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Appearing to non-members as irredentist supremacist movements, new cracks surfaced in the region’s old religious melange. Even factions with reputations for moderation excluded members of other faiths. Bahrain’s parliamentary opposition Wifaq party was headed by a Shia cleric and its parliamentarians were all Shia. The Muslim Brotherhood, the oldest and largest of the Islamist movements, was wholly Sunni. Protests which had begun as revolts against totalitarian regimes rapidly degenerated into sectarian struggles. Rather than signalling the aspiration for a system of checks and balances against absolute power, democracy became a euphemism for majority rule. In spite of Syria’s sectarian kaleidoscope the rebel’s political arm was top-heavy with Brotherhood members, and its rebel force, the Syrian Free Army, almost entirely Sunni. Feeling alienated and fearing a Sunni resurgence, the country’s other religious minorities – the Druze, the plethora of Christian denominations, and the Ismailis – kept to the sidelines or actively sided with the Alawites, the heterodox Shia sect of the Assad clan. When fighting erupted it rapidly acquired the overtones of a civil war. Sunnis defected from Assad’s forces in increasingly large numbers, leaving the predominantly Alawite Republican Guard and special forces to lead the battle. After twenty months, some 60,000 died in the sectarian bloodletting.
Spread by hundreds of thousands of refugees and partisan media outlets, the sectarian contagion spilled out of Syria, pulling at the seams of the region’s hybrid states. In Iraq, sectarian tensions which had begun to subside revived as Sunni tribes and mosques sent medicines and arms to Syria’s Sunni rebels, and Shias offered succour to government forces. Nuri al-Maliki’s government made some effort to inspect cargoes transiting to Iraq, but the border was too long and too porous to prevent weapons reaching the warring sides. In July 2012 Iraq’s Shia prime minister greeted Assad’s foreign minister with a guard of honour, on the same day as Sunni Kurds in their northern autonomous zone feted a Syrian rebel leader as head of state. The spectre of civil war again loomed over Lebanon, as Sunni and Shia activists smuggled aid, arms and men to rival forces over the border. Syria’s Sunni rebels threatened to bomb southern Beirut’s Shia suburbs after they captured Hizbollah fighters training and arming self-defence squads in Alawite villages. In Lebanon’s northern town of Tripoli, fighting erupted between rival Alawite and Sunni suburbs. Fuelling the sectarianism, the region’s governments, too, led by Iran and Saudi Arabia, provided political, financial military backing for their respective sects.
Increasingly, the region seemed caught in a tournament between two clashing crescents – a Shia one, identified by Jordan’s King Abdullah a decade earlier, running horizontally from Iran via Iraq and Syria to southern Lebanon, and a Sunni rival descending vertically from Turkey through central Syria to Jordan, an increasingly Islamist Palestine and Egypt. Not always by design, global powers sharpened their blades. With overtones of the old Cold War, Russia protected Syria from sanction at the UN, and signed its first arms deal with Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein, while the US solidified its ties with the region’s Sunni powerhouses, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
The region’s other sectarian fires which had subsided flared once more. Yemen’s Shia Houthis had agreed to a ceasefire in February 2010, halting a rebellion which had killed some 10,000 in six years of fighting, and left much of northern Yemen and some of the Red Sea coast in their hands. But in October 2011 fighting resumed after the Houthis laid siege to perhaps the Arab world’s most prestigious Salafi school, Dammaj, a few kilometres away from their capital, Saada. Of the school’s 7,000 students, 100 were killed.
Elsewhere in the peninsula, the Sunni monarchies deflected popular demands to surrender some of their absolute powers by presenting demonstrations as sectarian revolts by their Shia underclass. As the only Sunni-Arab-led country honouring Ashura, the highpoint of the Shia calendar, with two days of national holiday, Bahrain had prided itself on its tolerance. But when its browbeaten Shia majority converged on the Manama junction of Pearl Monument, its ruling al-Khalifa dynasty, opened its causeway to phalanxes of Saudi tanks, bulldozed the monument and dozens of Shia shrines and smothered its Shia villages with tear gas. Indicative of the sectarian divide, Wifaq, Bahrain’s all-Shia party, withdrew its parliamentarians, leaving the legislature bereft of Shia representation. Saudi Arabia’s Shias rose up in January 2012, after police shot dead a young Shia protester, Issam Muhammad Abu Abdullah. By the end of 2012, the security forces had killed at least a dozen Shia subjects.
