Ruth Pollard, Tunisia
December 17, 2011
Yemeni's women show off their fists painted in the colours of five Arab flags: Yemen, Libya, Syria, Tunisia and Egypt. Photo: AFP
KHALED Said and Mohamed Bouazizi never met, but their deaths - one murder, one suicide - started two revolutions that changed the Arab world forever. Other uprisings would follow. A dictator was killed, one stood trial, one stepped down and one fled his country. Others are hanging on, murdering their citizens as they cling to power, their media messages proclaiming innocence in contradiction to the blood flowing on their streets.
In just one year, the citizens of a region the West had written off as an undemocratic lost cause stood up to their governments and demanded something better than a lifetime of unemployment, rigged elections and repressive police states. The Arab Street has spoken.
A Tunisian woman shows her inked fingers after voting in October in a polling station in Ettadhamen, a working class part of Tunis. Photo: AFP
But it is not yet clear how these Middle East and North Africa uprisings will end - each is at a precarious stage along the revolutionary path and all face enormous, long-term problems that simply overthrowing a dictator will not fix.
One thing is certain: there can be no turning back. While these revolutions have been misnamed ''online revolutions'', social media such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter fuelled the protests and directed people's anger. They provided a way of recording and disseminating evidence of government and security force abuses and a forum in which to chart the progress of the uprisings.
The year's most commonly tweeted hashtag - used to mark topics on Twitter - was #Egypt. A protest movement that overthrew a dictator and is now fighting to force out the military leader who replaced him outranked American actor Charlie Sheen's very public meltdown, the royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton and the News of the World phone hacking scandal.
These protesters have had a taste of accountability, riding the perfect storm of citizen revolt and empowerment through social media, and they have said they will go back to the streets again and again until their governments, and the institutions that back them, get it right.
Today marks the first anniversary of the first revolution of the Arab Spring - Tunisia. Widely credited as the most successful uprising so far, in just 12 months Tunisia has developed an interim constitution, held parliamentary elections and this week announced the election of veteran human rights activist Moncef Marzouki as president.
Its well-developed civil society, close ties with Europe and attention to women's rights put Tunisia in a unique place among its neighbours, even after the repressive 23-year rule of former president Zine El Abadine Ben Ali.
But for activist Lina Ben Mhenni - author of The Tunisian Girl blog that chronicled the revolution, and one of several key figures in the Arab Spring named as a contender for this year's Nobel peace prize - it is not yet time to pack up the protests.
''I am one of the people who chose not to vote in the elections - for many reasons, but mainly because there were so many candidates and political parties running who were associated with Ben Ali's regime,'' she says from the sidelines of a protest on the streets of the capital, Tunis. ''We are still in the middle of the revolution, it is not yet finished - you must realise that we cannot build democracy in one day.''
Tunisia is helped by the fact that its army is not interested in clinging to power, as Egypt's is, and it is in a calm neighbourhood, a world away from the tensions of the Arab-Israeli conflict, says Paul Salem, the director of the Beirut-based Carnegie Middle East Centre.
And despite much angst, internally and from the West, over the election of the Islamist Ennahda Party, Salem describes it - so far - as ''pragmatic and responsible'' and clearly looking towards the moderate Turkey as a model.
Yet while Tunisia's revolution is ranked as the most successful, there is no doubt Egypt's is the most important. ''If Egypt sustains its revolution over many years, that success will radiate influence across all Arab societies from Morocco to Jordan to Saudi Arabia,'' Salem says.
It is difficult to overstate Egypt's place in the Middle East and North Africa. Its size and central position aside, for at least the last century Egypt has been at the heart of contemporary Arab culture. From politics to film, television and radio, the Egyptian identity, dialect and character is something most other Arabs have grown up with on their television screens, Salem says.
''They identify with it, they understand it, and accept that Egypt is a big, central part of their Arab identity. Saudi Arabia does not enjoy that position, Lebanon doesn't, Tunisia doesn't, Libya doesn't. Egypt has that credibility, that legitimacy.
''Indeed, when the Arab Spring happened in Cairo and was carried on people's televisions throughout the region, that was it: everybody was transformed because it was a narrative they could follow and identify with.''
But unlike Tunisia, Egypt's state, post-revolution, is muddied by a military unwilling to cede power, a constituency determined not to take a step backwards, a government still riddled with cronies from the Mubarak regime, and a growing Islamist political force.
