by Lin Noueihed
What is beyond dispute is that in the fifteen years leading up to the Arab Spring, Al-Jazeera had helped to shape a new Arab public sphere where discussion and exchange of opinion became the norm. But it was not just television that was revolutionizing communications in the lead-up to the Arab Spring. The mobile phone had become ubiquitous, and the internet had arrived – in Arabic.
The Connected Generation
In Egypt in 2008, a Facebook page set up by Esraa Abdel Fattah, a young woman with little experience of political activism, helped transform a months-long strike for better pay and conditions at the industrial town of Al-Mahalla Al-Kobra into a political crisis. Within two weeks of the online call for a general strike in support of the textile workers, 70,000 supporters had signed up. Political bloggers promoted the strike and most of the opposition political parties swung behind it. On the day, 6 April, thousands of workers and students around Egypt stayed at home, though the sit-in at Al-Mahalla Al-Kobra itself was broken up by police and sparked three days of clashes.
While the strike was only a partial success, it convinced young Egyptian activists of the powerful role that new media technologies could play, not just in disseminating their message, but in organizing action and forming instant networks that rallied thousands of people around a single cause. Internet use had exploded in the Arab world in the decade leading up to the uprising, eroding the state's monopoly on information as a new breed of internet-savvy young people found ways around government controls. Blog sites had mushroomed, breaking the hold of traditional newspapers with their censors and self-censors on information. A new generation of so-called ‘hacktivists’ brought traditional activism to the new battleground of cyberspace. The spread of social media such as Facebook and Twitter allowed millions of people who had never met to form instant communities of common interest that would play a major role when the time came. The change had been rapid and revolutionary.
The first Arab Human Development Report of 2002 had found fewer internet users in the Arab world than in sub-Saharan Africa, but that digital divide had narrowed sharply in the decade before the uprising, connecting people in new and unpredictable ways.20 By 2005, internet users in Arab states numbered just 25 million. By 2011, their numbers had more than quadrupled.21 Young people were using the internet not just to mobilize politically or to follow the news but also to chat online to members of the opposite sex, challenging powerful social traditions, particularly in the conservative Gulf region.22 E-mail became incredibly popular in a region with notoriously inefficient postal systems.
The spread of the internet also coincided with an explosion in the use and capabilities of mobile phones. The number of mobile subscriptions in the region quadrupled between 2005 and 2011, and soared far more quickly in certain countries. In Syria, it grew a spectacular 393-fold in the decade before the uprising, and had still only reached slightly more than half the population. In Yemen, it grew by 346 times, and still less than half the population owned a phone by 2010 – in contrast to Tunisia, where there was an average of more than one phone per person. In wealthy oil-exporting countries such as Saudi Arabia and Libya, there were almost two mobile phones per person on the eve of the Arab Spring.23
By now, mobile phones had spread to distant villages where inhabitants had never even had a landline. And where once the mobile phone had allowed users to conduct a conversation from anywhere with people they already knew, by 2010 the smartphone had revolutionized communications. Now users could access the internet from anywhere. They could capture photographs and footage on their phones and instantly upload the images to the world.
Facebook penetration rates remained low on the eve of the Arab Spring, averaging 6.7 per cent in December 2010, compared to 46 per cent in the United Kingdom, but social media was spreading at a phenomenal rate.24 In December 2010, the total number of Facebook users in the Arab world stood at 21 million, up 78 per cent from January of the same year.
