NATUR has its own immutable sense of poetic justice. It also delivers it with impeccable finesse. The sudden fall from absolute power of the Tunisian tyrant, Zein el-Abidine Ben Ali, is the latest example of the absolute veracity of this maxim.

Ben Ali ruled with absolute power. He was also ruthless and brutal, especially against those suspected of Islamic leanings. That was one trait of his that endeared him so much to his western mentors and admirers. He made life hell for his hapless people, violating their human rights with impunity and suppressing all dissent and voices of freedom with an iron hand. However, that didn’t bother his western friends one bit because he passed their bar of a ‘moderate’ Muslim ever inclined to dance to their tunes.

Ben Ali, the pro-West secularist turned his beautiful country into a playground for western tourists. They descended on Tunisia in droves, cavorted freely on its sun-drenched beaches while their governments turned a blind eye to Ben Ali’s excesses against the Tunisians. Little wonder that the likes of CNN and BBC, last week, were only worried about the safety of their ‘tourists’ while Tunisians agitating for the restoration of their usurped rights were being killed like partridges on the leafy boulevards of Tunis by Ben Ali’s security forces.

Ben Ali, who went after anybody espousing some role for Islamic jurisprudence in Tunisia’s system of politics and governance with vengeance, has been forced to seek refuge in Saudi Arabia. Why have the Saudi royals agreed to shelter Ben Ali when he was openly shunned by those in the West that admired him so much is anybody’s guess. It’s quite likely that the Saudis were bamboozled into accepting him by their own western friends. Ben Ali’s first choice for exile was said to be France but his friend Nicolas Sarkozy had no room for him.

Of course Ben Ali isn’t the first of western protégés thus shunned and kicked around. Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines and the Shah of Iran are but just two famous illustrations from a long list of fallen ‘heroes’. Marcos was never allowed to go beyond Hawaii — and died there — while the Shah was shunted around four continents like a pariah until he was sub-contracted to another protégé, Anwar Sadat — who was himself destined to die in a horrible murder at the hands of a countryman for having sold his country for a song to the Americans — in Egypt to spend his last days there and be buried in its soil.

So for those Arab and other Muslim autocrats still hopelessly tied to Washington’s and other western apron strings, who may have forgotten the old examples of Marcos and the Shah, the sorry tale of Ben Ali is the latest reminder not to expect succour from their mentors when needed most. Nature doesn’t provide such refreshers every day.

The Arab masses have been notoriously infamous in the world for their apparently inexhaustible capacity to suffer autocratic rulers. The Arab world is replete with the likes of Qadhafi and Mubarak who have been around for decades. Qadhafi has been exceptionally lucky, or bruta, in stamping out all opposition with an iron fist. Mubarak on the other hand has been savagely suppressing all dissent, especially from the Ikhwan, with connivance of his American overseers for whom his services are apparently invaluable. He has just stage-managed another parliamentary election, without a squeak or murmur of foul-play from the western democracy watchdogs.

The Tunisian people, in that sense, have added a brave new chapter in the annals of contemporary Arab history by taking on a well-entrenched and apparently unassailable tyrant head-on and knocking the ground from under his feet with such intensity that he’d to flee his power sanctum to save his skin.

Ben Ali was only the second ruler the Tunisians had known in 53 years of independence from France. The genial Habib Bourghiba, father of independent Tunisia, had brought him in as his prime minister. However, in a typical example of an ambitious subaltern pulling the rug from under the feet of his mentor, Ben Ali engineered a bloodless coup against Bourghiba, in 1987, to entrench himself in power.

One of the first things Ben Ali did in order to consolidate his hold on power was to hound out the intellectuals who couldn’t be bought over to his side. One of the finest brains among Arab intellectuals of the day was Rashid Al Ghannouchi, a liberal Islamic thinker in the mould of Iran’s Ali Shariati — murdered by the Shah’s goons in the notorious Savak. This scribe had the pleasure of interacting regularly with Rashid Al Ghannouchi during my diplomatic stint in Algiers, where he’d sought refuge in exile, during 1988-91.

I lost contact with him after I left Algiers and he, too, was chased out of there by the Francophone coup plotters who’d seized power from the benign Chadli Ben Jedid in order to subvert Algeria’s own democratic movement, then spearheaded by the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) led by a charismatic Abbasi Madani.

Rashid Al Ghannouchi, since living in exile in Europe, is still not being allowed to return to his motherland. The interim Tunisian leader, Prime Minister Mohammad Al Ghannouchi — no relation to Rashid — has whimsically declared that Rashid would still live in exile.

So it ought to be a wake-up call for the chess-masters of the West who have been playing havoc with the fates of the Muslims, especially the Arabs, by sponsoring tyrants and autocrats with such abandon and impunity. Until the Tunisian people rose to call this western bluff, the charade had gone unchecked or with little resistance, with the western leaders paying lip service to vacuous calls for democracy but subverting a genuinely elected government, by Hamas, in the occupied Palestine. They want only tailor-made democracies in the Muslim world, measured to western needs and always ready to sell their people at the altar of western interest.

But this Tunisian tempest is the work of ordinary people with no links to the much-maligned and decried ‘Islamists.’ Western commentators are already bemused how ordinary folks could amass so much moral strength without the grudgingly conceded organizational skills of the ‘Islamists,’ as to stare down a firmly-footed tyrant with ruthless and absolute power at his beck and call.

But the real moment of truth it is for Arab rulers. They must pause and ponder how trustworthy are their western power brokers and how long they could go on flouting the rights of the people in whose name they have been misruling for so long?

Indeed the walls of faux security built around the likes of Hosni Mubarak must be shaking because of this earth-shattering development in little Tunisia, whose valiant people have, truly, lit a trail for their Arab brethren to follow. What they have done is to have got rid of their fear of the tyrant. That alone should be sufficient to induce fear among all other tyrants and autocrats in Ben Ali’s league. Nothing unnerves a dictator more than his subjugated people standing up to him. Our own tin-pot Musharraf succumbed to that.

The ground situation in Tunisia is still fluid and shaky for obvious reasons. This genuine people’s movement is, so far, without a leader. There’s no Cory Aquino, a la Philippines, to lend it a symbol of organised resistance, as was the case with the yellow revolution of the Filipino people in the early 80s that snuffed out a ruthless Ferdinand Marcos.

The interim order in Tunisia, trying to prevail and guide the country toward normalcy and some semblance of leadership-in-control is still heavily made up of those time-servers who made hay under Ben Ali at the expense of the people. Four new ministers of the interim cabinet have resigned in protest over the presence in their ranks of agents of the ancien regime. That explains still rampant restiveness among the Tunisians who, in all fairness to them, should be reluctant to trust old carpet-baggers. Leopards don’t change their spots easily and charlatans don’t have the mettle to mutate into saints overnight.

Fears have been expressed that without a grass-roots leadership, still not in sight, continued agitation and unrest among the Tunisians may lead to this people’s revolution going the way the Sudanese people’s brave overthrow of their own tyrant, Jaffer El Numeiry, in 1985, eventually gave way to the army seizing control.

One should pray that that’s not the case with the heroic achievement of the Tunisians. It’s not their fate and future, alone, at stake; the future of the Arab peoples, groaning under a variety of ossified rulers — who come in all shades and stripes — for so long is also in the balance. K_K_ghori@yahoo.com