Read The New Middle East Online
Authors: Paul Danahar
Tunisia’s coalition government was led by Ennahda. It and its partners were still feeling their way on a whole range of issues from the role of Islam to the rights of women. The most pressing issue remains the economy, and it is likely to be several years before it can be turned around.
All the while, tensions simmer and suspicions linger between the secular people and the Islamists. It may not have been hugely popular in the years following the overthrow of the Ben Ali regime, but because it had gone into exile Ennahda was not tainted by it. Unlike the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, from which it was spawned, it had not constantly capitulated to the dictatorship. Many Tunisians may not have liked it, but they could not accuse it of years of collusion. But in the view of Olivier Roy, professor of social and political theory at the European University Institute in Florence, this means that its leaders don’t yet understand the country they have returned to, and that may be their undoing: ‘Ennahda’s problem is that it is far less rooted in Tunisian society than the Muslim Brotherhood is in Egypt. The Ennahda people were either in jail or in London, and so they don’t know their own society, which is very diverse. They are just far more isolated.’ They did not know what to do in a crisis, and a violent minority among Salafist groups exploited that ignorance to push their own agenda. They have smashed up hotels and bars selling alcohol, disrupted art exhibitions and attacked the US embassy. Many believed that they might have been linked to the assassination of the secular opposition leader Chokri Belaid in February 2013 which provoked a crisis in the government and led to the eventual resignation of the prime minister. The political turmoil and violence undermined what had started to look like a slow recovery in the economy.
Tunisia is now a democracy. The trade unions, which played a key role in the uprising, remain extremely powerful. Its society is not afraid to stand up to tyranny. The fact that around a million people took to the streets of the capital Tunis to express their fury at the murder of Mr Belaid says more about the country’s future than the handful of violent Salafists trying to drag it into the past. There will inevitably be more acts of violence by these fringe groups. There will also be regular protests against the government by secular demonstrators, and some of those will turn violent too. But Tunisia still promises to be a success story. History has rarely revolved around Tunisia, because outsiders didn’t want to fight too hard over it. It has no oil and no strategic importance. It will drop back out of the headlines and it will be the better for it. Tunisia gave the region a new start. Most importantly it was the first Arab state to make the transition to democracy by choice. The afterglow of being the first people to rise up may have worn off, but these are remarkable achievements.
The spontaneous overthrow of authoritarian rulers by the people of overwhelmingly Muslim nations gave the democracies that followed Arab, not American, roots. It undercuts the argument made by the kingdoms in the Gulf that democracy is un-Islamic and unwanted. There may be an argument over where the seed came from, but there is no real debate about who nurtured it and brought it to fruition. That surely makes the democratisation process irreversible in the countries where it has started, and possible where it has not.
‘Those who spread the myth that democracy is against Islam are the oppressive regimes and monarchies [in the Gulf] who sell their wealth cheaply to the Americans. Therefore, democracy is a threat to them and they tried to export the idea that democracy is against Islam.’ So said Abdul-Moneim Aboul-Fotouh as we sat in his party office in Cairo. For decades he was one of the most influential figures in Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, which inspired the creation of Ennahda. He left the organisation in 2011 to run for the presidency. ‘All the basic principles of democracy are in harmony with Islam. If the people [in the Gulf] are allowed to rule themselves, they will not leave in place oppressive rulers or corrupt princes who steal the country’s resources for themselves.’
‘Islamists coming to power in places like Tunisia and Egypt is very important,’ Princeton’s Professor of Near Eastern Studies, Bernard Haykel, told me in late 2012.
Islamists feel for the first time that the West is not going to stop them from coming to power, that’s an important thing. If Islamists get their act together, if they manage to run the country properly, then I think there is a very serious challenge to the Saudis. The Saudis and the Muslim Brotherhood compete ideologically on more or less the same terrain, which is Islam and its representation. So the Muslim Brotherhood represents a threat if they get their house in order. I think Egypt in particular is a very important country. If the Egyptians manage to create an order that is transparent, accountable, economically successful, if they reproduce Turkey in Egypt or something even approximating Turkey, then I think that could have a tremendous effect on the whole region. Because people will want that.
As they surfaced from the chaos of the revolutions, many countries began to look at Turkey as a potential model for their societies. It was once under military rule but is now governed by moderate Islamists. After the revolution Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood consulted Turkish officials over the best way to move the generals out of politics. President Obama has invested heavily in his country’s relationship with Turkey, an experience that made him less anxious when Islamists finally came to power in the Arab world. At one stage Ankara had achieved its stated foreign policy aim of ‘zero problems with neighbours’. Then things began to unravel with Israel and the Arab Spring created big problems with Syria. Ankara seemed to be ready to play a key role in the early months of the crisis on its southern border, and then seemed to lose its nerve as Syria descended into chaos. Suddenly some of the shine faded from the great Turkish success story. Its aspirations to be the regional leader took a knock. They were further damaged by the anti-government protests in Istanbul and beyond in June 2013.
The dictators were right when they said: ‘It’s the Islamists or me’; they were wrong when they implied that democracy was not suited to either one of them. America was traumatised by 9/11. Many Muslims around the world were traumatised by its aftermath. The religion of hundreds of millions of people around the globe was and continues to be vilified because of the atrocities carried out in the West by a tiny minority of Global Jihadists. It is hard to find a Muslim in the Middle East who did not feel viscerally distressed by that period.
Now the people of the Arab world have spilt their blood in revolutions to overthrow their dictators and speak for themselves. They used the Arab Spring to try to reclaim their identities from al-Qaeda and Hollywood’s central casting. The vast majority of those revolutionaries are religious. The vast majority of them are Muslims. They are Muslims who have fought harder and suffered more for democracy and human rights than most Westerners alive today.
