Tunisian President Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali was too late to admit his failure. He waited until Tunisia started to go up in flames in protest against his rule, which has lasted for the past 23 years. He tried to save himself from the uprising opposed to his rule. He laid the blame on his advisors. He said they had not been conveying the picture of reality to him: “they tricked me and they will be held to account”. He dismissed some of them immediately. He issued orders to security forces of ceasing to open fire against protesters. He pledged to defend democratic freedoms, not to run as candidate for a sixth mandate, and to dedicate what was left of his mandate to amending the electoral law. Ben Ali represents a model of ruler who has failed internally but receives foreign support, especially from the United States, where his democratic performance and progressive views are praised. The fact of the matter is that he has been protecting his rule through tyranny and repressing freedoms (the overwhelming popular uprising and his late confessions providing suitable evidence of this). He gathered in his entourage corrupt individuals who would share in his wealth and power, and who would tell him nothing that would displease him, out of fear for their privileges (the late Saddam Hussein being an example of this). Tunisia was not subject to foreign threats. Neither did Morocco threaten it nor did Libya covet its territory. Israel was not its neighbor to be the regime's pretext for tyranny and corruption. Rather, the opposite was true – as part of the regime's foreign legitimacy was based on it accommodating the US in its stance on the Hebrew state. Internally, Tunisia does not have the kind of diversity that exists in Sudan, Egypt or the Levant. Tunisians, like the inhabitants of Morocco and Algeria, all belong to the Maliki school of Sunni Islam. The system of rule established by Bourguiba was a carbon copy of the French system, in its secular tendencies and laws (civil marriage and equality between women and men). The Tunisian system could have been a model for the Arab World, yet it became the most representative model of this geographical area stretching from the ocean to the Gulf, the regimes of which are characterized by tyranny and police rule. Ben Ali was much too late to admit to the mistakes he made. And making advisors and minister bear responsibility for them is not appropriate. As for saying that they were not being sincere in giving him council, it does not absolve, but rather condemns him. Indeed, how can a President not know what is happening in the country he governs? Was he not informed about the electoral law tailor-made for himself and for those close to him in his party? Did he not interfere in the laws being legislated in Parliament? Was he not informed of what was being published in the newspapers filled with his pictures? Would he not be angered every time a newspaper would escape his control and charge those concerned with punishing the journalists “implicated in terrorism and in publishing lies”? At the height of his weakness, Ben Ali's confessions and his promises no longer convince anyone, especially not those crowds rising up in the streets, and not after such a large number of people have been killed by the gunfire of security forces. It is no longer of any use for him to fight with his back to the wall. As for the legitimacy he had acquired from abroad, it has begun to erode. He has no choice left but to submit to the facts on the ground in order to spare the lives of his citizens.
