The Battle for the Arab Spring

by Lin Noueihed

  Enjoying more time, fewer responsibilities, more personal freedom and better education, this younger generation had enjoyed something of a cultural and communications boom in recent years. To many, change was not inevitable, change was already happening. It was an ongoing, invigorating process.

  Yet as Gaddafi celebrated his forty-one years in power and Mubarak's NDP stole another election in the last few months of 2010, few, inside or outside the Arab world, would have predicted that three of the region's veteran rulers would be gone before the next year was out.

  These states looked stable from the outside, their leaders seeming invincible to those who had known no other. A succession of pan-Arabists, national socialists and liberal nationalists had smashed or co-opted opposition forces, particularly the left and the Islamists. Their leaders were exiled or imprisoned. A lack of political participation forced many to retreat to the narrow and cosseted protection of religion, sect or tribe.

  Allowed to rise to the surface, all of these bottled-up tensions and conflicts could, as authoritarian rulers liked to remind the world, end in chaos or civil war. From Lebanon to Iraq to Algeria, Arab experiments with democracy had descended into violence that claimed lives by the hundreds of thousands. Yet change was something that millions of people around the region would be prepared to risk their lives for in 2011.

  Before January was out, Tunisia's leader had been despatched into exile by peaceful protests that gravitated towards the capital through the country's forgotten hinterlands. The following month, demonstrations that had broken out around Egypt and drawn hundreds of thousands into Cairo's Tahrir Square had removed a president who would next appear six months later in a courtroom cage. By the end of a long hot summer, Libyan fighters backed by NATO air strikes had captured Tripoli and would soon hunt down their eccentric former leader, sodomize him with a stick, and send him to his maker. After fending off ten months of domestic and international pressure, Yemen's leader would finally sign a power transfer deal in November that offered him a face-saving exit.

  And when the United States killed Osama bin Laden after a decade of ‘war on terror’ that had infuriated Muslims around the world, and withdrew the last of its combat troops from Iraq, it tied up more loose ends in an old Arab world order that was unravelling at a furious pace. The paradigm that had defined and divided Arab states into the ‘moderate’ pro-Western camp, involving countries like Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and the resistance axis of Syria, Iran and their allies in Hezbollah and Hamas, was melting away. A new order was emerging in which old certainties were uncertain and the unlikely suddenly seemed possible.

  In the heat of revolutionary turmoil in January and February 2011, with seething crowds on the streets of Cairo, Tunis, Benghazi, Casablanca and Amman, it appeared as if every Arab regime was under threat. The protesters were successful by dint of what they did not have – a clear programme, a hierarchical organization with figureheads and followers – and by what they did not want – a specific ruler, his party, his family, his policies that had enriched his elite and impoverished the people.

  They were young. They spoke English or French. Their voices dominated Twitter and Facebook. They looked and sounded like people might on the streets of London or New York. They were not chanting religious slogans. They did not carry weapons. They drew satirical cartoons and penned sardonic raps about their leaders. The Western media adored them. They all voiced similar aspirations for freedom of expression, for decent jobs and pay, for better opportunities, for the right to choose their governments. With both the plodding Islamist parties and the state spies and torturers taken by surprise, it appeared that a youthful, dynamic, secular and liberal Middle East might now be in the making.

  It was never going to be that simple. The flash of that first revolutionary moment blinded both observers and the protesters themselves to the more ruthless battles that would now burst into the open. To see the Arab Spring as a series of popular uprisings against unelected governments would be to oversimplify the struggles that are under way, and to underestimate what is at stake. The Arab Spring also pitted people against people and states against states, complicating the transition to new systems of government. Some battles will be fought and won at the ballot box. Others will be fought and won and retained by the gun. Three of the region's leaders may have gone by the end of 2011, but the majority who remained would struggle ever-harder to cling on to power.

