February 7, 2011

by Praful Bidwai

Fragrance from the Jasmine Revolution, which overthrew Tunisia’s hated President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, is spreading, especially to Egypt, Yemen and Jordan, and triggering profound political changes in the West Asia-North Africa region. By the time these lines appear, it’s possible that Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak’s oppressive 30-year-long reign would have ended and far-reaching changes would be under way in the neighbourhood.

Egypt (pop. 84 million) is the region’s largest country, and changes there always impact or prefigure what happens in the entire Arab world. Tunisia (pop. 11 million) is tiny. But that doesn’t diminish the Jasmine Revolution’s significance. The successful 29-day uprising was the Arab world’s first real revolution. Unlike putsches, palace coups and colonels’ takeovers, misnamed “revolutions” in the past, this was a mass uprising.

The seismic waves from Tunisia, transmitted through the TV channel Al-Jazeera, have evoked the most resonance in Egypt. But they have shaken many other Arab autocrats too, who must watch the unfolding events fearing that their own people would take inspiration and rise. Nobody expressed their fears better than Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi—the world’s longest-ruling dictator—who arrogantly told Tunisians that bloodshed and anarchy had broken out in their country because they sacked Mr Ben Ali far too hastily.

Arab citizens have watched Egypt’s protests with great hope. It’s ordinary flesh-and-blood people like them, and not Islamists or foreign troops, who are frontally challenging a dictator. A majority of people in the 22 countries that form the Arab League share the Tunisians’ and Egyptians’ disgust with corrupt dictatorial regimes, which don’t provide basic public services or relieve food shortages and high prices.

The Arab states haven’t done well by their people. Even the oil-rich ones haven’t educated their people and created social opportunity or welfare for them. Many governments have embraced “austerity” programmes under pressure from the World Bank or Western donors. Recently hit badly by the global slowdown, they have further cut food and fuel subsidies, thus increasing popular suffering. This has robbed them even of their residual authority.

Most young Arabs are moderately educated, exposed to the wider world, and aspire to jobs in a modern economy. Such jobs are a rarity. The youth have no future. Their frustration is aggravated by denial of civil and political liberties.

So Egypt’s upsurge could well be replicated in other Arab countries. People’s bottled-up anger and frustration are the same everywhere, as is lack of freedom. A fine scholar, the late Fred Halliday, analysed the Arab people’s travails in his excellent Arabic Without the Sheikhs. As has Dilip Hiro in numerous recent books.

The democratic deficit in the Arab world is huge. Elections, if and when they take place, are typically rigged—as in Egypt recently, when the ruling party increased its parliamentary majority from 75 percent to 95 percent.

Only three Arab countries can lay some claim to being democracies, albeit flawed: Lebanon, the Palestinian Territories, and Iraq. Lebanon is a plural society with Shias, Sunnis, Christians and Druze Muslims, which holds free elections. But there too, democracy has a denominational character, with the top offices being divided up between religious communities and powerful families.

The Palestinian Territories had free and fair elections in 2006. But, Hamas, the victor, was excluded from the Palestinian Authority government in Ramallah. Its state power is confined to the Gaza Strip, itself an open-air prison under Israel’s occupation, without sovereign borders. In Iraq, the democratic process runs within a constitution and broad-sweep policy framework dictated by the United States after the 2003 invasion.

The rest of the Arab states are in a state of paralysis, where elected legislatures exist in some form—as in Kuwait—but wield very little power, which is subject to the ruling families’ will. Often, elections are held only as a safety-valve to vent popular frustration.

There are a few middling Arab performers in the democracy index, like Mauritania, Morocco, Jordan, Bahrain and Algeria. But some of the richest states, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Qatar, are at the bottom, like Libya, Yemen or Sudan. Saudi Arabia, an artificial creation of the British Empire, based on the most backward of tribes, and ruled by a despotic royal family, is at the very bottom of the abyss.

The democracy deficit is often blamed on Islam, especially salafi “desert Islam”, reinforced by ultra-conservative obscurantism. But other factors are more important: the devastation visited upon West Asia-North Africa by European imperialists, who created artificial states; the influence of tribalism and paternalism; oil money, which obviates the need to negotiate popular participation; the state’s failure to tax the rich and break their stranglehold, and not least, foreign aid dependence.

