A History of the Middle East (73 page)

Arguably the autocrats could have deflated the protests had they responded quickly and credibly with reforms, particularly free and
fair presidential elections. Instead hubris and the recourse to violence unpicked their remaining legitimacy and hastened their end. In Cairo, Mubarak tried to dislodge the protestors with thugs charging on camels. In Benghazi in mid-February 2011, Qaddafy’s troops sprayed the protestors with anti-aircraft gunfire. And in Syria, a local intelligence chief and nephew of President Bashar al-Assad dismissed parental appeals to release the children detained for demonstrating without a license. ‘Forget them,’ he is reputed to have told them. ‘Our soldiers will help your wives raise more.’ The same day Syria’s forces fired on protestors, snipers loyal to Yemen’s president, Ali Abdullah Salih, shot at the crowds from Sanaa’s rooftops, killing fifty. Regimes’ excesses quickened the recourse to arms. Libya’s opposition shot back after only a week of street protests. ‘I’ve read about what Mahatma Gandhi achieved in India and I admire it,’ said a Syrian pharmacist turned fighter. ‘But what would have become of him here? In a week he would have been lying dead in a field.’

Chaos reigned in the territories from which the regime either collapsed or withdrew, dampening the initial euphoria. In Libya, children commandeered tanks, and sped them like skateboards through high streets. Children with machine-guns looted depots. Bands of thugs, or
beltagiya
, wreaked havoc. Deprived of their income from bribes, an estimated half a million Egyptians, hitherto employed as Interior Ministry hands to beat-up opposition candidates in state-rigged elections and such like, preyed on the public, racketeering and kidnapping. Taxi drivers turned arms-traffickers, and smuggled sophisticated surface-to-air missiles out of Libya in the boots of their cabs. In Syria, the price of bread rose sevenfold and basic supply routes collapsed as the regime resorted to SCUD missile attacks and what by early 2013 was an average of 40 air strikes each day on civilian areas in rebel hands. With the proliferation of rockets, governments worried about the safety of Mediterranean flight-paths and Suez Canal shipping through which 7.5 percent of the world’s trade chugged, and wondered who would grab Syria’s chemical weapons should the Assad regime collapse.

Compounding the chaos, the seemingly unified forces of the
opposition quickly unravelled into their composite parts as soon as they took control of terrain. Though the social media of the urban educated elite fanned the flames and claimed leadership, the spark of rebellion lay in the anger of the periphery, where the regimes’ reach thinned and centrifugal forces prevailed. Bouazizi set himself on fire in Sidi Bouzid a neglected town 260 kilometres south of the capital, Tunis; Jordan’s protests were most virulent in the tribal Beduin south and Yemen’s in and around Taiz, a city tucked between the traditional powerhouses of the northern highlands and the southern coast. Libya’s uprising – which began in the marginalized east – took six months to reach the capital, Tripoli, and Syria’s – which first erupted in Dara near the Jordanian border – was a primarily rural struggle, which many urbanites, Sunni as well as other sections, preferred to avoid. It only reached the outskirts of the capital, Damascus, after seven months. Even in Egypt, where Cairo’s Tahrir Square was the epicentre, the most brutal confrontations occurred in the provinces.

As the regime retreated, each liberated town, and sometimes neighbourhood, raised its own militia, arming itself from unguarded weapons depots. In Tunisia’s hinterland, Salafi groups established their own Islamic courts. In Egypt’s peripheral Sinai peninsula, Beduin tribesmen took up arms, chasing out the state security forces, torching their headquarters, ransacking their stations and relishing their first taste of autonomy. They preyed on official trade routes, ambushing tankers and destroying gas regional pipelines while enhancing alternative smuggling routes, particularly with Gaza. Unleashed, these centrifugal forces dogged efforts to stand up a new order. Long after Qaddafy fell and a new government nominally took power, Libya’s militiamen – or as they styled themselves the
thuwwar
, or revolutionaries – rejected government demands to disband, hand over their captives and surrender their bases. Security chiefs dispatched by the fledgling government to the provinces were killed.

