301 - The Arab Spring is Bust: The People Have Lost Out

from Egypt and Tunisia to Yemen

            The much-vaunted Arab Spring accomplished little, and set back the drive for freedom, good governance, and meaningful democracy throughout North Africa and the Middle East.  This gloomy report was confirmed Sunday when President Kais Saied of Tunisia staged a fully fake election and -- no surprise -- emerged as the winner. Is it still possible for North Africans and Middle Easterners to reassert their human rights, and protest anew?

            The Arab Spring rebellion, which lit up the Muslim world, began in late 2010 in central Tunisia when a 26-year-old embittered vegetable peddler, disgusted with his life under a rapacious Tunisian dictatorship, set himself alight, and perished.  His tragic ending sparked a broad-based people's uprising that overturned the long-time and very comfortable dictatorship of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia and immediately spread to Egypt, where authoritarian Hosni Mubarak was pushed out of power, and to Syria, where massive crowds sought to unseat the Bashar al-Assad family that had repressed Syria's citizens for thirty years. Syria was convulsed by civil war for the next decade; the Assad regime clings to power still.

             The critique of dictatorship then coalesced in Libya where Muammar al-Qaddafi, its one-man show, was ousted and killed in late 2011 by angry mobs seeking both democracy and revenge.  Yemen and Bahrain also were convulsed by the Arab Spring, Yemen’s President Ali Abdullah Saleh leaving power in late 2011. But his departure thrust Yemen into a civil war which later resulted in Houthi rebels gaining power and supporters of the former Saleh regime retreating to southern Yemen, where they remain at war with the Houthi in the national capital of Sanaa.  In Bahrain the monarchy prevailed, and is still in control.

            The times were heady, and very promising. Islamist-leaning evangelical political movements seized control in both Egypt and Tunisia and for at least a few years there was hope that the tumult of the Arab Spring would in fact lead to transformational political and economic developments in both countries.  Even, briefly, there was the expectation that Libya could emerge modernized and poised to respect human rights and free expression. 

            Yet, as the Assad family bombed its own cities and used chemical warfare against militant protesters, preserving its autocratic rule and prerogatives, and Lebanon remained in the thrall of Hezbollah even after the battles with Israel from 2006, Egypt and Tunisia were true enough to the spirit of the Arab Spring until Field Marshal Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and his military command abruptly and definitively seized control of his key country from a popularly elected president in 2013.  Under Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brothers had begun to rule Egypt somewhat progressively, having followed the more tolerant and democratic movement that had initially succeeded Mubarak and had tried to turn the bumbling forces of the new Egypt in a markedly new direction. The energy and spirit of  the protests in Cairo's Tahrir  Square lingered for a few early post-Arab Spring years, but were then extinguished completely by Sisi.

            His governance of Egypt ever since has been fully authoritarian and repressive. There are no freedoms to assemble, to speak or publish freely, or to participate in governmental affairs. Moreover, he and his military cronies now run and profit from a panoply of economically valuable monopolistic enterprises; construction contracts pay well, especially those that relate to the building of Cairo+ governmental city on the outskirts of the Nile River capital. 

            Nothing happens in official Egypt that is not sanctioned by Sisi. His substantial financial backing from Washington helps to keep his despotism upright; we need his assistance against more fundamentalist Islam generally and now against Hamas. At great cost to the freedom of his own inhabitants, Sisi helps the U. S. stabilize North Africa and the Middle East.

            The U. S. hardly needs Tunisia in the same manner, and we assist and reward Saied's regime much less lavishly. Tunisia is much smaller (35 million to 117 million ) and much less important in every sense than Egypt. Yet, given the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, we have been mostly absent in curtailing the resurgent dictatorship that Saied has erected in Tunisia. There his erasure of the Arab Spring is complete.

            A law professor with no political experience and credentials that suggested that he would extirpate corruption and justify the events of 2011 that ended the Ben Ali period of corrupt despotism (1987 to 2011), Saied was easily elected to Tunisia's presidency in 2019.  Tunisians by that point hoped to return to the happier times that they had experienced under Habib Bourguiba (1957-1987); they expected that Saied would help them achieve the prosperity that had not occurred under the several Ennahda Muslim governments that had been elected after mobs sent Ben Ali packing.

            But few Tunisians anticipated that the quiet professor was a closet authoritarian, yearning for the hard-nosed dictatorship of Ben Ali or the somewhat more generous authoritarianism of the Bourguiba years. Indeed, because of the lack of economic progress by his political predecessors, many Tunisians welcomed, or at least accepted, Saied's preemptory sweeping aside of constitutional checks on his power in 2021, hoping to gain progress and economic advances from his blithe assumption of one-man rule (backed by the army).  At least, Tunisians hoped, someone in power would effectively tackle corruption and administrative dysfunction. They were prepared to trade their hard-won political rights for economic growth and personal prosperity.

            Just as in Egypt and Libya, and dramatically in Syria and Lebanon, none of those improvements have taken place.  Tunisia has continued to deteriorate economically as its democratic accomplishments have all vanished. In 2021 and 2022, Saied singlehandedly rewrote the nation's post-Arab Spring constitution to cement his dominance.  He successfully muzzled the media, dismissed judicial oversight and marginalized judges, harassed civil society watchdog groups, and dismantled the once independent national electoral commission. (Trump would like to follow suit.)

            To smooth his election this week, Saied disqualified or jailed his main opponents -- all on spurious charges. Thus, the fact that in the election on Sunday he was backed by 89 percent of voters is meaningless. Indeed, only a low 28 percent of eligible voters participated in the balloting, down from about 50 percent in 2019.

            The Arab Spring can be considered dead, with little immediate hope of resuscitation. Assad has been welcomed back into the Arab League, but he is regarded elsewhere as a renegade who killed his own people and survived and survives only with help from Putin and Russia, as well as being the beneficiary of major Iranian backing. There is no independent Lebanon left, thanks to Hezbollah's Iranian- and Syrian-supported supremacy. A Christian, Sunni Arab, and Druze Lebanon has all been overtaken by the Shiite-affiliates of Iran, and now by Israeli bombardment.

            Libya is split asunder with a UAE-backed warlord controlling the oilfields of eastern Libya from his base in Benghazi (the capital of Cyrenaica) and a Turkish-supported UN-approved regime governing western Libya from Tripoli.  But neither regime really controls the backlands, especially the Fezzan region near the Islamist infested Sahel south of the Sahara Desert.

            Sisi remains strong in Egypt, thanks in large part to cynical U. S. backing, and much of the rest of the Middle East is run by monarchs or, in Algeria, by generals (this month's fake election producing a solid endorsement of aging President Abdel Majid Tebboune).

            It will take the end of the war in Gaza and major reformist leadership developments throughout the region -- or an unlikely second people's revolt -- to reignite a successful Arab Spring. Until then, the residents of the entire Middle East, especially Iran, are held captive by their rulers, even in Tunisia. Washington must cope with the fallout, and the termination of people's rights across the entire Levant.