The Western powers, led by the US, sustain Arab autocracies for parochial reasons, originally related to the Cold War, and since maintained as part of the US’s strategic alliance system, in which Israel plays a pivotal role, closely followed by Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The US has bankrolled Egypt with about $3.5 billion annually since Anwar El-Sadat made peace with Israel in 1979, helping break its isolation in the Arab world.

Faced with a popular upsurge, President Mubarak first dissolved his cabinet and appointed former intelligence chief Omar Suleiman as the vice-president, thinking this would pacify the protesters. It only produced more protest, led by youth who chanted: “We don’t a new cabinet, we want you out” and “Hosni Mubarak, Omar Suleiman, both of you are American agents”.

Mr Suleiman is indeed a trusted US ally and a long-standing CIA collaborator who helped implement the notorious policy of “rendition” of terrorism suspects to third countries to extract confessions from them under torture. Under Mr Suleiman, long the main conduit between Mr Mubarak and Washington, torture has long been practised in Egypt.

The Egyptian people’s anger is rooted in opposition to the Mubarak dynasty, police brutality, widespread poverty, lack of housing, high food prices and unemployment. People under 30 make up almost two-thirds of Egypt’s population. About 90 percent of Egypt’s jobless are under 30.

Discontent has now infected the army, a nearly half-million strong, powerful institution in Egypt which enjoys various privileges including private supermarkets. Soldiers have refused to open fire on protesting crowds or stop people from painting anti-Mubarak slogans on battle-tanks.

In desperation, Mr Mubarak’s government on February 2 unleashed thugs upon peaceful protestors gathered in Tahrir Square. But they had to retreat and the new Prime Minister had to apologise.

Mr Mubarak has succeeded in uniting different social strata by inspiring hatred, including trade unions, the Facebook-networked 6 April Youth Movement created in solidarity with industrial workers, and sections of the middle class.

Numerous parties, including the National Association for Change led by former International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohammed ElBaradei and the Muslim Brotherhood, and secular parties, have joined the protesters, but none leads them, certainly not the Muslim Brotherhood. Egypt’s millionaires are fleeing. And people are telling Mr Mubarak: “The plane is ready.”

Mr Mubarak’s offer to continue till September and not contest the next election has proved unacceptable. A collapse of his regime will demolish the myth that the Arab people are incapable of staging a revolution. It will almost certainly ignite protests in other Arab states. This could prove a transformative moment in West Asia-North Africa which radically reshapes society and politics and inaugurates a new democratic epoch.

What does this mean for the Western powers and Israel? The West was at first reluctant to distance itself from Mr Mubarak, its loyal ally and Israel’s closest friend in the region Ditching him might provoke a groundswell of protest in other Arab states, creating further instability in an already volatile but oil-rich region. But the protests grew. The West is now asking Mr Mubarak to step down, out of fear that backing him would earn it intense popular hostility, just as happened in Iran in 1979 when it supported the detested Shah.

Even Washington has stopped vacillating between expressing faith in the stability of the Egyptian government, and calling for “an orderly transition” to a broad-based government. President Barack Obama has told Mr Mubarak to act immediately to make this happen.

Israel too is watching Egypt with nervousness about losing a close, indeed indispensable ally, whose cooperation is crucial not only in keeping Gaza in its present state, but in maintaining confusion and divisions in the Arab world. It fears that a democratic radicalisation of the Arab Street would bring the Palestine issue to the fore and stoke mass hostility towards Israel.

If Egypt’s next government decides to open the Rafah crossing with Gaza, it will break Israel’s siege of the Strip. This could reverse Israel’s hitherto-remarkably-successful gains in pushing the Palestinian Authority’s leadership into surrendering its primary claims to sovereign statehood and to land, and to accept a series of Palestinian Bantustans, leave illegal Israeli settlements untouched, and give up the right of return of 5 million Palestinian refugees.

Egypt is pregnant with big possibilities.