The Arab people finally have the chance to embrace Western-style democracy, but there shouldn’t be disappointment when they don’t embrace Western-style everything else. Voting like Europeans is not going to make people think like Europeans. The West itself has not reached a shared definition of democracy, so there will be debate on its form in the New Middle East too. Democracy absorbs the flavour of the culture and society it is mixed with. Democracy in the Arab world will have its own flavour too.
It was the people of the Arab world, not the schemes of the Western world, that finally brought democracy to the more despairing corners of the region. Their uprisings wiped away the last vestiges of the Cold War. But there was one more war they brought to a close. This one too had been going on for decades. Men from within the ranks of these two foes had plotted against, schemed with and assassinated the leaderships of the other. They had been revolutionary comrades and implacable foes. They had fought together in desert wars and then tortured their old allies in prison cells. Their arena was what was left of one of the world’s great civilisations: Egypt.
The present-day tensions between the secularists and the Islamists in Tunisia are dwarfed in scale by the epic battle that has taken place in Egypt, the dominant Arab state. There, the mother ship of all the region’s Islamists groups, the Muslim Brotherhood, has been in a long war with the Grandaddy of secular Arab nationalism, the Egyptian army. It has been a clash of the regional Titans. Because the outcome of this conflict will shape the future of Egypt, that means it will also shape the New Middle East.
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‘I can’t believe we’ve won, I can’t believe we’ve won!’ shouted a man to me over the noise of the chants and firecrackers as Cairo’s Tahrir Square exploded into an ecstatic mix of joy and relief. The people had ousted ‘the Last Pharaoh’, the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. They had ended three decades of his dictatorial rule in the most populous and important Arab country. It was a seminal moment in the Middle East. It would begin to redefine the entire region.
The heroes of the hour were the army. I watched the crowds lifting the soldiers onto their shoulders. The uniformed young men sat grinning above a sea of flags, their faces framed by fireworks that were exploding overhead. ‘The people and the army are one hand,’ the crowd chanted. State TV had just broadcast the announcement by the recently appointed vice-president and former intelligence chief Omar Suleiman that Mubarak’s rule was over. On the streets outside their studios I watched toddlers being handed up to soldiers still sitting in their tanks as proud parents captured the moment on their camera-phones.
It was the night of Friday, 11 February 2011, and it seemed the army had chosen the people over the dictator. Its standing had never been higher. It would require a remarkable amount of incompetence to squander that much good will, but over the coming months the old generals proved they were more than up to the task as they mismanaged their way from public adoration to public enemy number one. If the tens of thousands of people with me at that moment had known what was to follow, they would not have left the square and headed home that night. They would have realised that their revolution was not yet over. They would have understood that while the man had gone, the regime he helped to create was still alive, and would soon be kicking against the freedoms the revolutionaries in Tahrir Square thought they had just won.
The army leadership had removed Mubarak, not to protect the people but to safeguard itself. Nothing more typifies the shamelessness of the old order in Egypt than the whereabouts of the man whom Mubarak apparently chose as his confidant and confessor as he felt his power slipping away. Every night of his last five days in power, Hosni Mubarak, hero of the 1973 war against Israel and former air chief marshal, revealed his innermost feelings to a retired army general at the other end of a phone line in the land of his old enemy, Israel.
Binyamin Ben-Eliezer was born in Basra in Iraq. When he moved to Israel at the age of thirteen, he changed his name from Fouad, but that was the name Mubarak called him by throughout their long friendship. The walls of Ben-Eliezer’s cramped little office in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, are plastered with photographs of him meeting Arab and world leaders. Most are rather formal-looking, but the one in the centre of the wall shows two old men caught in a roar of laughter. ‘I had the feeling that with me, he felt like he was speaking with his brother,’ Ben-Eliezer told me. ‘Our relationship became very deep from the time I was appointed Israel’s minister for defence in 2001.’ They had known each other for twenty years. Ben-Eliezer has denied claims that he was so close to Mubarak he was even on the government payroll.
1
In the first night he said: ‘Fouad, Cairo is not Tunis,’ but by the second night he said: ‘Yes, there is a revolution.’ The third, fourth and fifth night was all criticisms of the Americans. He was very angry, very sad, he couldn’t understand why after he served the West for thirty years they came with the great idea of democracy, he said: ‘Tell me how I can implement democracy to sharia law, how I can implement democracy when the majority of the women are wearing [the veil].’
Ben-Eliezer described the moment Mubarak told him he was stepping down. It would be a full twenty-four hours before the people in Tahrir Square and the entire Egyptian nation would learn of the decision. It was also the final time the two men would speak. ‘The last night before he shifted to Sharm el-Sheikh, I said: “What’s happened to you?” and he told me: “Listen, [Field Marshal Mohamed] Tantawi advised me to go to Sharm el-Sheikh. Don’t worry, he’s guaranteed my security and my honour.” ’
I asked Ben-Eliezer what made Mubarak realise his time was over.
No one told him to go, but once he felt the Americans are pushing him to go away then I think he lost confidence, then he was listening to Omar Suleiman, because he was very close to him, and I understand Omar Suleiman slowly, slowly, told him there is no chance. I know one thing, this I know from him, he said: ‘Tantawi told me everything will be alright,’ that’s what I know.
It was not all right. Mubarak was sacrificed because the army was less worried about losing him than losing to the organisation they had been fighting for decades, the Muslim Brotherhood. The army and the Brotherhood, then still a banned organisation, were the two most powerful forces in the land. They had been slugging it out for years, but now they both knew the final round was coming. The only question for the army the night it toppled Mubarak was which one of them would eventually emerge from the revolution as the victor.