To Label Political Upheaval Of Early 2011 As The 'Arab Spring' Turned Out To Be The Wrong Metaphor For The Arab World
By
Shahid Javed Burki
January 31,
2021
In 2021,
the youth in the Middle East will be observing the tenth anniversary of what
came to be called the “Arab Spring of 2011”. That was when tens of thousands of
young people gathered in public squares of the region demanding to play a role
in the way they were governed. The immediate inspiration behind the expression
of their discontent was the self-immolation of Muhammad Bouazizi who, haunted
by the officialdom of Tunis, the capital of Tunisia, set himself on fire. “How
do you expect me to make a living? he shouted before dousing himself with
petrol in front of the governor’s office. His protest was aimed at official
corruption. Local officials had confiscated his fruit cart because he did not
have the licence to operate it. The real reason was that he did not have the
money they wanted to extort from him.
High hopes for a democratic Arab world have turned into civil wars
across the region
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To label
the political upheaval of early 2011 as the “Arab Spring” turned out to be the
wrong metaphor for the Arab world. Those who used that metaphor either did not
understand the region or if they did they were being overly optimistic. The
deep cold of authoritarianism in the lands of the Arabs did not yield to the
spring of democracy, freedom and inclusive economic progress. After the
rebellious youth were able to force a few long-serving dictators to leave
office, there was only a brief moment of respite and that too in a few places.
In some countries youth activism led to civil wars. This happened in Syria,
Yemen and Libya. In Egypt, after a brief interregnum of democratic rule under the
Muslim Brotherhood, the military was back in power, putting in place a
political order that was more vicious than the one over which General Hosni
Mubarak had presided for several decades. The elite and their supporters in the
West feared the Brotherhood since it brought Islam into politics. What the West
— in particular the United States — was looking for were leaders and political
systems that would calm these countries so that the citizens did not look at
Israel as a coloniser of Arab territory.
The West’s
reading was correct as a number of Arab countries made peace with the Jewish
state. Israel’s impressive technological advance, its management skills and its
ability to provide its people with education and training needed to get
associated with the modern world would be helpful for the Arab youth. This
opening to Israel by the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco is more of an Arab
Spring than the one that occurred ten years ago. The region has a lot of ground
to cover as suggested by some indicators and several analysts of Arab origin.
“It’s been
a lost decade,” said Tarik Yousef, speaking of the time since the “Spring” of
2011. He is the director of the Brookings Doha Center. He recalled the euphoria
he initially felt when the fall of Libya’s Moammar Gaddafi in August 2011
enabled him to return home for the first time in years. “Now we have the return
of fear and intimidation. The region has experienced setbacks at every turn.”
The same
sentiment was expressed by several other Arab thinkers. “Dictators have prevailed,
mainly through coercion,” said Lina Khatib, who is the head of the Middle East
and North Africa programme at London-based Chatham House. “However, coercion
seeds further grievances that will force citizens to seek political change.”
Others fear
worse instability and violence occasioned by the fall in oil prices, decline in
worker remittances, and the fallout from the coronavirus shutdowns. “We have
failing states across the entire region. We have a huge economic challenge
coupled with a young generation rising and asking for a role. This puts us on
the path to an explosion,” said Bachar al-Halabi, a Lebanese political analyst
who relocated to Turkey last year because of anonymous threats to his safety.
“The region is in a worse state than ever before.”
There are a
number of things common in the Arab world. A high rate of population growth
means a young population. And poor economic performance in most of these
countries means high rates of unemployment. The population of the region has
grown by 70 million since the Arab Spring of 2011 and it is expected to
increase by another 120 million by 2030. Youth unemployment has noticeably
worsened since 2011 — increasing from 32.9 percent in 2012 to 36.5 percent in
2020, according to International Labour Organization. Governments in the area
have been the largest employers for years but with economic pressures weighing
them down, this outlet has also narrowed. In the 1970s, a male Egyptian
graduate had a 70 percent chance of being employed by the government. By 2016,
that rate had fallen to 25 percent.
The
incidence of poverty in the Middle East has increased since 2011, making the
region the only place in the world where people have become poorer in terms of
both the total number of poor and their proportion of the population. According
to the World Bank, in 2018 the Middle East passed Latin America in terms of the
number of people it counted as poor. The gap between the very rich and the very
poor also increased significantly.
Egypt
offers a good example of the way the elite in the Arab world have responded to
the danger posed by events such as the “2011 Spring”. The government headed by
President Fattah el-Sisi has transformed Tahrir Square, the site where the
youth gathered in 2011 to mount an effective protest against the government of
Hosni Mubarak. “Tahrir Square — a throbbing tangle of traffic, staging ground
for revolutions and, in recent years, a field of broken dreams — has long
occupied a special place in Egypt’s culture and history,” wrote Declan Walsh in
his coverage of the tenth anniversary of the “Spring”. “Since it was carved
from a patch of swampy land by the Nile more than 150 years ago, the sprawling
plaza has been both a totem and threat for Egypt’s rulers. Tahrir was born of
the whim of a vain glorious ruler. In the mid-19th century, the Ottoman
viceroy, Khedive Ismail Pasha, built a network of elegant boulevards, imitating
Paris that converged on a space that was named, at first, after himself:
Ismailia Square. After the British took Cairo in 1882, Tahrir was at the heart
of the colonial project, home to a large military barracks where a young
officer named T.E. Lawrence — Lawrence of Arabia — proposed his first
expeditions across the Middle East. But Tahrir turned against the colonists in
1919 when a countrywide revolt swept Egypt, hastening Britain’s exit. It was
renamed Tahrir, or Liberation Square after the 1952 Free Officers’ revolution.”
President
Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the country’s new military leader, has also turned his
attention to changing Tahrir — this time by removing the Egyptian capital from
Cairo, a city of 20 million, to a place outside in the desert 25 miles from the
present capital. The cost is estimated at $60 billion. Only time will tell
whether the relocation of the capital would bring sustained peace.
Original
Headline: The Arab world after the ‘Spring of 2011’
Source: The Express Tribune
URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-politics/to-label-political-upheaval-early/d/124238
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