The New Middle East (5 page)

It is important here to explain the use of the word ‘secular’ in this book and throughout the Middle East. The words ‘secular’ and ‘liberal’ are used to describe people in the Arab world and Israel whose religion is part of their lives, but who don’t define much of their identity by religion. When people in the Middle East talk about the ‘seculars’ it does not mean atheists or non-believers; they are talking about people less religious than they are. It is very hard to find people in the Middle East who have no faith in God at all. They exist, and are often described as radical seculars, but they are such a tiny minority they have very little impact on their wider societies. As in the US, religious people do not make up part of the political spectrum, they are almost the entire political spectrum. What varies along that spectrum is the degree to which religion impacts on their political thinking.

The cry that was born in Tunisia but went echoing across the Arab world was: ‘The people want the overthrow of the regime.’ It was not only a challenge to the dictators, it was a challenge to the army: ‘Whose side are you on?’ The answer to that question defines the nature of an authoritarian state. If the army sees itself as an instrument of the state it will ditch the regime to protect the People. This is what we saw in Egypt and Tunisia. If the army has no investment in either the state or the regime, then the military will crumble, which is what happened in Libya. If the army is not only an instrument of the regime, but helped build the state, it will kill the People to protect it. Then, the People must not only overthrow the regime, they must fight to overthrow the state, because they are one and the same. That is what happened in Syria.

Lisa Anderson is the head of the American University in Cairo and a professor of International Relations. Her office sits on Tahrir Square, and that gave her a ringside seat to indulge in the area of specialism for which she is world-renowned, namely regime change and the formation of states. ‘The Tunisian military and the Egyptian military were prepared to sacrifice the regime because they were ultimately the protectors of the country,’ she told me.

So even though they were both very wrapped up in relations with the regime, particularly in Egypt, they could walk away. The Libyan military establishment was completely confused, just like the entire country, and it wasn’t clear whom they worked for but they certainly didn’t work for Libya. Whether they were the vanguard of [Gaddafi’s Green] revolution, which is the way they had been represented for a long time, or whether they were a praetorian guard for Gaddafi, they certainly were not Libya’s military establishment in their own self-image. So as soon as things began to come apart . . . it’s like you pull the string and the whole thing begins to unravel completely, and they had nothing that held them together. Being the vanguard of the revolution was something that very few people took seriously, and being his praetorian guard, unless you were one of the Gaddafi tribe, then you weren’t part of that.

It wasn’t hard to persuade the world to actively support the cry for freedom and democracy in Libya and thus help overthrow the regime. Within weeks of the start of the revolution the UN had agreed on a no-fly zone and NATO planes were attacking Gaddafi’s army, turning the tide of the war. By diplomatic standards the intervention in Libya took place at lightning speed, and it was down to how the world felt about one man.

Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, more than any other Arab dictator, brought the fear and violence of life lived under a despot to the people of suburban Europe and America. He was, US President Ronald Reagan famously declared, ‘The Mad Dog of the Middle East’.
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The only other man from the Arab-speaking world to have impacted on the lives of Westerners in such a violent, direct and personal way was the al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. It used to infuriate Libyans that the only thing people identified their country with was their quixotic leader, yet it was only because of Gaddafi’s antics that Libya had a place in the international spotlight at all. The last time I saw him alive he was driving past me in a golf buggy through a scrum of loyalists and security men, waving at the crowd and heading straight for a lamppost. Gaddafi didn’t care whether the outside world loved him or hated him. He just didn’t want to be ignored.

A few weeks before the NATO jets began to rev up their engines to drop their first payloads on the regime of the world’s most famous dictator, the man who would soon soar up the charts to grab that title from him was still pretty confident that he faced no serious trouble at home. Bashar al-Assad had hailed the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt as a ‘new era’ in the Arab world, but he said of his country: ‘We are outside of this; at the end we are not Tunisians and we are not Egyptians.’
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Gaddafi said something similar, and he was wrong too. But Assad was right about one thing. Syria was not Tunisia and it was not Egypt, because when it came to the crunch in those two countries the dictators had not built regimes willing or able to butcher their own populations.

‘Syria is stable. Why?’ asked Assad. ‘Because you have to be very closely linked to the beliefs of the people.’
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He didn’t say it then but he added later through deeds not words, that if being ‘closely linked . . . to the people’ doesn’t work then you could just try killing as many of them as possible.

If, before the Arab revolts, the Western world was largely ignorant of the brutality of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, it certainly wasn’t afterwards. If ever there was a case for intervention to protect civilians, then Bashar al-Assad had made it. But the regime was allowed to take its society beyond the point of reconciliation. Then some Gulf states started to directly undermine efforts at a peaceful outcome, but still the West was reluctant to step up and play a greater role. Syria’s geographic position and its kaleidoscope of religions and sects meant the Western world baulked at pulling at and unravelling the regime because it had no idea what would emerge from beneath.

The Assad family built the Syrian state by stitching together a patchwork of communities over which one of its minorities, the Alawites (also known as Alawis), presided. In Egypt and Tunisia the army was feted for staying loyal to the state and protecting the revolution. In Libya individual loyalties to family and region trumped loyalty to the military and the state, so the military establishment collapsed. In Syria loyalty to the state, to the regime, to the army and to family often all meant the same thing if you were part of the establishment and an Alawite.

