The future of the Middle East will be as rooted in the past as surely as we shall all be dead by its denouement
The Arab uprising, 2011: Revolutions and their histories are cyclical in nature. We journalists divide the past and present at our peril, says Robert Fisk
The Arab revolution or Arab uprising – and please let me never hear that State Department-inspired nonsense about the “Arab Spring” again! – began around 2005 in Lebanon, moved to Egypt in 2006, touched non-Arab Iran in 2009, blossomed in Tunisia in 2010 and burst into fury in 2011 in Egypt (again), in Bahrain, in Syria and in Yemen. And this uprising of the Middle Eastern Muslim peoples will not even have run its course in our lifetime.
We journalists, politicians and historians suffer a major problem in our work. We insist on separating history from the present tense, in chopping off past events from today’s news, of imagining that there is a clear distinction between, for example, the “history” of revolutions and what we are told in the media tonight; and slicing history off from what took place before that history occurred. In fact, history doesn’t work in such time warps. It is a continuum that we divide up at our peril.
The story we reporters are covering now in the Middle East is the same story that our forebears wrote about in 1948 – the foundation of the State of Israel and the Palestinian disaster – and in the Second World War, when Hitler almost destroyed all the Jews of Europe, and of the First World War, whose accomplishments included the western colonial takeover of the Arab world.
The first great popular Arab revolution in modern Middle East history – in which Arab civilians (rather than generals) changed the course of events in their country – came after the assassination of former prime minister Rafiq Hariri in 2005 – long before the much publicised “revolution” year of 2011. The Lebanese, in their millions, protested against his murder and demanded the withdrawal of the Syrian army from Lebanon. Hezbollah managed to bring a million Shias to Beirut to support Syria – they are already interfering in the latest version of the Lebanese revolution which is demanding an end to sectarianism and corruption – but a UN Security Council vote forced Syria’s soldiers out of the country.
A year later, tens of thousands of Egyptian cotton workers, largely led by women and trade unionists, staged a city-wide revolt against Mubarak’s regime in Mahalla, 50 miles north of Cairo. They demanded an end to regime corruption and to police repression, and better living conditions. They endured days of teargas and live-fire shootings from the cops in the city’s central square – which happened to be called Tahrir, a name to become so famous in Cairo’s much larger square and in the national revolution five years later. The workers achieved all their aims – save, of course, for the overthrow of Mubarak, which took another five years. We ignored this extraordinary event at the time, treating it as an industrial dispute rather than a small-scale social revolution.
A decade ago, revolted by the state-claimed and overwhelmingly large majority who allegedly voted for the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, millions of Iranians protested against their own republic’s political and commercial corruption. Here was a Muslim Middle East – not an Arab – revolt, although it was inspired by the experience of others. Ahmadinejad may have won the poll – though not by the immense figure of more than 62 per cent which the regime insisted upon – and the crowds were not, as the western media pretended, trying to destroy the Islamic republic.
Many Iranians spoke of the Lebanese ‘revolution’, and were clearly deeply influenced by a people who – even though Lebanon was no Islamic republic – were prepared to abandon their submission
Albeit inspired by Mir-Hossein Moussavi, who came a poor second (in the official version of the results), Iranian crowds gathered spontaneously the day after Ahmadinejad was declared president and marched in their millions through Tehran. They were savagely repressed by Iranian state security police whose prisoners were in some cases raped or murdered.
But it was a people’s uprising, just as the Beirut protests were provoked by popular anger at Syria’s military and security role in Lebanon. Many Iranians spoke of the Lebanese “revolution”, and were clearly deeply influenced by a people who – even though Lebanon was no Islamic republic – were prepared to abandon their submission. Once a people have lost their terror, it is impossible to reinject them with fear.
