Brian M Downing
The remarkable uprisings across the Arab world of the last sixteen months have ousted or imperiled leaders in several countries, including Egypt, Yemen, and Syria. None of these movements, however, has been successful in its goal of creating a new political system let alone a democratic one. Old rulers are gone in many cases but their regimes have persisted, either through adroit maneuvering or vicious repression.
The leaders of the old regimes believe they can wait out or repress the popular upheavals, much as European monarchies did when youthful revolutions swept the continent in 1848. Young people then and now are not patient. Frustration leads to despair, emigration, and violence. Young people in the Arab world today have options against intransigent authority – guerrilla warfare and terrorism among them – which old regimes should bear in mind. Outside powers hoping for stability in the region should do the same.
Uprisings and regime response
Middle East observers had long noted the immense youth population in most Arab countries, with fifty percent or more of the public under the age of twenty-two. Such a demographic bulge would be problematic in any country, but in countries with stagnant economies and stale political systems, it was an impending disaster and all that was needed was a trigger of some sort. That came with demonstrations against food prices and bold acts of violence. In a matter of weeks, public outrage was focused on corruption, oppression, lack of opportunity, and demands for a voice in their future.
In less time than anyone would have expected only a year earlier, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was forced to step down. The business, military, and political networks that made up his regime, however, are positioned to retain their privileges and suppress popular aspirations, leaving democratic forces with perhaps a decade-long task of incremental change. The are counting on civil disorder to bring middle classes to their side and on delaying tactics to disillusion the rest. The absence of unity in the opposition is on the regime’s side. Democratic forces are divided over tactics, factions, and fears of Islamism and Salafism.
Similar uprisings took place in Yemen, though with the complications of regional and sectarian antagonisms. After months of demonstrations and skirmishes, President Ali Abdullah Saleh agreed to pressure from his countrymen and regional powers and left the country he ruled for over twenty years. As with Egypt, his associates retained control over the military, state, and key businesses. Popular protest is on hold as people wait to see if meaningful reform will begin. Regional, tribal, and sectarian conflict remains. Hydrocarbon production is tapping out and water supplies cannot match population growth.
Yemen is becoming a ward of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Cooperation Council, which may augur well for economic aid but not for political reform. These Sunni powers see the Arab Spring as a dangerous threat to the principle of autocracy upon, which they have governed since independence, and as an international conspiracy directed by the Shi’ites of Iran. They are using their diplomatic and financial assets to oppose democracy throughout the region.
The uprising in Syria is in its second year. The military remains intact, loyal, and murderous. Security officers at the small-unit level of regular army formations ensure that defections and even critical discussions are limited. Russia, Iran, and China remain supportive. Saudi Arabia and other GCC states tried last year to detach Assad from his ties to Iran, but without success. In this effort, they tipped their hand in supporting autocracy over democracy in the region.
Outside powers are reluctant to intervene as the Syrian army remains loyal, the prospects of vicious sectarian fighting are more real than in any other time in recent memory, and stocks of chemical weapons may fall into the wrong hands if the government crumbles.
After months of repression, peaceful demonstrations gave way to armed opposition. But it has failed to mount effective defenses of rebel neighborhoods or inflict casualties on the army and security forces. In recent months repression has become increasingly murderous, with artillery raining down on cities and militias slaughtering villagers.
Options
Intransigent regimes historically have caused despair, withdrawal from politics, retreat into private life, and emigration. This would of course be welcome by the old regimes today, taking away a good deal of the pressure to reform. The lower turnout in successive Egyptian elections may be encouraging to rulers.
These options are unlikely today as Arab youth has insufficient opportunity to work and have families. Emigration will seem attractive to many, especially to Europe and the US. However, those countries are not as open as they once were to immigrants, and young men from the Middle East may be among the least welcome.
The activists in the Arab world today have thus far exhibited remarkable tenacity in the face of oppression and intransigence from rulers. There is still the conviction that their moment is at hand and failure will bring on decades of continued misrule. Unlike many rulers of the past, those in power today have the capacity to come down on activists and their families both cruelly and relentlessly.
A change in tactics will come and in places take the form of using violence and terrorism, initially sporadic and unorganized but with potential for becoming well organized, whether from new organizations or grafting on to existing ones. They will target personnel in the security forces, military, and state. Student groups and activist networks that coalesced early last year may turn their organizational skills to these acts, just as some in the US antiwar movement formed the Weather Underground after the 1968 police crackdown in Chicago, and launched a bombing campaign.
A more historically significant parallel is the People’s Will, a Russian group which emerged following the failure of populism and which assassinated Tsar Alexander III in 1894. It set the groundwork for later secret political movements that were dedicated to overthrowing the Romanov dynasty and directed by fearsome, single-minded figures.
Existing structures may serve the same purpose. The Muslim Brotherhood or splinter groups of it, in both Egypt and Syria, have been known to use violence. In Egypt, a splinter group assassinated President Anwar Sadat in 1981. In Syria, the Muslim Brotherhood began a wave of bombings that led to the regime’s ruthless attack on the city of Hama in 1982.
Salafist networks have long inculcated not only an austere form of Islam but also militancy and a zeal to transform the world and establish a just (Islamist) state. Salafis have an at least semi-secret organization with unseen but munificent benefactors, probably in Saudi Arabia. They have long acted as recruitment networks for causes in Bosnia, Chechnya, and Afghanistan during the Soviet war (1979-89). Today they have ties to the Sunni insurgents in Iraq, who in turn have ties to Iraqi refugees in Syria.
Salafi networks, however, are thought to be tied to Wahhabi clerics and Saudi intelligence, both of which recoil from democracy and support the cause of autocracy in the region. But Salafism enjoys an intermediary position between the conservative House of Saud and the revolutionary al Qaeda movement.
Part of al Qaeda’s appeal over the years has been its argument that secular dictatorships are unreformable and can only be brought down through armed struggle, which in turn will bring social justice. The Arab Spring was thought to signal the end of al Qaeda’s appeal by showing that secular dictatorships could indeed be brought down without the cataclysms bin Laden and the like called for.
The persistence of secular dictatorships will bring new appreciation of al Qaeda as intransigent regimes are ratifying a central part of its thought. Agents of al Qaeda are doubtless making this point in the region and only a few thousand converts could be problematic if not disastrous. Western powers supportive of democracy and Gulf powers supportive of autocracy might well bear this in mind, though of course the old regimes will not.
Brian M Downing is a political/military analyst and author of The Military Revolution and Political Change and The Paths of Glory: War and Social Change in America from the Great War to Vietnam. He can be reached at brianmdowning@gmail.com.
Copyright 2012 Brian M Downing