The Battle for the Arab Spring
Page 1
Copyright © 2012 Lin Noueihed and Alex Warren
The right of Lin Noueihed and Alex Warren to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Noueihed, Lin.
The battle for the Arab Spring : revolution, counter-revolution and the making of a new era / Lin Noueihed and Alex Warren.
p. cm.
ISBN 978–0–300–18086–2 (cl : alk. paper)
1. Arab Spring, 2011. 2. Arab countries—Politics and government—21st century. 3. Revolutions—Arab countries—History—21st century. 4. Protest movements—Arab countries—History—21st century. 5. Democracy—Arab countries. I. Warren, Alex. II. Title.
JQ1850.A91N68 2012
909'.097492708312–dc23
2012003580
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
2016 2015 2014 2013 2012
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Map
Introduction
Part 1: The Roots of Rage
1 An Arab Malaise
2 Bread, Oil and Jobs
3 The Media Revolution
Part 2: The Battlegrounds
4 Tunisia's Jasmine Revolution
5 Egypt: The Pharaoh Falls
6 Bahrain: An Island Divided
7 Libya's Revolution from Above
8 Disintegrating Yemen
9 The Struggle for Syria
Part 3: The New Arab Politics
10 The Kings’ Dilemma
11 The Islamist Resurgence
12 Embracing The Void
Afterword
Endnotes
Bibliography and Sources
Index
List of Illustrations
1 Tanks and soldiers in central Tunis, January 2011 (Lana Asfour)
2 Graffiti in Tunis, January 2011 (Lana Asfour)
3 Protesters in Tahrir Square, Cairo, 31 January, 2011 (Camilo Gómez-Rivas)
4 Misrata, May 2011 (Mohammed Abbas)
5 Pearl roundabout, 19 February 2011 (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)
6 Pearl roundabout, 19 March 2011 (AP Photo/Sergey Ponomarev)
7 Pro-Assad rally, Damascus, 29 March 2011 (AFP Photo/Anwar Amro)
8 Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh and Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah, 23 November 2011 (AFP Photo/SPA)
9 Nobel Laureate Tawakul Karman voting in Sana'a, 21 February 2012 (AFP Photo/Gamal Noman)
10 A member of the Free Syrian Army, 18 February 2012 (AFP Photo/Bulent Kilic)
11 A caricature of Muammar Gaddafi and rebel fighters, Tripoli, January 2012 (Alex Warren)
12 Hillary Clinton with Libyan soldiers in Tripoli, 18 October 2011 (AFP Photo/Kevin Lamarque/Pool)
13 Rally in Tahrir Square, Cairo, 25 January 2012 (Mahmud Hams/AFP/Getty Images)
1 Tanks and soldiers behind barbed wire in front of the Interior Ministry on Avenue Habib Bourguiba in central Tunis, January 2011, as protests continued following the departure of President Ben Ali.
2 Graffiti reading ‘Merci le peuple! Merci Facebook!’ on Rue de Rome, off Avenue Habib Bourguiba in Tunis, just after the ousting of Ben Ali in January 2011. Social media and the internet played an important role in mobilizing protests and raising awareness in Tunisia.
3 Protesters pray in Cairo's Tahrir Square on 31 January 2011, during the 18 days of rallies and protests that would end with President Hosni Mubarak stepping down from power.
4 A junction on Misrata's Tripoli Street shortly after the rebels broke a Gaddafi siege, May 2011. Misrata experienced amongst the worst damage of any Libyan city during the 2011 conflict.
5 Bahraini protesters chant slogans at the Pearl roundabout in the Bahraini capital Manama on 19 February 2011. The roundabout became a focal point for anti-government demonstrations.
6 Following a widespread crackdown on protests, the imposition of martial law and the arrival of GCC troops, the Pearl monument was demolished by the Bahraini authorities on 19 March 2011.
7Thousands of Syrians attend a rally in support of President Bashar al-Assad in central Damascus, 29 March 2011. Earlier that month, anti-regime demonstrations had begun to spread from the southern town of Deraa.
8 Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh greets Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah on 23 November 2011, shortly before signing the power transfer deal that saw him step down after 33 years in power. Riyadh played a central role in brokering the agreement.
9 Yemen's Tawakul Karman, a prominent figure in the 2011 anti-government demonstrations and the first female Arab winner of the Nobel peace prize, shows her ink-stained thumb after voting in Sana'a on 21 February 2012. The election saw Abed Rabah Mansoor al-Hadi, the only candidate, voted in to replace Ali Abdullah Saleh.
10 A member of the Free Syrian Army, with his face covered with the pre-Ba'ath Syrian flag, in Idlib, north-western Syria on 18 February 2012 as the armed rebellion against Bashar al-Assad gathered pace.
11 A caricature of Muammar Gaddafi and rebel fighters on a wall in the Ras Hassan area of Tripoli, January 2012.
12 US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton poses with Libyan soldiers in Tripoli on 18 October 2011. Two days later, the death of Muammar Gaddafi marked the end of a conflict in which the US played a vital political and military role.
