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Al Jazeera
Al Jazeera
Al Jazeera
com/indepth/features/2015/03/fallen-leaves-arab-
spring
By
Doha, Qatar - The fourth anniversary of the birth of the Syrian revolt may
be an opportune moment for Middle East mavens to take stock of the Arab
Spring phenomenon and examine its competing narratives with the benefit
of hindsight.
No matter what the current state of different Arab uprisings, this much is
certain: That where the people once loudly demanded the downfall of
certain regimes, many now want order and security before anything else.
Hassan Hassan, an Abu Dhabi-based Middle East analyst and a co-author
of ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, says there are no visible gains for the
people so far as conflicts and insurgencies in Syria, Libya, Iraq, Yemen and
Egypt continue to cut a swathe of destruction through the region.
"All that ordinary people are looking forward to is an end to the violence,
and stability at some point," he told Al Jazeera.
"They have lowered their expectations and are ready for outcomes that
will alleviate their suffering."
In what now seems almost light years ago, with the formation of coalition
governments in Iraq through legislative elections post-2005, it did appear
for a while that the Arab world and Iran were overdue for a better model of
representative democracy and rule of law.
For all the withering criticism that greeted US President George W Bush's
democracy-building efforts after the 2003 Iraq invasion, political reforms
were regarded even by many Arab intellectuals as a matter of urgency in a
vast region blighted by human development deficits that stretched from
Morocco in the west to Yemen in the east.
With Tunisia emerging as the sole country with something to show for the
price extracted by democratic transition, many liberal Arab revolutionaries
are now looking back in anger at their political naivete, wondering how
they could have even imagined overthrowing the established ruling orders
of such fragile entities as Libya, Syria and Yemen without inviting calamity.
"I knew from day one that this will take a very long time and it will not be
a smooth road to transition," a retired Syrian physician displaced by
fighting in Homs, who did not want to be identified, told Al Jazeera over
the phone from Damascus.
"We all feared that the revolt would turn into a sectarian and civil war, that
this was bound to happen."
The confrontation and destruction into which a peaceful uprising
inexorably descended is the subject of a documentary, Our Terrible
Country, made by Mohammad Ali Atassi, which is making waves at film
festivals.
Our Terrible Country follows the journey of Yassin Haj Saleh, a well-known
Syrian leftist dissident, and Ziad Homsi, a young photographer and former
rebel, from the Damascus suburb of Douma to temporary exile in Turkey.
Reviewing Our Terrible Country, Anne Barnard wrote in the New York
Times: "The film suggests Syria's revolt is itself on a parallel journey:
diverted by extremists in the wrong direction, yet unable, or unwilling, to
turn back."
Barnard says the documentary's "emotional climax" comes not in Syria but
in Istanbul when Homsi, released from captivity and torture by ISIL, and
Saleh "ask themselves if their revolution is to blame for the Islamists' rise,
and their country's destruction".
On the ground, though, nobody is quite sure whether to give peace talks
or war a chance.
The government, which enjoys the backing of Egypt and the United Arab
Emirates, has just declared a secular-aligned former general, Khalifa
Haftar, who launched his own military offensive against conservative
groups, as the commander of the national army.
But branches of ISIL have sprouted in Derna in the east and Sirte in the
north, raising the spectre of a Syria-like situation where they fill the
vacuum created by a prolonged war of attrition between government
forces and heavily armed opposition groups.
"Many ... ordinary Libyans are echoing this nostalgic sentiment about the
'secure and stable' Libya under the Qaddafi regime," Mohammed Eljarh, a
Libyan blogger and a nonresident fellow of the Atlantic Council's Rafik
Hariri Centre for the Middle East, wrote in a Foreign Policy report in
January, while pointing out that "the killings of army officers, security
personnel, judges, journalists, and activists started in 2011 ..."
The killings that Eljarh refers to grabbed the world's attention dramatically
if briefly on June 25, 2014, when Salwa Bughaighis, a 50-year-old Libyan
lawyer, women's rights activist and "a leading light of the February 17
revolution", was shot to death in her home in Benghazi, shortly after she
had cast her ballot in parliamentary elections.
Since June, the grim roster of slain Libyan activists has grown only longer
with the inclusion of Mohamed al-Mesmari, Siraj Ghatish and Mohamed
Battu - three social-media users whose headless bodies were found
outside Derna in November after they had been kidnapped - and Intissar
al-Hasaari, who organised protests against armed groups and was killed in
her car in Tripoli on February 24.
Bughaighis, who had visited Tunisia to observe the October 2011 election,
was under no illusions herself about the task at hand.
While the identity of the killers of the Libyan activists will probably not be
known for a long time, widely shared images and witness accounts left
little doubt that masked police officers were responsible for the birdshot
that claimed the life of 31-year-old Shaimaa al-Sabbagh in neighbouring
Egypt on January 24.
However, those who predicted that Sabbagh's death would turn her into a
unifying symbol for anti-government protests, in the manner that the
killing of 26-year-old Neda Agha-Soltan by Iranian security forces did in
2009, had underestimated the sense of insecurity induced by four years of
political and economic turmoil.
If surveys of Egyptian public opinion are any guide, many liberal citizens
who cheered the toppling of Mubarak and welcomed the participation of
the Muslim Brotherhood in politics in 2011, have now chosen to ignore
allegations of human-rights abuses and bet on President Abdel Fattah el-
Sisi's military-backed government to tackle a daunting array of challenges.
"Yet Hassan's wife and mother are staunch Sisi supporters, and see
Egypt's 2011 Arab Spring uprising as a 'waste of life and resources'."
The fact that groups of individuals within the same family hold differing
views on the upheaval of the Arab Spring, is of course not something
peculiar to Egyptians.
At the regional level, too, opinions are known to vary widely given that
different communities and sects have experienced different levels of
violence, repression, deprivation and, in some cases, empowerment since
the uprisings of 2011.
"To pursue real change, hard power is necessary - this conclusion drawn by
many youth activists has been capitalised upon by groups such the Islamic
State [ISIL], al-Nusra and other like-minded organisations," he told Al
Jazeera.
Trouble is, from Tunisia to Bahrain and from Algeria to Jordan, many
governments too appear to have reached the conclusion that tolerance for
dissent has its limits at a time of unprecedented regional tensions and
instability.
Worse still, crucial issues such as political reforms, human rights and
justice have been given a back seat once again, if not abandoned outright.
Source: Al Jazeera