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The Arab world is facing its most turbulent year since 1973, and there are no signs that the Spring—which became an Autumn and now a Winter—has any signs of tapering off. It’s almost irrelevant now to speak of these uprisings in the region in terms of seasons.
Almost a year since the storm started in Tunisia, it has rolled across the region, lighting hopes and raising expectations, and permanently changing the status quo. Four long-time leaders of the Arab world have fallen, and new voices have risen. Islamists (the once-de facto opposition) are now competing with a wide range of secular movements. The militaries, the guardian of stability in many of these states, are finding themselves challenged by the demands of governance and accountability, and in some cases, defections.
Different states have experienced this storm in varying degrees of magnitude. Looking back, Tunisia so far has been the only state that has come out of the storm, and this is largely due to a stable transition safeguarded by the military and an active civil society. Morocco, which had protests initially, is holding elections today for a new legislature that will elect the first popularly-elevated Prime Minister. Other states, despite the ferocity of the storm, have weathered it well; most notable is Algeria.
The storm has reached its fiercest fervor in Libya, Yemen, and Syria, where violence, unrest, and turbulence have brought these states to the point of collapse and continue to shake these states. It will be longer still before any of these states achieve a stable status quo—never mind the ultimate dream of ‘democracy’.
With the NATO campaign ended and the Qadhafi regime removed, the NTC’s new Prime Minister formed an interim government on Wednesday, incorporating elements of the rebellion which removed Qadhafi. It’s expected that in a period of a year this government will transition a united Libya to a democratic future. But already, the limits of its unity are being stretched with the question of where the trial of Saif Qadhafi will be held. Instead of admitting failure, the ICC, after the visit of Prosecutor Mario Ocampo to Libya, has chosen to back a trial in Libya without acknowledging the reality that a judicial system in Libya is far from established. Meanwhile the militia from Zintan, which captured Saif last Sunday, announced they had no intention of handing Qadhafi over to Tripoli—a sign of their distrust of Tripoli as the center of government.
In his insightful piece for The London Review of Books, “Who said Gaddafi had to go?” Hugh Roberts raises the important question of what will come next in Libya. A growing number of Islamists, tribes, militias, and city-states competing for control in Libya will soon find it hard to keep their differences from spilling over into new violence. And, the international community must do more now before it reaches the point of a new civil war.
Yemen’s political crisis entered a new phase on Wednesday when Ali Abdullah Saleh finally agreed to hand over power to his Vice President and a national unity government made up of the opposition and the ruling party, after months of refusing to sign any agreement. In this new agreement, Saleh would remain as nominal President until new elections are held, but he has chosen to spend his last months as President in medical treatment in New York. His acceptance of this UN- and GCC-mediated agreement in Riyadh was largely due to his own fear that his vast assets in European banks may be seized if financial sanctions were brought against him, as well as concerns that his family will be prosecuted or hunted down, as the Qadhafi regime was, if he were to hang onto power.
Even with this agreement, Saleh’s family would remain in their positions in Yemen for the foreseeable future, and this raises the question of how different Yemen will be with or without the patriarch. While this transition of power has been heralded in the press as a new era, violence between protestors and breakaway army factions and the government forces they are fighting continues unabated as this piece is written. With parts of the country in open rebellion and his departure not ending the level of violence, Yemen continues down its bloody path with no end in sight.
Syria has faced another week of intense bloodletting after flouting the Arab League’s attempts at mediation, with the death toll reaching over 4,000. The Arab League’s ultimatum for accepting their package aimed at ending the crisis passed with no response today from the Assad regime, and it’s likely now the League will pursue sanctions in addition to suspending the recalcitrant state from the League. Even, China and Russia have started to distance themself from their friendship with the Assad regime and have started to entertain the opposition. More and more defections in the army and more people coming into the streets, along with attacks on government facilities and sectarian fighting in cities such as Homs, has lowered by the day the life expectancy of the Assad regime.
On Tuesday, Prime Minister Erdogan of Turkey starkly warned Assad, “For the welfare of your own people and the region, just leave that seat,” Erdogan said. “If you want to see someone who has fought until death against his own people, just look at Nazi Germany, just look at Hitler, at Mussolini, at Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania,” he said. “If you cannot draw any lessons from these, then look at the Libyan leader who was killed just 32 days ago.”
But at the moment, it’s unclear what will replace the deposed Assad regime, at what cost and with what consequence? This question has kept policymakers busy in Washington and Paris, and has ensured that the Arab League will still engage the Assad regime despite their frosty reception. The US State Department confirmed this week that Robert Ford will return to Damascus, even with the announcement from the Quai D’Orsay that the French Ambassador has been recalled.
While the storm will likely get worse in these states, Egypt, the so-called bellwether state, has once again returned in the eye of the storm before the parliamentary elections this Sunday. Protestors have once again filled Tahrir Square demanding change, unhappy that the promises of change in February have borne little fruit in Egypt. The economic opportunities are still dire and the civil rights situation in Egypt has not gotten any better. Questions also have been raised about the future of the military’s role in the country. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces has been reluctant to cede their role in pushing for constitutional amendments that would keep the military separate from civilian oversight; pushing the presidential elections off until at the earliest 2013.
These protests—which grow in numbers ever week—have resulted in violent confrontations between the Egyptian police and the protestors, and have ground Cairo to a halt a week before the elections. The protests are notable in the sense that while the established opposition, the Muslim Brotherhood, are happy with the pace of change, a number of the Tahrir Square generation who were out on the streets earlier this year and who are now out in the Square are not satisfied with the pace, and want immediate fundamental changes.
The military has reacted with both violence and compromise: they have suppressed of the protests, but have also pushed the replacement of the largely nominal civilian government and promise presidential elections in 2012 while backing away from the constitutional amendments. These compromises have failed to satisfy the protestors, and Egypt now is at its boiling point. Will the elections occur on Sunday in this unsettled environment? The scenes coming from Tahrir Square on Friday evening make such elections look like an unlikely possibility.
The Arab Storm whirling around the region has yet to settle, and this week will likely go down as a notable week in this year (or potentially, years) of uprisings and change in the Middle East. As these states confront their futures, the revolutionary fervor which began in Tunisia is still alight, and a new Middle East is still in the making.