13 At a huge rally in Cairo's Tahrir Square on 25 January 2012, Egyptian protesters hold an obelisk with the names of those killed during the uprising that began exactly a year earlier and toppled President Hosni Mubarak.
Acknowledgements
This book would not have been possible without so many people and organizations. We are indebted to our publisher, Yale, and to Phoebe Clapham for her meticulous editing of our many drafts and her suggestions on structure and tone. Her encouragement was indispensable as we raced to complete the manuscript to a tight deadline while events on the ground continued to move at a breakneck pace. We are also grateful to our agent, Andrew Lownie, for his faith in this project, his hospitality and his support. This book would have been impoverished were it not for the dozens if not hundreds of people we interviewed both on and off the record, across many countries, and who generously committed their time, shared their experiences and offered their insight. This goes not only for our research in 2011, but in the many years preceding it too, and their names are too numerous to list here.
For regular access to his encyclopedic knowledge of the region, we thank Walid Noueihed. For generously sharing their photographs, we thank Lana Asfour, Camilo Gomez-Rivaz and Mohamed Abbas. For his valuable comments on the final draft, we thank Dr Warwick Knowles. Both authors would like, of course, to extend their gratitude to their families, for their love and their home cooking as we worked non-stop to finish on time. This book is dedicated to them. We thank Beth Hepworth for her support and for sharing her photographs of Libya, while emphasizing that this book does not reflect her views nor those of Frontier. Finally, we extend
our deepest appreciation to Reuters for giving Lin the opportunity and the time to write this book. While this book was written during Lin's employment as a Reuters journalist, Reuters has not been involved with the content or tone of this book, which are the authors’ responsibility alone.
When writing about such a complex region in so few words, and in such a short space of time, omissions are necessary and inevitable. The bulk of this book was written in a period of four months and, while we have visited and worked in many Arab countries, it would not have been possible without the scholars, journalists and colleagues whose preceding work and years of advice and insight enriched our understanding of the region long before the Arab Spring. As always, while we thank all those who assisted in this project, any shortcomings are our responsibility alone.
Introduction
On 1 September 2010, Tripoli residents awoke to the public holiday marking the anniversary of Muammar Gaddafi's 1969 revolution. The celebrations were not as lavish as the previous year, when Gaddafi triumphantly commemorated 40 years in power by inviting thousands of musicians, dancers and politicians from around the world, but they offered a rare insight into the preoccupations of one of the world's longest-serving leaders.
Strings of coloured lights were draped from buildings, and shiny new billboards designed by foreign PR agencies loomed over Tripoli's main streets. Some recreated scenes of the Libyan ‘guide’ in a desert tent, dreaming up his Green Book in the 1970s. Others showed him addressing the United Nations in 2009 on his first-ever trip to the United States. A towering poster of Gaddafi and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, standing side-by-side, hung from a building close to his Bab al-Aziziyah compound, marking the colonel's return to the international fold.
All seemed well for Gaddafi, and hundreds of dignitaries would gather that night to celebrate the flamboyant leader's longevity in the rapidly-shrinking international club of dictators. Gaddafi did not bother with elections, palming off his diffuse jamahiriya system of popular councils as the rule of the masses. Faced with US pressure or popular demand, however, most other Arab rulers obligingly dressed their authoritarian regimes in the ceremonial robes of democracy.
Almost three months after Gaddafi's celebrations, Hosni Mubarak's National Democratic Party (NDP) would take 83 per cent of seats in an Egyptian parliamentary election marred by violence, arrests and allegations of fraud.1 In October, elections in the Gulf monarchy of Bahrain would see the opposition Al Wefaq group win nearly half the seats in the lower house, despite accusations of gerrymandering, the detention of civil society activists, and the closure of publications and websites in the months leading up to the poll.2
A year earlier, Tunisia's Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali had secured a fifth term with 89 per cent of the vote.3 Over a thousand well-known figures, including singers, film-makers, doctors and businessmen, had already put their names to a petition exhorting the ageing president to run in 2014, despite a law stipulating that Tunisia's head of state must not be aged above seventy-five.4 In Yemen, parliamentary elections initially scheduled for 2009 had been postponed for two years because of disagreements over electoral reforms intended to level the playing field. And in Syria, Bashar al-Assad was only three years into his second seven-year term as president. The constitution had been amended when his father died in 2000 to allow the then thirty-four-year-old ophthalmologist to inherit the country's highest office, despite his youth.
