The Arab Spring
The Arab Spring’s balance sheet
Last year’s events in Egypt and Tunisia drew the curtain on a tottering old order and delivered much of the Arab world into a long-awaited new era. But what that new era will look like remains very much an open question, given the many challenges that the region’s countries still face.
The old order that has begun to vanish extends beyond the former regimes. The region’s entire value system – a political culture forged by autocracy – is being transformed. Arab men and women have shed the sense of humiliation and inferiority that despotism imposed on them – and that fostered desperation, anger, violence, and insularity.
This transformation, though far from complete – indeed, it may well last years – has nonetheless started to bear fruit. If the 2011 uprisings had not occurred, we would now be witnessing another year of autocracy, with more talk of dynastic successions. That would mean further humiliation for ordinary people, who bear the brunt of corruption, as government officials and their crony capitalists continued to siphon off public funds.
The Arab media would still be heaping uncritical praise on the region’s presidents and their families, while development programmes would be looted by them. Education would continue to stagnate, and Arab societies, which are divided across sectarian, tribal, and regional lines, would experience rising levels of retribution and violence. The infamous “death boats,” on which hundreds of young North African men risked their lives every year in search of employment and a better life abroad, would continue to deliver those who survived the journey onto Europe’s unwelcoming shores. And Arabs’ rage would reach unprecedented levels, causing utter mayhem and destruction.
Arab youth have rescued the Arab world from this fate. Their conscientiousness and integrity have restored people’s self-confidence. The old regimes’ opponents have demonstrated bravery without recklessness, and differences of opinion without bigotry.
Indeed, we have seen Islamists, liberals, and leftists standing together in defiance. We have seen Muslims and Copts protect each other in Cairo.
In Yemen, we have seen local tribesmen follow a woman, Nobel Peace Prize winner Tawakel Karman, in the fight for freedom. And we have seen the Arab media foster a mature debate about democracy, constitutionalism, and the role of Islam in the modern state, rather than dispensing disinformation and crass propaganda.
But the transformation must not stop here. The new and old political forces should initiate a dialogue to create a consensus on the rules of political engagement. As the people become their own masters, those who fail to engage in this process will eventually find themselves without political power.
The region’s emerging democracies urgently need an Arab initiative that resembles the Marshall Plan – a programme to attract large-scale investment in infrastructure, industry, and agriculture (and in the region’s wealth of untapped technical skills), thereby boosting employment. The initiative should also encourage free movement of goods and people within the region, by lifting the customs restrictions and complicated procedures that hinder bilateral and multilateral trade. Creating regional development banks and building a Mediterranean express railway from Alexandria to Rabat would serve this goal.
But long-term investments will not solve the immediate crisis. Egypt and Tunisia need immediate cash deposits and grants, and their newly elected leaderships should not be forced to resort to begging.
Meanwhile, the United States and the European Union should recognise the nature and depth of the unfolding changes. The Arab public is fully aware of the close alliances that existed between the West and the now-defunct despotic regimes, yet they have exhibited no desire for vengeance or retribution towards the West.
It is past time for the West to accept the Arab people’s will and to stop exaggerating the repercussions of change. The West must support genuine democracy in the Arab world.
If the Arab Spring is aborted, the result will be not dictatorships that are loyal to the West, but rather, a tsunami of rage that will spare no one. There is nothing more dangerous than aborted dreams, especially when those dreams may be the last chance for change.