Old and New Autocrats
With identity politics captivating the region, many pundits predicted the break-up of the geopolitical map that colonial powers had carved a century earlier, and its replacement with homogenous atavistic states. “Bouazizi set not just himself on fire, but the order of the Middle East set in place by Mark Sykes and Charles Picot”, commented one wag. Libya’s vast territory, they posited, would fragment into its three constituent parts: Benghazi in the east, Tripolitania in the West and Fezzan in the south. Syria seemed destined to follow Iraq. As Saddam Hussein in Iraq in the 1990s, the Assad regime appeared to retreat from Syria’s northern Kurdish towns, feeding Kurdish aspirations not only for autonomy but a pan-Kurdish state linked to neighbouring Kurdish zones in Turkey and Iraq. Analysts further anticipated Syria’s disintegration into a Sunni central spine running north–south linking Syria’s most populous cities and Alawite retention of a sausage of territory wiggling from Syria’s Mediterranean coast through the anti-Lebanon mountain to Hizbollah-controlled southern Lebanon. Poorer populous states eyed the opportunities afforded by their richer but weaker and dysfunctional desert neighbours. Egyptian security officials toyed with hiving-off Libya’s oil-rich eastern province to support Egypt’s 90 million people, almost half of whom lived in poverty.
But for all the regional turbulence, as with the previous seismic shocks of September 11 and the Iraq war, the region’s borders proved remarkably resilient. In two years of anti-regime protests, only four of the 19 Arab heads of state succumbed. Several deeply polarized states registered little more than murmurings, apparently fatigued from previous bouts of unrest. Having climbed out of its own civil war twenty years earlier, Lebanon’s population had no desire to hurl itself headlong into another. Though Syria’s feuding pulled at the country’s communal seams and there were sporadic attacks, including the assassination of its security chief, a Sunni, Lebanon’s army successfully quelled instances of communal fighting. Algeria’s Islamists seemed too exhausted to try again; they were still reeling from the generals’ success in crushing their rebellion after the army aborted elections in 1992 that they were poised to win. The Palestinian Authority, too, seemed a spent force in the struggle to end Israel’s occupation; having ceded Gaza to Hamas, President Abbas hung on shakily in the West Bank, too dependent on Israel for survival to defy it in any court but that of public opinion.
The remaining survivors were all absolute dynastic monarchies. Though many suffered from the same structural problems as the republics, they looked to their oil wealth and a conveniently timed price-hike to buy time. As the world’s largest exporter of natural gas and the Arab world’s smallest population, Qatar boasted the world’s highest per capita annual income of $143,000. Saudi Arabia boosted government spending by 50 percent between 2008 and 2011. The number of universities in Arab Gulf states mushroomed from one in 1950, to 28 in the 1980s, 40 in the 1990s and 120 in 2012. Attracted by booming economies, foreign investment rushed in.
Though it muted the impact, the funding did not render them immune from protest. Despite the repression, Bahrain failed to smother the cries for change. Two years on, its Shia villages remained semi-autonomous zones largely under the control of local activists. On their copious feast and mourning days, Bahrain’s Shias processions dominated the streets of their capital, Manama. And the reformist bloc Wifaq which pulled out of parliament lost ground to more radical and clandestine voices, such as al-Haq, which advocated the overthrow of the m
onarchy. The al-Khalifas imposed emergency law, hauled tortured protestors before military tribunals and allayed more general protest by whipping up Sunnis against Shias with a torrent of propaganda portraying Shias as perfidious blasphemers on state television. Sunni youths toured the streets with swords, boycotted Shia businesses, and erected checkpoints to establish Shia exclusion zones.
