Revolutions never take a straight line. After a frustrated fruit vendor in Tunisia lit the spark of what came to be known as Arab Spring, Cairo’s Tahrir Square came to symbolise it. Two long-ruling dictators fell, and a third, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, came to a messy end, in a fall aided by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. In Yemen, a protracted struggle and nudging by the monarchical Gulf Cooperation Council led to the displacement of the seemingly indestructible Ali Abdullah Saleh.
In Bahrain, the majority Shia revolt was put down with help from Saudi Arabia and the UAE, with the US watching with understanding, given its Fifth Fleet base. Morocco’s King Mohammed VI, on the other hand, successfully initiated reforms to quieten a budding series of protests in the short term. But the most harrowing has been the year-long bloodshed in Syria, with President Bashar al-Assad trying to crush a determined bid by opponents to topple him by undertaking unprecedented attacks in cities and towns on unarmed civilians and motleys of ragtag armed men and Army deserters. The United Nations and its envoy have gingerly stepped in, to what end remains to be seen.
There can be no doubt about the genuineness of the uprisings. For long, it was taken for granted that while the rest of the world was progressing towards a more democratic dispensation, the Arab world was doomed to live under dictatorships. The Arab Spring demonstrated that this was not a permanent state of torpor and while the West, in particular the US, was content to break bread with dictators, the people of West Asia, predominantly the young, were storming the barricades.
Second, the West’s conduct in each of the uprisings was determined by self-interest. The US was largely a spectator as events in Tunisia and Egypt took a life of their own. After initial hesitation, there was little to do but to accept the end of two dictators, President Hosni Mubarak’s political end in particular becoming a painful necessity, given the salience of Israel in America’s world view. The end of Gaddafi was helped along by the US and the West because he had few friends in the Arab world and was largely a loose cannon in the region and the wider world.
Keeping Bahrain’s Sunni monarchy in the Shia-majority country was a relatively simple decision because of the US’ interest in keeping its Fifth Fleet base safe and the interest of the Gulf monarchies in retaining the Sunni king in a region being threatened by a Shia Iran, as they saw it. Yemen consists of a patchwork of tribes and is riven by north-south animosities. The US was content to leave the problem in the lap of Riyadh and its partners while it fought Al Qaeda through drones and otherwise.
Syria presented a problem because it contained a mixed population with the minority Alawites having buttressed their power through the Assad family supported by a strong Army and elite presidential corps. The Sunni majority faced other religious and ethnic groups afraid of an intolerant Sunni surge. Arab Syria is tactically aligned with Shia Iran for geopolitical reasons. Much as the Gulf monarchies, in addition to the US, Turkey and Qatar, wish to see the end of Assad rule, the future promises to be messy.
Apart from waiting for the outcome of the efforts of the UN and Arab League envoy, Kofi Annan, to bring about a ceasefire, the West and Syria’s neighbours are applying a more muscular approach in arming the rebels, with Turkey hosting a growing number of Turkish refugees. Nervous about regional developments over which it has no control, Israel batted for Mubarak in Washington in vain. Meanwhile, Tel Aviv is consolidating its hold over occupied Palestine and East Jerusalem to make a two-state solution irrelevant. Indeed, it is a rare colonial power in the post-colonial age. The danger, of course, is that it will lose its democratic credentials by practising its own form of apartheid.
If those who contributed to and revelled in the Arab Spring are disheartened by the turn of events in Egypt, the traditional lodestar of the Arab world, they should remember that the hardest part of a revolution is to consolidate it. The liberals and secularists are facing a Hobson’s choice between the Muslim Brotherhood, having won roughly half of parliamentary seats, going back on its promise not to field a presidential candidate and a military set-up seeking to retain its economic empire and hence political power.
The fog will not lift for a while as newly enfranchised and traditional power centres seek advantage in the two rounds of the forthcoming presidential election. Besides, with the Muslim Brotherhood packing the body that will write the new Constitution with its own men, what hope can the idealists have? The Brotherhood is, of course, presenting itself as the more moderate Islamist party because a more extreme Salafist Party has also gained seats in Parliament.
The moral of the story is that it promises to be a long and hard struggle to wrest power from new and old vested interests in a region that is among the last to seek democratic change. But West Asia and North Africa cannot go back to the days before the Arab Spring. Although the Shia-Sunni schism has been enhanced by past year’s events, the looming change is more fundamental. Turkey’s ambition to be a regional superpower is on full display and the trend towards a somewhat moderate form of Islamist regimes is unmistakable.
The upheaval in the Arab world has shown that although outside forces can help shape events, as in Libya and Bahrain, the main actors in the drama that is unfolding are local and regional. To present this as a battle for influence between Saudi Arabia and Iran would be an oversimplification. The balance of power in the region is being redefined, with the possible end of the Assad regime affecting Iran, but it is not the end of the story.