The nature of the state that Bashar al-Assad’s father Hafez built, Lisa Anderson told me, meant that Syria was always going to be more resistant to change than Libya ever was, with or without outside intervention from NATO or anywhere else.

[In Syria] the regime’s project was to build the state out of what were fairly autonomous identities. [There] you do get the solidarity of the praetorian guard, which is ethnic, so all the Alawis have to rally around. But – and this is why things have been so horrid in Syria – you have a lot of people that bought this state-building project. You don’t have to be Alawis to say: ‘Syria is an important thing and this military represents Syria,’ whereas nobody thought the military in Libya represented Libya. There was hardly even any sense of ‘Libya’. Syria has enough national identity and enough conviction that the military’s function is to build out that national identity, that a lot of people have bought that and will support that and will say that: ‘Yes, the people that are trying to undermine this are bad guys and are just trying to create chaos.’ So the opposition has much less legitimacy in the view of substantial numbers of Syrians. So it becomes much more like a real civil war.

This is why some revolutions took weeks and others took months and years. Some of the regimes built by the dictatorships had been hollowed out with age. The socialist ideologies that created them were long gone. The regimes had died inside but the façade was still standing. It still looked menacing, but when the young people pushed against it, it collapsed.

The regimes that still had a purpose – in Syria’s case to protect a particular sect, the Alawites – were more resilient. Egyptians and Tunisians felt a little sheepish after the revolt that it had taken them so long to stand up to their bully. By the time the Syrian conflict entered its third year, those people who by now were living in shattered cities, scavenging for firewood and selling their possessions to buy food, wondered if it would ever end and whether the revolt had been worth it.

While there were many differences in these uprisings, there was one thing that united them. ‘The five countries where you have had revolutions, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria and Yemen, all shared one thing,’ Shadi Hamid from the Brookings Center for Middle East Policy in Doha told me.

There was a very unpopular repressive leader and that figure was able to unite the opposition because, as fractious as these oppositions were, the one thing they could agree on was: ‘We don’t like him and we want to get rid of him’ and they couldn’t agree on nearly anything else. Having that kind of personalised figure was a critical part of why these revolutions were able to occur.

But these weren’t the only Arab countries where demonstrations took place. In Bahrain, Jordan and Morocco protests were successfully and quickly either put down or defused.
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And these countries too had something in common. They were Arab kingdoms. ‘No monarchies have fallen, no monarchies have even come close to falling, and that’s not by mistake,’ says Shadi Hamid.

Monarchies are a fundamentally different form of governmental structure. They tend to have more legitimacy, more popular support [and] it’s also more difficult for the opposition to come and say: ‘We want the fall of the leader’ because they don’t want that. They want, maybe, constitutional reform, but because the monarchy has this elevated status [the protesters] have to have a different call to arms. And saying: ‘We want constitutional monarchy’ on a bumper sticker, that’s not very catchy, it’s not able to unify the opposition and give them a clear sense of purpose.

And if someone does have to go, an Arab monarch always has the option of blaming the mere mortals in his kingdom’s largely useless and ineffective parliament. King Abdullah of Jordan, where street protests started in the first month of the Arab Spring, has only been on the throne since 1999. The Jordanian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, which the King described as a ‘Masonic cult’, dominates the opposition.
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The Arab kingdoms without oil or gas had to try to slowly reform their way out of trouble. By the time of the general elections, which had little credibility because the Brotherhood boycotted them, had been held in January 2013, King Abdullah had already worked his way through ten prime ministers during his reign.

Many people in the Arab world who followed the progress of the uprising in Tunisia on Twitter, Facebook or on Arab satellite TV channels saw the potential for change in their own lands too, and took to the streets. At first glance neighbouring Algeria also looked ripe for revolution. It had a patriarchal leader in President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who had been in power for more than a decade. Like Egypt it was at the time being governed under emergency rule, though that was quickly lifted. The economy was in trouble and it had the same demographic ‘youth bulge’. But Algeria had already had its landmark ‘free and fair’ elections in 1992, and as in the elections that took place in the Arab world twenty years later, Islamists had won. Back then the Algerian military were not ready to hand the country over to the winners, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS). The elections were annulled, a civil war ensued, and more than 150,000 people died in the violence.
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The people of Algeria were still exhausted when their next-door neighbour began its struggle against dictatorship. In Algeria most people who watched the Arab uprisings unfold on their TV screens saw in them the potential for another round of appalling bloodshed, so they mostly stayed at home and locked their doors.

In most of the Arab world countries the dictatorships had pretended to keep up with the times by putting up a little democratic tinsel to catch the eye of the Western world. In the Gulf states they hardly bothered. The reason why revolution was not sparked there was less complicated than in the other nations. In the Gulf, oil money is sloshed around society at the slightest hint of dissent to try to co-opt the vast majority of the people into a docile acceptance of the status quo. The few who won’t settle for a pay rise are easily picked off by the well-funded internal security services. But the Gulf countries will not be able to buy their way out of trouble for ever, says the labour market specialist Professor Assaad:

It is absolutely not sustainable. It’s basically a perpetuation of the authoritarian contract where we’ll throw money at you and give you a whole bunch of giveaways but you don’t question the authority of the state and you don’t demand democracy. That is the model that was operating in most of the region, but it became unsustainable in places like Egypt and Tunisia. The oil economies are still able to afford that model for the time being, but I don’t see with the increasing number of young people, with the increasing education levels, that that sort of social contract can be sustainable.