It had been a turbulent decade in the Arab world, home to some of the world's richest countries, like Qatar, and some of its poorest, like Yemen. In late 2010, food prices were scaling the heights they had reached in 2008. Runaway costs were as much a headache for populous countries as for desert emirates with tiny populations but little agriculture of their own, squeezing household budgets and raising demands for state subsidies. Fuel prices were stubbornly high – a relief for the crude exporters but a serious problem for oil-poor Arab countries like Tunisia and Morocco. In a region where 61 per cent of the population was under 30, widespread youth unemployment was a fact of life.5
So was a lack of change at the top. While satellite television and the internet had created a new public space in the Arab world, eroding the personality cults that surrounded stalwart rulers, freer expression did not translate into political change. A dangerous disconnect was developing between ageing leaders, security-obsessed and seemingly stuck in a Cold War paradigm, and the restless youths they ruled. Lacking the resources to marry and still living with their parents, members of what has come to be called the ‘generation-in-waiting’ could not express their dissatisfaction at the ballot box.6 While few rulers went so far as to hold no elections at all, polls that ranged from the fraudulent to the meaningless only fed a belief that leaders and the cliques that surrounded them were not serious about ceding any real political power.
Mubarak had been in power since 1981, longer than the majority of Egyptians had been alive. Only two men had occupied the post of president since Tunisia won independence from France in 1956. When Gaddafi seized power in 1969, Richard Nixon was president of the United States and Barack Obama had just celebrated his eighth birthday. The United States has seen eight presidents occupy the White House since the colonel, then a youthful twenty-seven-year-old, deposed King Idris.
Arab intellectuals and journalists railed against what they saw as their atrophied political and cultural life, and bemoaned their diminished place in the world. When the first Arab Human Development Report was published in cooperation with the United Nations in 2002, it stirred heated debate. While praising countries for combating poverty and raising life expectancy, it outlined three so-called deficits that were holding the region back – the freedom deficit, the women's empowerment deficit and the knowledge deficit.7 The report revealed that the Arab world had lower literacy levels than the developing countries’ average, and invested less in research than most regions of the world.8 Then came the humbling observation that almost as many books were translated in Spain each year as had been translated into Arabic since the ninth-century reign of Islam's Caliph Ma'amoun.9
The report was not authored by a team of Western policy wonks but by a group of Arab scholars respected in their own countries and research fields. It echoed a deepening sense of despondency in a civilization that, during the golden age of Islam, had been at the forefront of world science, medicine and philosophy, preserving and expanding on the works of Greek philosophers that Europe, then mired in the Dark Ages, had forgotten. It was a loss of confidence that had been exacerbated by the 11 September 2001 attacks, ushering in a new era in which Muslims at airports and on university campuses were now viewed as potential practitioners or sponsors of terrorism. The US invasion of Iraq, pursued despite broad Arab misgivings and worldwide protests, unleashed years of sectarian civil war that inflamed tensions between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims to levels not seen in decades.
‘It's not pleasant being Arab these days. Feelings of persecution for some, self-hatred for others: a deep disquiet pervades the Arab world,’ Samir Kassir, a critic of Syria's domination over Lebanon, wrote in Being Arab.10 ‘Even those groups that for a long time have considered themselves invulnerable, the Saudi ruling class and the Kuwaiti rich, have ceased to be immune to the enveloping sense of malaise since a certain September 11.’ Published a year before he was assassinated in 2005, Kassir's soul-searching book on the ‘Arab malaise’ was an appeal to rediscover the cultural renaissance that Arabs had enjoyed a century earlier as the Ottoman Empire crumbled. More and more Arabs, it seemed, were disappointed with their lot and their place in the world. And as Ted Gurr argued in his seminal book, Why Men Rebel, the gap between what people have and what they believe they are entitled to lies at the heart of revolution.11
One day before Ben Ali fled Tunisia, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned America's Arab allies that they could not delay reforms forever. ‘In too many places in too many ways the region's foundations are sinking into the sand,’ Clinton told a regional conference
in Doha. ‘Those who cling to the status quo may be able to hold back the full impact of their countries’ problems for a little while, but not forever.‘12
The fact that change was so much talked about inside and outside the Arab world suggests that many had wanted and expected it to happen. Far from being a sudden awakening, the Arab Spring capped a decade of protest, political activism and media criticism that had laid the ground for more open political systems. Movements against rising prices and unemployment, against corruption and political stagnation, had gained traction in Tunisia and Egypt in the five years before the uprisings. Strikes posed serious challenges to governments struggling to maintain the economic growth that was so vital to creating jobs and mollifying the angry and unemployed youth. In Syria, big business was booming but years of drought had wrought havoc in the rural hinterlands. A web of struggles for power had already destabilized Yemen and a decade of political reform in Bahrain had ended in disappointment and pushed protesters back out onto the streets.
Arab populations were indeed young, but that was because the previous generation had produced so many children. In the decade since the publication of the first Arab Human Development Report, fertility rates had fallen in most Arab countries. In North Africa, women had an average of 2.2 children in 2010, lower than the world average. The rate was 2.7 in the Gulf countries and 3 in the Levant, though it has remained higher in Yemen. This was a significant decline from an average of more than 6 children in the previous generation.13 People were getting married at an older age, and more and more were choosing their own life partners, breaking the traditional hold of fathers over their lives.