Tag Archives: Arab Spring

Watching Egypt’s revolution die

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Arsenal Bolt: Quick updates on the news stories we’re following.

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Germany’s Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom – an NGO dedicated to promoting liberalization of governments and markets – recently announced it was closing its longstanding Egypt office, citing unsustainable pressure from the illiberal environment of the current military-backed government. Ronald Meinardus, now directing the South Asia office in New Delhi but formerly directing FNFF’s Egypt office, reflects in The Globalist on his experience watching the revolution die:

Never, on the other hand, will I forget the images of the massacre at Rabaa Al Adawiya where, in a blood bath, Egypt’s military ended all democratic experiments in the Arab world’s biggest nation.
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One of my biggest frustrations was that long time Arab friends and partners would publicly argue that their part of the world was neither ready nor suitable for liberal ideas and practices. Many of these people would support authoritarian rule, arguing it was by far better than giving space to the Islamists, whom they saw as the biggest threat.

The announcement of the closure of the regional office of the liberal Foundation in Cairo coincides with the fifth anniversary of what used to be termed Egypt’s Revolution of January 25.
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Future chroniclers without ideological blinders will note that Egyptians enjoyed most freedoms under the brief rule of the Muslim Brothers who, not by chance, won every single democratic election they were allowed to participate in.

 

Tunisia debates ex-regime corruption amnesty bill

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Claiming it is a recessionary necessity for bringing back domestic investment by Tunisian businessmen and government bureaucrats affiliated with the former regime, Tunisia’s leading party (which is itself relatively aligned with the old regime) is proposing a controversial law to accelerate and streamline the process for forgiving corruption-related crimes committed before the 2010 revolution:

The economic reconciliation bill proposed by the presidency, however, calls for “an amnesty … in favour of civil servants, public officials and the like, regarding acts related to financial corruption and embezzlement of public funds, as long as such acts did not seek to achieve personal gain”, according to an English translation of the bill provided to Al Jazeera by the ICTJ.

 
Oh, well, if the embezzlement of public funds was not meant “to achieve personal gain” then I guess it must be ok.

That’s about as plausible as a former deputy governor in China’s Shandong province recently claiming that “nearly all of the money he accepted [5.6 million yuan] had simply been set aside – and that he was in principle saving money for the country.”

For pro-reform Egyptians, the terrorists have already won

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Summary | Arab Spring: Massive undirected terror unleashed by foreign fundamentalists and diehard regimes cooled enthusiasm for protest.

An Issue Brief entitled “Egypt’s Next Phase: Sustainable Instability” by Michael Wahid Hanna for The Century Foundation (published on July 1, 2015, just ahead of the second anniversary of the military coup d’état) includes a section making the case that the catastrophic region-wide failure of the Arab Spring — especially its particularly violent self-immolation in Syria, Libya, and Yemen — has deterred Egyptians from seeking new rounds of reform against their reactionary government.

While Egypt’s security situation is deteriorating and its security establishment has proven unsuited to the task at hand, particularly with respect to dealing with the low-level insurgency in the Sinai peninsula, the rising tide of violence, terrorism, and conflict throughout the Arab world have had a profound effect on Egyptian society and have curbed the impulse for political change. In the current regional context, political change and efforts at reform are seen by most Egyptians to be risky endeavors with potentially disastrous unintended consequences.
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This regionalized climate of instability has helped solidify support for the Sisi regime, albeit ambivalent support among certain segments of Egyptian society. The horrifying regional examples of state collapse and civil war have created widespread aversion and revulsion at the prospect of political violence and terrorism. While the proliferation of such violence might damage the credibility of the Sisi regime and its competence over time, it is unlikely to produce widespread public support for radical political change and potential upheaval amongst a cautious and fatigued society.

 

Status and outcomes of Arab Spring uprisings as of February 2015. Map by Ian Remsen for Wikimedia.

Status and outcomes of Arab Spring uprisings as of February 2015. Map by Ian Remsen for Wikimedia.

Tunisia’s Rachid Ghannouchi addresses social issues

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Rachid Ghannouchi, the leader of the Islamist democratic party Ennahda and one of the leading practical theorists of Islamic democracy outside Turkey, continues to make the rounds with European interviewers (see previous link for more). This time he gave interviews to French journalist Olivier Ravanello for a book called “On the Subject of Islam.”

While past interviews have often focused on political or economic theory questions, the book’s pull quotes on social issues have made more waves this time (at least in the relevant, Francophone circles).

Unfortunately, because the interviews were published in French and Ghannouchi’s not an extremely high-profile person if you don’t follow this topic regularly like I do, I’m guessing it’s not getting much play yet in English-language media. The quotes are collected in the French-language Tunisian edition of Huffington Post.

He states perhaps a problematic view on some issues like blasphemy laws or inheritance rights, but made interestingly pragmatic comments on abortion & homosexuality for a relatively conservative region (though Tunisia is more liberal than the region in general). I did the translations below myself and converted idiomatic phrasing where appropriate, so these are not 1:1 translations.

