heraldsun.com.au
- From: Herald Sun
- January 02, 2012
Tunisian protesters demonstrate beneath a poster of slain martyr, Mohamed Bouazizi, near the Prime Minister's office in Tunisia. Picture: AP Photo/Salah Habibi AP
THE fates of nations can turn on a sixpence. And look out when they do.
Last year the fate of a few countries turned on an angry moment in the life of Faida Hamdi, a lowly council worker in Tunisia.Having got out of the wrong side of bed that day, she reportedly slapped a young man selling fruit in an impoverished central Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid - few had heard of it.
Normally, such an event would pass with angry words or, at most, a call to the police.
But Tunisia is an Islamic country, and a 45-year-old woman humiliating a proud young Muslim man was too much.
Already frustrated that he could barely support his mother, sisters and brother, Mohamed Bouazizi was apparently a regular target of corrupt local officials who routinely harassed him; they were probably seeking bribes to turn a blind eye to his street selling.
The powerless Bouazizi family did not have the money for bribes - even the $6 bribes demanded by Hamdi - or the connections to persuade authorities to leave them alone.
Hamdi had also taken Bouazizi's weighing scales and tipped over his cart of fruit and vegetables, bought on credit the night before.
It was the last straw.
The 26-year-old walked to the local municipal headquarters to lodge a complaint, but they wouldn't let him in.
He went to the nearest petrol station, bought some fuel, poured it on himself and lit a match.
A year ago today he was reported to be recovering, having been moved to a hospital near the capital. Tunisia's thieving and tyrannical President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who visited the unconscious young man, must have wished he had.
But the poor fellow died on January 4.
His death fuelled the riots that had been spreading since his self-immolation. Ten days later, Ben Ali and his family fled to Jeddah, in Saudi Arabia.
The so-called Arab Spring that flowed from these events has seen revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, while destabilising regimes in Bahrain, Yemen and, as we saw again over the weekend, Syria.
Last week London's The Times named Bouazizi 2011 Person of the Year.
Tyrants of the year awards might go to Ben Ali, or posthumously to Libya's Colonel Gaddafi, or even the ailing former Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak, who is now on trial for his life.
They could perhaps all share it.
In Jeddah, Ben Ali could well be living at the house the Saudis provided for the late genocidal Ugandan dictator, Idi Amin.
Amin is alleged to have murdered 500,000 countrymen. He even ate some of them.
Ben Ali didn't do that, but his excess baggage charges would have been steep: The family is believed to have taken 1.5 tonnes of gold from the country's central bank with them.
The Saudis are Sunni Muslims. Ben Ali is a Sunni.
Amin was a Sunni. Quite often, Sunnis stick together, wedded by nothing other than a mutual loathing for Shia Muslims.
You might murder half a million, or ransack your nation, but sinner Sunnis have a friend in the Saudis.
Iraq, on the other hand, is a predominantly Shia nation, which is why the Ayatollah Khomeini was living there in exile on October 23, 1977.
That moment is the sixpence on which the fate of his homeland, Iran, and its leader, the rapacious Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, turned.
Khomeini's son was killed in a car accident that day. Maybe.
He is also reported to have suffered a heart attack while driving, which will often lead to an accident, I am sure.
The doubt about the "accident" - and the confidence that the Shah's secret police were involved - was enough to trigger riots against the hated Shah and give momentum to Khomeini's offshore campaign to turn Iran in to a ruthless Islamist dictatorship in which all his enemies could be murdered by the state.
It didn't take long. Within weeks many Khomeini followers were convinced that fate would deliver their man power.
If you can believe this, many of his adherents stayed up at night staring at the moon, from which they were convinced his face was beaming.
One of them must have been Iran's present day leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is barking mad. A genuine lunatic.
The Shah fled Iran in January 1979 after ruling it for 37 years.
In that time, corrupt as he was, he led a mostly secular life, gave Iranian women rights they wish they had today, immeasurably raised literacy rates and greatly expanded university education, and improved health and wealth.
With US troops departing Iraq it is feared Iran will fill that Shia vacuum, as it surely intends.
But the real worry about Islam's undeclared civil war is Iran and its ambition to be a nuclear power.
A theocracy with the bomb?
The highlight of the Wikileaks' revelations was a cable dated April 20, 2008, from the US embassy in Riyadh to Washington.
In it, there is plenty of evidence of the Saudis' fears about the increasing influence of Shias.
At a meeting attended by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, General David Petraeus, the then US commander in the Middle East, and its then ambassador to Iraq, the Saudis' worries were discussed.
Abdullah's hand-picked ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir "recalled the King's frequent exhortations to the US to attack (Shia) Iran and so put an end to its nuclear weapons program".
"He told you to cut off the head of the snake," Jubeir reported.
Do you think Jubeir was concerned that "the snake" might point its weapons at Tel Aviv and let loose?
Like most Saudis, the ambassador would celebrate such an event with praise for Allah.
But no, he was thinking closer to home.
The West, working overtime in a campaign that has cost thousands of allied lives, including too many Australians, seeks peace for the region along with a future for Israel, other than the annihilation so many ignorant and bitter Arabs would prefer.
But we are too often caught between these ancient Islamic hatreds.
As we tread warily through the minefield of Middle Eastern politics in 2012, we'd do well to step around any sixpences.
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