It would be wrong to overemphasize the role of social media once the uprisings began. The five Arab countries with the highest level of Facebook penetration in December 2010 were the UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, Lebanon and Kuwait. Of all those countries, only Bahrain, and to a far lesser extent Kuwait, saw significant unrest in 2011.25 In Yemen, where protests would break out in January, only 0.7 per cent of the population used Facebook and only 12 per cent were internet users at all. In Egypt, once at the forefront of Arab culture and politics, only 5.5 per cent of the population used Facebook on the eve of the revolt, and just a quarter used the internet. In Libya, 3.7 per cent were Facebook users and 14 per cent used the internet. Even in Tunisia, which would become the birthplace of the Arab Spring, 17.6 per cent were Facebook users in 2010, and overall internet penetration was still only slightly more than a third.26
Yet to assess whether the internet and social media were used successfully or unsuccessfully to organize specific protests and disseminate specific information in the Arab Spring is to miss the point. Whatever its role in the mechanics of the revolts, the rapid rise in internet use, blogs and social media over the preceding five years had already had a democratizing effect on Arab society that authoritarian governments could not roll back. From the invention of the wheel to the printing press to the internet, technology has consistently revolutionized the world, connecting people in new ways, shrinking the globe, and breaking down established power structures. This type of change is far more fundamental and has had more lasting effects on states and societies than a single change of government or the reform of a political system in an individual country.
As the printing press did 600 years ago, the internet eroded old elites, forcing the traditional media to re-evaluate its role and weakening the power of national governments and hierarchical organizations. New communication technologies and new media have historically played a key role in movements of political and social upheaval. In Iran, activists smuggled in casette tapes, then a modern technology, of exiled Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's speeches in the lead-up to the 1979 revolution. New media allows activists to spread their message faster and to more people than was possible before, which is crucial in breaking down the barrier of fear that would normally prevent the mass of ordinary people from joining the hardcore of committed activists and turning a humdrum sit-in into an engine for major political upheaval.
Under authoritarian regimes that try to instil a cult of personality, and where the costs of dissent can be as high as arrest, torture or even death, a large number of people tend to oppose the government but few will take the risk of making that opposition public, so the extent of opposition remains hidden. The state appears strong, but is in fact only fierce, as Nazih Ayubi described it in Overstating the Arab State. This becomes evident the day that a mass of people realize that dissent is widespread. With that knowledge, a growing number join the protests and the regime crumbles much faster than anyone had expected.27 These factors would be seen at play once the Arab Spring broke out, as social media, combined with satellite television, would play a crucial role in creating a sense of communal fearlessness.
Thus, through a single Facebook page, an individual could rally thousands of supporters around a cause, thousands of supporters who had never met, who may live in different countries around the world and who, at any other time in history, would not have been able to connect.
Critics have warned that so-called ‘slacktivism’ could undermine revolutionary movements as time spent on virtual activism is time not spent on real activism that carries very real risks.28 They argue that it can be useful for those who want to lazily burnish their activist credentials by clicking a button to support a cause online, similar to those who may have bought a bumper sticker twenty years ago, but that it cannot change the world in the way protest can. Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion, correctly argues that governments had been quick to exploit social media for their own ends, using it to monitor dissent and spread propaganda. Indeed, Bahrain's government posted pictures of protesters on Fac
ebook and asked its supporters to identify them for arrest, while Syria's government set up an ‘Electronic Army’ to fight its war online.29 Online activists themselves acknowledge that uprisings require a combination of old methods such as pamphleteering and new methods such as Twitter, and would amount to nothing unless large numbers of people were ultimately willing to brave the rubber bullets, tear gas and, in some countries, tanks and snipers. But the internet, social media and even WikiLeaks undoubtedly played a role.
When in December 2010, days before protests broke out, WikiLeaks published a batch of US diplomatic cables that detailed the corruption and mafia-like practices of Ben Ali and his wife, some commentators immediately began to write of the first ‘WikiLeaks Revolution’,30 describing a narrative of ‘hacktivists’ changing the world, or at least individual countries, by leaking government documents through the demo--cratizing medium of the internet. This is overstated. Few within Tunisia would trace their anger back to WikiLeaks, but what the leak did was to confirm what Tunisians had known all along and to reveal that the United States was no big fan of Ben Ali, information that simultaneously galvanized opposition and weakened the president in the eyes of the people.
