The New Middle East (4 page)

The confusion about what will now follow is reflected by disagreement even over what this dramatic change should be called. It has been argued that the phrase ‘Arab Spring’ is yet another inappropriate Western import into the region, drawn as it was from events in Prague during 1968 at the height of the Cold War. Some people, like US Secretary of State John Kerry, refuse to use it, preferring the term ‘Arab Awakening’. ‘Spring’ does suggests something quick and pleasant. That may have broadly been the case in Tunisia and Egypt; it certainly wasn’t in Libya and Syria. It was also clear by the summer of 2011 that these events would take many seasons to play out. However ‘Arab Awakening’ has been used before, to describe the surge of Arab nationalism in the 1950s, so reviving it now is also confusing. The Israeli government and its supporters first called these events ‘the Islamic Spring’ and then later ‘the Islamic winter’. In the years that followed the start of these events some were calling it the ‘Sunni Spring’. It is a testament to how much these revolts have changed the region that they mean so much to so many people in so many different ways. If I have tended to use ‘Arab Spring’ in this book, it is because it is the phrase most commonly used on the international stage. Every country, including Syria, is in the post-Arab Spring era, because they are having to deal with the consequences of the initial revolts.

Whatever people choose to call the uprisings, the challenge for the rest of the world is to embrace the changes in the Middle East, engage with its new leaders and form a partnership with these emerging forces to make sure democracy in the region survives its infancy. The road to democracy for the Arab world has been harder and longer than for almost any other region on the planet. It took so long that a casual assumption was made in parts of the West that it simply couldn’t work there. That conclusion propped up dictators for decades. The key test for the revolutionaries of the New Middle East, now that they have fought and won their new states, is this: Can they accept democracy’s fundamental characteristic? It expresses the will of the
majority
of the people. So many of them may not like what they are going to get.

Jerusalem/al-Quds, 4 July 2013

1

The Collapse of the Old Middle East

‘Take a sheep and give me your vote,’ said the placard in Arabic. It was held above the heads of two young Tunisian women standing in a crowd of a thousand people outside the results centre for the Constituent Assembly elections in the capital Tunis. They were waiting for the announcement of the final tally but they already knew who had won. Unusually for a protest in the Arab world, more than half the demonstrators were women. They suddenly felt they had the most to lose from the outcome of the first democratic process born of the Arab Spring.

After the revolts the rich educated urban youth, many of whom had propagated the uprising through their Facebook pages and with rocks and stones on the streets of Tunis, had woken up to the reality of their country. They were not the real Tunisia. Like many wealthy people living in the developing world, the poor were to them the men and women who served, cleaned and did jobs they did not want to do. And they did it quietly. The people eking out an existence just above the poverty line weren’t necessarily thought of badly. They simply weren’t thought of at all, except as an intellectual concept to be debated in coffee shops or over dinner.

The poor did not have a voice during the years of President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali’s dictatorship in Tunisia. Now they not only had a voice, they had a vote. And in October 2011 they used it to make the moderate Islamist party Ennahda the largest in the Constituent Assembly. This crowd of the liberal elite simply couldn’t believe anyone would pick Ennahda unless their vote had been bought. They assumed the poor were gullible enough to swap their votes for livestock.

Standing among the placards was Manal Labidi, who taught accountancy at a college in Tunis. She was in her twenties, very fashionably dressed, with a pair of designer sunglasses pushed up onto her head. And she was angry. ‘They stole the revolution,’ she told me. The most remarkable thing about Manal Labidi’s protest was not what she said, it was the fact that after she said it she wasn’t dragged by her hair down to the local police station. Before the revolution her entire generation had been constantly warned by their parents to keep quiet, keep their heads down and avoid eye contact with the police.

In Tunisia you had only to compare the size of the force assigned to protect the country with that assigned to protect the regime to see what kept President Ben Ali awake at night. The internal security services were at least five times larger than the army.
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Like all the Arab dictators, Ben Ali was much more afraid of his own people than he was of foreign invaders. And what scared him most about them was that one day they might get the vote. In a fair fight at the ballot box the Arab leaders all knew they’d be kicked out on to the streets. Fortunately for them, democracy in the Middle East did not suit their friends in the West either.The end of the Cold War in Europe in 1989 saw a wave of democracy wash around the globe, but it hit a wall in the Middle East. The academics of the day even had a phrase for it: it was called ‘Arab Exceptionalism’, and people studied it as if it was a supernatural phenomenon. It was not. It was man-made. Many in government in the West believed that letting the people of the Middle East make their own minds up only produced what became known as the ‘Algerian problem’, which ‘crystallised as the nightmare vision for American policymakers of what democracy might bring to the Arab world: legitimately elected Islamist governments that are anti-American, and ultimately anti-democratic, in orientation’.
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Dr Osman Hassan, from Warwick University, who has studied the attempts to bring democracy to the region, described the ideas of ‘Arab Exceptionalism’ to me in much clearer terms: ‘It’s inherently racist, there are no two ways about it. It becomes a really benign way of saying: “We don’t need to do anything because Arabs can’t have democracy because they don’t want it because there is something fundamentally wrong with them.” ’

For much of the last sixty years the West didn’t understand the region because the story we heard from the Middle East was simple. The news focused largely on the violence. The victims and perpetrators ebbed and flowed but the plot did not. At worst the Arabs were treated as an amorphous mass of people who were constantly trying to kill each other or the Israelis. At first glance even the revolutions fitted an easy narrative. There was a dictator against the people. Simplicity once again hid the subtleties. But there is nothing simple about the New Middle East.

