This week, the Algerian high command, in supposed synchronisation with the country's ailing, failing and visibly disgruntled president Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who surged to the supreme office in the wake of the Islamist rebellions of the early 1990s, which in fervour and vicariousness were no second to the groundbreaking violent rebellion and afterbirth of the revolution against French and pieds-noir domination. Within days, the second - and most deserving - of the umarah of the Arab world previously beleaguered, but ultimately victorious against the pressures of the 2011 wave, Sudani strongman Omar al Bashir, would face downfall amidst intense popular protests and the typical (late) intervention of the armed forces. The ladder turned on its benefactee, posed not even with the question of how graceful the checkout, after long-overdue eviction. The coincidence of Mr. Assange's, as it were, ejection with its less than dignified elements would seem to draw all of the attention one might want (as well as attention) that would rightly have been drawn from this man.
Domination, of this - for a long time - conglomerate of two grand peoples, ironically named condominium during the Anglo-Egyptian era, has been Bashir's pregorative for a long time, and for all but the last years including the Bantu Sudanis of the south, now embroiled in a civil war of their own outside his grasp. The cruelties inflicted in particular on these, and more so upon the people of Darfur, would face unkeen international antagonism for otherwise patiently tolerated autocrats prevailing within the region. With a personal stash of slaves, of the most literal and in an Anglo-American dominated interpretation of history (but fitting to an Arab one also, largely) gruesome kind, a record of ethnic cleansing of those not fitted for the new republic, and continuing the islamisation of what could - and certainly to some extent had been - a multicultural (as well as by design multi-ethnic) country over the rest by continuing and strengthening the policies timely set out by Jafa'ar Nimeiry, Bashir earns a place as one of the cruelest, crudest and most retrograde of rulers in the Arab League. He will leave it as eventually exiting as the longest republican custodian, barring only three Gulf monarchs and the Sultan of Oman, the longest. Also, after a nigh-thirty year reign (self-installed the month of the Tiananmen massacre) presiding over the poorest in the league after Somalia and Yemen, by virtue of anarchy, endemic tribal warfare and the timely (if not too generous) contributions of the Saudi airforce. But unless he leaves his country, now without the guise of protection of his unearned garb, it is far from certain the warrant of arrest issued - finally - a decade past, he is uncertain to face justice already overdue by supra-Italian proportions.
His legacy could not be more distorted, and did - it must be said - sully the image of the ostensibly washed and reformed African Union beyond redemption. His crimes may soon be more clearly articulated, lest one is to miss the chance of indulging in great expectations. The forces which eventually engineered his downfall, a typical cataclysmic muster of both disgruntled elite and immediate and daring expression of demotic disapproval, seems more conservative than what one might have hoped for in the decade ripe with, if nothing else, heavy-rocking and momentous change, but a wider popular rebellion seeping into the legal political process, akin to that in the northern colonial power Egypt in 2012 (and the other one in 2016). But for an overthrow of now only Bashir, but the system which made him, a more positive vision that the typical Arab rebellions - so much more the French revolution (as Zhou, after all, might have called it) of 1968 than of 1789 - is sordidly required.
Above all, Arab - and African - intellectual life must acquire both a sense of integral independence and intellectual libertarianism. Something akin to Adunis, at home and not from a pervasive exile, is required, against which the embedded framework of penal shari'ah will pose a just as suppressive mechanism than the armed forces. The first step, which ought have been the first, for hopeful alteration in 2011 must be followed by another separation, whose fate will rest in the battle of the streets and for the institutions in Khartoum, against which rural communities and wills are almost certain to clash. A free press must be established, at the spill of blood as well as ink (and computer code), and particularly cable. Support for these institutions in their independent variety, and not the double scourge of direct economic aid to the coup-makers, and independent civil society are key if the north, in the end, is to outshine the south. With this drive, some forces within the old oligarchy are almost certain to pose sympathy, at least on the onset.
For all these uncertainties, with Bashir's passing we may see the closing of an era unlike any previous tumultuous moment of 1979, or 1989 (which hardly seeped into the reek of the region's whitherto growing strongmen) or even 2011, where an angry knife plunged into the cavity in symbolic rejection of the state of his country replaced a near-half century of amiriyyah and eccentric cruelty, but also of stability and a life of luxuries - the freedoms from, above else - now undeniably craved for. Without even taking the refugee crisis, itself strong enough to sway events of this kind (and of which I will write shortly) into the narrative. For with the fall of the last of the last of the pre-2011 Arab leaders, bar the more illustrious but eventually less well fated monarchic systems, Sudan had turned its back not only on a period of horror, needless conflict and the hurtful altercation of the near and distant past, but opened a door to a future of even greater uncertainty. And this time, unexpected as it had somehow not been amidst the cries of joy (and else) at Tahrir, it was the people who finally broke down the door.
