Arab Spring still alive

| by S. Nihal Singh

( September 26, 2012, New Delhi, Sri Lanka Guardian) What is the future of the Arab Spring? On December 7, 2010, a hawker named Mohammed Bouazizi set himself on fire to protest against police harassment and lit a prairie fire that singed his country Tunisia and reverberated in Egypt and throughout the Arab world. The long-time dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and his pampered and corrupt clan went surprisingly quickly on January 14, 2011, fleeing to Saudi Arabia. But the main trophy was the head of Hosni Mubarak in the traditional Arab heartland of Egypt. It led to some bloodshed but relatively little by the standards of such transforming events.

Then it was Libya, Bahrain and Yemen as the march of the Arab Spring seemed unstoppable. But the dethroning of Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen took time and a measure of blood was spilled. The ultimate outcome was far from clear, with the Saleh clan still in positions of power and the power struggle among the main factions and tribes continuing. The US employed its familiar medicine of drone strikes in the battle against a branch of Al-Qaeda.

Bahrain, with its Sunni monarchy ruling over a Shia majority, proved to be a no-go area. Saudi Arabia, helped by the United Arab Emirates, intervened to save the monarchy. And the United States, mindful of the home of its Fifth Fleet, made deprecatory noises but did little to help the Shia majority. It was a warning of the limitations of the Arab Spring in which regional players and outside powers play their own games in line with their interests.

But the US and other Western powers decided to intervene directly in Libya, using the fig-leaf of a UN Security Council resolution. Muammar Gaddafi had few friends in the Arab world, and it proved easy enough for the Arab League to give its imprimatur to aerial surveillance and policing ostensibly to protect civilians. In reality, the US and other Western powers practically delivered Libya to Gaddafi’s opponents. But this intervention was to cast a pall over Western efforts to intervene in Syria because both Russia and China were adamant in denying the West the excuse of a UN Security Council resolution to employ their air power to change the status quo in Syria.

Indeed, the bloodshed in Syria is a reminder of the limits of the sway of the Arab Spring in changing the scenario. Tragically, the continuing bloodshed in what is now a civil war is an indication of the complexity of the ethnic and tribal mix and the fact that though President Bashar Assad is leader of the minority Alawaite clan in a Sunni majority nation, there are enough Alawites, Christians and others who are fearful of a future Sunni-majority rule to give heart to a desparate Assad regime to fight on, using its unchallenged air power.

Apart from the Western interest in seeing the end of the Assad regime, there are important regional players seeking the same goal, in particular Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey. On the opposite side are Iran, somewhat ambiguously a newly Shia-ruled Iraq and Russia and China. In Turkey’s case, it has been a great transformation of its neighbourhood policy, with the proclamation of a policy of “zero problems” with neighbours transformed into a publicly proclaimed declaration of support for change, hosting a large Syrian refugee population and high-level defectors while serving as a conduit for arms and essential supplies to rebels.

It would be an oversimplification to call the conflict a Shia-Sunni confrontation, but there are elements of such a contest, with Saudi Arabia and Iran leading the opposing camps. What then is the future of the Arab Spring? First, by lighting the flame of freedom against authoritarianism, the phenomenon has earned its place in Arab history proving that Arabs are not people perennially condemned to living under hereditary dictatorships. But after decades of military rule often dressed up in civilian clothes or other family-ruled corrupt fiefdoms, it would have been over-optimistic to assume that the path to the future would be smooth. Second, any more democratic dispensation in the Arab world results in more conservative Islamist mores, inevitably exploited by the more extremist elements to build new regimes in the mould of their own concepts.

The Arab Spring has a future because freedom and democracy are universal values. However, extremists would want to clothe them in the garb of a strict Islamic state. Conditions, of course, vary from country to country. Tunisia seemed to move in the direction of a moderate Islamist dispensation until the insulting American video set sections of the population on the rampage. But these disturbances, which have enveloped the Arab world and Muslim countries beyond it, have a different logic quite apart from the stirrings of the Arab Spring.

There are always fringe elements working against the moderate positions of Arab societies, and an insult to the Prophet falls in a unique category. Although Americans were cross with the Islamist President of Egypt, Mr Mohammed Morsi, for being tardy in condemning the anti-American rampage leading to loss to property and some blood spilled, the presidency was mindful of the balancing act it had to undertake in condemning the vulgar insult to the Prophet to appease the Muslim Brotherhood constituency while condemning anti-American disturbances.

In Libya, of course, the anti-American tumult led to a more tragic end in the deaths of the US ambassador and his three colleagues in the eastern city of Benghazi, with extremist elements making full use of the mayhem to burn down what served as the US consulate. Besides, it is easy enough to spread anti-American feelings in the Arab world, given the region’s views on American policies and its full support for Israel’s policies, however detrimental they might be for regional peace. Much of the debate is, of course, being framed in the context of Israel itching to bomb Iranian nuclear sites, provoking the US to come on board.

Despite these circumstances and the twists and turns the region will face in the future, the Arab Spring is very much alive and will continue to serve as a beacon for future reformers. It has demolished the myth that Arab peoples are different from others elsewhere in the world to remain under one form of dictatorship or another. Islamism and the West’s reaction to it complicate the picture for the Arab world’s forward march, but the fortuitous beginning of the revolt against authoritarianism will ensure that the future will be unlike the past. The Arab world has woken up.