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Tunisia is a tiny chip of a country, its society as tightly knit by personal relationships as Afghanistans. One contact, a Ben Gacem, for
example, opened doors everywhere. Within two days, I was sitting in
on the executive bureau meeting of a newly birthed political party, Afek
Tounes. The heated conversation veered among topics as diverse as
whether international observers should be invited to monitor upcoming
elections, or what sort of people the party should accept money from.
We want Tunisia to be a democracy, a woman explained to me.
We want to break with corruption. But we do not want political Islam.
The Islamist party has always set itself up as the only alternative to
corruption.
Militant political religion as the only alternative to corruption. That
was just the nexus I had seen in the Talibans appeal in Afghanistan,
and in the frequent presence of extremist insurgencies in other acutely
corrupt countries. Public integrity, the proposition seemed to be, could
only emerge through the rigid purity of religious practiceimposed by
law if need be, or savage violence.
I met with two members of the interim cabineta collection of
brilliant technocrats, most of whom had been working abroad. How I
wished wed had talent like that in Afghanistan. They too were still
reeling at the extent of the corruption, whose dimensions even they had
never imagined.
The development gap has grown unimaginable, remarked Interim
Finance Minister Jalloul Ayed, recently of Citigroupso no stranger to
excess. Ben Ali and his family went berserk. They went on a wild spending spree that offends the social mores of this country. We werent raised
like that. Interim Transportation Minister Yassine Brahim could not
summon words to describe the scene he discovered at the port of Tunis.
He just shook his head, wincing. A story making the rounds referred to
a court photographer, whose job was to go to the high-society weddings
and snap pictures of beautiful girls who would then be invited to Ben
Ali family parties.
The behavior was lifted directly from Machiavellis warning: To be
rapacious and usurp the goods and the women of his subjects, that is
above all else what will make [the prince] hateful.4
While remarking on the evident fact that their revolution was not
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anti-American in character, these ministers and others did raise questions about the responsibility of international actors. U.S. policy is
not in line with its values, said an Afek Tounes member, echoing comments I had heard across North Africa. Another young activist questioned international lending practices, pointing out that International
Monetary Fund and European Union loans had gone into the pockets
of the regime. If investigation confirms that the money never reached
the people but was stolen, he wondered, could that debt be forgiven?
Queries like these raise important issues about the ethics, but also
the advisability in international security terms, of active and passive
collusion with kleptocracies. Governments and multinational institutions, private businesses as well, should weigh them with more consideration than they have in the past.
Finance Minister Ayed was even more direct than the young activist.
We have seen nothing from the United States, he remarked acidly. A
congratulatory phone call, a few bracing words from Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton, and that was it. Something extraordinary is happening here, bigger than anything since Hannibal. It would cost a fraction
of a fraction of what Washington spent on Iraq, for the same result that
was desired there.
Tunisians called for a Marshall Plan, to demonstrate to an expec
tant population that peaceful revolution could deliver results: Eight to
ten billion would transform Tunisia within a decade, said Sami Zaoui,
another former businessman, who had thrown himself into a nonprofit
in the wake of the revolution. And the knock-on effect across the region
would be huge.
Beneath these Tunisians urgency floated a growing fear, whose contours were already visible. If their revolution against kleptocracy did
not deliver some palpable measure of improved social justice, the people,
in their frustration, might radicalize after all. Tunisia might become
like Iran, said Zaoui.
That month spent in the vortex of the Arab Spring in 2011, together
with subsequent trips, reinforced beyond even my most expansive predictions a maturing hypothesis. The wave of protests, the toppling of
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