'Mr. President, Your People Are Dead.'
Amy Davidson
Who is El Général, and what did he have to do with the fall of the government of Tunisia? Steve Coll, in his Comment in The New Yorker this week on Tunisia—which he is discussing with readers in a live chat now—describes El Général’s “President of the Country” as “a searing Arabic rap song” that “served as a soundtrack for the revolution.” One of the triggers for what happened was the self-immolation of a twenty-six-year-old fruit vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi. Coll writes:
The week before Bouazizi’s death, Hamada Ben Amor, who is twenty-two and goes by the name El Général, used a handheld camera to tape himself singing the song, a baseball cap pulled over his eyes. “Mr. President,” he exclaimed, “your people are dead!” Al Jazeera and various social media picked up the video. The secret police arrested Ben Amor, inflaming his followers, and hastening Ben Ali’s exit.
Here is the video in question. I am no expert in Arabic or any other kind of rap, but to me it seems like a classic of the genre. An angry young man, with a sense of what his real, and not just imagined, grievances are—of where to direct his anger—is standing with a microphone in front of a graffitied wall:
So there was singing, but first there was a man burning. The Times had a long piece on what drove him to kill himself like that; the story involves a bribe, a confiscated electric scale, and a slap in the face. The political is often very personal, especially when it comes to corruption.
After he died, the Times reports,
Bilal Zaydi, 20, saw the vendor’s relatives and friends outside the governor’s office that afternoon, throwing coins at the gate. “Here is your bribe,” they yelled. Over the next day and half the protests grew and the police “started beating protesters, and firing gas,” he said. Mr. Zaydi, a high school student, slept during the day, and then he and his friends would take on the police at night.At the same time, news of the unrest was spread on the Internet by people like Shamseddine Abidi, a 29-year old interior designer who posted videos and updates to his Facebook page. A journalist from Al Jazeera was one of Mr. Abidi’s Facebook friends, and quickly the Arabic channel, almost alone, carried the news abroad.
“I did my best,” Mr. Abidi said. “It’s a miracle.”
The Times’s Lede blog rounds up several of those videos.
So where does that leave the rest of us? Coll concludes:
Sometimes, common sense is ample guidance in foreign policy: the United States must invest in populations, not in dictators. At hinge moments in domestic politics, President Obama has shown why words matter. Now is the time to add his measured voice to the fury of El Général’s.
Another angle Coll discusses is the role of WikiLeaks. Raffi Khatchadourian has a good post up looking at how the mechanism WikiLeaks put in place prefigured the release of the so-called Palestine Papers by Al Jazeera and the Guardian—and why we may be in for a journalistic “arms race.”
Jan. 24, 2011