Few have earned arrest so much. Few of the sordid kleptocrats of the Sahel - and their yet-privileged Gulf cousins - wielded it with the same penchant for cruel displacement and a lesser eye for the changing vicissitudes of his long and unglorious reign. Few, I hope, blunders by the now entirely disgraced Zuma, now enjoying his last weeks of presidency had he not been ousted in his own right, will be as sordidly spat and, I hope, never forgotten as the failure to live up to his international obligations and orchestrate the renewal of the image of the African Union - and his own too, I think -and arraign Bashir's exit by a legal arrest, and strike fear into his more inglorious colleagues as well. Whether you like it or not, their reckoning is coming, and the waltz which Bashir has now been called to will leave him as sordidly mute as the fate of more awe-striking voices, fearful or pleasant. This Bashir, this Bashir. Take this Bashir, with a clamp on its jaws. (And, as one might be tempted to add while straying from the subject, first we take Khartoum, then we take Arabia.) But never, for an instant, consider forgiving its sturdiness or the record it set, being indicted years before its time was finally limited, let alone the woes it inflicted, for long after the day this immediate fate of the dictatorship was settled. For whatever the future may bring, and however grim, the Sudanese may rightly rejoice over the departure of the worst tyrant and kleptocrat not immediately affected by the shockwaves unleashed in the cradle of this decade of so many disappointments.
For all these uncertainties, with Bashir's passing we may see the closing of an era unlike any previous tumultuous moment of 1979, or 1989 (which hardly seeped into the reek of the region's whitherto growing strongmen) or even 2011, where an angry knife plunged into the cavity in symbolic rejection of the state of his country replaced a near-half century of amiriyyah and eccentric cruelty, but also of stability and a life of luxuries - the freedoms from, above else - now undeniably craved for. Without even taking the refugee crisis, itself strong enough to sway events of this kind (and of which I will write shortly) into the narrative. For with the fall of the last of the last of the pre-2011 Arab leaders, bar the more illustrious but eventually less well fated monarchic systems, Sudan had turned its back not only on a period of horror, needless conflict and the hurtful altercation of the near and distant past, but opened a door to a future of even greater uncertainty. And this time, unexpected as it had somehow not been amidst the cries of joy (and else) at Tahrir, it was the people who finally broke down the door.
Few have earned arrest so much. Few of the sordid kleptocrats of the Sahel - and their yet-privileged Gulf cousins - wielded it with the same penchant for cruel displacement and a lesser eye for the changing vicissitudes of his long and unglorious reign. Few, I hope, blunders by the now entirely disgraced Zuma, now enjoying his last weeks of presidency had he not been ousted in his own right, will be as sordidly spat and, I hope, never forgotten as the failure to live up to his international obligations and orchestrate the renewal of the image of the African Union - and his own too, I think -and arraign Bashir's exit by a legal arrest, and strike fear into his more inglorious colleagues as well. Whether you like it or not, their reckoning is coming, and the waltz which Bashir has now been called to will leave him as sordidly mute as the fate of more awe-striking voices, fearful or pleasant. This Bashir, this Bashir. Take this Bashir, with a clamp on its jaws. (And, as one might be tempted to add while straying from the subject, first we take Khartoum, then we take Arabia.) But never, for an instant, consider forgiving its sturdiness or the record it set, being indicted years before its time was finally limited, let alone the woes it inflicted, for long after the day this immediate fate of the dictatorship was settled. For whatever the future may bring, and however grim, the Sudanese may rightly rejoice over the departure of the worst tyrant and kleptocrat not immediately affected by the shockwaves unleashed in the cradle of this decade of so many disappointments.
We will die if we do not create gods /
We will die if we do not kill them.
Adunis, proud national socialist and true voice of Syria (by virtue, not birth)
Already an image on the wall. The uprising, also deemed as iconic as the ones in Egypt, Libya and Syria long before, has managed in toppling the most incredulously cruel and everlasting of incumbent Arab emirs and tawagit (yes, I'm borrowing the quasi-Caliph's nomenclature whenever he is right) bar the sultan, turning the existing image of Arab nationalism and politics on its head, yet again. This time, rather than asking, "Will it last?", ask this: What will be said of it in ten, one hundred years to come? How will it last? How may she retain significance?
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