New postscript to the 2011 paperback edition
In January 2011, a wave of popular democracy movements brought the Arab world to a crossroads, as the worst decade in the modern history of the Middle East drew to a close.
The Arab world has been in a state of crisis since the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. Events over the ensuing ten years have put Arabs and Muslims under more pressure than ever before. The West’s so-called War on Terror produced full-scale wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and missile strikes on Yemen and Pakistan. Syria and Iran have been threatened with attacks and regime change.
Within the Arab world, governments used the War on Terror to clamp down on domestic opposition movements—particularly Islamists. As aging dictators groomed their sons to succeed them, their single-party states grew ever more repressive. A narrow clique of elites loyal to autocratic rulers enriched themselves while a burgeoning young population of increasingly well-educated citizens came of age looking for jobs and a dignified life, only to join the ranks of the unemployed.
Some tried to challenge their authoritarian governments by peaceful means. The authors of the 2004 “Arab Human Development Report,” published under the auspices of the United Nations, set out a template for political freedom in the Arab world. That same year, a group of Egyptian activists formed the Kifaya (literally, “Enough!”) movement to protest the continuation of Husni Mubarak’s rule over Egypt and moves to groom his son Gamal to succeed him as president. Also in 2004, Ayman Nour, an independent member of the Egyptian parliament, formed the Ghad (“Tomorrow”) Party. His audacity in challenging Mubarak in the 2005 presidential election captured the public’s imagination, but Nour paid a high price. He was convicted of election fraud and jailed for over three years.
In Lebanon, the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri led to popular demonstrations that forced Syria to withdraw in what came to be known as the Independence Intifada. In Iran (a regional power though not an Arab state), fraudulent results from the 2009 presidential elections provoked the Green Revolution, as Iranians sought to regain their political liberties from an ossified Islamic Republic. Each of these movements—in Egypt, Lebanon, and Iran—was ultimately defeated by the determined opposition of autocratic rulers (in Lebanon’s case, by neighbouring Syria).
As the late Samir Kassir, the Lebanese journalist quoted at the start of this book, reflected: “It’s not pleasant being Arab these days. Feelings of persecution for some, self-hatred for others; a deep disquiet pervades the Arab world.” The disquiet set down roots through all layers of society and spread across the Arab world before exploding in the revolutionary year of 2011.
It is hard to imagine anyone less likely to inspire revolution across the Arab world than a vegetable vendor in moderate Tunisia.
Mohamed Bouazizi was born and raised in the central Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid, one of those inland provincial places neglected by tourists and the government alike. He earned a precarious living, and helped support his mother and siblings with the proceeds of his vegetable cart. By all accounts he was an affable and popular man, whose high school education had given him a love of poetry and reading. Twenty-six years old, he was hoping to save enough money to expand his vegetable trade by buying a van.
It was hard enough to make a living selling vegetables without having to pay off the municipal inspectors as well. Vendors in Sidi Bouzid claim that they had to pay bribes of ten Tunisian dinars (approximately US$7) to secure the inspectors’ permission to sell on the street. Failure to satisfy the inspectors led to fines for selling without a permit of twenty dinars (US$14). Mohamed Bouazizi had been fined twice in the past two years. On December 17, 2010, Bouazizi was accosted by a forty-five-year old female inspector. He didn’t have a permit, didn’t have cash for a bribe, and could not afford another fine. Eyewitnesses claimed that when Bouazizi defended his produce against confiscation, the woman slapped Bouazizi and encouraged two of her colleagues to beat the young vendor and confiscate his wares.
Smarting from the humiliation of being beaten in public by a woman—something totally unacceptable in male-dominated Tunisian society—Bouazizi went first to the municipality to complain about his treatment, and then sought an audience with the provincial governor of Sidi Bouzid. He received another beating at the municipality and a snub from the governor, who refused even to see him.
Confronted by corruption, injustice, and public humiliation, Mohamed Bouazizi doused himself with paint thinner outside the gates of the governor’s office and set himself on fire. He suffered burns over 90 percent of his body before the flames could be doused by the horrified onlookers. He was rushed to a hospital and placed in intensive care.
That same afternoon, a group of Mohamed’s friends and family held an impromptu demonstration outside the governor’s office, where Bouazizi had set himself on fire. They threw coins at the metal gates, shouting, “Here is your bribe!” The police dispersed the angry crowd with batons, but they came back in greater numbers the next day. By the second day the police were using tear gas and firing into the crowd. The local hospital reported a doubling in the number of patients admitted. Two men who were shot by the police died of their wounds. Mohamed Bouazizi’s condition deteriorated.
Word of the protests in Sidi Bouzid reached Tunis, where a restive young population of graduates, professionals, and the educated unemployed spread word of Mohamed Bouazizi’s ordeal via the Internet. They appropriated him as one of their own, erroneously claiming that Bouazizi was an unemployed university graduate reduced to selling vegetables to make ends meet. They created a Facebook group, and the story went viral. A journalist working for the Arab satellite TV station Al-Jazeera picked up the story from Facebook and put it on the air. The state-controlled Tunisian press did not report on the troubles in Sidi Bouzid, but Al-Jazeera did. With its story about the underprivileged standing up for their rights against corruption and abuse, Sidi Bouzid began to run nightly on Al-Jazeera’s programs to a global Arab audience.
The self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi galvanized public outrage against everything that was wrong in Tunisia under President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s reign: corruption, abuse of power, indifference to the plight of the ordinary man, and an economy that failed to provide opportunities for the young. After twenty three years in power, Ben Ali had no solutions. However much the Tunisian dictator was reviled, it was his wife, Leila Trabelsi, and her family that became the focus of public outrage. It was common knowledge in Tunisia that the Trabelsis had enriched themselves, but the rumors were confirmed through the publication of U.S. State Department reports from Tunisia by the Wikileaks website. Reports by U.S. diplomats on the Trabelsi family’s extravagances were made public at much the same time news of Mohamed Bouazizi’s tragedy was gaining circulation.