Fuelling internal rivalries was a broader struggle over the direction and control of the country. Reformers jostled with revolutionaries, peasants with workers, federalists with centralizers, exiles with those who had endured the trauma of totaliterian rule.
Often, the key point of contention was over how much of the regime to replace. Mahmoud Jibril, Libya’s first prime minister of the new order, who had acted as chief economic advisor to Qaddafy’s son, Saif al-Islam, warned against repeating the mistakes of America’s regime-change in Iraq, which had gutted the outgoing administration and disabled Iraq. If the Prophet Mohammed could integrate soldiers from Mecca’s army of Unbelievers including its commander, Khalid bin Walid, into its new army of faithful, suggested an advisor, so could the new Libya. But bolstered by arsenals of looted weapons which could outgun anything the central government could muster, Libya’s new warlords and militia chiefs were loath to forgo the inheritance they had grabbed and argued for a total overhaul of anything that hinted of old power. Four months after Qaddafy’s interior minister, General Abdel Fatah Younes, defected to become the rebel commander in chief, militiamen gunned him down.

In pursuit of a purge of regime remnants, popularly known as
fulul
, or dregs, the militias coined Libya’s version of Iraqi de-Baathification. They established tribunals to vet cabinet and parliament for regime loyalists, and vetoed government appointments. ‘We want to enter the ministries and cleanse them from the regime,’ explained a militiaman from the port city of Misrata, hopeful of a place in Libya’s diplomatic corps. The more violent the upheaval, the greater grew the cries for revenge. Despite appeals for an inclusive approach, Syria’s rebels drafting a declaration in Cairo for a future Syria in November 2012 insisted on dismantling the Baath party and purging the military.

Transnational identities often exercised as powerful a pull as local allegiances. Once monochrome societies transformed into Lebanese-like patchworks. Following Qaddafy’s fall, leaders of the Berber or Tamazight movement waved the flag of their ethnic group which Qaddafy had dismissively called ‘mountain Arabs’, and set about building alliances from the mountains of Morocco to Saharan oases in Mali and Egypt to promote their separate language and culture. A plethora of Islamist movements filled the newly liberated public space, emerging after decades of persecution and clandestine activity
to give the Arab Awakening a distinctly religious hue. Where free elections took place, the depth of the support for Islamist politicians was stark. They won 44 percent of Palestine’s elections in 2006, 48 percent of Iraq’s in 2010, 52 percent of Turkey’s in 2011, 41 percent of Tunisia’s in 2011, and 69 percent of Egypt’s in 2011–12.

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Appearing to non-members as irredentist supremacist movements, new cracks surfaced in the region’s old religious melange. Even factions with reputations for moderation excluded members of other faiths. Bahrain’s parliamentary opposition Wifaq party was headed by a Shia cleric and its parliamentarians were all Shia. The Muslim Brotherhood, the oldest and largest of the Islamist movements, was wholly Sunni. Protests which had begun as revolts against totalitarian regimes rapidly degenerated into sectarian struggles. Rather than signalling the aspiration for a system of checks and balances against absolute power, democracy became a euphemism for majority rule. In spite of Syria’s sectarian kaleidoscope the rebel’s political arm was top-heavy with Brotherhood members, and its rebel force, the Syrian Free Army, almost entirely Sunni. Feeling alienated and fearing a Sunni resurgence, the country’s other religious minorities – the Druze, the plethora of Christian denominations, and the Ismailis – kept to the sidelines or actively sided with the Alawites, the heterodox Shia sect of the Assad clan. When fighting erupted it rapidly acquired the overtones of a civil war. Sunnis defected from Assad’s forces in increasingly large numbers, leaving the predominantly Alawite Republican Guard and special forces to lead the battle. After twenty months, some 60,000 died in the sectarian bloodletting.

Spread by hundreds of thousands of refugees and partisan media outlets, the sectarian contagion spilled out of Syria, pulling at the seams of the region’s hybrid states. In Iraq, sectarian tensions which had begun to subside revived as Sunni tribes and mosques sent medicines and arms to Syria’s Sunni rebels, and Shias offered succour to government forces. Nuri al-Maliki’s government made some effort to inspect cargoes transiting to Iraq, but the border was too long and too porous to prevent weapons reaching the warring sides. In
July 2012 Iraq’s Shia prime minister greeted Assad’s foreign minister with a guard of honour, on the same day as Sunni Kurds in their northern autonomous zone feted a Syrian rebel leader as head of state. The spectre of civil war again loomed over Lebanon, as Sunni and Shia activists smuggled aid, arms and men to rival forces over the border. Syria’s Sunni rebels threatened to bomb southern Beirut’s Shia suburbs after they captured Hizbollah fighters training and arming self-defence squads in Alawite villages. In Lebanon’s northern town of Tripoli, fighting erupted between rival Alawite and Sunni suburbs. Fuelling the sectarianism, the region’s governments, too, led by Iran and Saudi Arabia, provided political, financial military backing for their respective sects.

