A History of the Middle East (72 page)

Turkey’s reorientation might have proved less significant had it not been for the dwindling of other traditional regional heavyweights
such as Egypt, Iran and Iraq, as well as the waning of US influence following the Iraq imbroglio. As it was, thanks to these factors Turkey recouped an influence not felt since the Ottoman Empire’s collapse. By the end of the first decade of the millennium, Ankara had transformed its geopolitical standing in the region. Turkey’s exports to the region swelled sevenfold in as many years, reaching $31 billion by 2008, and Turkish companies secured contracts to build airports in Cairo, Libya, Tunisia, Qatar and the UAE, and a crude-oil refinery in Iran. Sidelining his secular-leaning foreign officials, Erdogan projected Turkey’s soft power with a vastly expanded Islamic relief network, particularly in Gaza. He further assuaged a series of historic regional grievances, reopening the border with Armenia (closed since 1993), and congratulating ‘his friend’ Ahmadinejad on his 2009 election victory. In 2005 Syria ended its longstanding territorial claim to Hatay, a province the French mandate granted to Turkey in 1939, and in return Turkey eased Syria’s diplomatic isolation, lifting visa restrictions on Syrian nationals, connecting the two countries’ gas and electricity networks and laying the foundations for a common market.

More remarkably still, Erdogan made strides to defuse Turkey’s 25-year-long domestic war against the Kurdish separatist movement, the PKK, which had cost 40,000 lives. In the summer of 2009, much to his generals’ ire, Erdogan offered an estimated 4,000 PKK fighters an amnesty. More broadly, he granted Turkey’s own Kurdish population, estimated to number 12 million, limited political and cultural rights in a country which until the late 1980s had called Kurds ‘mountain Turks’. He lifted the ban on the use of languages other than Turkish in public and, speaking a few words of Kurdish, in September 2009 he launched a Kurdish-language satellite channel. He sanctioned the teaching of Kurdish in schools, and allowed some towns to again assume their Kurdish names, thereby jettisoning the Turkification plan of the 1940s which had assigned 12,000 localities Turkish names.

The policy was not without setbacks. It stoked Turkish nationalist sentiments inside Turkey, and prompted some to warn of a
military backlash. Warnings that Erdogan was opening a Pandora’s box proved dangerously plausible after the PKK resumed a bombing campaign against civilians in Istanbul in 2008 and enthusiastic crowds extended a hero’s welcome to the beneficiaries of the amnesty, who returned in rebel uniforms. In the 2009 local elections, the main Kurdish party, the Democratic Society Party, fared well, particularly in the predominantly Kurdish south-east, prompting the authorities to ban it for ‘damaging the independence of the state and the indivisible integrity of its territory and nation’. At the same time, the reforms eased relations with neighbouring states and the EU, which had long pressed Turkey to improve minority rights, and paved the way for Turkish participation in the exploration of oil in Iraqi Kurdistan.

The flip-side of Turkey’s improved stature in the Muslim world was its nose-dive in relations with Israel, souring their military alliance which had followed the Oslo Accords. During the Gaza war, Erdogan – perhaps mindful of imminent elections – publicly rebuked Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, during a live debate at the World Economic Forum in Davos and stormed out of the conference hall. Amid mutual recrimination, Turkey barred Israel from a NATO air force exercise and Israel denied Turkish officials access to Gaza, withheld delivery of military drones, substantially reduced its tourist flows, and rebuffed a Turkish offer to renew Israeli–Syrian mediation. Erdogan’s stance yielded dividends both at the polls and in the Arab world, where Turkey – not Iran – was hailed as Gaza’s standard-bearer during the war. Gazans took to the streets waving Turkish flags.

That said, Erdogan’s populism – which occasionally verged on demagoguery – gave some Arab security regimes pause for thought. His promotion of parliamentary sovereignty over military hierarchy, his efforts to clip military influence by putting senior officers on trial, and his powerbase amongst the emerging business-oriented and often Islamist middle class challenged the very pillars on which Arab governance was based. After seven years in power, the Justice and Development Party could reasonably ask whether it offered a
model for other regional states to follow. As Turkey consolidated its switch from military to civilian decision-makers, with a resounding national election victory in 2007, the country presented a rare image of a regional power enjoying legitimacy, a popular government, relative economic prosperity and a possible alternative for the region’s security regimes to follow.

