The Fires of Spring: A Post-Arab Spring Journey Through the Turbulent New Middle East - Turkey, Iraq, Qatar, Jordan, Egypt, and Tunisia
320
The Fires of Spring: A Post-Arab Spring Journey Through the Turbulent New Middle East - Turkey, Iraq, Qatar, Jordan, Egypt, and Tunisia
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Overview
Turkey, Iraq, Qatar, Jordan, Egypt, and Tunisia
The “Arab Spring” all started when a young Tunisian fruit seller set himself on fire in protest of a government official confiscating his apples and slapping his face. The aftermath of that one personal protest grew to become the Middle East movement known as the Arab Spring—a wave of disparate events that included protests, revolutions, hopeful reform movements, and bloody civil wars.
The Fires of Spring is the first book to bring the post-Arab Spring world to light in a holistic context. A narrative of author Shelly Culbertson’s journey through six countries of the Middle East, The Fires of Spring tells the story by weaving together a sense of place, insight about issues of our time, interviews with leaders, history, and personal stories. Culbertson navigates the nuances of street life and peers into ministries, mosques, and women’s worlds. She delves into what Arab Spring optimism was about, and at the same time sheds light on the pain and dysfunction that continues to plague parts of the region. The Fires of Spring blends reportage, travel memoir, and analysis in this complex and multifaceted portrait.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466874954 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 04/19/2016 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Shelly Culbertson has lived, worked, and traveled extensively in the Middle East. She is a Middle East analyst at the RAND Corporation and formerly worked at the U.S. Department of State. Her commentaries about the Middle East have appeared in Newsweek and U.S. News&World Report, on CNN.com, and elsewhere. Culbertson is the author of The Fires of Spring: A Post-Arab Spring Journey Through the Turbulent New Middle East.
Read an Excerpt
The Fires of Spring
A Post-Arab Spring Journey Through the Turbulent New Middle East
By Shelly Culbertson
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2016 Shelly CulbertsonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-7495-4
CHAPTER 1
Tunisia
Avenue Bourguiba on Election Day
It was Election Day in Tunisia — December 21, 2014.
Concrete barriers, metal partitions, and hoops of razor wire divided the Parisian-style city blocks of Avenue Bourguiba in Tunis. Underneath tranquil hedge-cut ficus trees and ornamental iron lampposts, white police vans with metal bars on the windows were parked every few blocks. On the corners, policemen and soldiers in uniform stood guard with machine guns. Tanks in desert camouflage pointed guns into the street.
But there was a general sense of calm and order, a stillness in the streets. There were no banners, no election slogans, no rallies, no music, no chanting crowds of people, and no one was handing out flyers to promote candidates. It was quiet. People walked past me on the street with index fingers stained brown with ink, a mark that showed they had voted so that they could not vote again. Others chatted outdoors in the chilly December weather, sipping cappuccinos in prosperous cafés fronted by palm trees. A newscaster with a film crew quietly spoke into a microphone in front of a camera on a corner. I walked past the Art Nouveau Municipal Theater, a Mac makeup shop, Benetton, pizza parlors, and shawarma stands.
People were acting like it was normal, not a historic peaceful transfer of power based on elections and the rule of law as set out in a new constitution, after a major revolution that toppled a dictator and sparked other revolutions around the Middle East. With the bright blue sky and fluffy clouds, all in all, it was a peaceful day of democracy in beautiful Tunisia.
During the revolution in Tunisia, the first Arab Spring country to unseat a national leader, crowds surged through this street. "Dégage. Dégage. Dégage," they chanted, French for "Get out, get out, get out." In January 2011, when protesters scaled the walls of the Ministry of Interior here on Avenue Bourguiba, President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali fled the country to Saudi Arabia, after nearly three decades in power.
The Economist chose Tunisia as its 2015 country of the year because of its transition: "The idealism engendered by the Arab Spring has mostly sunk in bloodshed and extremism, with a shining exception: Tunisia. ... Its economy is struggling and its polity is fragile; but Tunisia's pragmatism and moderation have nurtured hope in a wretched region and a troubled world. Mabrouk, Tunisia!" And a group of Tunisian civil society organizations won the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize for their role in negotiations and building a pluralistic democracy during and after Tunisia's revolution.