On January 4, 2011, Mohamed Bouazizi died of his burns. An individual tragedy, a communal protest movement, a discontented nation, social networking websites, Arabic satellite television, and Wikileaks: it was the making of the perfect twenty- first century political storm.
In the first two weeks of January, the demonstrations spread to all the major towns and cities of Tunisia. The police responded with violence, leaving hundreds wounded and over two-hundred dead. The country’s professional army, however, refused to fire on the demonstrators. When Ben Ali realized that he no longer commanded the loyalty of his army, and that no concessions were going to mollify the demonstrators, he stunned his nation and the entire Arab world by abdicating power and fleeing Tunisia for Saudi Arabia on January 14, 2011. The Jasmine Revolution, as the Tunisians called their movement, had toppled one of the long-reigning autocrats that had dominated Arab politics since independence.
Tragically, a number of young men took Mohamed Bouazizi’s example to heart and set themselves on fire to express their despair against their own authoritarian governments—five in Algeria, one in Mauritania, four in Egypt—all between January 13 and January 18, 2011. Other cases of self-immolation were reported in Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Syria. It was all too reminiscent of the suicide bombings that had been the hallmark of the Jihadi Islamist movement—men who believed their lives meant less than the cause they sought to advance. Kassir again: “How has a living culture become discredited and its members united in a cult of misery and death?”
Yet the man who sets himself on fire is very different from the suicide bomber. Aside from the obvious fact that self-immolation does no one else any physical harm, these men made no connection between their acts and their Muslim faith. Al-Azhar, the ancient bastion of Sunni Muslim orthodoxy in Cairo, even issued a fatwa denouncing self-immolation as a violation of Islamic belief. The men who set themselves on fire acted in protest against political injustice and socioeconomic misery; they did not do so for religious motives. This has been reflected in the protest movements that Mohamed Bouazizi and his fellows have inspired, which have been distinctly secular in nature.
The impact of the Tunisian revolution was felt around the Arab world. Presidents and kings watched nervously as one of their peers was toppled by the power of a nation’s citizens. Almost without exception, every populous Arab country faces a large, young, underemployed population growing increasingly assertive of their political rights. There are few leaders in the Arab world today who can be confident of their position against a similar popular uprising.
In January 2011, Yemen was rocked by massive protests demanding the end of President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s thirty-two-year reign and rejecting his son as his presumed successor. In Khartoum, tens of thousands demonstrated against President Omar al-Bashir, who has led Sudan since 1989. Jordan, a monarchy where life rule and dynastic succession are legitimate institutions, witnessed a wave of demonstrations that forced King Abdullah II to sack his prime minister and form a new government. It was unclear where the region’s next popular movement might arise, and how far the demonstrators might go in asserting their new-found political freedoms. Yet all movements seemed to be placed on hold as the Middle East, and the world at large, watched the greatest struggle for political rights unfolding the Arab world’s most populous country: Egypt.
The people should not fear their government, read a placard in Cairo’s central Tahrir (“liberation”) Square. Governments should fear their people. The message captured the moment as hundreds of thousands of democracy activists using social networking software to organize their grassroots movement brought the whole of Egypt to a standstill. Known as the January 25 Movement, named for the date the demonstrations began, the Egyptian revolution of 2011 has witnessed mass demonstrations in Cairo, Alexandria, Suez, Ismailiyya, and other major Egyptian towns and cities.
For eighteen days the whole world watched transfixed as Egypt’s democracy movement challenged the Mubarak regime—and won. The government resorted to dirty tactics to defeat the demonstrators. They released convicted prisoners from jail to provoke fear. Policemen in civilian clothes assaulted the protesters in Tahrir Square, posing as a pro-Mubarak counter-demonstration. The president’s men went to theatrical lengths, mounting a horse and camel charge on the democracy activists. Yet every attempt at intimidation was repelled with determination, and the number of protesters only grew. Throughout it all, the Egyptian Army refused to support the government and declared the protesters’ demands legitimate. As Ben Ali before him, Mubarak recognized his position was untenable without his army’s support. On February 11, 2011, he stood down to jubilation and wild celebrations in Tahrir Square. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces assumed control of the country and dissolved parliament to oversee the transition to democratic government. Mubarak’s fall was thus but the first stage in Egypt’s revolution of 2011.
When concluding The Arabs in 2009, I wrote: “If the Arab peoples are to enjoy human rights and accountable government, security, and economic growth, they will have to seize the initiative themselves.” They have now done so. Through their courage in confronting their governments to uphold human rights and political freedom, the people of Tunisia, Egypt, and the rest of the Arab world have put to rest once and for all the myth that the Arabs, as a people, or Muslims more generally, are somehow incompatible with democratic values. Citizens of the Arab world are more assertive today than ever, and in fighting for their rights they are discovering a new sense of dignity. It is difficult to imagine the gains of 2011 suffering a total reversal.
That is not to say that all democracy movements in the region will meet with quick success or manage a smooth transition from dictatorship to representative government. Many of the states in the region lack stable institutions on which to build an open political system. If the autocratic rulers in Yemen and Libya are toppled, there is a great risk of leaving a political vacuum in their wake. And even the most democratic of states are finding it hard to satisfy the social and economic demands of their citizens in the global economy of 2011. But the gains of 2011 will stand as a benchmark for years to come. The highest standard of political freedom achieved by one Arab state will become the measure by which citizens in other Arab countries will judge their own governments. And change is in the air.
E.R.
Oxford
February 2011