Arab Spring Then and Now. Robert Fisk
so closely associated with the old regime will have any credibility with people in the streets.
Conditions vary across the Arab world but there is plenty in common between the situation in Tunisia and that in Algeria, Jordan and Egypt. Economic and political stagnation is decades old. In some states this is made more tolerable by access to oil revenues, but even this is not enough to provide jobs for educated youths who see their path blocked by a corrupt elite.
There are echoes of the Tunisian crisis in other countries. In Jordan the security forces have been battling rioters in Maan, a traditional site of unrest in the past where the government has difficulty coping. In Kuwait there was an attack by security forces in December on academic and members of parliament. Food prices have been going up.
Yet all these regimes that are now in trouble had a carefully cultivated image in the west of being "moderate" and anti-fundamentalist. In the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, President George Bush and Tony Blair made much of their democratic agenda for the Middle East, but when one of the few democratic elections to take place in the region produced victory for Hamas among the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank, the US did everything to thwart the outcome of the poll.
The Middle East still has a reputation for coups but a striking feature of the region since the early 1970s is how few of the regimes have changed. The forces behind the Tunisian events are not radically new but they are all the more potent for being so long suppressed.
Western governments have been caught on the hop because explosions of social and economic frustration have been long predicted but have never happened. The extent of the uprising is yet to be defined and the Tunisian army evidently hopes that the departure of Mr Ben Ali may be enough for the government to restore its authority. The generals could be right, but the shootings over the last month failed to work. There is no particular reason why the same tactics should start to work now.
Patrick Cockburn
Monday, 17 January 2011
DEMOCRACY, BUT NOT TOO MUCH DEMOCRACY
The end of the age of dictators in the Arab world? Certainly they are shaking in their boots across the Middle East, the well-heeled sheikhs and emirs, and the kings - including one very old one in Saudi Arabia and a young one in Jordan, and presidents - another very old one in Egypt and a young one in Syria, because Tunisia wasn't meant to happen.
Food price riots in Algeria, too, and demonstrations against price increases in Amman. Not to mention scores more dead in Tunisia, whose own despot sought refuge in Riyadh - exactly the same city to which a man called Idi Amin once fled.
If it can happen in the holiday destination Tunisia, it can happen anywhere, can't it? Tunisia was feted by the West for its "stability" when Zine el-Abdine Ben Ali was in charge. The French and the Germans and the Brits, dare we mention this, always praised the dictator for being a "friend" of civilised Europe, keeping a firm hand on all those Islamists.
Tunisians won't forget this little history, even if we would like them to. The Arabs used to say that two thirds of the entire Tunisian population - seven million out of 10 million, virtually the whole adult population - worked in one way or another for Ben Ali's secret police. They must have been on the streets too, then, protesting at the man we loved until last week.
But don't get too excited. Yes, Tunisian youth have used the internet to rally each other - in Algeria, too - and the demographic explosion of youth (born in the Eighties and Nineties with no jobs to go to after university) is on the streets.
But the "unity" government is to be formed by Mohamed Ghannouchi, a satrap of Ben Ali's for almost 20 years, a safe pair of hands who will have our interests - rather than his people's interests - at heart.
For I fear this is going to be the same old story. Yes, we would like a democracy in Tunisia - but not too much democracy. Remember how we wanted Algeria to have a democracy back in the early Nineties? Then, when it looked like the Islamists might win the second round of voting, we supported its military-backed government in suspending elections and crushing the Islamists and initiating a civil war in which 150,000 died. No, in the Arab world, we want law and order and stability. Even in Hosni Mubarak's corrupt and corrupted Egypt, that's what we want. And we will get it.
The truth, of course, is that the Arab world is so dysfunctional, sclerotic, corrupt, humiliated and ruthless - and remember that Ben Ali was calling Tunisian protesters "terrorists" only last week - and so totally incapable of any social or political progress, that the chances of a series of working democracies emerging from the chaos of the Middle East stand at around zero per cent. The job of the Arab potentates will be what it has always been - to "manage" their people, to control them, to keep the lid on, to love the West and to hate Iran.
Indeed, what was Hillary Clinton doing last week as Tunisia burned? She was telling the corrupted princes of the Gulf that their job was to support sanctions against Iran, to confront the Islamic republic, to prepare for another strike against a Muslim state after the two catastrophes the United States and Britain have already inflicted in the region.
The Muslim world - at least, that bit of it between India and the Mediterranean - is a more than sorry mess. Iraq has a sort-of government that is now a satrap of Iran, Hamid Karzai is no more than the mayor of Kabul, Pakistan stands on the edge of endless disaster, Egypt has just emerged from another fake election (a friend called me from Cairo yesterday because she knew what I wanted to know - "No, we won't," she said). And Lebanon… Well, poor old Lebanon hasn't even got a government. Southern Sudan - if the elections are fair - might be a tiny candle, but don't bet on it.
It's the same old problem for us in the West. We mouth the word "democracy" and we are all for fair elections - providing the Arabs vote for whom we want them to vote for. In Algeria 20 years ago, they didn't. In "Palestine" they didn't.
And in Lebanon, because of the so-called Doha accord, they didn't. So we sanction them, threaten them and warn them about Iran and expect them to keep their mouths shut when Israel steals more Palestinian land for its colonies on the West Bank.
There was a fearful irony that the police theft of an ex-student's fruit produce - and his suicide in Tunis - should have started all this off, not least because Ben Ali made a failed attempt to gather public support by visiting the dying youth in hospital. For years, this wretched man had been talking about a "slow liberalising" of his country. But all dictators know they are in greatest danger when they start freeing entrapped countrymen from their chains.
And the Arabs behaved accordingly.
No sooner had Ben Ali flown off into exile than Arab newspapers which have been stroking his fur and polishing his shoes and receiving his money for so many years were vilifying the man. "Misrule", "corruption", "authoritarian reign", "a total lack of human rights", their journalists are saying now. Rarely have the words of the Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran sounded so painfully accurate: "Pity the nation that welcomes its new ruler with trumpetings, and farewells him with hootings, only to welcome another with trumpetings again." Mohamed Ghannouchi, perhaps? Of course, everyone is lowering their prices now - or promising to. Cooking oil and bread are the staples of the masses. So prices will come down in Tunisia and Algeria and Egypt and Jordan. But why should they be so high in the first place? Algeria should be as rich as Saudi Arabia - it has the oil and gas - but it has one of the worst unemployment rates in the Middle East, no social security, no pensions, nothing for its people because its generals have salted their country's wealth away in Switzerland.
And police brutality. The torture chambers will keep going. We will maintain our good relations with the dictators. We will continue to arm their wretched armies and tell them to seek peace with Israel. And they will do what we want. Ben Ali has fled. The search is now on for a more pliable dictator in Tunisia - a "benevolent strongman" as the news agencies like to call these ghastly men. And the shooting will go on - as it did yesterday in Tunisia - until "stability" has been restored.
No, on balance, I don't think the age of the Arab dictators is over. We will see to that.
Robert Fisk
Friday, 21 January 2011
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