ON April 9, 2003, Baghdad fell to an American-led coalition. The removal of Saddam Hussein and the toppling of a whole succession of other Arab dictators in 2011 were closely connected — a fact that has been overlooked largely because of the hostility that the Iraq war engendered.
Few of the brave young men and women behind the Arab Spring have been willing to publicly admit the possibility of a link between their revolutions and the end of Mr. Hussein’s bloody reign 10 years ago. These activists have for the most part vigorously denied that their own demands for freedom and democracy, which were organic and homegrown, had anything to do with a war they saw as illegitimate and imperialistic.
To see the connection between the overthrow of Mr. Hussein in 2003 and the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in 2011, one must go back to 1990, when Iraq’s army marched into Kuwait. The first gulf war — in which an American-led coalition ousted Iraq’s occupying army — enjoyed the support of most Arab governments, but not of their populations. Mr. Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait threatened the order that had kept authoritarian regimes in power for decades and Arab leaders were willing to fight to restore it.
Citizens tend to rally around their leaders when faced with external attacks. But Iraqis didn’t. Millions of Iraqis rose up against Mr. Hussein following the 1991 war, and did what was then unthinkable: they called upon the foreign forces that had been bombing them to help rid them of their own dictator.
Mr. Hussein’s brutal response to the 1991 uprising killed tens of thousands of Iraqis. For the first time, the rhetoric used by Mr. Hussein’s so-called secular nationalist regime turned explicitly sectarian, a forerunner of what we see in Syria today. “No more Shias after today,” was the slogan painted on the tanks that rolled over Najaf and fired at Shiite protesters. The Western and Arab armies that had come to liberate Kuwait simply stood by and watched as Shiites and Kurds who rose up were massacred. The overthrow of Mr. Hussein was deemed to be beyond the war’s mandate.
And so ordinary Iraqis had to die in droves as the Arab state system was restored by force of Western arms. Those Iraqi deaths were a dress rehearsal for what is going on in other parts of the Middle East today.
The first gulf war achieved America’s goals, but the people of Iraq paid the price for that success. They were left with international sanctions for another 12 years under a brutal and bitter dictator itching for vengeance against those who had dared to rise up against him, including Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south. By the time of the American invasion in 2003, the Iraqi middle class had been decimated, state institutions had been gutted and mistrust and hostility toward America abounded.
Both the George W. Bush administration and the Iraqi expatriate opposition to Mr. Hussein — myself included — grossly underestimated those costs in the run-up to the 2003 war. The Iraqi state, we failed to realize, had become a house of cards.
None of these errors of judgment were necessarily an argument against going to war if you believed, as I do, that overthrowing Mr. Hussein was in the best interests of the Iraqi people. The calculus looks different today if one’s starting point is American national interest. I could not in good conscience tell an American family grieving for a son killed in Iraq that the war “was worth it.”
We didn’t know then what we know today. Some, including many of my friends, warned of the dangers of American hubris. I did not heed them in 2003.
But the greater hubris is to think that what America does or doesn’t do is all that matters. The blame for the catastrophe of post-2003 Iraq must be placed on the new Iraqi political elite. The Shiite political class, put in power by the United States, preached a politics of victimhood and leveraged the state to enrich itself. These leaders falsely identified all Sunni Iraqis with Baathists, forgetting how heavily all Iraqis, including some Shiites, were implicated in the criminality of Mr. Hussein’s regime.
Although I always feared, and warned in 1993, that the emergence of sectarian strife was a risk after Mr. Hussein’s fall, my greatest misjudgment was in hoping that Iraq’s new leaders would act for the collective Iraqi good.
For all its bungling, the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq exposed a fundamental truth of modern Arab politics. Washington’s longstanding support for autocracy and dictatorship in the Middle East, a core principle of American foreign policy for decades, had helped stoke a deep-seated political malaise in the region that produced both Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. By 2003, American support for Arab autocrats was no longer politically sustainable.
The system of beliefs Mr. Hussein represented had ossified and lost the ability to inspire anyone long before 2003. And yet he was still there, in power, the great survivor of so many terrible wars and revolutions. Before the American invasion, it was impossible for Iraqis to see beyond him.
There was hardly any war to speak of in 2003. Mr. Hussein’s whole terrible edifice just came crashing down under its own weight. The army dismantled itself, before L. Paul Bremer, the American proconsul, even issued his infamous and unnecessary order to purge Baath Party members from the military.
Toppling Mr. Hussein put the system of which he was such an integral part under newfound scrutiny. If the 1991 war was about the restoration of the Arab state system, the 2003 war called into question that system’s very legitimacy. That’s why support from Arab monarchies was not forthcoming in 2003, when a new, more equitable order was on the agenda in Iraq.
After 2003, the edifice of the Arab state system began to crack elsewhere. In 2005, thousands of Lebanese marched in the streets to boot out the occupying Syrian Army; Palestinians tasted their first real elections; American officials twisted the arm of Hosni Mubarak to allow Egyptians a slightly less rigged election in 2006; and a new kind of critical writing began to spread online and in fiction.
The Arab political psyche began to change as well. The legitimating ideas of post-1967 Arab politics — pan-Arabism, armed struggle, anti-imperialism and anti-Zionism — ideas that undergirded the regimes in both Iraq and Syria, were rubbing up against the realities of life under Mr. Hussein.
No Arab Spring protester, however much he or she might identify with the plight of the Palestinians or decry the cruel policies of Israeli occupation in the West Bank (as I do), would think today to attribute all the ills of Arab polities to empty abstractions like “imperialism” and “Zionism.” They understand in their bones that those phrases were tools of a language designed to prop up nasty regimes and distract people like them from the struggle for a better life.
Generations of Arabs have paid with their lives and their futures because of a set of illusions that had nothing to do with Israel; these illusions come from deep within the world that we Arabs have constructed for ourselves, a world built upon denial, bombast and imagined past glories, ideas that have since been exposed as bankrupt and dangerous to the future of the young Arab men and women who set out in 2011, against all odds, to build a new order.
In the place of these illusions, the young revolutionaries made the struggle against their own dictatorships their political priority, just as their Iraqi counterparts had done in vain 20 years earlier after the first gulf war.
Ideas are not constrained by frontiers or borders. Young people in the Arab world are not constrained by the prejudices of old men, by my generation’s acquiescence to and compromises with dictatorships. And so in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria, a new movement that is still in the making has demanded a political order that derives its legitimacy from genuine citizenship.
It envisions new forms of community not based on a suffocating nationalist embrace supposedly designed to hold in check the avaricious intentions of America and Israel. All the Tunisian fruit vendor Mohamed Bouazizi was asking for in December 2010 was dignity and respect. That is how the Arab Spring began, and the toppling of the first Arab dictator, Saddam Hussein, paved the way for young Arabs to imagine it.
THE Arab Spring is now turning into an Arab winter. The old rules that governed Arab politics have been turned completely upside down. Here, too, Iraq offers lessons.
Mr. Hussein used sectarianism and nationalism as tools against his internal enemies when he was weak. Today’s Iraqi Shiite parties are doing worse: they are legitimizing their rule on a sectarian basis. The idea of Iraq as a multiethnic country is being abandoned, and the same dynamic is at work in Syria.
The support that several key Arab monarchies are providing to Syrian resistance forces fighting against President Bashar al-Assad is further undermining the legitimacy of the whole Arab state system. The war will go on until Mr. Assad is gone and perhaps the state we know as Syria is, too. The only success story seems to be the Kurds — the great losers of the post-World War I order — who have built a thriving semiautonomous region in northern Iraq that might eventually require independence to sustain its success.
Our species, at least in its modern garb, needs states, even imperfect ones. States are still the cornerstones of our security as individuals, and provide at least the possibility of a civilized way of life.
Traditionally conservative Arab monarchies are now doing the unthinkable and risking total state collapse in Syria. They are opposing Mr. Assad’s Arab nationalist regime in an attempt to dictate the kind of country that will emerge from the chaos and to ensure some form of influence over the new Syria. That is the only way to salvage something of the old Arab order that they feel shifting under their feet.
And against these kinds of forces, unfortunately, the young revolutionaries of the Arab Spring are helpless.
Kanan Makiya is a professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Brandeis University and the author of “Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq” and“Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising, and the Arab World.”