Tunisia's elections were hailed as momentous, both for Tunisia and for the troubled Middle East. The 2011 upheaval had been followed by constructive negotiations within society about Tunisia's values, the ratification of a new constitution, peaceful elections, and a national truth and dignity commission to investigate past government abuses. However, Tunisia's tenuously hopeful new direction was threatened by terrorist attacks that killed sixty people in 2014 and 2015.
Avenue Bourguiba is a place of deep symbolism for Tunisians. The street tells the story of Tunisia. Avenue Bourguiba's architecture reflects the era of French colonialism that began in 1881 when the French took what was then the Ottoman province of Tunisia from the weakening Ottoman Empire. It is named after Habib Bourguiba, who led Tunisia's anticolonial struggle against the French, became Tunisia's first president, and modernized the country. But Bourguiba also created an autocratic government that his successor, Ben Ali, took to new levels. Protesters who toppled the dictatorship of Ben Ali assembled in Avenue Bourguiba's wide-open spaces, demanding that he leave because of his excesses. Avenue Bourguiba has been an avenue of tear gas, as well as of cafés, florists, and bookstores.
Under Ben Ali, suppression of dissent, torture, imprisonment for political views, and trumped-up charges against political challengers were common. Indeed, as I sought out interviews with Tunisia's political and thought leaders, I found that a surprising number had been charged with crimes relating to their political views and communication. Some had been tried, imprisoned, beaten by police, tortured, or lived in exile.
Tunisia's economy under Ben Ali was a corrupt den of crony capitalism, with business policies set up to favor himself, his wife, his family, and friends. The World Bank described Tunisia's economy as "asphyxiated by its own corruption." Business regulations, according to the World Bank, were manipulated to such an extent that a fifth of private sector profits in the country accrued to Ben Ali's associates. When U.S. diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks described the extravagant lifestyles of Ben Ali's extended family, including lavish mansions and a pet tiger fed with prime steak, the public became enraged.
Then, in the hardscrabble town of Sidi Bouzid, the young fruit-seller Mohammed Bouazizi set himself on fire in protest of the petty corruption of officials that prevented him from supporting his family by selling fruit at his fruit stand. Something resonated with Tunisians all over the country. They wanted change. Protests spread through villages and towns along the coast, in the interior, and in the south.
The revolution started as youth protests. And then civil society came out in mass: the labor unions, the military, Islamists, secularists, and the political parties. When the protests started, the military's decision to not intervene sent a signal of support to the protesters. Bloggers organized protests and narrated the events inside Tunisia to the outside world when journalists were prohibited. Western journalists dubbed it the Jasmine Revolution, after Tunisia's national flower, and in a nod to the wave of protests and government overthrows named after colors and flowers that swept countries of the former Soviet Union and Balkans in the early 2000s, such as the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and the Rose Revolution in Georgia.
The revolution in Tunisia took the world by surprise. From the outside, Tunisia looked moderate, prosperous, and stable. But underneath that façade of stability were layered decades of frustration. The Tunisian people had had enough of suppressed freedom of speech and conscience, corruption and nepotism, a stifled economy, and imprisonment and torture.
And then Ben Ali and his hated regime, suddenly, were gone.
Dégage. Dégage. Dégage, I repeated to myself as I walked along Avenue Bourguiba.
Revolution spread elsewhere in the Middle East. Tunisia's upheaval against its oppressive government made other Arab youth want the same for their countries. Al Jazeera broadcast images of the protests, captivating the world with a narrative of heroic youth demanding change. Al Jazeera's reporting created a common narrative, with shared assumptions that the governments were bad and revolutions were good.
Fraught with conflict and uncertainty, the years since then have not been smooth for Tunisia. After Ben Ali fled, elections were held for an interim government. While the revolution started as a youth movement, democracy favored Islamist groups, long repressed by Ben Ali's government and excluded from power, but the only significantly organized opposition to the regime. A plurality of votes for the interim government was for Tunisia's Islamist political party Ennahda. Ennahda, recognizing the need for power-sharing with parties that were not Islamist, joined with the next two largest political parties (both center-left) for a unity government called the troika. They were set with the task of drawing up a constitution in a year. But despite the jubilation and solidarity of the revolution, negotiations for the constitution that would define Tunisia's postrevolutionary order gridlocked. The Islamists and the secularists could not come to agreement on fundamental questions about the basis for society in the constitution.
