A Quest for Change in the Middle East

Change is such an integral part of human history that, as far back as the 5th Century B.C., the great Greek philosopher Heraclitus noted that “All is flux; nothing stays still.” At about the same time, Buddhism—a major religion in Asia—made the same point by declaring “impermanence” one of three “marks of existence.”

What usually drives change is a desire to live or do better—to replace the pains, irritants, and shortcomings of the present with a more perfect future. Unfortunately, that’s not always what happens. Once the status quo is weakened or gone, history can—and often does—move in an unpredicted and undesirable direction. 

For the past six years, global attention has been directed toward just such a dramatic development in the Middle East, an area that includes the Arabian Peninsula, Iran, Egypt, and northeast Africa. History knows few people as restless and discontented as the Arabs have been since the end of World War I, when the Ottoman Empire was divided up between the victorious Great Britain and France.

Egypt became a British protectorate, and was given the control over Palestine, Jordan, and Iraq. The French were put in charge in Syria and Lebanon. The two colonial powers drew boundaries of their spoils that were acceptable to the Europeans, but ignored the complex relationships among the area’s ethnic and religious groups. The result was trouble—states that encompassed a kaleidoscope of frequently antagonistic Sunni, Shiite, and Alawite Arabs; Kurds; the Druze; and Armenian and Maronite Christians.

On top of living with unwanted neighbors, the people of the Middle East found themselves being ruled by a revolving door of unsavory, incompetent, and corrupt military and civilian tyrants. In 1949, the Arabs were still more humiliated by the wholesale eviction of Palestinians from the newly created state of Israel, and their helpless fury grew worse with each military triumph of the Jewish state. During the six decades that followed, the region experienced twelve armed rebellions or full-scale wars and a bloody overthrow of five regimes—a constant and destructive turmoil that kept the area from developing economically, except for the oil-rich Persian Gulf.

Into this overheated, frustrated atmosphere, on December 18, 2010, one of the tens of thousands of poor, unemployed Tunisian youngsters, literally tossed a match that triggered an explosion. His name was Mohamed Bouazizi, and on that day he was, as usual, selling fruit at a roadside stand when a municipal inspector came by and demanded to see his vendor’s license.

Since Bouazizi had neither a license nor money for a bribe, the official confiscated the fruit. Anguished beyond endurance, Bouazizi doused himself with gasoline and set himself afire. His death on January 4, 2011, turned out to be the last straw that broke the thin veneer of stability in a region that, ironically, gave birth to the three great religions of peace: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

The young vendor’s dramatic suicide unleashed the pent-up anger and distress of hundreds of thousands of Tunisian activists, trade unionists, students, professionals, and ordinary Arabs, who collectively poured into the streets to demand a change. It was the most dramatic wave of social and political unrest in Tunisia in decades, and the demonstrators paid a high price. Scores of them died or were injured fighting the security forces and the police, but within a few days they forced Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the country’s unpopular and longtime president, to flee into exile in Saudi Arabia.

The success of the Tunisian rebellion set aflame the rest of the change-hungry region. Led by young, highly educated urban Arabs, fueled by their own frustrations and grievances, and organized with the help of social media, anti-government street protests quickly spread to other Arab countries. By the end of January 2011, the “days of rage”—which usually started after the Muslim prayers on Friday afternoon—began changing the political map of the Middle East.

The most significant early result of the upheaval followed two weeks of massive protests in Cairo’s al Tahrir square. The resignation of Egypt’s president Hosni Mubarak on February 11, 2011, convinced the world that Arabs had embarked on a fundamentally new and better path. Casting for a shorthand name, the press called the region’s liberalization mood “Arab Spring,” an echo of an earlier historic landmark, “the Prague Spring” in Central Europe.

An Early Optimistic “Spring”

Although similar, the Arab upheaval did not quite match the changes that began in the then-Czechoslovakia in January 1968.

In the mid-1960s, the Moscow-subservient Communist government in Prague introduced a few minor reforms that were meant to improve the country’s ailing economy. What followed was a classic example of what happens when a repressive regime tries to ease its controls: once loosened, the whole lid blows off.

Following on the heels of twenty years of Communist dictatorship, the modest reform program triggered a groundswell of demands that climaxed in the election of a reform-minded Communist party boss, Alexander Dubček. 

Building on the country’s democratic past, Dubček promised to enact “socialism with a human face” and loosened restrictions on the freedom of the media, speech, and travel. Within a few weeks, the whole country was agog as its students, artists, and intelligentsia lost their fear of the secret police and launched a crusade for a major political make-over.

Disregarding Dubček’s go-slow agenda, they formed a non-Marxist political party and founded political clubs that agitated for still more freedoms. Censorship of the press and television was scrapped and the 16 million Czechs and Slovaks were free—for the first time since 1948—to travel abroad. By June, their liberalization was in full swing and the term “Prague Spring” had entered the world’s political vocabulary. 

As could have been expected, the Soviets could not tolerate freedom in Eastern Europe. On August 21, 1968, they put an end to the “Prague Spring” by invading the rebellious nation with 200,000 troops and 2,000 tanks. Dubček was removed from power and the Communist party resumed its dictatorship.

The “Arab Spring”

The Arab version of the Czechoslovakian phenomenon followed a similar trajectory in terms of its early success. In addition to El Abidine Ben Ali and Mubarak, rulers had been forced out of office in Libya and Yemen within a year; civil uprisings had erupted in Bahrain and Syria; major protests had broken out in Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, and Sudan; and minor protests had taken place in Mauritania, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Djibouti, Western Sahara, and the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

As in 1968 in Czechoslovakia, however, most of the gains proved short-lived. In November 2011, Egypt’s first free elections in 30 years brought into power the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist party whose early decrees touched off a violent battle between the party members and their liberal opponents. In 2013, a military coup d’etat forced the Brotherhood out of power and eventually replaced it with a repressive regime headed by a former general. Since then, Egypt has returned to the same type of governance it had before Mubarak was ousted. 

In Libya, the August 23, 2011 overthrow of strongman Muammar Gaddafi, unleashed a chaotic free-for-all among competing militias that degenerated into a civil war. The extensive fighting has caused tens of thousands of casualties; involved armed intervention by France and the United States; and, so far, has produced no elections and no government capable of governing the entire state.

The most disastrous consequence of the “Arab Spring” protest movement has been the civil war in Syria, where several pro- and anti-democracy militias are battling the Syrian army in an attempt to depose President Bashar al-Assad. The bloody conflict has so far helped enlarge the territory controlled by the terrorists of the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL); forced the flight of close to a million Syrians to Europe; and caused the death of an estimated 300,000 civilians and fighters—all without removing al-Assad from the presidential palace.

Five years after the first protests in the streets, Tunisia remains the only Arab country to have enjoyed the fruits of its “Spring.” There, the rebellion eventually led to free elections and a thorough democratization, a change that was acknowledged in 2015 by the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the four civic organizations that stepped in during the rebellion and made a “decisive contribution to the building of a pluralistic democracy.”

Elsewhere in the Middle East, the increasingly heard new name for the “Arab Spring” is “Arab Winter.”