Rarely, if ever, has a street vendor created such turbulence. On 17 December 2010 Mohamed Bouazizi, a young university graduate, set himself on fire after local officials in his scruffy Tunisian town confiscated his unlicensed vegetable cart, and upturned the applecart of the Arab world. Protests at his immolation gathered volume as they swept north. Cries of ‘down with prices’ morphed into ‘down with the regime’. ‘Now I understand what you want,’ pleaded Tunisia’s president for 23 years, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. But it was too late. Within days he and his family fled to exile.

It is strange that Tunisia, perhaps the modern Arab world’s dullest country, should have cradled its most exciting event. Not since the Fatimids set forth from Mahdiya on Tunis’s coast to conquer North Africa over a millennium earlier had the country exercised such regional influence. Within weeks, Tunisia’s protests had spread across North Africa and the Middle East, shaking the brittle regimes of Ben Ali’s fellow autocrats.

The alarm bells had been ringing for almost a decade. Saddam Hussein’s capture in a pit reduced the most brutal of the region’s autocrats to a cowering paper tiger, puncturing his invincibility, piercing the fear barrier and launching a new confidence in people power. Backed by their Ayatollahs, Iraqi Shias took to the streets en masse, defying the Arab public’s reputation for docility, dubbed by a Tunisian dissident as ‘the silence of the Arab lambs’. The protests forced out Bremer, America’s appointed CPA chief, and hastened its electoral process. Inspired by Iraq, Lebanon’s protestors chased out Syria’s forces in 2005, and Palestine’s voters turned on their traditional rulers, Fatah, in favour of the Islamist movement Hamas in 2006. In Iran, voters responded to rigged elections with mass
protests demanding a fair vote. Egypt, in the years preceding Mubarak’s downfall, was mired with strikes; according to Egypt’s Land Centre for Human Rights, the number of labour protests rose from 222 in 2006 to over 700 in 2009.

While regime change in Iraq was the catalyst and model for the Arab Awakening, the causes – outlined in preceding chapters – were threefold: the ossification of the existing regimes; the retreat of global powerbrokers – Russia in the late 1980s and America in the late 2000s – and the appeal of transnational identities over outdated national ones.

In response to America’s plans for regime change, all the region’s autocrats tightened their domestic grip, deploying a mixture of repression, handouts and rise of an external threat, while abandoning anything more than cosmetic reforms. But in so doing they forfeited political consent, becoming ever more estranged from their own increasingly educated, informed and sceptical population. Corruption investigations went nowhere, unless designed to suppress rivals. Governance was top-heavy and sclerotic. The two most important Arab states, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, were both led by octogenarians. Innovation was deemed to threaten the status quo: in Egypt formation of a neighbourhood association to cultivate trees required an interior ministry permit. Discontent was always a security problem, never a sign of social malaise in want of treatment. Economies failed to adapt to a burgeoning middle class. Often the highest unemployment levels were amongst graduates, one of whom was Tunisia’s street vendor, Bouazizi.

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Although it remained the sole superpower, America’s ventures in regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq proved so militarily, financially and strategically draining that it became increasingly wary of intervention – be it to topple autocrats or prop them up. Far from quelling Islamist movements, its efforts to shape the region only emboldened them. Overexposed, the Bush administration began the process of retreat. It agreed a new compact – the 2008 Status of Forces Agreement – with Iraq; and rather than risk opening another
front, embarked on tentative talks with Iran aimed at forestalling nuclear proliferation. Barack Obama, who took office in January 2009, hastened the drawdown. Rejecting the neocolonialism inherent in an American-imposed war or peace, he accelerated the US troop withdrawal, pulling troops out of Iraq by the end of 2011 and committing to pull them from Afghanistan by 2014. In his address to Cairo University in June 2009, he quoted Thomas Jefferson, the third US president and principal author of America’s Declaration of Independence: ‘I hope that our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us that the less we use our power the greater it will be.’

The retreat was not merely a matter of saving US money, men and prestige. Increasingly the Middle East mattered less. With the growth of alternative energy sources, including ethanol and gas, and the ability to extract gas from shale, offering America vast new untrapped sources of oil, the threat of Armageddon in the event of a conflagration in the Straits of Hormuz, the passageway for oil exports, receded a little. In part, America’s diminishing readiness to project its power in the region reflected a diminishing American interest.