While the constitution was being negotiated, both domestic and international events made Tunisians fearful of instability in their country. Two Tunisian opposition parliamentarians were assassinated by extremists. An angry mob firebombed the U.S. embassy in Tunis and an American school. More protests erupted in Tunisia against the assassinations and violent events. As many as three thousand Tunisians traveled to Iraq and Syria to join ISIS, making Tunisians the largest group of foreign fighters for ISIS. Tunisia's Ministry of Interior announced that it had blocked an additional eight thousand Tunisians from going to fight. While Ennahda was not the perpetrator of those incidents, many criticized them for ineffectiveness in maintaining security, creating a permissive environment for extremist Islamist groups, incompetence in administration, and pushing the country in a more religious direction. Elsewhere in the region, after Arab Spring movements, Libya and Syria deteriorated into civil war. Events in Egypt provided a tale of caution. Like in Tunisia, after Arab Spring protests, Egyptians had also elected an Islamist-led government (the Muslim Brotherhood). After widespread civilian protests about the Muslim Brotherhood's abuses of power and poor performance in government, in 2013, Egypt's military overthrew them, with killings and mass imprisonments.
These events inside and outside of Tunisia provided an example of what Tunisians did not want — the disorder, violence, and chaos overtaking other countries in the region. In retrospect, these events served a purpose. They brought all sides together, incentivizing compromises. After negotiations, in a display of pragmatism, the Islamist Ennahda-led government agreed to step aside for a technocratic government, but remained a leader in the constitutional process. Negotiations for the constitution got back on track. In January 2014, Tunisia's newly drafted constitution was approved nearly unanimously by the Constituent Assembly.
After ratification of the constitution, a new political party called Nidaa Tunis formed as a coalition of essentially anybody but the Islamists. A figure from the Ben Ali regime, Beji Caid Essebsi, was at the new party's head. With a political career beginning in 1941, Essebsi had served as minister of interior, minister of defense, and minister of foreign affairs. His appeal to experience, stability, and being non-Islamist attracted support from broad sectors of society. The secular Nidaa party came out first in parliamentary elections, the Islamist Ennahda party second. And then, there were the presidential elections that very day as I walked around Tunis. Essebsi won.
With Essebsi elected, however, others worried that this could signal a return to the abuses of power of Ben Ali. The pendulum had swung back to the government of a member of the old regime — a democratically elected counterrevolution.
This would be the test for the provisions of Tunisia's new constitution that institutionalized more participation and placed limits on presidential power.
But even with all this, unlike the other Arab Spring countries, Tunisia weathered the Arab Spring aftershocks. Why was this? During my journey through Tunisia, I wanted to learn how Tunisia stayed stable when other Arab Spring countries did not. How had Tunisia managed to balance the interests of its Islamists and secularists? What will prevent Tunisia from returning to dictatorship? What did Tunisia's revolution accomplish?
I think that the biggest factor to Tunisia's post Arab Spring accomplishments was the commitment of Tunisia's strong civil society and leadership — both secular and Islamist — to working out differences at the negotiating table. Throughout my interviews in Tunisia, people repeatedly talked about tough compromises and persistent efforts at solutions. Over and over, people used a curious phrase: the need to respect "the other." Use of the phrase is a recognition of differences, our inherent tendency to dehumanize those who are not like us, and the explicit need to make conscious efforts to overcome that.
My Tunisian friend Adel summed it up: "Tunisia is a showcase, and it has got to succeed. We would like to be the lighthouse for everybody. We got rid of a dictatorship."
To learn more about the protests in Tunisia's revolution, I walked to a café along the Avenue Bourguiba to meet Lina Ben Mhenni, a blogger and protest leader.
Blogging the Arab Spring
When Mohammed Bouazizi set himself on fire in Sidi Bouzid, setting off the youth demonstrations that sparked Tunisia's revolution, blogger Lina Ben Mhenni rushed there to record what was happening and tell the world about it. While the censored Tunisian media was not covering the protests, Ben Mhenni took pictures of the demonstrations and police violence, and posted them on her blog, A Tunisian Girl. She was the only blogger present in Sidi Bouzid and Kasserine when government forces killed fourteen protesters. The international press was severely limited, and local journalists could not report freely in Tunisia. Her blog became one of the most influential sources of information during Tunisia's revolution.