Increasingly, the region seemed caught in a tournament between two clashing crescents – a Shia one, identified by Jordan’s King Abdullah a decade earlier, running horizontally from Iran via Iraq and Syria to southern Lebanon, and a Sunni rival descending vertically from Turkey through central Syria to Jordan, an increasingly Islamist Palestine and Egypt. Not always by design, global powers sharpened their blades. With overtones of the old Cold War, Russia protected Syria from sanction at the UN, and signed its first arms deal with Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein, while the US solidified its ties with the region’s Sunni powerhouses, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

The region’s other sectarian fires which had subsided flared once more. Yemen’s Shia Houthis had agreed to a ceasefire in February 2010, halting a rebellion which had killed some 10,000 in six years of fighting, and left much of northern Yemen and some of the Red Sea coast in their hands. But in October 2011 fighting resumed after the Houthis laid siege to perhaps the Arab world’s most prestigious Salafi school, Dammaj, a few kilometres away from their capital, Saada. Of the school’s 7,000 students, 100 were killed.

Elsewhere in the peninsula, the Sunni monarchies deflected popular demands to surrender some of their absolute powers by presenting demonstrations as sectarian revolts by their Shia underclass. As the only Sunni-Arab-led country honouring Ashura, the highpoint of the Shia calendar, with two days of national holiday,
Bahrain had prided itself on its tolerance. But when its browbeaten Shia majority converged on the Manama junction of Pearl Monument, its ruling al-Khalifa dynasty, opened its causeway to phalanxes of Saudi tanks, bulldozed the monument and dozens of Shia shrines and smothered its Shia villages with tear gas. Indicative of the sectarian divide, Wifaq, Bahrain’s all-Shia party, withdrew its parliamentarians, leaving the legislature bereft of Shia representation. Saudi Arabia’s Shias rose up in January 2012, after police shot dead a young Shia protester, Issam Muhammad Abu Abdullah. By the end of 2012, the security forces had killed at least a dozen Shia subjects.

Old and New Autocrats

With identity politics captivating the region, many pundits predicted the break-up of the geopolitical map that colonial powers had carved a century earlier, and its replacement with homogenous atavistic states. “Bouazizi set not just himself on fire, but the order of the Middle East set in place by Mark Sykes and Charles Picot”, commented one wag. Libya’s vast territory, they posited, would fragment into its three constituent parts: Benghazi in the east, Tripolitania in the West and Fezzan in the south. Syria seemed destined to follow Iraq. As Saddam Hussein in Iraq in the 1990s, the Assad regime appeared to retreat from Syria’s northern Kurdish towns, feeding Kurdish aspirations not only for autonomy but a pan-Kurdish state linked to neighbouring Kurdish zones in Turkey and Iraq. Analysts further anticipated Syria’s disintegration into a Sunni central spine running north–south linking Syria’s most populous cities and Alawite retention of a sausage of territory wiggling from Syria’s Mediterranean coast through the anti-Lebanon mountain to Hizbollah-controlled southern Lebanon. Poorer populous states eyed the opportunities afforded by their richer but weaker and dysfunctional desert neighbours. Egyptian security officials toyed with hiving-off Libya’s oil-rich eastern province to support Egypt’s 90 million people, almost half of whom lived in poverty.

But for all the regional turbulence, as with the previous seismic shocks of September 11 and the Iraq war, the region’s borders proved remarkably resilient. In two years of anti-regime protests, only four of the 19 Arab heads of state succumbed. Several deeply polarized states registered little more than murmurings, apparently fatigued from previous bouts of unrest. Having climbed out of its own civil war twenty years earlier, Lebanon’s population had no desire to hurl itself headlong into another. Though Syria’s feuding pulled at the country’s communal seams and there were sporadic attacks, including the assassination of its security chief, a Sunni, Lebanon’s army successfully quelled instances of communal fighting. Algeria’s Islamists seemed too exhausted to try again; they were still reeling from the generals’ success in crushing their rebellion after the army aborted elections in 1992 that they were poised to win. The Palestinian Authority, too, seemed a spent force in the struggle to end Israel’s occupation; having ceded Gaza to Hamas, President Abbas hung on shakily in the West Bank, too dependent on Israel for survival to defy it in any court but that of public opinion.