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Its not the time of triumph that matters rather its the time of trial that matters.

http://www.slideshare.net/VogelDenis...gs-arab-spring

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Its not the time of triumph that matters rather its the time of trial that matters.

I guess it’s official now: The term “Arab Spring” has to be retired. There is nothing springlike going on. The broader, but still vaguely hopeful, “Arab Awakening” also no longer seems valid, given all that has been awakened. And so the strategist Anthony Cordesman is probably right when he argues: It’s best we now speak of the “Arab Decade” or the “Arab Quarter Century” — a long period of intrastate and intraregional instability, in which a struggle for both the future of Islam and the future of the individual Arab nations blend together into a “clash within a civilization.” The ending: TBD.

Josh Haner/The New York Times
Thomas L. Friedman
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"On Egyptian TV it is no longer surprising to see a liberal pseudointellectual hurling insults at a sheikh while the sheikh reaches for his shoe to throw it at him."
Noor, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
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When the Arab Spring first emerged, the easy analogy was the fall of the Berlin Wall. It appears that the right analogy is a different central European event — the Thirty Years’ War in the 17th century — an awful of mix of religious and political conflict, which eventually produced a new state order.

Some will say: “I told you so. You never should have hoped for this Arab Spring.” Nonsense. The corrupt autocracies that gave us the previous 50 years of “stability” were just slow-motion disasters. Read the U.N.’s 2002 Arab Human Development Report about what deficits of freedom, women’s empowerment and knowledge did to Arab peoples over the last 50 years. Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen and Syria are not falling apart today because their leaders were toppled. Their leaders were toppled because for too many years they failed too many of their people. Half the women in Egypt still can’t read. That’s what the stability of the last 50 years bought.

Also, “we” did not unleash the Arab Spring, and “we” could not have stopped it. These uprisings began with fearless, authentic quests for dignity by Arab youths, seeking the tools and freedom to realize their full potential in a world where they could see how everyone else was living. But no sooner did they blow the lids off their societies, seeking governments grounded in real citizenship, than they found themselves competing with other aspirations set loose — aspirations to be more Islamist, more sectarian or to restore the status quo ante.

Still, two things surprise me. The first is how incompetent the Muslim Brotherhood has been. In Egypt, the Brotherhood has presided over an economic death spiral and a judiciary caught up in idiocies like investigating the comedian Bassem Youssef, Egypt’s Jon Stewart, for allegedly insulting President Mohamed Morsi. (See Stewart’s perfect takedown of Morsi.) Every time the Brotherhood had a choice of acting in an inclusive way or seizing more power, it seized more power, depriving it now of the broad base needed to make necessary but painful economic reforms.

