By the time you get to read this column, Hosni Mubarak may have quit power or he may have crushed the resistance to his rule by brute force. And then there is a third possibility, which is that the popular revolt will be going on, with both sides digging in for the eventual battle. Hopefully, in the end, it will be the people of Egypt who will do what the Tunisians did only a few weeks ago. And hopefully there will be change in Jordan and Yemen as well. Perhaps the sparks of revolt will be ignited in Libya as well? Perhaps the entrenched monarchies of the Middle East will one day, and soon, go the way that Iran's Pahlavis went more than three decades ago?
Anything is possible. Indeed, since the French Revolution of 1789 and then the Russian Revolution of 1917, it has always been something of a given that people will rise in rebellion once their backs are against the wall. There is that certain glory that comes with thoughts of the majesty of the people. We saw that happening in China when in October 1949 Mao Zedong proclaimed the People's Republic at Tienanmen Square. In later times, Fidel Castro's march into Havana on New Year's Day in 1959 to overthrow the corrupt Fulgencio Batista and, twenty years later, the triumph of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua were clear manifestations of the ability of men and women to come back from behind and send their tormentors packing. In Bangladesh, before it became Bangladesh in 1971, it was the sheer, sustained will of the people, with Sheikh Mujibur Rahman at the head, which forced General Ayub Khan to quit. In 1986, People Power proved durable enough to push the greedy Marcoses out of Malacanang and into exile.
Not to be overlooked is the magic which went into the fall of communist regimes in eastern Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The lesson everywhere has been identical. It is that people may suffer too long, may remain silent and cowering too long, but a time does come when they will strike back at the putrid empires of thieving men. And out of that lesson emerges the hope that a day could soon be here when North Koreans will rise to see Kim Jong il and his ilk get their comeuppance. In like manner, the hard-jawed soldiers who have kept Burma in their grip since 1962 just might be looking for the fastest planes to take them away to safety when Burma's people pour out on the streets.
Egypt needs and deserves a change. When Colonel Nasser overthrew the morally and financially corrupt King Farouk, a charming message was sent out to those regions of the globe dominated by depraved oligarchies. Nasser was a brave man, although sometimes a naïve one as evidenced by his miscalculations in June 1967. His successor Anwar Sadat was quite a bit of a visionary, as was made evident by his willingness to make peace with Israel in 1979. And his reward was assassination. And then came Hosni Mubarak, a former air force chief whom Sadat had made vice president. That was in 1981.
Thirty years on, Mubarak is a spent force. It is time he made his way to the exit.
