The Arab Spring After Qaddafi
The Arab Spring After Qaddafi
A. Ahram: Arab Spring After Qaddafi
The Arab Spring has claimed the rule of Muammar Qaddafi, the Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Great Popular Libyan Arab People’s Republic. Like many other self-styled popular leaders, Qaddafi was a tyrant of the worst caliber—rash, megalomaniacal, and brutal. Forty years of his rule have brought the Libyan people not only oppression, but also impoverishment through the maldistribution and mismanagement of Libya’s sizeable oil reserves.
The demise of the Qaddafi regime represents a new phenomenon in the now protracted Arab Spring, following the nonviolent protests that brought down Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt this winter. Those protests followed the course of the Color and Flower Revolutions, in which internecine bloodletting was averted because the revolutionary coalitions eschewed polarizing ideological or factional claims. At the same time, though, the legacy of this type of revolutionary moment has proven somewhat impermanent and reversible. Similar to the disappointment following the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the Egyptian and Tunisian state apparatuses have remained relatively intact while political transition appears to have stalled short of delivering free and fair political contestation.
While Tunisia has seen an efflorescence of new political parties, the transitional government remains dominated by leaders of Ben Ali’s own party and by the army. Repression, including the arrest of protesters and bloggers, continues. The lack of personal security and ongoing economic woes have spurred new outflows of refugees. With inchoate opposition groups forced to wait until late October for a chance at an electoral challenge, Tunisia’s incumbent powers are positioning themselves as the voters’ choice for a return to “normalcy.”
In Egypt, the High Military Council, the ruling junta, has driven a wedge between secular and youth-oriented organizations on the one hand and Islamist parties on the other. Though the emergency law has been lifted and the secret police dissolved, the transitional government continues its intimidation of secular youth and labor movements that refuse to stand down. In the run-up to the constitutional referendum in March 2011, the Muslim Brotherhood turned on its erstwhile allies in the opposition, joining stalwarts from Mubarak’s National Democratic Party in backing the military’s plan for a limited reform package and early elections that would cut short the time necessary for newer parties to organize grassroots support. The Islamists claim that secularists intend to undermine the Muslim nature of the country and argue that a quick transition would ensure stability. In public opinion polling, the generals far surpassed any civilian politician in popularity.
As in Tunisia, the military in Egypt offers itself as the national savior in the midst of worsening economic conditions, Muslim–Christian violence, and endemic street crime. When pressed, the military rulers have preferred to allow people to vent popular frustrations on convenient targets, as evident from their inaction during the assault on the Israeli embassy in Cairo, rather than offer any real concessions. Though parliamentary and presidential elections are scheduled for October and November, the military appears to be consolidating its position in the commanding political heights while ceding parliamentary space to the Islamists, to the exclusion of liberal and secularist parties.
Libya’s revolution, in contrast, has shown no half measures. As fighting drags on between the remnant loyalists and the rebel forces, Qaddafi’s fate increasingly resembles that of Saddam Hussein. Like most Arab dictators, Qaddafi probably at some time mistook his people’s compliance for devotion, making popular rejection of his rule and the undoing of its institutions all the more shocking. Qaddafi cannot expect a soft landing—few countries would take him in as an exile and a death sentence is assured if he is captured. The only remaining option is a scorched-earth defense that leaves nothing behind to rule. Moreover, while there are no American tanks on the streets of Tripoli, there is no doubt that Western financial and military backing was critical to the rebels’ successful offensive. The tasks confronting Libya’s new rulers are in many ways comparable to those of the Iraqi opposition after the fall of Baghdad.
Unity of organization and purpose eludes the anti-Qaddafi movement. Just two months ago a top rebel commander, General Abd el-Fattah Younis, was assassinated by factions within his own army. While Qaddafi’s forces have clearly committed gross violations of human rights, the rebels too have been implicated in reprisal massacres. The opposition is divided by individual personalities, by tribe and clan, by degrees of commitment to principles of Islamic rule, and by exile versus homegrown leadership. It remains an open question whether they can overcome these cleavages, assert indigenous legitimacy given their obvious Western backing, and restore order after a total breakdown of the police and army.
Libya’s path could be a harbinger of things to come for countries like Syria and Yemen, where unrest occurs in the context of pronounced societal cleavages and more fragile states apparatuses. The international community has thus far refused to commit the types of military and diplomatic support to these rebellions that it did in Libya, making a protracted and bloody stand-off, similar to what appeared to be the case in Libya just a month ago, ever more likely. The Assad clan in Syria and Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen govern based on the same cynical logic of regime survival. They combine the use of heavy-handed coercion through secret police, the army, and special security services with cooptation through networks of patrimonial redistribution to those who comply. If the leader falters and his subjects are neither confident in his ability to deliver patronage nor fearful of his wrath, the entire political order could collapse. In Yemen, top generals and tribal leaders have joined the opposition, leading the government to ever more desperate and violent bids at suppression. In Syria, the Allawi-dominated regime is struggling to put down an uprising among the Sunni Arab majority.
The centripetal tendencies of such divided societies, long exploited by the regimes themselves, make the formation of a new ruling coalition extremely difficult. There is no single face of the opposition movement in these countries, much less a political organization that can offer a comprehensive and inclusive vision for post-revolutionary politics, or constrain competition between factions in the opposition. If the axis of conflict shifts from between regime and opposition to within the opposition itself, the turmoil and bloodshed could be far worse than anyone imagined, much less desired.
The Arab Spring has yielded strange and unpredictable fruit. Old elites still hold sway in Egypt and Tunisia, but increasingly have to broker some new arrangements with the ascendant populist Islamic parties likely to win parliamentary elections. Acting with the complicity of the United States, Saudi Arabia has led a much more direct counterrevolutionary onslaught, crushing the uprising in Bahrain and providing diplomatic, financial, and military support to sure up its fellow monarchies in Jordan, Morocco, and elsewhere. Libya, though, augers a bloodier and even more unpredictable turn in the Arab Spring. As the revolutionary waves reaches the region’s poorer, more fractious, and institutionally frail states, the results could more resemble Yugoslavia in 1991 than Ukraine in 2004: the beginning of a civil war rather than the end of a revolution.
Ariel I. Ahram is an assistant professor and the Middle East studies coordinator at the University of Oklahoma and the author of Proxy Warriors: The Rise and Fall of State-Sponsored Militias (Stanford University Press, 2011).
Image: rally on September 9 in Tripoli (Ammar Abd Rabbo, Flickr creative commons)
