Revolution in the Arab World - Observation of a lost soul Blog

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foreign policy • revolution in the arab world So Much to Be Angry About By Blake Hounshell On Dec. 17, 2010, a 26-year-old street vendor in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid poured gasoline on his head and lit himself on fire. The desperate act by Mohamed Bouazizi, who snapped after being humiliated by a bribe-seeking policewoman, has resonated deeply not only in Tunisia, but across the Arab world, inspiring millions of frustrated young people to rise up against their autocratic rulers. There are nearly endless recruits for this revolution in a region where as much as 60 percent of the population is under age 25, and they have much to be angry about. Besides oil and natural gas, the Arab world today exports little of economic value. Its public sectors are inefficient, bloated, and rife with corruption. Unemployment rates are well into the teens. For the last three decades, the region has experienced hardly any economic development at all. In real terms, per capita GDP grew just 0.5 percent per year in Arab countries from 1980 to 2004, according to World Bank statistics. Most Arab regimes, ruling over artificial states and with questionable legitimacy, maintain power only through brute force. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, in which 19 Arab men hijacked planes and crashed them into the symbols of American political and economic power, the world began to pay attention. U.S. President George W. Bush vowed to spread liberty to every corner of the globe; his secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, declared in a major 2005 speech in Cairo: “For 60 years, the United States pursued stability at the expense of democracy in the Middle East—and we achieved neither.” But Bush’s “Freedom Agenda” was met almost uniformly with suspicion 4
foreign policy • revolution in the arab world by Arabs, not least because they saw democracy being delivered at gunpoint in Iraq, rather than being grown from within. Arab regimes took advantage of the outrage over the war, as well as the growing threat of terrorism, to clamp down further on their restive populations. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, long the burning issue in Arab politics, raged quietly, with no solution in sight. And when Islamist parties dominated elections in Egypt and the Palestinian territories, the United States suddenly lost its brief ardor for Arab democracy. Now, after years of stagnation, the long-dormant Arab street has finally awakened. It took just under a month for protesters to dislodge Tunisian President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, and only 18 days for Egyptian demonstrators to drive their leader of three decades, Hosni Mubarak, from power. Both men were once thought to be pillars of the American-backed “stability” in the region, bulwarks against terrorism and chaos. It took unheralded, underestimated youth movements to show just how brittle their rule really was. In Egypt, the revolutionaries who occupied Tahrir Square for three weeks have gone home, and key political leaders—such as the liberal politician Ayman Nour—say their main demands are being met. Mubarak, his rigged parliament, and his anti-democratic constitution are gone, and the country is in the early days of a momentous transition, still under military rule yet experimenting with newfound freedoms as ordinary Egyptians begin discussing politics openly for the first time. The military, for the most part welcomed by the demonstrators as the least tainted of Egypt’s pre-crisis institutions, has promised to hand over power to an elected, civilian government in six months’ time. Yet the fall of Mubarak represents only the partial collapse of his regime. Many top figures have left the hated National Democratic Party, which saw its headquarters burned during the protests on Jan. 28, but its vast electoral machine still exists. Hundreds of mini-Mubaraks—heavy-handed provincial governors and corrupt local officials—control the provinces. The Interior Ministry, though much diminished, still operates, as does Mubarak’s feared state security apparatus. His final cabinet, led by a former Air Force officer with close ties to Mubarak, has not been replaced, and it’s not clear what role Vice President Omar Suleiman will play going forward. 5
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