A YEAR ago today, Mohamed Bouazizi was eking out a meagre existence selling fruit from a cart in the town of Sidi Bouzid in central Tunisia.
Like many Tunisians, he had long borne the brunt of entrenched corruption, battling police and government officials for years as he tried to run his small business in a depressed region with high rates of unemployment. But on December 17, 2010, when a local policewoman confiscated his produce, then tried to take the scales he used to weigh his fruit, the 26-year-old decided he could take no more.
Humiliated and desperate, with no money to pay the required bribe, he went to the municipal offices in Sidi Bouzid to complain. When he received no response, he walked outside, poured lighter fluid over his clothes and set himself alight. For 19 agonising days he lay in hospital, his body burnt almost beyond recognition. His act of desperation was the catalyst for the Tunisian revolution, prompting mass protests and emboldening Tunisians to speak out against the corruption, greed and economic pressures crippling their country.
On January 14, after nearly a month of protests, Ben Ali fled the country, his hated wife Leila famously taking much of the central bank's gold reserves with her as they sought exile in Saudi Arabia.
Bouazizi's body now lies in a simple white grave in a small cemetery about 17 kilometres from his home town, surrounded by olive groves, almond trees and cactus, their pink fruit the only flash of colour in the harsh, dull landscape.
Tunisia's revolution may have been the most successful, but walking along the bleak streets of Sidi Bouzid, it is hard to find much hope among a populace struggling to see any real change a year on from the uprising. The police may have stopped harassing the fruit sellers, but 24-year-old Hisham Effy understands too well the pain and frustration that led his fellow trader to take his own life.
The two young men worked in the same market for several years before Bouazizi's death, and Effy wonders when, if ever, life will get any easier. As he braces himself against the freezing winds at the end of another long day selling mandarins, oranges and apples to people with few dinars to spend, it is clear the first anniversary of his friend's suicide, and the revolution it started, is weighing heavily.
''There should be more than just a small celebration,'' he says quietly. ''It should be a carnival.''
He makes 80 dinars a fortnight (about $A53) at his small stall. But after the costs of buying the fruit to sell, and splitting the takings with his brother, he is left with little to live on. When asked if he is married, Effy responds with a regretful laugh. On this money, who would have him?
A world away, in the cosmopolitan, coastal Egyptian city of Alexandria, another young man's violent death sowed the seeds of a second revolution.
Khaled Said was beaten to death by police officers on June 6, 2010. He was arrested in an internet cafe after he posted online a video of local police officers sharing the spoils from a drug bust. Like many in Egypt, he was tired of the open corruption and greed of government employees and saw the potential to expose the hypocrisy via social media. He was killed for his trouble. Pictures of the 28-year-old's corpse went viral. His face had been reduced to pulp, his nose and jaw clearly broken, his skull fractured.
Dubai-based Egyptian Google executive Wael Ghonim saw the horrific picture of Said that was circulating and established a Facebook page in his memory - ''We are all Khaled Said''. It attracted hundreds of thousands of followers, and Ghonim used it to help inspire the massive demonstrations that ultimately led to the downfall of president Hosni Mubarak's 30-year regime eight months later.
Months of labour strikes leading up to the protests hinted at wider cracks in Egyptian society, but even so, when the civil resistance began en masse on January 25, 2011, calling for an end to the decades-long state of emergency, police brutality, corruption and high unemployment, few dreamed it would all end so quickly. After 18 days of protests and a deadly government crackdown in which 850 people died and up to 6000 were injured, the ageing dictator resigned on February 11, as the world watched, astonished.
Across the border in oil-rich Libya, protests broke out in the eastern city of Benghazi on February 15 when human rights activist and lawyer Fethi Tarbel was arrested by Muammar Gaddafi's security police. Outraged, the families of the victims of the notorious 1996 Abu Salim prison massacre, whom Tarbel had represented in court, took to the streets in anger. Their treatment at the hands of police sparked larger protests that by February 17 had grown into the beginnings of a revolution.
Long a hotbed of anti-Gaddafi sentiment, Benghazi quickly fell into rebel hands, and the freedom fighters turned their sights to the west, slowly working their way along the coast and through the desert, and from the Western Mountains on the other side, to the capital, Tripoli. Inspired by the experience of Egypt and Tunisia, Libyans faced their fears and took to the streets in their thousands. ''We saw them protest in Benghazi but we did not ever think we would see people on the streets in Tripoli,'' was a familiar refrain from families living in the capital.