  In this book, we will look back at the first turbulent year that followed the Arab Spring to ask if the hopes of those youthful protesters have been fulfilled. With Islamists winning elections in Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco and climbing to the top of the transitional authority in Libya, we ask why they had such mass appeal and what their rise to power, after so long in shadows, will mean. Are Arab countries less repressive one year on than they once had been? Have corrupt officials been held to account and can their decrepit systems, bled dry by rapacious bosses and grasping civil servants, be cleaned up without a fight? We consider the Arab monarchies that did not see major upheaval in 2011, and ask if they can survive or if they too will be swept away in a second phase of revolutionary change.

  The battle for the Arab Spring is a battle for the identity of a region buffeted through the past century by the rise and fall of European empires, by Cold War rivalry and by the encroachment of a triumphant US superpower that aggressively pressed its interests. It is a battle for satisfying jobs, decent housing and the right of young people to grow up and build families and futures of their own. Most of all, it is a battle for dignity and justice after years of repression. But other conflicts, simmering below the surface for decades before the Arab Spring, have also been unleashed.

  Policies that favoured cities over provinces, one region over another, wealthy business elites over ambitious graduates, are coming home to roost. Struggles for control of councils and committees have reawakened old feuds between rival families, villages and clans, not over religion but money, land, resources and power.

  And policymakers are at odds over how best to tackle economic problems, which if left unaddressed will only trigger more revolts in the future. Can new governments provide the jobs that young people so desperately need? Can they satisfy a desire for higher wages, for better education, for young people to be rewarded on merit rather than through connections? Should they bow to popular opinion and increase state salaries, offer better benefits, raise subsidies and drop taxes? Or should they push ahead with measures that are painful in the short-term but would make their economies competitive in the long-term? Which approach emerges victorious will be crucial to the shape and direction of the region.

  New Arab governments do not face this dilemma alone. The Arab Spring was part of a season of upheaval that has removed European prime ministers, forced Western nations to kneel before the markets, seen protesters occupy Wall Street in the name of the 99 per cent who fear big business has usurped their democratic rights, prompted Indians to march against runaway corruption in the world's largest democracy, and driven Russians onto the streets to cry foul over vote-rigging. We ask if 2011 might just have brought the first rumble of a greater earthquake.

  Looking in turn at Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, Yemen and Syria, we will analyse the events – all different but all extraordinary – of 2011, asking to what extent these countries and their ruling regimes have really changed, and what minefields remain. At stake is not just the future of individual countries. The Arab world is perched on the axis of the world's busiest trade routes that link Europe, Asia and Africa, and at the centre of the biggest energy-exporting region, and what happens here has the potential to shake the entire globe.

  This book draws on our first-hand experiences and interviews from the front lines of the Arab Spring and from a decade of reporting, analysis and research that has provided a ringside seat at some of the Middle East's most dramatic moments. Between us, we were on the first flight to Tunisia after Ben Ali's departure in January 2011 and among the first
to visit post-uprising Sidi Bouzid, where it all began. We were in Bahrain in March when Saudi troops rumbled over the bridge and we were in the Rixos Hotel in Tripoli as Gaddafi held out in the summer of 2011. We watched in Cairo as the standoff between Egypt's army and its protesters turned violent in October, as Egyptians cast their ballots in their first post-Mubarak elections in the ensuing months and as Islamists took control of the new parliament in January 2012.

  Over the past decade, we have attended Hafez al-Assad's funeral in 2000, witnessed Lebanon's 2005 Cedar Revolution, and watched the bombs crash down in Israel's 2006 war with Hezbollah. We were in Najaf in 2005 as Iraqis cast their ballots in the first elections after Saddam Hussein's defeat and watched that country descend into civil strife. We spent time all over Libya in the final years of Gaddafi's rule. From Dubai, we watched the oil boom fuel a property bubble that reached its height in 2008, and we were there to see it burst. Between us, we have also reported from and worked in Oman, Yemen, Jordan, Morocco and beyond. Speaking Arabic and French, and having lived in countries across the region, we have attempted to bring some of this context to events that surprised the world in 2011.