The second surprise? How weak the democratic opposition has been. The tragedy of the Arab center-left is a complicated story, notes Marc Lynch, a Middle East expert at George Washington University and the author of “The Arab Uprising: The Unfinished Revolutions of the New Middle East.” Many of the more secular, more pro-Western Egyptian political elites who could lead new center-left parties, he said, had been “co-opted by the old regime” for its own semiofficial parties and therefore “were widely discredited in the eyes of the public.” That left youngsters who had never organized a party, or a grab bag of expatriates, former regime officials, Nasserites and liberal Islamists, whose only shared idea was that the old regime must go.

Since taking power in Egypt, “the Brotherhood has presided over economic failure and political collapse,” said Lynch. “They have lost the center, they are feuding with the Salafists, and they are now down to their core 25 percent of support. There is no way they should win a fair election, which is why the opposition should be running in — not boycotting — the next parliamentary elections.” The old line that you have to wait on elections until a moderate civil society can be built is a proven failure. “You can’t teach someone to be a great basketball player by showing them videos,” he said. “They have to play — and the opposition will not become effective until they compete and lose and win again.”

The old sources of stability that held this region together are gone. No iron-fisted outside powers want to occupy these countries anymore, because all you win today is a bill. No iron-fisted dictators can control these countries anymore, because their people have lost their fear. The first elected governments — led by the Muslim Brotherhood — have the wrong ideas. More Islam is not the answer. More of the Arab Human Development Report is the answer. But the democratic opposition youths don’t yet have leaders to galvanize their people around that vision.

Given all this, America’s least bad option is to use its economic clout to insist on democratic constitutional rules, regular elections and political openness, and to do all it can to encourage moderate opposition leaders to run for office. We should support anyone who wants to implement the Arab Human Development Report and oppose anyone who doesn’t. That is the only way these societies can give birth to their only hope: a new generation of decent leaders who can ensure that this “Arab Quarter Century” ends better than it began.

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Its not the time of triumph that matters rather its the time of trial that matters.

The Tunisian singer Emel Mathlouthi, a gentle firebrand whose song “Kelmti Horra” (“My Word Is Free”) became an anthem of the Arab Spring, made an enthralling New York debut at the French Institute Alliance Française on Wednesday night. In Arabic she sang, “We are free men who are not afraid/We are the secrets that never die/And we are the voice of those who resist.”

The song has a forthright, steadily rising melody in a major key; it’s easy to imagine it being sung by Joan Baez, one of Ms. Mathlouthi’s early role models. On Wednesday she began it quietly, almost like a lullaby, and carried it toward a clarion fervor, moving between Western and Arabic modes and drawing the audience into a singalong finale.

Ms. Mathlouthi is a 21st-century performer, versed in Western rock and dance music and touching on styles around the Mediterranean. Her 2012 international debut album, “Kelmti Horra” (World Village/Harmonia Mundi), uses rock and Middle Eastern instruments, electronics and samples of protests and speeches from the Arab Spring.

On Wednesday she had only half of her usual Tunisian band, a keyboardist (mostly on piano) and a guitarist who could play oudlike lines. These musicians summoned the momentum of flamenco or created eerie electric-guitar drones and effects. (Her percussionist and violinist could not get visas.) She performed barefoot, sometimes using pedals to add effects to her voice or make loops of her vocals and guitar. Ms. Mathlouthi, 31, grew up in Tunisia listening to Western rock and to the 1960s folk revival, drawn to its spirit of protest. She went on to discover socially conscious Arabic-speaking songwriters like Sheikh Imam, from Egypt, and Marcel Khalife, from Lebanon. (She opened the concert singing Mr. Khalife’s “Bghalbetek” solo, with electronic echoes of her voice.)

Ms. Mathlouthi wrote songs of her own about Tunisia, but they were banned and her career was stymied. In 2007 she moved to France, where a friend, Amin El Ghozzi, gave her the lyrics for “My Word Is Free.” (Ms. Mathlouthi writes both words and music for most of her songs.) A video of “My Word Is Free” from a Paris concert spread, via YouTube and Facebook, around the Arabic-speaking world. She was on tour in Tunisia when the revolution arose in 2010, and in another widely circulated video she performed “My Word Is Free” during a rally there.

Her concert offered resolve and compassion, not stridency. She introduced songs in English: a homage to “people who fought for our freedom,” a song against fear, a song called “Dhalem” (“Tyrant”) that vowed, “Kill me, and I will write songs.” Each one was a musical narrative, unfolding in multiple sections, moving between delicacy and fierce tenacity, mourning and defiance. And her serious sense of purpose didn’t stop Ms. Mathlouthi from dancing at the end, twirling barefoot.