We need to understand why the Arab people’s fight for democracy was so long and lonely. There were broad forces that made the old Middle East collapse, but there were also distinct differences between each revolution because of the distinct differences between each nation.

‘The Arabs’ have never been thought of or portrayed as a collection of individuals. The world focused only on the things that made them the same. We need to focus on the things that make them different. We must dispel even those myths about the Middle East that were created with good intentions. By examining what made each uprising distinct, and how the societies differed in their religious and political make-up, we can see why each country has since taken a different path after the Big Bang of the revolt. That will help us work out where each country is going. It will also help us understand why the firestorm of revolution was sparked in what had always been the least exciting corner of the region.

Democracy has finally arrived in the Middle East, but it has quite literally had a torturous journey. Many of the leaders of these new democracies were subjected to sadistic brutality by the old regimes simply because of their religious beliefs. Successive Western governments turned a blind eye to this abuse for the same reason. Now that these Islamists are being lectured by Western politicians about freedom and human rights, they wonder why the same people were silent when they were in jail. Understanding this legacy will help us understand those tensions. If the Western governments are suspicious of the Islamist politicians, then the Islamist politicians have plenty of personal reasons to mistrust Western governments.

The uprisings were described around the world as the ‘Facebook’ revolutions.
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The West looked for labels it could understand to describe a region it did not. Across the Middle East and North Africa the nature of the demonstrations confused the state security apparatus. It was not designed to deal with this. The organisation through social media created a disorganised pattern of protest. Young revolutionaries would later recall coming across other protest marches entirely by accident, assuming at first that the crowd on the horizon was riot police ready to confront them.
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The confusing nature of the rebellion was so effective at undermining the security forces that it led to the belief among the regimes that there must be some hidden hand or dark force at work.
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But then these were old men who probably needed help from their grandchildren to operate the DVD player.

The essence of dictatorship is control of the public arena. It is done through stories shown on the state television, the editorials in the newspapers, the omnipresent image of the ‘Father of the Nation’ on posters or statues. Social media took that power away. The Grandads were too blind to see that their political class didn’t control the message any more. By the time they tried to turn the Internet off it was too late. As the revolutions moved from country to country the role of the World Wide Web in getting an alternative message out became more and more important.

Yet many of those who emerged as the voices of the regional protest movements say that social media was merely an instrument of the uprisings, it should not have been used to define them. They argue that the West projected its own wishful thinking onto the revolutions, hoping that a third force of young liberals was emerging as an alternative to the old dictators and the resurgent Islamists. Their desire was that this group, which was unsurprisingly a reflection of the West’s own image, would then determine the fate of the New Middle East. But the West got it wrong, the Egyptian–American writer and activist Mona Eltahawy told me:

When you look at Facebook and Twitter, how many people do they reach? When we had the [constitutional] referendum in Egypt [in March 2011], if you followed the Egyptian Twitterverse the majority of the people were going to say ‘no’ and then seventy-five per cent of Egyptians said ‘yes’. That shows you where Twitter is and where the rest of Egypt is. Social media was a tool in the way cassette tapes were a tool for Ayatollah Khomeini in the run-up to the Iranian Revolution, in the way the fax machine was a tool in the run-up to Tiananmen Square, the printing press in the run-up to Martin Luther, pamphlets for the Soviets. It’s just a tool and it helped to connect people that couldn’t find each other in an atmosphere where civil society was being decimated by the regime.

The dictators first began to lose control of the public sphere with the rise of the Arabic satellite news channels, the most important of which was Al Jazeera. It was where the Arab people found a common narrative, because Al Jazeera in its heyday, in the first decade of the new century, was reporting on causes that united the Arab people. There was the second much more violent uprising by the Palestinians against the Israeli occupation in 2000, and then came the partial and then total Western occupation of Muslim lands in Afghanistan and Iraq. Al Jazeera was also a catalyst for the Tunisian revolution. It picked up early and stayed with the protests as they gathered pace, and because of its constant coverage it increased the momentum. By the time of Egypt’s revolution the channel was perceived by many in the Arab world as not just reporting but cheering on the uprisings, but as those who saw it that way were on the same side it upset no one.

Which is why Al Jazeera came in for so much criticism when it seemed to do its utmost to ignore the uprising in the Gulf state of Bahrain.
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That was the moment it and Al Arabiya really began to be perceived by parts of their audiences as softer arms of their host states Qatar and Saudi Arabia. During the Libyan conflict, even though it was staunchly on the side of the opposition, revolutionaries became distrustful of the channel’s motives. The rising tide of revolution took the viewing figures of every Arab news network with it, but the Arab-language Al Jazeera news channel saw its credibility damaged as staff members resigned, accusing the channel of allowing interference by the Qatari government.
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Unlike earlier revolutionary movements in the world’s history, social media in the twenty-first century provided the capability to organise without central control. The revolution in Tunisia, like the ones that followed, was leaderless, so the usual government tactics didn’t work. There was no one to buy off, lock up or scare away. It was the great strength of the Arab Spring when it began, but for the secular middle class it also proved to be its greatest weakness. They had formed the vanguard of the uprisings but they had no one to represent them when the dictators fell. As events wore on young democrats were sometimes campaigning to stop free and fair elections from quickly taking place because they knew they weren’t ready to compete.
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The spoils went to the groups who were the most organised. In Tunisia and then Egypt this meant that the first waves of democracy produced a surge in influence for the Islamists, not for the secular revolutionaries.