But with the backing of NATO air strikes and the advance of the rebel soldiers across the country, the revolution grew, and Tripoli fell to the rebels on August 21, with surprisingly little bloodshed. By October, Gaddafi had been captured and killed, and last week a new interim cabinet was sworn in - Tarbel is now Libya's new sport and youth minister.
Yet Libya remains in the grip of a power struggle between the new government and the rebels, who are not yet ready to give up their arms and return home.
AS EACH revolution rolled on, the cracks in those already fractured societies worsened. Citizens were rising up and overthrowing governments faster than new systems could be put in place.
''We are now in a very precarious position,'' says Mona Yacoubian, the senior adviser on the Middle East at the US-based Stimson Centre. ''If we are thinking about stages of these revolutions I would say we are at the beginning of the beginning. Yes, there is tremendous hope for democratic transformation in the region, but there is also tremendous peril and very significant challenges.''
These challenges range from resurgent authoritarianism in places such as Egypt, to the dangers of civil war in Syria, and possibly Yemen, she says. ''Then there is also the significant challenges posed by the socio-economic issues that are very much a part of what brought people on the streets to begin with.''
Yacoubian warns that it is also crucial to learn the lessons from the West's response to Algeria in the 1990s when it comes to dealing with the election of Islamist parties in the region. Back then, a knee-jerk reaction resulted in the repression of moderate parties and the rise of violent radical Islamists and, she argues, ''the roots of what eventually became al-Qaeda''.
With the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party and the Salafis winning a majority of seats in Egypt's first round of parliamentary elections late last month, that lesson will be important.
''There is a very interesting open debate that is finally occurring among Islamist parties and factions in the region. To have the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt debating various points with the Salafists is good, and we need to better understand what they are saying.''
Yacoubian, along with other experts, has raised the need for something akin to the Marshall Plan that was implemented at the end of World War II to help rebuild Europe, or the EU assistance that helped central and eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
''The genius of the Marshall Plan was not about the money. What made it successful, that can be distilled into an Arab world context, was regional economic integration. This was critical to helping Europe to get back on its feet and to provide an engine for growth, and will be critical in this instance, too.''
But Yacoubian has this warning for the future. ''There is going to be tremendous dislocation and we would be naive to think that a region that has been repressed for decades would just suddenly blossom into a series of free market economies and blooming democracies.''
Paul Salem agrees, noting that technical assistance will be as important as money in rebuilding the region. ''In the case of eastern and central Europe it was more about the institutional mechanisms the EU presented, the rules and regulations that these countries had to achieve in order to get entry into the EU … One reason Turkey is a success is that it has been trying to follow the European blueprint to join the EU.''
Salem argues that countries emerging from revolutions will have to sink or swim on their politics alone. ''Egypt two years from now is not going to have solved its employment problem - in fact, things are probably going to be worse - so when that first massive wave of disappointment hits Egypt, the system is going to have to hold, politically. The US went through an economic crisis but the political system did not collapse - that is the test.''
Amid the turmoil of the current revolutions, it is difficult, if not impossible, to predict which country could be next, says Alanoud Al-Sharekh, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
Syria is still teetering on the brink of civil war, with Bashar al-Assad holding grimly to power as the toll of civilian deaths and casualties rises by the day. This bloody battle, along with the problems continuing to plague Egypt, has led people in the region to look at two different models for revolution, she says. There is the Tunisian model, which was relatively peaceful and brought a lot of hope to people in the Arab world. Then there are Egypt and Syria, where Al-Sharekh says it is difficult to be ''anything less than pessimistic''.
''People are quite wary now … so unless you are in dire circumstances, a la Yemen, you don't really want to rock the boat and destabilise a regime when there is no viable alternative.''
Instead, in places such as Jordan and Morocco where there have been some protests, it is more likely that activists will use the threat of an Arab Spring-style revolution to force change, rather than a revolution itself. ''The threat of revolution has accelerated reform in a place like Saudi Arabia, where reforms that would have taken 10 years to happen have occurred in six months, precisely because people were keen to avoid a full revolution.''
The people have spoken, and they are leveraging change any way they can.
Ruth Pollard is Middle East correspondent.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/a-year-of-hope-and-bloodshed-20111216-1oyvy.html#ixzz1grIE3Ngm
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