The Hill News

The ouster of Tunisian dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali holds a lesson for authoritarian regimes all over the Middle East. The Tunisian leadership thought it could keep a lid on the pressure cooker, but it was wrong. The result is the first “velvet revolution” in an Arab land.

France refused asylum to the discredited leader, who was last elected with an implausible 89.62 percent of the vote. France’s role in its former colonies has long been ambiguous, but I think it likely that the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and probably also the Americans, told Ben Ali that his time was up. However, the future remains uncertain as â€" like the rest of the Arab world â€" Tunisia has never known Western-style democracy since independence.

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