The broken dreams of the Arab Spring
The famous avenue Habib Bourguiba in Tunis where massive demonstrations took place in 2011, Thursday, January 14, 2021. Tunisia commemorated the 10th anniversary of the flight into exile of its iron-fisted leader, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, driven from power in a popular revolt which foreshadowed the “Arab Spring”.
But there have been no festive celebrations marking the revolution in this North African nation, condemned to containment to contain the coronavirus.
© AP Photo / Mosa'ab Elshamy
Text by: RFI Follow
7 mins
In 2011, the Arab world was shaken by an unprecedented protest movement.
From Syria to Tunisia, from Egypt to Yemen via Libya and the Arabian Peninsula, where are we ten years later?
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The hopes of 2011 led to war in three countries: Syria, Libya, Yemen.
In Syria, it is indeed a popular revolt which pushes the demonstrators in the streets of the country in March of that year.
Gatherings are suppressed and a civil war begins, then turns into a largely internationalized conflict.
In Libya, a Western military intervention accelerates the fall of President Gaddafi but the “aftermath” has never been prepared and the country remains fragmented and unstable.
Yemen believed for a moment to give the example of an organized transition, for the departure of President Ali Abdallah Saleh.
But internal tensions shattered the process and fueled the Houthi rebellion.
What these three countries plunged into chaos have in common, ten years after the uprisings of 2011: they have been and still are the scene of external interventions, most often by force of arms.
In Syria, Bashar al-Assad has remained in power, but at the cost of his country's extreme dependence on foreign support, Russia and Iran in the lead.
The Syrian armed opposition has also been tossed about according to the priorities of its various sponsors (Gulf countries, Westerners, Turkey).
To the point that ex-Syrian rebels have been used as Turkey's armed auxiliaries in Libya and even in Azerbaijan.
Ten years after the start of the military intervention led by NATO, Libya is still evolving in the shadow of foreign sponsors: Russia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates for eastern Libya held by Marshal Khalifa Haftar, Turkey for Tripolitania.
Ditto in Yemen, where the intervention of a coalition commanded by Saudi Arabia plunged the country into the "worst humanitarian crisis" according to the UN.
Consequence of the disintegration of these states: jihadist groups (Islamic State Group, al-Qaeda) were able to establish their positions there.
► To read also: 2011-2021, ten years later, where are the Arab Springs?
The fragile Tunisian hope
No spring for these countries plunged into chaos, but for Tunisia?
The country was the first to experience a huge popular push after the self-immolation of a young itinerant merchant from Sidi Bouzid (center of the country) on December 17, 2010. Mohamed Bouazizi's gesture of despair was the starting point of a huge wave of protest that first broke in Tunisia where Ben Ali was the first dictator to leave power during these "Arab Spring" whose breath at the time seemed to take everything.
The popular revolt led to an unprecedented political opening.
The dictatorship gave way to a semi-parliamentary regime which gave birth to a new constitution and paved the way for the first free elections.
Which makes Tunisia an example of peaceful transition in the Arab world.
The strength and vigilance of civil society have a lot to do with it.
The other side of the coin is parliamentary instability which prevents the establishment of a lasting government capable of facing economic and social challenges.
Unemployment, massive emigration, pauperization of the interior regions remain.
► See also: Tunisia: "We are in a period of learning about democracy"
Ten years after NATO's intervention in Libya, is a political transition finally possible?
On March 10, a transitional government led by billionaire Abdelhamid Dbeiba received the confidence of Parliament, a first since 2014 and the outbreak of the second Libyan civil war.
Will the advent of the Dbeiba government, a transitional executive which must organize elections under the aegis of the UN in December 2021, mark the end of the divisions?
At present, the ceasefire signed last October still stands.
But on the ground, the armed forces maintain their positions, including the Russian mercenaries, at the gates of Sirte, where the session of the vote of confidence in the government was held.
The vote of confidence also expresses the aspiration to end
a series of conflicts that have claimed thousands of lives
since 2014, many of them civilians.
Counter-revolutionary push
A decade after the Arab Spring, a “counter-revolutionary” current has firmly established itself in the region.
Particularly in Egypt, where the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in February 2011 was followed by the election of Muslim Brother Mohammed Morsi.
Very short term for the first democratically elected president in the history of Egypt, since in 2013, the Islamist leader was overthrown by the streets and by the army.
It is a marshal, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who then takes power, ruling out any opposition and any dispute.
Islamists or not, the revolutionaries of Tahrir Square are repressed and it is without real competition that Abdel Fattah al-Sisi was elected president in 2014 and then in 2018. This recovery in hand enjoys the massive support - political and economic - of Country of the Gulf, who had a very bad experience of the protest of the leaders in place in 2011. This desire not to give in to it was expressed at the start of 2011 in Bahrain, the only Gulf monarchy to experience a real movement calling for reforms.
RFI gives the floor to an Egyptian activist, anonymous, present in Tahrir Square at the time.
He continues to fight for his country today.
Very quickly, Saudi and Emirati armored vehicles crossed the bridge that linked the Bahrain archipelago to the rest of the Arabian Peninsula and crushed the popular uprising.
Since then, the United Arab Emirates have become the regional spearhead of this counter-revolutionary movement.
Led by its leader Mohammed Ben Zayed (Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi), the federation of seven emirates articulates a discourse fiercely hostile to any form of political Islam and any form of political claim in the region.
It is in the name of this regional vision that the United Arab Emirates (alongside Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Egypt) orchestrated the boycott of Qatar from 2017. The quartet tried to put pressure on Qatar accused of being too favorable to Islamist movements in the region.
It was also the Qatari television channel al-Jazeera - which widely opened its antennas to the uprisings and demands of 2011 - which was in the crosshairs of the United Arab Emirates and its three allies.
The quarrel officially closed at the start of 2021, but reconciliation seems slow to materialize.
It is also in the name of this desire to erase the Arab Spring that the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain have reopened their respective embassies in Damascus.
The question of Syria's return to the Arab League (it was suspended in 2011) is still debated within the pan-Arab organization.
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