So the Tunisian revolt of 2010-11, which began after the most infamous suicide-by-fire in modern history, was not quite the sudden turning point in Muslim Middle East history that many suggested at the time. Trade unions played a leading role in the overthrow of Zin el-Abidin Ben Ali, as they were also to do in Egypt. But we should not forget the might-have-beens of history. It is now clear that Ben Ali, flown to Saudi Arabia aboard a Tunisian airliner, had every intention of returning to his country within hours; but his plane’s crew, invited to the Saudi airport’s VIP lounge where they saw an Al-Jazeera report on the imminent overthrow of their president, quietly decided to seek immediate flight clearance to travel back to Tunis. Ben Ali only learned of their departure after the aircraft had left Saudi airspace. Not only was the Tunisian president abandoned by his people – but by his airline as well.
Where trade unions were strong within dictatorships – in Tunisia and Egypt, for example – there was less violence. Where they had long been concretised into the Arab regimes – in Libya, Yemen and Syria – the revolutions turned into bloodbaths. Where they were also tribal (Yemen, Libya), the uprisings turned into sectarian or inter-communal conflicts, often assisted by outside powers – Britain, France and the US in Libya, the Saudis in Yemen. Indeed, local or international powers proceeded to fund or arm the protagonists in many of the “revolutionised” countries – the Gulf Arabs and the CIA supplied parts of the anti-Assad opposition in Syria, the Russians took the side of the regime, along with the Iranians.
But the Arab people who spurned their rulers were not motivated by outside help. Indeed, they were sometimes misled and betrayed by it. Look at the promises of the western nations to support Syria’s 2011 revolution – before they closed their embassies in Damascus and left them to their fate. Nor did the digital revolution and social media create their uprisings. This has been much exaggerated.
This revolt of the spirit has not died just because General al-Sisi has locked up 60,000 political prisoners in Egypt after supplanting the pitiful but democratically elected president Mohamed Morsi
A gradual increase in education – despite the largely slovenly university systems which exist in the Arab Middle East (dictators don’t like educated populations) – and foreign travel convinced many Arabs that they should own their own countries, that tyrants and elites who passed or tried to pass their nations on to their biological children (rather than the “children of the nation” whom they always claimed to love so much) were worthy of disgust rather than admiration.
This revolt of the spirit – this discovery that the mostly pro-western kings and princes and pettifogging army generals were not “natural” to the Arab world and did not have to be obeyed – has not died just because General al-Sisi has locked up 60,000 political prisoners in Egypt after supplanting the pitiful but democratically-elected president Mohamed Morsi. The very statistic speaks of the extent of opposition to the field-marshal-president. Or because the Bahraini royal family suppressed its majority Shia revolt with Saudi help or because the Syrian uprising, from the start, was impregnated by Islamist groups, armed – directly in some cases – by the west.
There are no neat conclusions to the phenomenon of Arab dissent over the past 10 years – or 19 years if you accept the 2005 Lebanese revolt, or the historical upheavals which have overwhelmed the peoples of the Middle East for the past hundred years. In Syria, drought and insane government agricultural policies drove the armies of the poor into the fringes of the big cities – to produce the legions of disaffected Syrians who became the foot-soldiers of the unarmed but then swiftly weaponised uprising against a ruthless regime.
In Lebanon, the tens of thousands of young people – protected by their middle class parents during the 1975-90 civil war, who sent them to Paris, New York or Geneva – returned to find the same old elites and aristocracies running a clapped-out sectarian state which bore no relation to the modern societies in which they had grown up. It is they and their children who are demanding a social revolution in the great cities of Lebanon today.
There are those who will tell you that the Arab revolution has failed – they are the ones who believed in the nonsense of the “Arab Spring” (or the “Cedar Revolution”, to use the pathetic American nomenclature for 2005 in Beirut) – and that the people will sink back into the lethargy and re-infantilisation of the old dictatorships. I doubt it.
Israel has the Arab revolution to confront and – if it is to survive – to find some reconciliation with the millions who live around it and who seek the same dignities and benefits as we in the west take for granted
The revolution in Saudi Arabia will not come from its Arab Shia minorities but from within the royal family and from the national revulsion at the Yemen war. Sisi’s nemesis may turn out to be the angry young intelligence officers in his own supposedly loyal army. Syria’s government army, which has remained loyal to its masters and fought to the death against Isis and Nusra, will want a role in the “new” Syria, albeit sealed with the old glue of the Sunni commercial classes, the Christian minorities and the Alawites from the Assad clan.
