Vijay Prashad has combined history, culture, and politics into a superbly researched and very clear work on the Arab Spring. He must also have needed courage. On the American radio programme Democracy Now! in March 2011, he mentioned one Khalifa Hifter, who had led a Chad-based rebellion against the Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qadhafi and was later financed and housed by the United States government near the CIA headquarters in Virginia and even resurfaced during the Libyan civil war. That evening, Prashad found that his computer had been hacked and his database destroyed.
In West Asia and North Africa, events did indeed seem to portend a new dawn. On December 17, 2010, the central Tunisian fruit vendor Mohamed Bouazizi — a graduate who could find no other work — set himself on fire; he died on January, 11, 2011. Nationwide protests erupted, and within three days the 23-year reign of Zine el Abedine Ben Ali ended as the despot fled to Saudi Arabia. On January 25, about 50,000 people gathered in Cairo’s Tahrir Square; the number soon rose to 300,000. On February 11, Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year dictatorship collapsed, and in one country after another throughout the region, an entire civilisation humiliated by poverty, by viciously repressive regimes, and by three decades — at least — of being second-class citizens on the world stage rebelled. They had had enough.
Of course the international media loved the events in Tunisia and Egypt. Young people using the latest gadgets to tweet, facebook, and text their plans were, it seemed, the embodiment of technologically-driven liberation. Furthermore, the young protesters infuriated their rulers, who were bewildered at their own inability to control the protests and, in the glare of instant video and mobile-phone images, could not respond with their usual violence.
Yet when it came to elections, the tech-savvy urban youth, without the funds to create a mass base or organise nationally, stood little chance. Egypt’s Freedom and Justice Party, the Muslim Brotherhood’s political wing, had the immense advantage of its parent body’s nationwide organisation and vast, rural, socially conservative following, and won both the assembly and the presidency; the presidential runner up was Mubarak’s last prime minister, Ahmed Shafik. In Tunisia, where the electoral law required half the candidates to be women and the names of male and female candidates were alternated on the ballot papers, the Islamist party, Ennahda, also won.
Simmering trouble
What the media missed was that trouble had been simmering for a long time and that a key cause was a material one, namely mass hunger — as it had been in the French Revolution. The 2008 Russian and Australian droughts had pushed grain prices sharply upwards; both Egypt and Tunisia import wheat, and angry demonstrations about food prices and cuts in subsidies occurred repeatedly in the years thereafter.
Whatever the causes, once others in the region saw successful popular action they too rose up, but the reaction of the world’s most powerful countries was very different. Prashad incisively shows how the Atlantic powers in particular, specifically the United States, Britain, and France, muttered unhappily about the Brotherhood’s wins in North Africa but had to accept that the elections were free and fair, while in West Asia they claimed to want democracy but did their utmost to preserve the regimes involved.
The reasons are not far to seek; Bahrain hosts the U.S. Fifth Fleet, Yemen is the purported bastion against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and Saudi Arabia is, with Israel, the biggest U.S. ally in the region. All those regimes get away with repressing their Shia minorities. Even the western mutterings about the Brotherhood had a tinge of hypocrisy; the region’s Islamist movements are top-down and authoritarian, and are also economic neoliberals, for being which the International Monetary Fund has praised them. Like the regimes they have replaced, they hate workers, and Prashad details their brutalities against workers’ and other left movements.
For the west, the exceptions were Syria and Libya. The Syrian tragedy is still unfolding, as international action is blocked by strategic and other alliances, as well as Russian and Chinese anger over the way the Atlantic powers traduced the United Nations Security Council in order to impose violent regime change on Libya. Millions of Syrians are paying a terrible price.
Conduct of West
Over Libya, Prashad shows just how dirty western conduct has been. Libya, one of Africa’s wealthiest countries, was seriously harmed by U.N. sanctions imposed in 1992 for its alleged involvement in the bombing of a U.S. airliner over the Scottish village of Lockerbie in 1988 (a crime yet to be satisfactorily explained, even according to some of the families who lost loved ones in the attack). The chaos following the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, however, revived western fears over access to oil; George W. Bush and Tony Blair renewed links with Qadhafi, who while no saint himself was now easy prey for Libyan neoliberals — including his son Saif al-Islam, the politician Mahmoud Jibril, the oil corporations, and consultants like McKinsey.
Sensing likely exclusion from the spoils, the eastern region of Cyrenaica rebelled. This was the excuse the Atlantic powers wanted; Qadhafi had long alienated Saudi Arabia, which effectively pushed the Arab League into supporting the U.N. no-fly zone over Libya (only 11 of the 23 members attended the vote), and the west totally ignored the African Union’s strong mediation plan. Western officials’ wild claims of genocide and mass rape — still unproven — by government forces helped override Arab leaders’ doubts, and by the time the latter withdrew their support for the no-fly zone it was too late. Mahmoud Jibril emerged as prime minister of the new state. And a dead Qadhafi could tell no tales.
What lies ahead for West Asia and North Africa cannot be predicted, but Prashad is right that the Arab lands will not be the same again, even if, as he says, the Arab world, cursed with oil, has seen little economic diversification and no attempt to use its wealth for balanced social development. He has achieved a considerable feat, with a book that deserves to become essential reading, a canonical account of a world-historic chain of events.
ARAB SPRING, LIBYAN WINTER: Vijay Prashad; LeftWord Books, 2254/2A Shadi Khampur, New Ranjit Nagar, New Delhi-110008. Rs. 300.