  A year on, there is much to suggest that the Arab Spring should have been predictable. A media revolution had prepared the ground. Elite corruption was insulting to ordinary people who struggled with soaring food costs, rising rents and miserable job opportunities. Strikes were breaking out. Protests were increasingly common. Yet in 2010, right on the eve of change, plenty of evidence suggested that regimes in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and elsewhere were impregnable, that popular protest could never achieve anything, and that talk of ‘Arab exception’ was perhaps true. Few realized that a new chapter in Arab history was about to open.

  PART 1

  THE ROOTS OF RAGE

  CHAPTER 1

  An Arab Malaise

  Good rulership is equivalent to mildness. If the ruler uses force and is ready to mete out punishment and eager to expose the faults of people and to count their sins, (his subjects) become fearful and depressed and seek to protect themselves against him through lies, ruses and deceit … They often abandon (the ruler) on the battlefield and fail to support his defensive enterprises … The subjects often conspire to kill the ruler. Thus the dynasty decays, and the fence (that protects it) lies in ruins.

  – 14th-century Tunisian philosopher Ibn Khaldun, Al-Muqaddimah

  Not a single Arab country made it onto the 2011 list of top global risks issued by Eurasia Group, a multinational consulting firm that helps clients identify looming instability. Some perennials, such as the Iranian nuclear standoff, were mentioned, but domestic change in the Middle East was simply not on its radar – even though protests had been spreading since late 2010.1 After all, despite their dysfunctional economies and ossified political systems, Arab rulers had proved remarkably resilient to both domestic pressures and external shocks. They had survived the end of the Cold War and the so-called ‘third wave of democratization’ that swept away dictators from Portugal to Indonesia, from the 1970s onwards.2

  Arab regimes, if not individual leaders, had made it through a series of wars and three unpopular peace deals with Israel. They had largely crushed violent Islamists. They had adjusted, as mostly Sunni Muslim rulers, to the Shi'ite resurgence ushered in by Iran's 1979 revolution, and they had survived the sectarian and political tensions wrought by two US-led wars against Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

  Syria, Morocco, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates had all survived the deaths of veteran leaders and managed relatively smooth successions. Syria, the only republic on this list of monarchies and dynasties and the one most vulnerable to a succession crisis, had set a precedent with Bashar al-Assad's carefully-choreographed takeover in 2000 from his father Hafez, who had ruled for the previous three decades. Mubarak, who had led Egypt for thirty years without naming a vice president, took note as he groomed his son Gamal for the presidency.

  Democrats around the Arab world lamented the birth of the first Arab ‘jumlukiya’. Literally translated as ‘republarchy’, the word fused together jumhuriya, Arabic for ‘republic’, and malakiya, Arabic for ‘monarchy’.3 With the creation of this monstrous hybrid dropped the last fig leaf of legitimacy. There could be no more pretence that national interests came before the interests of the ruling family, and the sect or tribe to which it belonged. In Tunisia, another Arab republic, it was widely suspected that Ben Ali, whose only son was a toddler, was grooming his son-in-law for the top job. There were fears that the first lady, Leila Trabelsi, derided by Tunisians as a latter-day Marie Antoinette, had her own eye on high office.

  Rather than invest in the future of their countries, these leaders dedicated much of the wealth and power of the state to ensuring their own survival. Coercion, or the threat of it, was widely used in a region whose governments spend a higher proportion of their state budgets on defence and security than any other. In 2009, an average 4.6 per cent of Arab GDP went on military spending, compared to a global average of less than 2 per cent.4