Most of the Syrian soldiers – and most of the 85,000 dead in their ranks these past nine years – are Sunnis. The political make-up of Syria, as much a part of France’s old colonial policies in the region as Lebanon, is not going to change. But it will evolve. No regime has fought its corner as hard and as bloodily as Syria’s – with Russia’s help, of course – but it cannot survive without some form of reconciliation. It needs its refugees and its ex-soldiers to rebuild the country, whether the money for this unprecedented exercise comes from the Saudis, the Qataris or through Russian mediation.
And watch Algeria. From the slaughter of its 1990-98 civil war and the ghastly skeletons who ruled in its aftermath has come one of the most powerful revolutions of its kind in recent Arab history. Algeria’s elite and educated society is refusing to accept the results of elections which inevitably shoehorn yet more military satraps (and their clones) into power in a nation which should be as rich as the Gulf states. And now Iraq, sidelined by our epic invasion and occupation, has joined the Arab uprising.
In short, the Arab revolution has not died. Given the firepower of its enemies – courtesy of Washington, Moscow and Paris (and, yes, the UK) – it is remarkable that it has survived and re-blossomed, spattered with blood and suffering and despair. It will take another 10 years to resolve – perhaps half a century – and the story will not end there. That’s history for you. Yesterday’s news is as much tomorrow’s, and the future of the Middle East will be as rooted in the past as surely as we shall all be dead when its denouement is at last clear.
Take Palestine and its own revolt against the Balfour Declaration. Notice how the Palestinians and Israel and Trump did not once emerge in this essay on revolution? We have neatly slotted it into a separate historical chamber. And we are wrong to have done so. Israel is the successor coloniser, the only “western” nation – this is a generous description – to continue the colonising impetus of the old imperial nations which once directly ruled the Middle East.
Israel has the Arab revolution to confront and – if it is to survive – to find some reconciliation with the millions who live around it and who seek the same dignities and benefits as we in the west take for granted. Stealing more land in the West Bank will bring about Israel’s own destruction as a “democratic” state – though its political elite and its American supporters seem quite undisturbed by this. In the end, Arab dictators and Zionism cannot own so much real estate and get away with it in future. That is the lesson of all the revolutions and intifadas these past years. Will this produce justice? Freedom and equality for women? Respect? When the answer is known, we will all be dead. That’s history for you.
The brutal truth about Tunisia
Robert Fisk, 17 January 2011
Bloodshed, tears, but no democracy. Bloody turmoil won’t necessarily presage the dawn of democracy.
The end of the age of dictators in the Arab world? Certainly they are shaking in their boots across the Middle East, the well-heeled sheiks and emirs, and the kings, including one very old one in Saudi Arabia and a young one in Jordan, and presidents – another very old one in Egypt and a young one in Syria – because Tunisia wasn’t meant to happen. Food price riots in Algeria, too, and demonstrations against price increases in Amman. Not to mention scores more dead in Tunisia, whose own despot sought refuge in Riyadh – exactly the same city to which a man called Idi Amin once fled.
If it can happen in the holiday destination Tunisia, it can happen anywhere, can’t it? It was feted by the west for its “stability” when Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali was in charge. The French and the Germans and the Brits, dare we mention this, always praised the dictator for being a “friend” of civilised Europe, keeping a firm hand on all those Islamists.
Tunisians won’t forget this little history, even if we would like them to. The Arabs used to say that two-thirds of the entire Tunisian population – seven million out of 10 million, virtually the whole adult population – worked in one way or another for Ben Ali’s secret police. They must have been on the streets too, then, protesting against the man we loved until last week. But don’t get too excited. Yes, Tunisian youths have used the internet to rally each other – in Algeria, too – and the demographic explosion of youth (born in the Eighties and Nineties with no jobs to go to after university) is on the streets. But the “unity” government is to be formed by Mohamed Ghannouchi, a satrap of Ben Ali’s for almost 20 years, a safe pair of hands who will have our interests – rather than his people’s interests – at heart.
