The Arab Spring exception
Tunisia’s revolution was more successful than others in the region
The headline-grabbing revolutions that gripped the Middle East in early 2011 brought the promise of an “Arab Spring,” a new dawn for democracy in a region with a history of autocracy. But the real result, as it turned out, was in many cases almost the opposite: a wave of violence, repression and civil war.
One shining exception has been Tunisia. That North African nation’s peaceful transition from Islamist rule and adoption of a new democratic constitution brought important recognition Friday to four civil society groups that have worked to achieve peaceful political dialogue: the Nobel Peace Prize.
Tunisia
Produce seller Mohammad Bouazizi cried out for relief from the oppressive life inflicted on Tunisians by taking his own in December 2010. His death by self-immolation brought attention to the lack of opportunity under the rule of corrupt autocrat Zine el Abidine ben Ali for 23 years.
The suicide sparked a month of pro-reform protests that drove Ben Ali, his wife and much of his entourage to flee abroad. The ex-ruler was convicted in absentia of embezzlement and other charges in June 2011 and sentenced to 35 years in prison.
Unemployment still afflicts at least 15% of Tunisians and the country has been the target of Islamist extremists bent on thwarting the Arab Spring’s most peaceable and inclusive political transformation.
But presidential and parliamentary elections last year brought to power a coalition of secular and Islamist leaders collaborating — unlike elsewhere in the region — in strengthening pluralism and development to build on the accomplishments of the revolution.
Egypt
Massive protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in late winter and spring of 2011 put a spotlight on the brave face of young Egyptians demanding an end to the 30-year rule of strongman Hosni Mubarak, who was forced to resign after weeks of violent protests.
A military-led interim leadership was succeeded in 2012 with the election of Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi, whose imposition of Islamist rule spurred counter-protests by former Mubarak government supporters and secular Egyptians. Constant turmoil and terrorist acts devastated Egypt’s vital tourism industry and led to the popularly supported coup that brought Gen. Abdel Fattah Sisi to power in 2013.
Mubarak, 87, is confined to a military prison hospital and facing a potential third trial on corruption and murder charges. Morsi also languishes in prison awaiting appeal of his death sentence for plotting a 2011 prison break that freed 20,000 convicts, many of them Brotherhood members who helped fuel the protests that brought down Mubarak.
Sisi won election to the presidency in May 2014 but his government has postponed parliamentary elections.
Libya
Inspired by the ouster of long-reigning autocrats elsewhere in the region, Libyan rebels of myriad political and sectarian stripes rose up against the erratic and dictatorial leadership of Moammar Kadafi in early 2011.
Backed by a sevenmonth campaign of NATO airstrikes, the rebel militias captured and killed Kadafi in October 2011, ending his 42-year domination of the oil-rich North African nation but igniting a bloody power struggle that afflicts Libya and its 6 million citizens to this day.
Rival governments in Benghazi and Tripoli have failed to restore order, leaving Libya fertile recruiting ground for Islamic State and other militant groups. Amid the lawlessness, human smugglers have made Libya’s Mediterranean Sea ports the hub of their trafficking of desperate Syrian migrants.
Bahrain
spread from North Africa to the tiny island emirate of Bahrain in February 2011, drawing hundreds of young protesters, mostly of the Shiite Muslim majority, to demonstrations against the political and social strictures of the Sunni monarchy. Riot police responded with tear gas and rubber bullets, and at least 50 protesters were killed before opposition demonstrations were outlawed in 2012 and only modest reforms considered.
Although the United States was supportive of most Arab Spring uprisings, Washington said little to encourage the protesters’ demands for release of political prisoners and investigation of corruption and torture, apparently reluctant to offend the ruling Khalifa family that has hosted the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet for decades.
Yemen
Poverty, corruption and indifference to widespread suffering during the 33-year rule of President Ali Abdullah Saleh lured Yemenis into the Arab Spring revolutions in January 2011, driving the autocrat to flee a year later. Longtime rival Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi was elected president in 2012, but reform and stability have been elusive amid the remains of Saleh’s military allies in the country, Al Qaeda’s most active terrorist franchise and a rebellion by the Iranbacked Houthi group that last year seized control of Sana, the capital.
Hadi’s government, which had been collaborating with U.S. intelligence in the campaign to drive out Islamist militants, including Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, has been forced into de facto exile in the port city of Aden.
U.S. drone strikes have killed some key extremists holed up in Yemen, including American-born Muslim cleric Anwar Awlaki in 2011. But the conditions that sparked revolution nearly five years ago persist, and sectarian fighting has taken an even deeper toll on the battered infrastructure and economy.
Syria
Though most of the Arab Spring revolutions accomplished little more than deposing one repressive leader to be followed by another, Syrians have failed in their more than four-year battle to oust President Bashar Assad.
What began as political opposition rallies against the 40-year-old dynastic rule once headed by his father, Hafez Assad, escalated into armed rebellion with the Damascus government’s brutal crackdown on dissent.
The U.S. and other Western states backed moderate rebel groups in the early months of the civil war, which broke out in March 2011 and attracted Sunni militants from across the Arab world to the fight against Assad’s Shiiteaffiliated Alawite minority.
Islamic State extremists have proclaimed a style “caliphate” across half of Syria and huge areas of Iraq and threaten to overrun the major city of Aleppo and potentially the capital. That looming debacle has prompted Russia to intervene in the multinational and uncoordinated bombing campaign against the militants in an effort to shore up Assad, a longtime Kremlin ally.
An estimated 250,000 Syrians have been killed and U.N. officials say half the country’s 24 million citizens have been driven from their homes.