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Its not the time of triumph that matters rather its the time of trial that matters.

For more than two months, 565 people representing a cross section of Yemen’s population have gathered in a luxury hotel on the outskirts of Sana, the capital, trying to hammer out the shape a future government will take.

It is called the National Dialogue Conference, and it is the closest any of the 2011 Arab revolutions has approached to a peaceful, broad-based transition from despotism to democracy.

“It is the only negotiated transition that exists in the context of the Arab Spring,” said Jamal Benomar, the United Nations special adviser on Yemen. “It is a genuine process, nothing has been cooked in advance.”

President Obama focused renewed attention on Yemen last week with his speech on national security, both for the American drone attacks there and for the scores of Yemenis still held in the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. He said that he was lifting the moratorium against repatriating Yemenis, which was seen in Yemen as an endorsement of the national dialogue’s progress in creating more political stability.

More than half the remaining 166 prisoners are Yemenis, and among them 56 are low-level inmates long cleared to go home. They are expected to be transferred on a case-by-case basis. Mr. Obama had barred their repatriation after Al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula, or A.Q.A.P., a militant group based in Yemen, claimed responsibility for trying to blow up a passenger plane headed to Detroit in 2009.

The Yemeni government is hoping that the United States will help underwrite a new program to rehabilitate the detainees, said Rajeh Badi, a media adviser to Yemen’s president. Washington must provide evidence of wrongdoing if it wants any of them put on trial, Mr. Badi said. The fear that they might join extremist groups is “exaggerated,” he said.

A common sentiment among Yemenis is that the low-level detainees have suffered enough, and that the 56 due to be released are likely to pose little danger. Over all, there are about 90 Yemenis in Guantánamo, Mr. Badi said, and Yemeni officials doubt anyone still considered a real threat will be released.

But in Washington, critics of the Obama administration tend to focus on recidivism. Exact numbers for Yemen are vague, particularly since the estimated two dozen sent home previously faded away from any government oversight in the chaos of the 2011 revolution.

Perhaps the most spectacular example of recidivism is Said Ali al-Shihri, the deputy head of A.Q.A.P., who has been reported killed at least twice by the American and Yemeni governments, yet rises Lazarus-like each time. A Saudi repatriated from Guantánamo, Mr. Shihri fled to Yemen in 2008 after graduating from the Saudi rehabilitation program.

In Yemen, optimists laud the dialogue process as a successful — if messy and imperfect — attempt to forge a more representative political system. Pessimists fret that it is merely a lull in the violence that troubled the country until about a year ago, with explosive issues like the desire of the south to secede posing the threat of bloodshed.

“We have not gotten to the solution,” said Abdulghani al-Eryani, a political analyst and an adviser to the conference. But the dialogue “changed the political dynamic and the balance of power in the country,” he said.

He and others said they believed the dialogue could work in Yemen even though it failed elsewhere, most disastrously in Syria. First, the fragmentation of power, especially within the military, was such that no one faction thought it could prevail.

Second, a small group of elder statesmen cajoled the various factions into avoiding civil war. Third, the Arab Gulf states and the international community were united on Yemen. The United Nations Security Council was involved early, and it unanimously threatened international sanctions against anyone who threatened the peaceful transition.

“We finally got some benefit from being poor and insignificant,” Mr. Eryani said. “The international community is not fighting over interests in Yemen.”

But the problems of poverty, alienation, corruption, unemployment and weak or nonexistent government services, which spurred the revolution in the first place, have not evaporated, nor have powerful players retired.

Electricity shortages plague the capital, for example, because tribes angry at the lack of services cut the power lines. Saudi Arabia has provided assistance, but billions of dollars in aid pledged by Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates have not been paid.

The southern secessionist movement is gaining steam, while the Houthis, a rebellious quasi-Shiite Muslim minority in the north, remain restless, although they joined the dialogue.

Al Qaeda has been chased from the territory that it ruled in the south, but it still carries out frequent attacks nationwide.

The national dialogue was supposed to address all those problems within six months after it started on March 18. Participants divided into nine specialized committees are forging a new constitution, and presidential and parliamentary elections are planned for February 2014. While they took to the task with gusto, the schedule is in doubt.

Most working groups “have not come to the so-called nitty-gritty,” said Abdul Karim al-Iryani, a former prime minister and one of the men who shaped the dialogue. “They are discussing general things.”

A plenary session is scheduled for June 8 to review progress, and many expect an extension of four to six months.

The biggest issue shadowing the dialogue is that most of the top political leaders in the south, an independent Marxist country before unification in 1990, are pushing for separation. Most are boycotting the dialogue, so if the conference agreed on a federal system, it is unclear whether they would accept it.