Quotes on homosexuality, in principle and from a legal perspective:

“We don’t approve of it. But Islam doesn’t spy on people. It preserves privacy. Everyone lives his life as he wants to, and everyone is responsible before his creator… The law does not follow people into their private lives. … What happens in your house concerns nobody. It is your choice, and nobody has the right to enter and ban you from doing this or that.”

 
This would be an improvement over existing laws in Tunisia, which the Huffington Post article says criminalized homosexuality and can result in a three-year prison sentence. Unfortunately, Mr. Ghannouchi’s own party refused to change the law when it controlled the Human Rights and Justice Ministry during the national transition.

On the former, he endorses contraception as legitimate for women to prevent pregnancy; abortion in the first 4 (maybe 5) months, i.e. “before the development of the fetus” is possibly morally permissible. After that he opposes it on principle as an “aggression against life.” According to the Huffington Post article, this is consistent with the Tunisian law allowing abortion in the first 3 months for any reason — and for physical or mental health reasons thereafter.

Essentially, Ghannouchi’s view on abortion is approximately in line with the U.S. Supreme Court’s view in Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992, wherein viability was estimated to be as early as 22 weeks and states could potentially ban or severely restrict it after that… But his contraception view is a lot more pragmatic than that of many U.S. Republicans.

After ISIS attack: Rise of the Tunisian Army?

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Flag-of-TunisiaAfter an ISIS terrorist attack in Tunisia’s capital left 23 dead, Tunisia’s new government announced the deployment of the Tunisian Army to protect major population centers. Reuters:

“After a meeting with the armed forces, the president has decided large cities will be secured by the army,” the president’s office said in a statement.

Middle East Monitor:

[…] the decision comes after a cabinet meeting with the three armies and the High Security Council attended by President Beji Caid Essebsi.

Essid stressed that the Tunisian authorities were working to prevent the re-occurrence of similar terrorist operations, noting “that any other terrorist operation will have very serious consequences for the country”.

The prime minister pointed out that the army and security agencies are equipped with everything they need to defend the country and cooperate with their allies. A deal to purchase eight US made Black Hawk helicopters is being concluded and the helicopters are expected to arrive in Tunisia during the second half of this year, Essid said.

 
It’s a very unusual move to deploy the Tunisian Army domestically, in contrast with peer nations across North Africa and the Middle East. Keeping the Army on the border or in the barracks was a core (self-preservation) principle of modern Tunisia’s founder, Habib Bourguiba, and has been maintained to present day. Badra Gaaloul wrote for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace about this atypical trend back in November 2011, less than a year into the Arab Spring:

The political and social prominence that the military has assumed over the last year [2011] is unprecedented in Tunisia’s history. Unlike Egypt or Algeria—where the military beds with both politician and businessman and seeks the protection of its own economic interests—the Tunisian counterpart lacks political experience, as former regimes have deliberately kept it far away from the political sphere. This strategy dates to 1962, when the military fell out of favor with the first post-independence president, Habib Bourguiba, after a Lazhar Chraiti’s attempted coup. After the imprisonment or execution of key officers, Bourguiba restricted the army’s power through institutional mechanisms; in 1968, he gave the paramilitary National Guard (technically a civilian force) oversight over the army—and this arrangement has generated a long-standing antagonism ever since.

Zein El Abidine Ben Ali followed Bourguiba’s footsteps. His crackdown on the military was the harshest in its history. Ben Ali (himself from a military background) focused on preemptively weakening the army and monopolizing power by marginalizing the military establishment: in 1991, he accused a group of officers of plotting a coup. The officers maintained that the charges against them were fabricated to discourage others from thinking about a rise to political power through the military. Officers accused of involvement or belonged to Islamist groups were imprisoned, placed under house arrest, or forced into early retirement. Between 1991 and 2011, the total number of personnel was reduced to about 40,000. Ben Ali reduced the ministry of defense’s budget, delayed promotions, and introduced a compulsory retirement for often the most competent officers. The military’s role was strictly defined as defending the country, contributing to economic development, dealing with natural disasters, and taking part in UN-led global peacekeeping efforts.

 
Although the Tunisian Army took center stage again very briefly during the late 2010 Tunisian Revolution that sparked the Arab Spring, the Army restricted its role to protecting voting sites from attacks and filling in for police until the latter returned to their jobs. The police and internal security forces were spooked by the initial uprising, which began as a protest against chronic abuses by police that have fostered a climate of mass resentment and terrorist sympathizing for many years in Tunisia.

It seems likely that the huge gap between public support for the non-meddlesome Tunisian Army and public hatred for the abusive police and security forces may have encouraged the decision to involve the Army more heavily in the aftermath of the terrorist attack in Tunis. However, the longer the Army finds itself in the role of a police force and domestic counterterrorism force, the likelier it becomes that it loses credibility and support. Moreover, it may come to be seen as bearing shared responsibility with the Old Guard leadership of the new coalition government for any crackdown that is probably about to happen.