A Decade of Activism
On the eve of the Arab Spring, then, a new generation was coming of age. It was a generation that had grown up watching satellite television in Arabic, with a deluge of political opinions and news spin, with television dramas and Arabic music videos, with televangelists and call-in chat shows. It was a generation that was connected by mobile phone, by BlackBerry and by iPad. It was a generation that was internet-savvy; that harnessed e-mail and Twitter and Facebook to build networks with like-minded young people in other Arabic-speaking countries and beyond.
It was the 61 per cent of Arabs who were under 30. Unlike their parents, swathes of whom were illiterate, most of this generation could read and write. Some could read and write in English or French as well as Arabic. It was a generation with high expectations of life, a generation that had delayed marriage in favour of university, and had delayed child-bearing in favour of a career. Enjoying more time, fewer responsibilities, more personal freedom and a better education than their parents, these younger Arabs had also benefited from a cultural and communications boom in recent years.
Television programmes such as Prince of Poets had reinvigorated enthusiasm for the best-loved of Arab literary forms. In 2007, the Emirates Foundation had launched the International Prize for Arab Fiction, which aims to become a sort of ‘Arab Booker’, and had helped to bring a wider variety of Arab voices to the West. A renewed effort to ensure that the best of Arabic literature found its way into English translation had flowered into a new cultural conversation. Arab film festivals were annual events in Beirut, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Doha, Marakech, Cairo and beyond.
Indeed, Emmanuel Todd and Youssef Courbage have argued that civilizations are not heading for the inevitable clash that was predicted by Samuel Huntington, a theory that gained so much currency during the 'war against terror’. Rather, civilizations are converging. Changing marriage patterns and rising literacy were already revolutionizing Arab countries much as they had revolutionized Europe, shifting the emphasis when it came to political, social and economic choices from the traditional patriarchal family to the individual.31
It had also been a decade of activism. Fed up with the lack of change at the top, impatient with the cautious and long-term strategies of the mainstream Islamist parties, appalled at the violent antics of the jihadis, disgusted with the corruption that had eaten away at state institutions, angry at the abuse carried out by spies and police with seeming impunity, a handful of young people were taking action. In the midst of the apathy and the hopelessness, youth activists from Egypt, from Syria, from Lebanon and elsewhere were turning to the ideas of an American academic.
Gene Sharp's 1993 work From Dictatorship to Democracy had become a handbook for non-violent revolutionaries around the world, inspiring the young Serbian activists who overthrew Slobodan Milosevic in 2000 and setting off a chain of revolutionary change around Eastern Europe in the 2000s. Otpor, the Serbian group that orchestrated the non-violent opposition to Milosevic, trained and aided other East European revolutionaries as well as young activists battling authoritarian regimes from Burma to Egypt to Lebanon.
In many ways, the Arab world's wave of popular action did not begin in 2011, but in 2005, when Lebanese activists used non-violent resistance tactics not to overthrow a dictator but to push the Syrian army out after twenty-nine years. Like the removal of Ben Ali or Mubarak, it was a huge achievement for unarmed activists facing military might. Lebanon and Syria signed an accord establishing diplomatic relations and opening an embassy, the first time Syria had officially treated Lebanon as a sovereign and independent neighbour rather than an outlying province. Lebanon's revolt, known in Arabic as Intifadat al-Istiqlal, or the Indepen-dence Uprising, but to the foreign media as the Cedar Revolution, was heavily branded. Its proponents wore the red-and-white sashes that were the same colour as the Lebanese flag. Banners and symbols representing different political parties or religious factions were nowhere to be seen. The protesters all united behind Brand Lebanon, beginning their demonstrations with candle-lighting vigils and growing into a mass sit-in in Martyrs’ Square where a hardcore of activists camped out until the Syrian army was gone.