Among the political players, former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who ruled Yemen for more than three decades, still leads the General People’s Congress, or G.P.C., the former ruling party that has not been disbanded and wields significant influence. Of 22 provincial governors, for example, 17 are still G.P.C. leaders.

Many analysts say they believe that Mr. Saleh, granted immunity for stepping down, is plotting a comeback through the elections. A G.P.C. victory would make him a kingmaker but would probably inspire a new street revolution, analysts said.

Islah, the Muslim Brotherhood branch in Yemen, is part of a coalition called the Joint Meeting Parties and so could probably not dominate a future government the way Islamist groups have in Egypt and Tunisia.

But the power-sharing agreement between the two main factions that paved the way to the national dialogue has subsequently spawned a form of paralysis. Each faction wants an equal share of government posts, which means, for example, that many ambassadors, including a new ambassador to Washington, have not been appointed because of endless haggling.

The military is plagued by personal, tribal and regional alliances, said April Longley Alley of the International Crisis Group. But it is the one area where the leader of the interim government, President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, has promoted some reform.

A year ago, for example, checkpoints separated the fiefs of three military commanders in Sana. Those are gone, although some violence persists.

The dialogue participants stopped work in protest for one day last week after tribal gunmen killed two southern youths who had the temerity to try to overtake a wedding procession in Sana. “Remember, this is still a country where private citizens own tanks,” noted one diplomat.

Mr. Saleh’s son and heir, Ahmed, was retired as the head of the Republican Guard, which is being folded into the regular military. The military powers of Mr. Saleh’s main rival, Gen. Ali Mohsen, have also been curtailed, although he remains in the presidential palace as an adviser.

Yemenis and outside analysts worry that with those old rivalries bubbling under the surface, the former power brokers are not going to cede willingly to new players who have a role in the national dialogue, including women, youths and minorities. But so far the dialogue has balanced all those competing interests.

“They are not shooting at each other, they are not even shouting at each other, which is a good start,” said Fazli Corman, the Turkish ambassador to Yemen. “No one can stop the process.”

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Its not the time of triumph that matters rather its the time of trial that matters.

ERBIL, Iraq — Despite the upheavals of what was optimistically termed the Arab Spring, much of the Middle East still suffers a deficit of press freedom as turmoil continues to unsettle the region.

As the United Nations marked World Press Freedom Day on Friday, a survey of the past year ranked the Middle East at the bottom of an international score card of media freedom.

Reporters Without Borders, which published the index, said 2012 was the deadliest year globally for reporters and citizen journalists in a decade in which 600 have been killed in the course of their work.

Syria, where at least 23 reporters and 58 citizen journalists have been killed since March 15, 2011, was the most perilous place for journalists.

Those killed included Marie Colvin, an American, and Mika Yamamoto of Japan, who were both named World Press Freedom Heroes by the International Press Institute.

Reporters Without Borders said they were victims of an information war waged by both the regime of President Bashar Al Assad, which it said stopped at nothing to impose a news blackout, but also by opposition factions that were increasingly intolerant of dissent.

For the first time, the media-rights watchdog added Syrian rebel groups to its list of so-called predators. It cited the Al Nusra Front and other Islamist rebel groups as among those that were proving to be increasingly intolerant and suspicious toward the media.

There was also a gloomy assessment about developments in countries such as Egypt, where bloggers and other Internet activists were credited for a role in overturning autocratic regimes.

The predators’ list also singled out members and supporters of the dominant Muslim Brotherhood for harassing and physically attacking independent media and journalists critical of the party.

Germany’s Deutsche Welle, in an article marking the 20th World Press Freedom Day, said the fall of dictatorial regimes after the Arab Spring apparently had not brought about any durable guarantees for freedom of expression.

It said that among those targeted were Bassem Youssef, the Egyptian TV satirist, who had to face Egyptian prosecutors over charges of insulting Islam and President Mohamed Morsi.

It also cited the case of Weld El, 15, a Tunisian rapper recently sentenced in absentia to two years in prison for insulting the police.

Freedom House in the United States, while noting a worrying decline in world press freedom, said Libya and Tunisia had retained gains in press freedom won during the Arab Spring revolts.

But in Egypt the media environment declined and was now described as unfree, it said.

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Its not the time of triumph that matters rather its the time of trial that matters.

“A THING long expected,” Mark Twain noted, “takes the form of the unexpected when at last it comes.” The yearning of the Arab masses for self-determination, democracy and human rights has a long history stretching back to the Ottomans, the European colonial rule in North Africa and the British and French mandates following the First World War.

The anti-colonial struggle often led to Arab socialist regimes and not multiparty democracy. The Arab people that resisted republicanism witnessed consolidation of strong dynastic rule.