"I went to the hospitals and saw the corpses. I met the families," she said. "What we were trying to do was break the media blackout to show what was going on in Tunisia and mobilize people," she explained, as we sat sipping café crème in a marble-floored aging grande dame of a hotel on Avenue Bourguiba.
Other people sent her videos that she posted on her blog; she helped other bloggers; and she organized protests. Ben Mhenni also did freelance reporting for news channels like Al Jazeera English, among others. She was widely reported to have been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2012 for her role in Tunisia's revolution. Since Tunisia's revolution, she has served as a spokesperson for freedom of speech and human rights in Tunisia.
"Why did you start blogging?" I asked.
She started her blog in 2007, writing about a mix of personal and political issues, including her poetry, photos, and essays on human rights and social problems. The trouble started in 2010 under Ben Ali, she said, when she and two friends organized an antigovernment demonstration. Police arrested her two friends (both men) and raided her parents' house to take her computers, equipment, and cameras. The government blocked her blog inside Tunisia, and so only people outside Tunisia or people logging in through a proxy could access it. Her audience became the world outside. She wrote in English and French.
"When Tunisia's revolution happened in 2011, the rest of the world did not expect it. But something about it resonated and spread through the Middle East. What was Tunisia's revolution about?" I asked.
"They wanted a decent life," she said. "We were living under a dictatorship, with too much corruption, nepotism, and violence. It was a police state. There was injustice, and marginalization of the remote areas of the countryside. People were fed up with all of this. The slogan was 'employment, freedom, social justice, and dignity' — that summarizes it."
"Did the revolution accomplish what you and others hoped it would?" I asked.
She shook her head no. She was very disappointed. She argued in op-eds in The Guardian and on CNN that Tunisia's leaders have failed the "dignity revolution."
"We can't say that a country is free and that we have democracy just because we had elections," she paused. "I don't think that people died to have elections."
She did not see progress in the four purposes of the revolution: employment, freedom, social justice, and dignity. "People are suffering with the same social problems and dignity problems. Until now, despite the fact that we had a new government, there was no real willingness to change things."
The revolution was hijacked by the political parties, she thought, and in particular by Ennahda. "Instead of dealing with the real problems of Tunisians, to find a solution and fulfill the directions of the revolution, they drove us into a useless debate about religion and identity and succeeded in dividing the county. Those who are with them are good Muslims, and those who are against them are viewed as nonbelievers."
Ben Mhenni was exasperated with the election of secularist Nidaa as well. "Now the revolution is confiscated again. The Nidaa party is infiltrated by people of the old regime. As a person who took part in the revolution, I am so sad to see people from the old regime."
She boycotted the elections because of this. "I chose not to vote because neither of the two candidates represented me," she explained. Essebsi, who had just been elected, was part of the old regime, and his opponent, Moncef Marzouki, was unofficially affiliated with the Islamists. But Ben Mhenni was widely criticized for that position, as both candidates had been chosen with significant democratic support among Tunisians; not voting seemed not constructive, as Tunisia needed a way forward based on pragmatic compromise, not a desire for an unattainable idealistic perfection that could lead to gridlock.
"But Tunisia is stable, while other Arab Spring countries are not," I noted. "Why is that? It is being held up as a model."
"We don't have bloodbaths," she said. "But it is not true that everything is okay. We have terrorism. The situation is not stable. When we do a revolution, it is to improve things, not to regress. Unfortunately everything is regressing in Tunisia."
But giving her optimism were the many young people who continue to play the role of watchdogs of democracy. "Freedom of speech is the only thing that we have from the revolution, and we have to preserve it," she said.
I wondered if freedom of speech was enough; Tunisia needed institutions, new initiatives, and security to lead them forward as a functioning, healthy state.
"Your blog in particular has been an important part of freedom of speech, and social media has been crucial as well. What do you think was the role of your blog, and the blogs of other people in the revolution?" I asked. For example, the blog Nawaat provided a platform for citizen dissidents and political debates and offered advice to other bloggers on circumventing government censorship. Other blogs had exposed corruption or government power abuses.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Fires of Spring by Shelly Culbertson. Copyright © 2016 Shelly Culbertson. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
A Note on the Text,
Map,
INTRODUCTION,
TUNISIA,
TURKEY,
IRAQ,
JORDAN,
QATAR,
EGYPT,
CONCLUSION,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,
Acknowledgments,
About the Author,
Copyright,