Arab Spring: from hope to despair

S P SETH

With the Arab world plunged in an orgy of mindless violence, the hopeful Arab Spring of, what looks like only yesterday, is now a distant memory. That inspirational people’s revolution, which brought down tyrants and dictators like Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and Muammar Qaddafi in Libya, has turned into a nightmare. Its transformation in Syria from an uprising against the Assad regime is now a hodge-podge of terrorist groups, with the so-called Islamic State (of Iraq and Levant) declared as a caliphate. While Tunisia remains relatively stable with its secular and Islamic components trying out an unsteady coexistence, Libya is tearing itself apart into warring militias with no one in charge of the country. In Egypt, the Arab world’s most populous country and, in some ways, its cultural centre, it looks like the Mubarak era is reborn with another military dictator in a civilian garb taking charge of the country. Its new President, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has declared war on the Muslim Brotherhood, having overthrown President Morsi and throwing its leadership and a good number of its supporters into jail, sentenced to death or to serve long  sentences. They are now a banned terrorist organization. At the same time, the government has demolished 800 houses along its border with Gaza to create a buffer zone to prevent infiltration of militants from across the border after a suicide bomber killed 30 soldiers in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.

It obviously raises questions about how the Arab Spring changed from hope into a recurring nightmare? In all such cases of social and political turmoil, there are no definite answers but researchers and analysts are all the time grappling to make some sense out of it. The first question to ask is how did the people’s revolution start in a region that had been the plaything of dictators? And the answer to this is the first extensive use of social media to mobilize people and thereby largely bypass the vast reach of the dreaded intelligence and security agencies.  The resultant popular protests and demonstrations at Tahrir Square in Cairo and elsewhere tended to create a sense of camaraderie among the crowds gathered there. It also created a sense of security in numbers when faced with early police repression.  

Another factor cited by some analysts is the rising proportion of youthful population of the Arab world, where in some countries the median age is said to be twenty-four. The use of social media, combined with rising level of education among youth, had a radicalizing effect making them the frontline of the revolution. At another level, many of the young and even older people had come to believe that, after the long torpor and repression of the likes of Ben Ali, Hosni Mubarak and Muammar Qaddafi, a new popular revolution might be the only way to create a new social, economic and political order. And the hope for a new future didn’t seem all that illusory when almost all strata of society, including the Muslim Brotherhood, secular and liberal youth, Christians and many others joined together in what looked like a common cause to overthrow the repressive regimes. And in Egypt when the Muslim Brotherhood undertook not to contest the presidency, which turned out to be false, it seemed that for the first time Islamic ideology was not being pushed as the only or dominant foundation of a new society. There were variations of this theme in other countries experiencing Arab Spring but the general trend seemed, to start with, one of accommodation between Islamic, liberal and secular elements. Syria (and now Iraq) remains in a class by itself where Islamic State jihadists have hijacked the project, for the present at least.

But the signs of a new beginning in the new decade turned into a comprehensive disaster. In Egypt, the coalition of Muslim Brotherhood and the liberal/secular pioneers of the revolution started to fray when the former decided to contest the presidency bringing back fears of a revivalist Islamist agenda. And that seemed validated after the Brotherhood’s Mohammad Morsi was elected the country’s president pushing forward a new constitution with Islamist overtones against considerable opposition from secular/liberal elements. The Brotherhood even sought to use emergency powers and their governance of the country increasingly started to resemble more and more like Hosni Mubarak’s regime by jailing dissidents and journalists. Which ruptured the national coalition and broad consensus forged during the successful revolution to overthrow Mubarak. Who would have thought that so soon after Mubarak’s overthrow, in which the army sought to play a neutral but essentially supportive role, crowds would again throng Tahrir Square and in much larger numbers supporting and urging the army to get rid of President Morsi and the Brotherhood! Many of the youthful secular/liberal pioneers of the anti-Mubarak revolution made a common cause with the army, not realizing that the same army junta, now under former General (turned-president) Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, would turn on them as well. In other words, Egypt has turned full circle from the army-backed Mubarak dictatorship, punctuated with an interlude of Brotherhood rule, to revived military-backed dictatorship of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, as if the Arab Spring had just passed by without creating the bloom that was highly anticipated and expected.

Some analysts have argued that the expectations about the Arab Spring were highly exaggerated, if not unfounded. According to Robert F. Worth, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars who is working on a book on the 2011 Arab uprisings, “The broader point is this: the educated youth who kicked off the revolutions of 2011 are not necessarily the vanguard of a new and more secular Middle East. They are one party in a bitter conflict over fundamental issues of identity and social order, a conflict whose outcome is far from certain.” He doesn’t believe that the Arab youth are necessarily progressive in the sense we in the west understand and expect them to be. As he puts it in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, “Many of the young Gulf Arabs I know view the uprisings of 2011 with horror, and have become more convinced in their belief that the region is not ready for democracy anytime soon.” Furthermore: “Many of them are also just as passionately sectarian as their parents.” If that is true, and the ISIL crusade against Shias and other minorities, now joined passionately by many Sunni Muslim youth, would seem to give it some credence, the so-called Arab Spring that we witnessed briefly was a false dawn.                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

Note: This article was first published in the Daily Times.

Contact: sushilpseth@yahoo.com.au