime, the national televisions displays a breaking news: an important matter will be an announced to the people. This is the first time the word people is used in the internationally recognized meaning of the word. This is the first time in decades the people feel that they are a people, they exist and that the speech is actually going to be addressed to them. The people have been used to be addressed when the leader wanted and in occasions that he thought right. These occasions had nothing to do with neither the people’s history nor their past glories. His Excellency appears on television, announces that he sacked his government, declares that his advisers misled him and admits indirectly that he lives in a place and a time different from the time and place where his people are. The dictator declares that he will not run after this term and makes a strong case for why people’s leadership cannot be inherited by his children. The people are too great to be bequeathed to anyone, their leadership is only deserved. At this stage the dictator uses words such as: the great, the peaceful and the glorious people. Words that had been absent in his vocabulary for many decades.
7.The dictator’s speech carries a tinge of begging. After years of serving the president, the builder, the unifier, the only brave, the only poet, the only thinker, the sunriser and its setter, the head of the artists, the great pole, the strong barricade, the maker of miracles and the pole of stability. After all these years spent in worshiping an individual, people are astonished to see him on television begging to finish a term or be allowed to die in his country. All what the dictator wants to achieve at this moment is saving his life and be given an amnesty so that the could enjoy the billions of dollars he embezzled from his people in an Arab desertic country. Europe and America are an unreachable dream. Pinochet like judiciary processes will be waiting for them. As we watch the leader, we feel tears in his eyes but his heart is dry from sitting so long on the chair. Tears refuse to roll down his eyes; they refuse to be used to trick the people again. We are sure that were Arabs to see their leader cry on television, they would have pardoned him. However, the tears refuse to support dictatorship. Dictatorship is simply against the human nature.
8.We discovered a cultural superficiality among the two toppled Arab leaders. We also discovered their inability to imbibe the fast transformations happening around them. When the people were chanting “people want to topple the regime”, the latter starts making concessions that he should have made many years ago. The president appoints a vice president, lifts the state of emergency or appoints a committee to reform the constitution. Timely measures to buy time without addressing the core issues that the people made a revolution for. These hasty appeasing measures showed the intellectual poverty of the rulers, their confusion and their inability to resolve conflicts with their people peacefully. Neither the Egyptian nor the Tunisian people bought the regimes hoaxes, they continued till the end. People have reached the political maturity while the regimes were still wallowing in their political adolescence.
These are some of the main characteristics that are common between the speeches of the two toppled Arab dictators. The toppling of other dictators, their flight and the speeches they will address to their people will show the nature and the structure of the dictator’s speech. We discovered, with these speeches, that dictatorship is a very strong man who flexes his muscles every day, but has no chance to win the battle against the will of the people. We also discovered that the dictator resorts to all sorts of weapons to remain in power after the failure of threats. We will not be surprised if we hear that a dictator used pre-Islamic poetry to mention the great qualities of the Arabs — such as hospitality, tolerance, respect for their elders, providing for the marooned (toppled dictators are in this category) — to make a case for themselves. However, they will never mention the Arab’s love for freedom, respect, dignity, bravery and especially their spirit of revolution. This latter is what all Arab dictators wish to eradicate from dictionaries these days.
Brahim teaches Arabic language and culture in the United States. His areas of research include Arabic literature, Islam and society, and “berbérité” and Islam among the Berbers of southeast Morocco.