Surprisingly, the retreat appeared smoothest in Iraq. The political violence that had racked the country abated as the US prepared to leave Iraq. The great success of the US troop ‘surge’ in Iraq was to mislead Americans and much of the world into believing the US, not Iraqi’s Shias, had won. In fact, the decreasing death-toll owed less to America’s military and more to Shia forces which overran Sunni positions. Obama’s position on Palestine proved less convincing. In his Cairo declaration he promised to remedy the daily humiliations of Israel’s occupation and provide Palestinians with a homeland. But having cavalierly ditched the negotiation framework his predecessor had begun at Annapolis, he failed to coin an alternative, and he frittered away political capital on trying to achieve half-measures, such as a meaningful settlement freeze from Netanyahu.

Sensing waning American clout, the region’s leaders grew increasingly defiant. Initially nervous of the new president (so much so
that Israel stopped its 2009 Gaza war before he took office), Netanyahu declared a temporary settlement freeze; but it was full of loopholes, and did not include Jerusalem. While Israel defied America by building in occupied territory, small powers, including Mahmoud Abbas’s dependency, the Palestinian Authority, rejected Obama’s demand to resume negotiations with Israel. The multiple rebuttals damaged US credibility, and prompted some to wonder whether Washington had been relegated from Middle East broker to bit-player. ‘Obama would make a good UN Secretary-General,’ quipped a UN official in Jerusalem. ‘But as the American president, I worry.’

Doomsayers warned that, bereft of a US umpire, Iran or
jihadi
groups would fill the vacuum. But they fared no better. Iran’s suppression of popular demonstrations made it look less revolutionary power than another old security regime, particularly after it backed Syria in suppressing a popular revolt, and weakened its capacity to capitalize on the region’s popular uprisings when they came. In Lebanon, its closest regional ally, Hizbollah, lost ground at the ballot box. Hamas began the search for alternative, Sunni, patrons. With its regional influence under threat, Iran looked to its future status as a virtual nuclear power to compensate for its waning conventional clout. But here too it faced constraints, precipitating biting sanctions and the threat of military action.

Jihadi
groups might also have been expected to thrive in the chaos. Undoubtedly the Arab Awakening presented opportunities, particularly when revolutionaries despaired of mass protests to unseat autocrats and took up arms. But al-Qaeda’s central leadership appeared on the defensive. A covert US war continued to debilitate its leadership and demoralize its rank and file. US marines killed Osama Bin Laden in a Pakistani town in May 2011, and drones killed its operatives in Yemen. After the aborted assassination of Saudi Arabia’s counter-terrorism chief in December 2009 and the near downing of a Northwest Airlines flight the same month, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula had little reach beyond its base in Yemen’s
tribal hinterland. With little to show for its violence, followers increasingly questioned its tactics. High-profile attacks hatched in faraway Afghanistan failed to thwart the Shiite ascendency in Iraq; and in the aftermath of the Arab Awakening most Islamists found ballots more effective than bombs. A civilian Islamist movement unseated the Mubarak regime, where clandestine cells of armed
jihadi
guerrillas had failed. Tellingly, even in Iraq, hitherto the Arab world’s leading theatre of
jihad
, Sunnis in northern and central areas staged mass non-violent rallies in late 2012 in protest against their second-class status, seemingly more inspired by Sistani’s
modus operandi
than Bin Laden’s.

As foreign forces retreated, the region’s population was increasingly left to find the solutions for its problems itself. Long-suppressed tribal, ethnic and religious communities rose to the fore, honing coping mechanisms for protection and welfare, which chipped at the glue of the nation-state. The connectivity offered by modern technology proved critical to forming new networks and offering new tools of organization in cities. Facebook pages attracted mass support – one site, ‘We are all Khalid Saeed’, named after an 18-year-old protestor from Alexandria who died in police hands in June 2010, notched-up two million followers.

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Tunisia’s ousting of Ben Ali in January 2011 captivated the imagination of the region. Within days, hundreds of thousands had filled the streets of Cairo, the most populous Arab city. As Mubarak fell in February 2011, a huge swathe of Bahrain’s population moved into Pearl Monument, a junction in the heart of its capital. Libya’s disaffected youth danced in the face of the regime’s bullets. And in Syria a month later, youths chanted, ‘
Ya Doktor, Ijak al-Dour
,’ – ‘Doctor, now it’s your turn.’ Social unrest even shook Israel’s cities, as Israeli youth occupied Tel Aviv’s streets in the summer of 2011, chanting anti-government slogans in Hebrew to the beat of the Arabic anthem that unseated dictators,
Al-Shaab Yurid Isqat al-Nitham
, the people want the regime to fall.