Desert Kingdoms to Global Powers by Rory Miller

Author:Rory Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300192346
Publisher: Yale University Press

CHAPTER 7

SELF-DEFENCE

‘I and my brother against my cousin, and I and my cousin against the stranger.’

– Arab Proverb

For the ordinary people of the Arab world, especially the region’s huge population of under-twenty-fives, the Arab Spring was a spontaneous and unexpected expression of people power that, at least while it lasted, was simply the most significant reform movement in the Arab world in living memory. For those local leaders across the Arab Gulf, the events of 2011 – popular revolt in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya; large-scale anti-regime protests in Bahrain; smaller-scale unrest in Oman, Kuwait and the oil-rich Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia; and the start of the ongoing quasi-civil war in Syria – threatened to undermine all their hard-won success in consolidating stability at home and projecting influence abroad over the previous decades. Though the root causes of the Arab Spring ran deep and cannot be traced to any one event, there is wide agreement that the drastic action of Mohamed Bouazizi, a downtrodden twenty-something street vendor in the rural Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid, was the catalyst that sparked subsequent events across the Arab world. Bouazizi was not remarkable in any way. Like millions of others in the region he was a high-school dropout with few prospects struggling to deal with the harassment, corruption and the callousness of daily life. When he could take no more he set himself on fire on the same busy city streets where he had plied his meagre trade.

His act of defiance sparked mass protests in villages, towns and cities across Tunisia against the rule of President Zine El Abidine Ben-Ali. A soldier and security technocrat turned politician, Ben-Ali had seized the presidency in a bloodless coup in 1987. After a quarter of a century in office he was forced out amid the countrywide revolt in January 2011, less than a week before Bouazizi died from his burns and wounds. The Jasmine Revolution, as the revolt against Ben-Ali in Tunisia came to be known, inspired millions of angry citizens in half a dozen Arab countries to take to the streets. They protested against elite indifference and corruption, a lack of jobs and economic opportunities and, worst of all, a lack of hope.

Soon after Ben-Ali was overthrown, thousands of protestors set up camp in Tahrir Square in central Cairo. They called for Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak to give up power. For most of the modern era, Egypt had been the pivotal state in the Arab world – the big pebble on the Arab beach, as British diplomats had referred to it in the past. Mubarak had led the country for three decades. During those years he played a central role in regional politics and diplomacy and was a highly visible figure on the world stage. Few imagined that the protests in Cairo would lead to his overthrow. Mubarak was a much more important figure than Ben-Ali, but like the ousted Tunisian leader he was also a former senior military officer who had lost touch with his people after a generation in power.

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