For I fear this is going to be the same old story. Yes, we would like a democracy in Tunisia – but not too much democracy. Remember how we wanted Algeria to have a democracy back in the early Nineties?
Then when it looked like the Islamists might win the second round of voting, we supported its military-backed government in suspending elections and crushing the Islamists and initiating a civil war in which 150,000 died.
No, in the Arab world, we want law and order and stability. Even in Hosni Mubarak’s corrupt and corrupted Egypt, that’s what we want. And we will get it.
The truth, of course, is that the Arab world is so dysfunctional, sclerotic, corrupt, humiliated and ruthless – and remember that Ben Ali was calling Tunisian protesters “terrorists” only last week – and so totally incapable of any social or political progress – that the chances of a series of working democracies emerging from the chaos of the Middle East stand at around 0 per cent.
The job of the Arab potentates will be what it has always been – to “manage” their people, to control them, to keep the lid on, to love the west and to hate Iran.
Indeed, what was Hillary Clinton doing last week as Tunisia burned? She was telling the corrupted princes of the Gulf that their job was to support sanctions against Iran, to confront the Islamic republic, to prepare for another strike against a Muslim state after the two catastrophes the United States and the UK have already inflicted in the region.
The Muslim world – at least, that bit of it between India and the Mediterranean – is a more than sorry mess. Iraq has a sort-of-government that is now a satrap of Iran, Hamid Karzai is no more than the mayor of Kabul, Pakistan stands on the edge of endless disaster, Egypt has just emerged from another fake election.
And Lebanon? Well, poor old Lebanon hasn’t even got a government. Southern Sudan – if the elections are fair – might be a tiny candle, but don’t bet on it.
It’s the same old problem for us in the west. We mouth the word “democracy” and we are all for fair elections – providing the Arabs vote for whom we want them to vote for.
In Algeria 20 years ago, they didn’t. In the Palestinian territories they didn’t. And in Lebanon, because of the so-called Doha accord, they didn’t. So we sanction them, threaten them and warn them about Iran and expect them to keep their mouths shut when Israel steals more Palestinian land for its colonies on the West Bank.
There was a fearful irony that the police theft of an ex-student’s fruit produce – and his suicide in Tunis – should have started all this off, not least because Ben Ali made a failed attempt to gather public support by visiting the dying youth in hospital.
For years, this wretched man had been talking about a “slow liberalising” of his country. But all dictators know they are in greatest danger when they start freeing their entrapped countrymen from their chains.
And the Arabs behaved accordingly. No sooner had Ben Ali flown off into exile than Arab newspapers which have been stroking his fur and polishing his shoes and receiving his money for so many years were vilifying the man. “Misrule”, “corruption”, “authoritarian reign”, “a total lack of human rights”, their journalists are saying now. Rarely have the words of the Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran sounded so painfully accurate: “Pity the nation that welcomes its new ruler with trumpetings, and farewells him with hootings, only to welcome another with trumpetings again.” Mohamed Ghannouchi, perhaps?
Of course, everyone is lowering their prices now – or promising to. Cooking oil and bread are the staple of the masses. So prices will come down in Tunisia and Algeria and Egypt. But why should they be so high in the first place?
Algeria should be as rich as Saudi Arabia – it has the oil and gas – but it has one of the worst unemployment rates in the Middle East, no social security, no pensions, nothing for its people because its generals have salted their country’s wealth away in Switzerland.
And police brutality. The torture chambers will keep going. We will maintain our good relations with the dictators. We will continue to arm their armies and tell them to seek peace with Israel.
And they will do what we want. Ben Ali has fled. The search is now on for a more pliable dictator in Tunisia – a “benevolent strongman” as the news agencies like to call these ghastly men.
And the shooting will go on – as it did yesterday in Tunisia – until “stability” has been restored.
No, on balance, I don’t think the age of the Arab dictators is over. We will see to that.
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