The protests that began in Tunisia in January 2011 and quickly spread to several Arab states were hailed in highly romantic terms. The original clichés still figure in the international discourse on the changing political landscape in the Arab world but its glowing vistas stand darkened by the post-Qadhafi chaos in Libya, the conflict in Syria, the collapse of the state in Yemen, the uncertainties of Bahrain and the unresolved political and economic issues in Egypt.

The Arab Spring has been no exception to the fact that revolutions are prone to unintended deflections of course. Arab struggles have historically suffered from a deterministic mix of internal contradictions and foreign interventions. First, the affluent Arab states built counter-revolutionary dykes against the rising tide with limited reforms and generous spending of oil revenues on instant welfare schemes. Secondly, external interference came in a concerted western effort to control and redirect the processes of change by diplomatic and military means.

The indigenous dynamics of the Arab Awakening were unmistakable. The UNDP report on Human Development and Poverty in the Arab states (March 2000) documented how the Arab region had lagged behind other regions in moving towards participatory governance by missing out on waves of democratisation that swept across Latin America, East Asia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia in the 1980s and early 1990s. There was also a conspicuous failure to translate economic development into social development with most indices being disappointing.

A decade later, the scene was even more ominous. Leaders in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya had been in power for 25 to 40 years; their authoritarian rule more intolerant of dissent and their political institutions more stagnant than ever before. In Syria, the long rule of Hafez al-Assad had been followed by his son Bashar al-Assad assuming power. Unexpectedly, Bashar al-Assad failed to reform the state, partly because of the reluctance of senior members of the ruling Alawite clan to take risks when the West held a sword of Damocles over Syria, the closest regional ally of Iran.

None of the Arab leaders seriously addressed the deleterious effects of the neo-liberal economics adopted under western advice. As Soumaya Ghannoushi pointed out in the Guardian in March 2011, millions had suffered as state-owned firms (67 per cent of firms in Tunisia; more than 50 per cent in Egypt) were privatised and sold to foreign investors and their local partners.

Ghannoushi identified the upsurge as a rebellion as much against political authoritarianism as against the economic model imposed by the IMF, the World Bank and the European Union. The aging rulers, in particular Hosni Mubarak, also faced simmering discontent because of the failure of their conciliatory Israel policy.

Against this backdrop, western powers can achieve only limited success in redirecting the Arab upsurge to their advantage.
President Sarkozy began by offering French assistance to the then Tunisian president, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, to put down the protests. Washington made pro-Mubarak noises. Once the West comprehended the scale of the uprising, it switched to the lexicon of freedom and liberation.

The climax of this role change was Libya where France and Britain, with Barack Obama leading from behind, deftly converted the UN Security Council resolution 1973, passed in the name of the doctrine of Responsibility to Protect (R2P), into a mandate for a massive and sustained assault on Muammar Qadhafi. Not much is heard of this doctrine now that Libya is ravaged by disparate militias fighting for turf and profit.

Tunisia was a relative success but the Egyptian revolution continues to be characterised by surprises, especially for the West.
There was no chaos as the armed forces led by Field Marshal Mohammed Hussein Tantawi stepped in to ensure stability and the military’s pre-eminence in Egypt’s polity. Since then, radical activists have continued to agitate against the military’s interim rule as they are fearful of it influencing the presidential election and the new constitution.

The other unforeseen development in Egypt is the phenomenal success of Islamist parties in parliamentary elections: the Muslim Brotherhood participating as the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) bagged 47 per cent of seats; the new rightist Salafist Nour Party took another 25 per cent seats. The traditional liberal parties fared badly.

Till the other day, the moderate Muslim Brotherhood seemed ready, much to the chagrin of the secular protesters, to accept the army’s dominance till June. In a remarkable shift, it has risked tension with it by demanding that parliament form a new coalition government to replace the prime minister and the cabinet.

Egypt’s politics is complicated by a notable economic downturn: sharp fall in foreign investment; shrinking of foreign exchange reserves from $36bn in January 2011 to the current $10bn; rising unemployment; double-digit inflation; and a steep drop in tourism revenue. Ironically, the military has run into difficulties with the US that is unabashedly leveraging economic assistance to gain political influence.

Nothing defines the complexity of the Arab Awakening better than Syria where all the sub-texts are heading for a bloody denouement. The regime used gratuitous force against demonstrators in Latakia and Deraa more than a year ago triggering off a spiral of ever-increasing violence by government and armed protesters. An emerging ‘Free Syrian Army’ may well become a conduit of external military interference.

Bashar al-Assad has lost support of Arab states and, no less significantly, of neighbouring Turkey. He now depends heavily on Russia and China that vetoed a Security Council resolution which might have conceivably created space for foreign intervention. Obviously, Syria needs a separate article that should also encompass the politics of influential oil-rich Arab states.
This would be my next contribution to this newspaper.