Despite the regimes’ efforts to paint the stirrings as sectarian, the discontent spanned a cross-section of Gulf society. Tired of a paternalistic system unable to provide jobs and a hereditary system which denied them representation, young people in the Gulf, who are among the best connected and educated in the Arab world increasingly asked when their awakening might come. But their rulers looked on impervious. As per his constitution, the Sultan of Oman retained his titles of head of state and de facto Prime Minister, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, Foreign Minister, Defence Minister and governor of the Central Bank. Saudi Arabia dismissed demands for national elections. Kuwait’s emir, Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah, dissolved a newly elected but unruly parliament in June 2012, after it launched an anti-corruption investigation. He issued an emergency decree, amending the electoral law to ensure a more pliant legislature, and had a member of the ruling family, Meshaal al-Malik al-Sabah, detained for tweeting that he would stand in fresh elections on a platform to ‘expose corruption among top officials’. Police clashed with protestors after loyalists won all fifty seats in fresh elections in December 2012 that were boycotted by the opposition. Even Qatar, which sold itself as the region’s font of cutting-edge critical journalism, replaced Wadah Khanfar, the director of Al Jazeera who was both an Islamist and an ardent supporter of civil rights, with a member of the emir’s al-Thani tribe. So quick to report criticism in other Arab states, its editors gagged any mention of the Emir’s prison sentence for a Qatari poet who criticized him.
Doubts over the royal successions accentuated concerns over stability. Oman’s ageing sultan is heirless; and Saudi Arabia seems destined for ever-diminishing gaps between its kings as it holds fast to a line of succession which passes from one brother, not one generation, to the next. In 2013 King Abdullah was nearing 90, and by 2015 the youngest of his remaining brothers was set to be over 70 years old. Saudis likened their increasingly hospitalized leadership to that which marred the frequent change of leaders in the dying years of the Soviet Union.
Beset with internal challenges, the monarchs closed ranks. They upgraded the Gulf Cooperation Council into a union; its richer and larger members not only bailed out the smaller ones with less oil, particularly Oman and Bahrain, populations non-Sunni as noted, dispatched their forces to crush unruly Qatar, whose satellite channel goaded other protestors to overthrow their leaders, suspended coverage of Bahrain.
Jordan and Morocco, the Arab world’s two monarchies without access to oil wealth, had fewer resources to resist the winds of change. Both applied to join the GCC, but once rebuffed resorted to varying degrees of repression and reform to cushion their rule against protests. Moving quickly to confuse and divide the opposition, Morocco’s king Mohammed VI appeared on television promising a new constitution which stripped him of his infallibility. Before the end of the year he had held elections, allowed the country’s loyal Islamist movement, Justice and Development, to win, and appointed its leader, Abdullah Benkirane, first minister. A British diplomat likened the country’s transition to parliamentary monarchy to England’s 17th century Restoration, and compared its monarch’s title of Commander of the Faithful to the British monarch’s status as head of the Anglican Church. But Morocco remains far from being a constitutional monarchy. Its king presides over the Council of Ministers, the Supreme Security Council, and the Ulama Council, which administers the mosques. He runs the military, the security forces and the intelligence. Tellingly, when US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton travelled to the kingdom in March she met the king’s foreign affairs advisor ahead of the government’s Islamist foreign minister.
Moving more slowly and less dextrously, King Abdullah of Jordan interpreted any meaningful concession as a sign of weakness and a slippery slope that could lead to his downfall. He tinkered with his powers, touting the tweaks he had made to a third of the constitution. But unlike Morocco, he kept the right to appoint the prime minister, and shied from putting amendments to a referendum. Whereas Morocco’s king had courted the Islamists and elevated them to government, Jordan’s monarch schemed to exclude them. He endorsed a new electoral law which gerrymandered the seats to favour rural Beduin tribes, so infuriating the Brotherhood whose powerbase was in the cities that it declared a boycott. Exacerbating the unrest in late 2012, the king slashed subsidies to pay for his heavy borrowing used to calm the streets at the start of the Arab Awakening. Protestors, who had initially peppered their protests with cries of ‘S-S-S’ – hinting at the Arabic for ‘dismiss’, grew increasingly daring, openly chanting for the toppling of the king.