Yet as soon as that main goal had been achieved, the country collapsed into the worst bout of infighting since the end of its 1975–90 civil war, the ranks of the anti-Syrian independence movement decimated by a series of assassinations that were claimed by no one but served Syria and its allies. Blinded by the red-and-white flags, the Western media had taken the cosmopolitan and liberal young demonstrators in Martyrs’ Square to be representative of Lebanon, but Hezbollah, the main Shi'ite Islamist group backed by Syria and Iran, had been lying low. The Shi'ites were believed to be the single largest sect in Lebanon, a country comprised entirely of minorities, and most of them had been absent from the protests in central Beirut.
When Hezbollah called its supporters out on 8 March 2005 in a display of appreciation for Syria, legions of bearded men and women wrapped in black chador cloaks filled downtown Beirut. Within two years, Syria had managed to re-establish its political influence over Lebanese politics, even though its soldiers were gone. In the third year, Hezbollah turned its guns on its anti-Syrian rivals inside Lebanon, further asserting its military and political domination with the blessing of its friends in Damascus and Tehran. The demonstration effect of the Lebanese protests was powerful, and the tactics of its young activists would be mimicked in Egypt and elsewhere in the years leading up to the 2011 uprising, but the battle that emerged for the future of Lebanon was more instructive of the challenges that protesters would face in the aftermath of the Arab Spring.
By the time Mohammed Bouazizi set himself alight in a desolate town in central Tunisia, the region was a tinderbox waiting for a spark. Protests that had broken out a decade earlier in support of the Palestinians, then against the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, then again against Israel's war with Hezbollah in 2006 and then against its war on Gaza in 2009, had turned repeatedly against the Arab rulers who sat idly by, unwilling to stand against their allies in Washington. On television, taboos had been broken and the cults of personality had been eroded. Waves of strikes had convulsed factories, mines and offices in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere. Once easily isolated and crushed, labour movements increasingly teamed up with the new generation of dissident bloggers who harnessed the internet and social media to raise awareness of strikes and generate wider public support. Once the protests began, despite government efforts to close down the internet, ban specific sites or cut off mobile phones, they would not be able to halt the momentum.
Lacking the hierarchical structures of traditional organizations, the loose and leaderless networks flummoxed police, who could not identify ringleaders and did not see the young internet-savvy activists as a serious threat. Focusing
on a single demand with general appeal, protesters would build coalitions that brought together the Islamist and the secular, the trade unionist and the businessman, the young and the old. Those coalitions would be broad, but they would necessarily be loose and easily divided. The online networks that were formed were able to grow very large, very quickly, but they lacked the cohesion of smaller, tight-knit networks based on face-to-face interactions over a long period, and they could vanish as quickly as they had appeared.
When it came to persuading the average person on the street that they could govern, the weaknesses of youth movements would be exposed and the older, more established groups would outmanouevre them. So it was in Tunisia, where by mid-January 2011 a cross-border protest movement that had already started to ripple through Morocco, Algeria, Jordan and elsewhere, was on the verge of claiming its first scalp.
PART 2
THE BATTLEGROUNDS
CHAPTER 4
Tunisia's Jasmine Revolution
If, one day, a people desires to live, then fate will answer their call, And the night will begin to fade and their chains break and fall.
– Tunisian poet Abu Qasim al-Chebbi1
On the evening of 14 January 2011, Tunisian President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, his wife, their five-year-old son, one of his daughters and her fiancé sped to the airport.2 Around them, the normally sleepy capital was in tumult. A general strike had paralysed the economy. Thousands were on the streets demanding that the president step down. It was less than twenty-four hours since Ben Ali, in a televised address, had promised not to run for re-election. The following day, he sacked his government, called early elections and declared a state of emergency. Tour operators had evacuated tourists from the Mediterranean hot spot. A curfew was imposed. Yet the army had refused to use force to quell demonstrations after four weeks of police crackdowns that had only swelled the ranks of protesters now braving bullets in towns from the deepest south to the furthest north of the country.