“Can Mubarak be toppled?” asks BBC’s Jon Leyne (January 27). Henry Clinton, even when two deaths and 1500 arrests had already been reported, replied almost a day later: “Our assessment is that the Egyptian government is stable and is looking for ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people.”

But she was only trying to keep up appearnaces. On February 1, in a televised speech, Hosni Mobarak conceded what nobody would have expected only weeks ago. This speech was a reaction to historic demonstrations earlier that day. According to AlJazeera (ironically, pro-Saudi Al Arabiyya has all the time a different story/figures to tell), two million people gathered in Cairo’s Tahrir square on February 1. Total of eight million people were protesting all over Egypt on February 1. There were 300,000 in Suez, 250,000 in Mahalla, 250,000 in Mansoura, half a million in Alexandria. There was a manifestation in every single city/town in Egypt. All were chanting in unison: “Mubarak Go”.The scale of mobilisation has been simply mesmerising. However, Mobarak is clinging on to power depite heroic struggles by millions across Egypt.

The New York Times enlightens us as to why ‘Egyptian government is stable’. In a front page article, New York Times says, “An uprising in Tunisia, a peripheral player in the region, is not the same as one in Egypt, a linchpin. The Egyptian government is a crucial ally to Washington” (Jan 26). Should one characterise New York Time’s approach as imperial hubris. Or is it historical amnesia? In January/February 1979, Iran also was a lynchpin as was Iraq in July 1958. True, autocratic regimes often do not crumble overnight. The case of Tunisia is significantly exceptional. Egyptians may not be able to emulate the alacrity their Tunisian cousins have shown in toppling Ben Ali. One may even expect Hosni Mubarak to survive the way Ahmedinejad survived the summer of discontent in 2009. Muhammad El-Baradei, a bad omen for Egypt, will be ready to play the Hussain Mousavi. Lucky for Tunisian revolution that it was ‘leaderless’. The masses in Tunisia took their fate in their own hands instead of mortgaging it to any particular party/leader. Hence, Tunisians once on the streets, did not return until Ben Ali had fled. Even after his ignominious exit, Tunisians did not give up. They brought down the interim government since it co-opted ministers from Ben Ali’s party, RCD. At the time of writing these lines, protestors are camping out in the heart of capital, demanding interim prime minister, Mohammad Ghannouchi, to resign. Even importantly, Tunisian workers went on strike that delivered the end of Ben Ali dictatorship.

In case of Iran, the workers, except in the transport sector, did not stretch their muscle. It is indeed hard to say if Egyptian unions will emulate their Arab cousins or will follow the example of their Iranian counterparts. However, the beginning of Hosni Mubarak’s end has for sure begun. Cairo has witnessed biggest mobilisations ever since 1977 rotiriots. Cairo may calm down temporarily. Or disruption, as the attack on Tehrir Square on February 2 shows, of movement by the regime may give a sinister twist to events. But Tunisian message has been heard loud and clear much beyond Egypt. People in Jordan, Algiers and Yemen have taken to streets in massive numbers. Eerie silence has been broken by a mass thud. It is, therefore, not surprising that Sultans on their thrones are shaking. Faiz Ahmed Faiz comes to mind:

We shall see
Certainly we, too, shall see
The day that has been promised us
Which is written with God’s ink
We shall see!
When the mountains of cruelty and torture
Will fly like pieces of cotton
Under the feet of the oppressed
This earth will shiver, shake and beat
And over the head of oppressors
When lightening will thunder.
We shall see!

It is to stem the arrival of such a day that Obama Administration is consulting Hosni Mubarak while Sultans from Libya to Saudi Arabia, forgetting their differences, have been united. In an exercise of damage control, Obama administration has sent its assistant secretary of state for the Near East, Jeffrey D. Feltman, to Tunis. His mission is to “confer with the interim government.”

Tunisians are being lured with a promise of elections in six months. Washington is manoeuvring in all essentials to restore the old regime sans Ben Ali. This cynical fraud is being presented as promised “democracy.” Meantime, the Western media that ignored Tunisian developments to the point of censorship until January 12, have taken up the Arab cause. Not just television networks and press, even academics at media departments are alerting their students to the role ‘new media’---a liberating technology--- like Facebook and Twitter have played in Tunisian/Egyptian developments. A BBC blogpost, for instance, says about Egypt: “Sites including Facebook and Twitter have been key tools in organising the protests, but are reported to have been blocked across the country at times.” The Murdoch press has been even nasty. According to British-tabloid The Sun, Tunisian upheaval was ‘first WikiLeaks revolution.’ It has been the same Sun that viciously grilled Julian Assange for risking the lives of ‘our boys’ in Afghanistan. A ‘sober’ tool of US imperialism, Foreign Policy, was hardly better. A day after Ben Ali fled, Foreign Policy’s Elizabeth Dickinson, in an essay titled ‘First WikiLeaks Revolution?’, concluded, “Tunisians didn’t need more reasons to protest when they took the streets these past weeks---food prices were rising, corruption was rampant, and employment was staggering. But we might also count Tunisia as the first time that WikiLeaks pushed people over the brink.”

WikiLeaks ‘pushed people over the brink’? Does Ms. Dickinson really believe that Mohammad Bouazizi, the youth whose self-immolation ignited Tunisian intifada, read WikiLeaks before he set himself on fire on December 17? And does she really think Tunisians, Egyptians, Jordanians, Saudis and rest of the Arabs would need some leaked cables, dispatched by bored clerks at US embassies, to find out that their Sultans were corrupt, their unfortunate countries had rising prices and staggering unemployment? As the media in the West highlight the liberating role being played by ‘social media’ headquartered in the USA, one hardly finds a mention of the brutal military/police apparatuses built in the Middle East under Western tutelage. It is these apparatuses that have sustained the oppressive Sultans on thrones. That is the real Western ‘contribution’ in Middle East. Had WikiLeaks and ‘social media’ been so liberating, Europe and North America would have been forced to withdraw from Afghanistan and Iraq by now.

Farooq Sulehria