Study on Syria finds concrete link between drought, climate, the war

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A new study found that prolonged drought conditions (directly associated with warming of the global climate) in Syria for several years preceding the war pushed over a million people to migrate from the northern countryside to cities in the 2007-2011 period, fostering substantially more unrest and instability than usual by the time the Arab Spring sparked protests and an uprising that became the Syrian civil war. While many factors caused the war, this seems to have exacerbated or accelerated it.

“There are various things going on, but you’re talking about 1.5 million people migrating from the rural north to the cities,” said climate scientist Richard Seager at Columbia, a co-author of the study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “It was a contributing factor to the social unravelling that occurred that eventually led to the civil war.”

 
These results are among some of the most definitive so far in proving not just a general environmental/resource stress factor in civil unrest but stress factors specifically connected to global warming.

The study in Syria is also not the first link identified between global warming-related droughts and the upheaval of the Arab Spring. Previously, drought conditions in Ukrainian and Russian export breadbaskets in the summer of 2010 — also thought to be a result of global warming — have been tied to skyrocketing wheat and bread prices in Egypt, which was a major contributing factor in the January 2011 revolution.

Pictured: Destroyed Syrian Army tanks, August 2012, after the Battle of Azaz. (Credit: Christiaan Triebert via Wikipedia)

Pictured: Destroyed Syrian Army tanks, August 2012, after the Battle of Azaz. (Credit: Christiaan Triebert via Wikipedia)

4-party grand coalition deal reached in Tunisia

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Four parties and some independents have formed a grand coalition government in Tunisia after months of struggling to assemble a coalition that had a majority but did not include the second-place Ennahda (the main Islamic democrats party), which led much of the transition after the Arab Spring.

Eventually, first place Nidaa Tounes (the secular Bourguibist party), which leads the new cabinet and holds the presidency, recognized that the math wasn’t there to leave out Ennahda and invited them to join, along with two other secular parties, Free Patriotic Union and Afek Tounes. After the October 2014 elections, Nidaa Tounes controls about 40% of the seats in the unicameral Assembly of the Representatives of the People, while Ennahda controls about 32%. Between them, they hold over 70% of the seats and about 85% of the seats with the addition of the 3rd and 5th largest parties.

This has left the new coalition on the receiving end of charges that it has restored One-Party Rule (like what the country experienced for much of its post-independence period), but that ignores the reality that other parties captured very little of the vote but won enough seats to make a smaller coalition very difficult. 12 parties won more than 1% of the vote, and 14 parties plus independents hold seats. The bulk of votes and seats went to Nidaa Tounes and Ennahda. The margin between 2nd (Ennahda) and 3rd place (Free Patriotic Union) is a whopping 53 seats.

Last month, Nidaa Tounes had proposed a coalition with the 3rd largest party (probably its closest ideological match) but that fell 5 seats short of a majority, and neither 2nd place Ennahda nor the 4th place marxist-leninist-secularists of the Popular Front supported a minority government arrangement. (The Popular Front were not invited to participate in this government either and have announced their displeasure with the new coalition too. 5th place Afek Tounes joined instead.)

Bringing four of the five biggest parties on board (including Ennahda), while presenting a rather overwhelming unity force, guarantees that the coalition could survive even if one of them drops out later. Moreover, it at least gives a say in governance to a collective 70%+ of voters, without giving disproportionate power to parties that won just 1-2% of the vote each last October. After all, even a 3-party coalition of Nidaa Tounes, Free Patriotic Union, and Popular Front (or Afek Tounes) — but without Ennahda — would have only had the support of only about 45% of all voters, even if it held a majority of seats in the assembly. That’s a good way to delegitimize democracy at the start. In contrast, this four-party coalition will be providing majority rule as well as representing various political factions and minorities.

On balance, this grand coalition is excellent news, in my opinion. This is the path forward for the next few years in the first term of elective democracy under the new, post-Arab Spring Constitution. Everyone is on the hook for failures and bad decisions as part of the coalition, so it removes some incentives to be obstructionist or to root for failure. It also encourages party supporters not to fight each other outside a political context.

Major, controversial ministries like Interior, Defense, and Justice have been given to independents, which might also help defuse tensions and reduce the risk of those offices being turned into political weapons. Less controversial key ministries have been divided between Nidaa Tounes and Ennahda, with the winning secularists representing the high-profile public face of Tunisia (via the Foreign Ministry and Finance Ministry for example), while the lower-profile but important work at the Employment Ministry goes to the Islamists, along with various junior ministries. Giving the Islamists the Employment Ministry seems an ideal choice, as that’s a major focus/concern of the party and has been a big factor in their popularity. The coalition’s other big challenge will be combating the appeal of terrorist recruiters in Tunisia.

Prime Minister Habib Essid spoke to members of the Assembly after the coalition proposal was overwhelmingly adopted and said “The motto of this government will be work, then work… and nothing other than work.”

Time to get to it, then.

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