But though Jordan’s Islamist leaders reproved their ruler, few spoke of following Egypt by replacing him. The Brotherhood’s politicians still hung portraits of the king in their offices, albeit ones in which he sported a beard, and reluctantly admitted that for all their hunger for power and assets, their monarchs were more tolerant than the republics and slower to kill. Jordanian officials claimed that of some 7,000 protests in the two years of the Arab Awakening, only three people – one of them a policeman – were killed. Bahrain – the most repressive of the monarchies – killed 90 of its citizens in two years of protests, a small fraction of the killing fields in the republics. In an attempt to heal wounds, the al-Khalifas invited an international human rights commission to investigate security force abuses and released some of their political prisoners.
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In the four countries which toppled their leaders, new systems of government began to take root. The transition was smoothest in Tunisia and Egypt, where regime change was civil not military. By hiving themselves off from the ruling clan, the old armed forces survived and provided a bridge between new and old. Their criticism of their outgoing presidents for inter alia seeking to establish dynasties and their refusal to fire on protestors ensured that the old order was co-opted rather than purged. In Egypt, the generals garnered sufficient legitimacy from their role in deposing Mubarak to form a junta, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), which provided an interregnum pending transfer to civilian rule. Mubarak’s National Democratic Party, which claimed three million members on the eve of the election, was disbanded by court order on 16 April 2011 and its assets nationalized; but its members were allowed to compete for political office, and two of Mubarak’s former ministers contested the presidential elections. Similarly, although the Constitutional Democratic Rally (RCD) Party, which had ruled Tunisia since independence in 1956, was dissolved, only a few of its senior members were put on trial. Others, including Ben Ali himself, were allowed to flee into exile. Revenge killings were remarkably rare.
The continuum was even more pronounced in Yemen, where outside parties – primarily Saudi Arabia and the United States – helped negotiate a roadmap for stabilizing the transition. President Salih stepped down in February 2012 after 33 years in power, but he remained in the country, and his cronies and relatives, including his son and three nephews, continued to exercise power as security chiefs. In elections in February 2012, his long-standing deputy was the only candidate. Though the figurehead had changed, the old system survived.
Even Libya, where militias divided up much of the spoils in the post-Qaddafy era, held together. Despite the collapse of the security regimes, the flight of police and surfeit of weaponry, crime levels remained astonishingly low. Close-knit family, religious and tribal ties coupled with the glue of optimism in the dawn of a new era prevented the sort of looting and mugging which might have ravaged western societies faced with a parallel collapse of law and order. Testifying to their desire for central authority despite its absence on the ground, Libyans went to the polls in large number
s in elections which were remarkably unscarred by violence. Federalism remained a dirty word. Militias continued to maintain their own prisons and makeshift judicial systems, but sensing their lack of legitimacy, donned national uniforms and repainted their looted vehicles in the colours of police cars. Along Libya’s borders, warlords managed the smuggling routes, reviving the ancient entrepots and coastal city-states, but oil revenues remained wholly under central control, ensuring that the government remained the country’s primary source of patronage and distributor of wealth.
Indeed, the forces that emerged out of the chaos largely conformed to the historical rule of thumb that authoritarian regimes that break down beget authoritarian successors. From Saddam Hussein onwards, all Arab states which ousted their leaders staged elections to choose their replacements. But as in Russia in 1917 and Iran in 1979, their successors quickly acquired the dictatorial traits of the past. In Iraq, Egypt and Tunisia, the victors were tempted to treat democracy as a system of winner takes all, rather than a mechanism of checks and balances on abuses of absolute power. Establishing democracies proved more complicated than simply erecting polling stations.
A History of the Middle East Page 57