  Much Gulf Arab military spending is intended as a deterrent against Iran, a non-Arab Shi'ite power in a region dominated by Sunni rulers, but the aura of an impregnable state, possessed both of the latest weaponry and of support from Western countries, also put off potential opponents from mounting any serious challenge for power. It was not just the amount spent on the armed forces, but also their composition, that discouraged revolt. Some rulers and their families fortified their power bases by filling the military and interior security forces with members of their own tribe or sect, creating a patronage network and ensuring that those who bore arms owed their allegiance to the leadership rather than the state itself. The Saudi Arabian National Guard, for instance, is a separate force that bypasses the defence ministry and draws its soldiers from tribal elements historically loyal to the royal family and dedicated to protecting the king from a family rebellion or a challenge from the regular army.5 Bahrain, meanwhile, has resorted to recruiting foreigners, who were less likely to balk at shooting or beating protesters and had no stake in local politics. Tellingly, the army in Tunisia was considerably more professional than most in the region and considered itself to be an institution of the state rather than the private security wing of the ruling family or party. In Tunisia and Egypt, furthermore, tribal ties are weak and both countries are home to majority Sunni populations ruled over by Sunni rulers, who focused on crushing opposition parties or rival elite figures rather than shielding themselves from competing sects or clans.

  An underlying sense of fear was also perpetuated by intelligence agencies, or mukhabarat, that employed spies at every level of society. This was manifested in different ways in different countries. Egypt or Bahrain did not feel oppressive day-to-day, but Syria was another story. Men in lurid shirts and leather jackets loitered in hotel lobbies, hiding behind newspapers and listening to the conversations that went on. It was casually assumed that phones were tapped and on no account was any political conversation to be undertaken in taxis, whose drivers were widely believed to be informants. One in Damascus openly admitted that he worked for Syrian intelligence, describing how he had been based in Beirut before the 2005 withdrawal of Syrian forces but by 2010 was forced to supplement his paltry civil servant's salary with taxi fares.6

  Intelligence agencies operated in a legal grey area, carrying out arrests and operating secret jails where political prisoners, numbering thousands, were abused or tortured. Many of these prisoners were Islamists, but any journalist or academic worth his salt could expect to be in and out of jail on trumped-up charges, or no charges at all.

  The Syrian regime had maintained emergency law since the Ba'ath Party coup of 1963, Egypt had done so since 1981 and for long stretches before that, while in Algeria emergency law had been in place since 1992. This effectively suspended constitutional protections and gave rulers much wider scope for arbitrary arrests. It meant that a journalist who stepped over the line could
suddenly find him- or herself in a military or security court on charges of undermining national security that would normally be reserved for cases of terrorism or espionage. The absence of the rule of law meant that no one knew exactly what was permitted and what was not, forcing critics to play a dangerous game of self-censorship as they tried to make their point without tripping up on one of the many red lines that criss-crossed the public sphere.

  But it was not all repression. Authoritarian rulers also built alliances among prominent tribes, families and business elites to bolster their rule. Libya's Gaddafi rewarded the clans who helped him to recruit fighters in the war against Chad with plum government jobs, or put the scions of loyal families in charge of public sector companies. In Syria, the ruler was Alawite but the established Sunni business families were among the main beneficiaries of Assad's economic liberalization policies of the 2000s. In Saudi Arabia and among some Sunni monarchies, political bonds were strengthened through marriage, much as they had been among European aristocracies in centuries past.

  The economic reforms introduced in Syria, in Tunisia, in Libya and beyond had lifted the pall of oppression that hung over these countries in the 1980s and 1990s. New cafés, restaurants and shops opened up. Foreign high-street brands arrived in upmarket districts. The lot of most Syrians and Libyans had improved a great deal since the 1980s, when imports were effectively banned but local industries could not produce enough goods of sufficient quality to meet demand. Yet such reforms were intended to protect the incumbent rulers by relieving economic discontent and staving off calls for deeper change.

  Facing US pressure or domestic demand, some Arab dictatorships and dynasties even introduced more meaningful elections, but they worked to curtail any concrete changes the ballot box might bring. When one party can change the laws to its benefit, can wield the security forces to intimidate its opponents, the judiciary to jail its critics and the state-run media to campaign on its behalf, there is no real choice. Either electorates were not allowed to vote freely or the body that they were voting for lacked any meaningful powers. This system proved effective on at least two fronts. Firstly, it applied a veneer of plurality to systems that were in reality based on a single party that saw itself as the state. Secondly, it divided the opposition. After years underground, some activists felt that, since they could not beat the system, they should try to change it from the inside.