Bashar Al-Assad and Ali Abdullah Saleh have the opportunity to step away from disaster, but they're not doing it, writes Abdel-Moneim Said The only possible way to interpret all the evasiveness, manoeuvring, shiftiness and even deceitfulness that characterise Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh's reaction to the initiative of the Gulf Cooperation Council and Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad's reaction to the Arab League initiative is that they are on a "mission of tyranny" in its purest form. Dictatorship is hardly new to the Arab world -- indeed, to the world at large. There have always been and always will be persons who imagine that they have been singled out as individuals or as heads of a political party or movement to lead their nation to new horizons and unprecedented heights. Modern times have brought tyrants who claimed to possess a universal ideological mission, as was the case with the Nazis in Germany, the fascists in Italy, the communists in Russia and China, and the Islamists in Afghanistan and Iran. Other modern tyrants confined themselves to a domestic mission, seeing themselves as the only bulwark against potential civil war, sectarian strife, and national disintegration and fragmentation. Arab publics have grown familiar with dictators' proclamations, "Without me the country will descend into chaos," and other such variations on Après moi le déluge. But what is new in the Arab world is that the Arab people have rebelled against this formula and no one foresaw the consequences or appreciated the potential cost of this rebellion, the nature of which no one has really grasped in its entirety. The great uprising, which manifested itself in the major streets and squares of Arab cities, began as a form of peaceful mass protest or collective acts of civil disobedience that soon encountered the heavy-handed response of tyrants. The revolutionaries responded to the violence in various ways. At times they met the violence with violence (in some places they appealed for foreign assistance when it became clear that the regime was prepared to engage in wholesale slaughter of its own people) and elsewhere they persisted in their peaceful activism, ready to make the ultimate sacrifice. It is impossible to predict what the Arab revolutions will eventually produce. All have raised the banners of democracy and free elections, dignity and justice, and other noble principles. However, embodying these values on the ground is another matter entirely, to which testify the arduous and stressful experiences in Egypt and Tunisia. Perhaps, in some cases, society will have emerged from one tyranny only to plunge headlong into another. In Egypt, it has been said that the Pharaohs have gone. But "Pharaonism" may remain, if under a different mantle or priesthood. Be that as it may, the revolutionary experience itself has been of inestimable value. That the people engaged in the political fray in various ways and learned how to deal with authority and authoritarian might is a net gain the ultimate effects of which cannot be assessed on the basis of one political round. Tyranny is where evil ones are free to speak while the good are forced to remain silent. Today, the latter have begun to speak, to cheer, to deliberate and to negotiate. The tyrant no longer holds a monopoly on wisdom or on a mission. In fact, one major trait of tyranny is that the tyrant always claims to speak in the name of the people, the masses or the nation, and for the past, present and future. He is the one and only great keeper of history. But when eventually the people did speak, they had something else to say. The "people," the "masses" and the "nation" began to air opinions that may not necessarily have been the wisest of opinions, but were definitely not those of the tyrant. In such cases, the tyrant would be wise to listen and even wiser to leave. This particular insight is clearly beyond the grasp of Saleh and Al-Assad. The angry mass protests in their countries are akin to the tale of the child that blurted out that the emperor had no clothes. The veneer of lies and false promises is completely see-through, the people have proclaimed, in the Yemeni and Syrian cases. And it was not long before the emperor bared his teeth. From one minute to the next, he turned from the magnanimous and venerable father to an ogre, feeding his people to the jaws of prison and the machines of torture and genocide. Then, with every fresh outburst of popular anger and with each additional day of the mass uprising, he increased his dose of violence and brutality, out of the belief that this would cure the illness of the people's contrariness and their desire for change. To judge from the reactions of the two "leaders", they are totally clueless as to why their countries are in turmoil. There is no reason why Saleh should have remained in power for 33 years, as though Yemen's female population had lost the power to produce offspring with leadership capacities. The Yemeni population has nearly tripled during his period of rule and the world has changed several times, but the Yemeni president remains unchanged, and he thinks his country should too. Bashar somehow forgot that he came to power by hereditary succession in a constitutional republic whose constitution had to be tailored to suit his age. But then, he had always felt that his legitimacy stemmed from the power he possessed through his control of Syria's diverse agencies of repression and for some time no one seemed prepared to disillusion him. Ironically, the first objections came from within the Al-Assad family itself, when Rifaat Al-Assad found himself deprived of the spoils and when it dawned on Abdel-Halim Khaddam that Syria was not a democracy. But all that is just the surface. Syria's real game has to do with Iran, a few Gulf countries and, as always, Lebanon, the prize, the bargaining chip and the eternal victim. The Arab people rose up to say that they had had enough. No country can remain forever outside of history, geography and other coordinates of space and time. The tyrants the people rose up against live in a realm of their own, a self-feeding fantasy in which there is an abundant store of people to drive the great fiction they created for themselves until eventually they come to believe it so thoroughly that they willingly abandon the few remaining opportunities to save themselves or embark on a new life. Generally, the people would have no problem striking some kind of deal. The Tunisian people did not object to the flight of Ben Ali and, apart from a few isolated voices, no one there clamoured for his return so he could stand trial. Many revolutionaries in Egypt had hoped that Mubarak would leave the same way. But the former president chose to step down, as he should have, yet to remain in his country even if as an inmate. Gaddafi chose another path. He rejected all initiatives and was simultaneously determined not to leave, and this path led to a consummately tragic end. Meanwhile, the Libyan people that fought until the bitter end, found themselves at a totally new beginning in the fullest sense of the term: they have no state, no government, and total chaos and madness. Yemen and Syria, now, are at a historical threshold. Sadly, their fates are in the hands of Abdullah Saleh and Bashar Al-Assad, both of who have the opportunity of an initiative to save them from disaster, but both of whom seem bent on a course from which there can be no return.