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Its not the time of triumph that matters rather its the time of trial that matters.

This is not an Arab spring, in my view, nor is it an Arab inferno. It is a process of change that was bound to happen, but one has to be realistic about its chances.”
These are the words of Marwan Muasher, currently VP for studies at Carnegie Endowment, summing up his views of the emerging events in the Arab world and whether they can lead to any lasting outcomes. His speech was part of the third plenary session of the Economic Research Forum (ERF)’s 19th annual conference, providing an outlook for possible scenarios that could result from the rise of Islamist parties to power.
The Battle between Islamist Forces & Secular Elements
Following the overthrow of autocratic regimes, the uprisings started shaping up into a battle between political segments -namely Islamic forces and secular elements- that have surfaced after years of being kept under the lid. However this battle disregards the very essence of the revolutions, which originally set off as battles for pluralism; to consolidate democracy and solidify everybody’s right to be included.
One promising outcome of the revolutions, however, is that the people now have developed the savvy to question, criticize and claim power. Bringing down regimes that have been around for decades in a mere two-week time is an unmistakable threat to the “Holiness” of the rising political forces, especially the religious ones such as the Muslim Brotherhood. The problem with these political forces, Muasher explains, is that their ideologies and slogans have never been put to the test during the previous regimes. Now that they’re in the spot light, promises of reform and slogans like “Islam Is the Solution” must be translated into detailed programs of action in order to gain credibility.
The Economy: Beyond “Bread before Freedom”
Muasher argues that the old regimes’ economic reform programs weren’t wrong, but were incomplete. The problem with the “Bread before Freedom” argument is that it makes way for corruption; they weren’t supported with a proper political system, represented in a strong parliament that works in parallel with the government to address problems and abuses when they arise.
The reason behind the rise and electoral success of Islamic parties can’t really be attributed to their agendas and promises that were never actually put to the test, as much as for their being the only organized element, under the previous regime, among others who weren’t allowed to be organized. Now other political forces are organizing and are becoming neck and neck with Islamists, such as the case in Tunisia between El-Sibsi’s Nidaa Tounes opposition party and Ennahda Islamist Movement, and this is where promises are challenged.
In Muasher’s view, the economy is a major determinant of reform, especially in countries that have undergone transition, and the people are the ones who reward or punish governments, based on their performance through their votes. He predicts that the Islamists’ mask will fall and they will prove to be not any better than autocratic regimes.
Is There A Future for 3rd Forces in the Arab World? Challenges & Opportunities
The way things are going, the crowds are beginning to thin away from Islamists whose performance is coming as a disappointment to many. The Arab world is now witnessing a bipolar monopoly; between political elites and governments without accountability and Islamist movements whose commitment to both politics and religion is highly doubtful. Nonetheless, secular parties aren’t likely to collect the votes that stray from Islamist despotism, for they are not yet as organized.
The public’s skepticism of 3rd forces’ intentions and capacity creates yet another challenge for their future in Arab politics; they are seen as groups that:
try to win elections to serve personal agendas rather than the greater good
do not have clear political programs
do not consolidate their forces or have financial & organizational capabilities
The People vs. Politics
The battles between political forces have undoubtedly created divides between the people themselves, who first started the transitional movements as a battle for pluralism. What’s worse is that most people now know what they’re against rather than what they’re for, which is yet again not only blurring our affiliations but also our identity as an Arab nation.
I strongly agree with Muasher that in order to avoid another autocracy, both Islamist and secular forces need to understand that the future lies in accepting each other rather than their denial of each other. They need to work together to translate the popular movement into an intellectual framework that once again stands for pluralism rather than against deposition.

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Its not the time of triumph that matters rather its the time of trial that matters.

Repeat with one voice, for one faith:

We are all Tunisia in the face of repressive elites.

We are all Tunisia in the face of repressive elites.

The Arab governments and who rules them are,

without exception, thieves.

Thieves!

MUHAMMAD ibn al-Dheeb al-Ajami’s poem titled Tunisian Jasmine allegedly ‘encouraged’ the overthrow of Qatar’s authoritarian rule and also ‘insulted’ the Emir. The poem, posted online in 2010, expresses the poet’s support for the Arab Spring Tunisian uprising against the “repressive elites”. In response, the poet has been sentenced to life and is currently under solitary confinement.

Human rights observers in the Gulf and beyond have criticised the move, urging Qatar to free the poet as his poem is merely a form of peaceful criticism. The sentence, however, is very much in line with tough measures in Gulf states against any form of dissent against their rule. — Haneen Rafi

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Its not the time of triumph that matters rather its the time of trial that matters.