Features

Fuck this shit, I’m lighting myself on fire.
Way back in December 2010, while future freshers waited patiently for useless NCEA results, and the rest of us prayed for twelve weeks of living with the olds to come to an end, something big was happening. Something really big. In Tunisia - a country that, admit it, you had maybe kind of heard of once - 26-year old Mohamed Bouazizi made a drastic decision. Sick of years of harassment by local officials over his tiny street-side vegetable cart, Bouazizi sat down in front of city hall, doused himself in lighter fluid, and set himself, and the Arab world, on fire.
 

Funerals often double as acts of protest in the Arab world, and the protests that followed Mohamed’s funeral were brutally repressed by the Tunisian police. But the tide of public opinion had turned. The protestors took over the streets and civil disobedience and protest rocked the capital city of Tunis. Hundreds were killed as the state security forces attempted to smash the rebellion. After twenty-eight days of protest, and twenty-three years after he came to power, Tunisian dictator Ben Ali was on a flight to Saudi Arabia. The Tunisian people had fought for and won their freedom. The Arab world was beginning to revolt.

 
Thirty years loyal service and this is how you repay me?
 

The protests that rocked Tunisia spread to Egypt on January 25. Tens of thousands took to the streets to protest against police brutality, corruption, unemployment, and the thirty year reign of President Hosni Mubarak.

 
Considered the centre of the Arab world (as opposed to Saudi Arabia, the centre of the Muslim world), Egypt experienced weeks of peaceful protest. Fittingly centred in Tahrir, or Revolution Square, hundreds of thousands of mainly young Egyptians, in part organised through Facebook and Twitter, demanded free, fair, and democratic elections. Most amazingly of all the protests remained largely peaceful (though three hundred were killed in sporadic violence). The army, rather than defending the regime, sided with the protestors, defending them from the hated secret police and Mubarak’s hired thugs.
 

Like deluded dictators the world over, Mubarak believed that he alone knew what was best for his people, his “sons and daughters” as he called them. The army, however, knew his time was up. Only the February 11, only twenty-four hours after declaring that he would stay in power, Mubarak was gone and  82 million Egyptians were free for the first time in their lives. Within days the protests had spread to Jordan, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen and even Saudi Arabia.
 

Poor little Bahrain and one crazy mofo
 

In scenes reminiscent of the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, Bahrain, the tiny emirate to the east of Saudi Arabia, invited Saudi security forces in to assist in crushing the protest movement there. However thanks to the craziest mofo in the whole Arab world, attention has moved from Bahrain to one bad ass mother fucker, Moammar Gaddafi.
 

Gaddafi has been the Arab world’s resident crazy mofo for over forty years. Living in an old school bedouin tent, and surrounded by his hand-picked female bodyguards, he has been kicking up trouble since Jim Flynn was an undergrad. When protests broke out in Libya, Gaddafi rushed to crush them as brutally and quickly as possible. The Libyan protestors defended themselves, seizing weapons from army bases in the eastern town of Benghazi, and attacking across the desert towards the capital Tripoli. Tribal based Libya is a different kettle of fish entirely to Egypt: Gaddafi retains the support of his tribal unit and his violent attacks on the eastern rebels forced them back into their eastern Benghazi strong hold.

 
Barak O-bomber
 

But wait, it’s the West to the rescue! When it became obvious that Gaddafi was about to get all Slobodan Milosoveic on Benghazi, the United Nations passed a resolution authorising any necessary measures to protect the civilian population. Barack Obama finally got to have a war of his very own! Supported by the French, British and the Arab league, the Americans attacked Libyan forces threatening to take Benghazi, and destroyed Libyan air defence platforms throughout the country. While everyone loves a good bombing campaign and hours of watching CNN repeat itself, concerns about civilian deaths, and how it can possibly end with out invading Libya have left Peace and Conflict Studies kids wringing their hands.

 
I’d rather live at St Margs
 

So what the heck are these crazy Arabs protesting against? Since the British and French gave up their colonies in the Arab world, none of the Arab states had ever become a democracy. Some, like Egypt, experienced military coups which overthrew the royalty only to enter into years of military dictatorship. Others, like Bahrain, which would soon be gripped by its own protests, remained under the yoke of the ruling royal families.

 
Today most of the Arab dictators are in their late seventies or early eighties while 50% of Egyptians are under twenty-five. Hundreds of thousands of young people, especially men, were unhappy, unemployed and, due to a law restricting marriage to men with jobs, desperately in need of a root. Food prices were going through the roof and the government really didn’t care.
 

These secular rulers had spent years telling their people that they didn’t need to have elections; they were Muslims and God had chosen leaders for them. Also, due to an attitude of “Insha'Allah”, or let the will of God be done, if your place in life sucks, that was Gods decision, and who the heck are you to tell Allah he got it wrong?!? If the people still got pissed off, then the Arab dictators always had a trump card, the one thing they could always pull out of the bag to take the pressure off themselves: blame it all on Israel! It’s not my fault you have no job, no car, no wife, live with your parents and have only seen tits in National Geographic, it’s the fault of those bloody imperialist Israelis!

 
By directing the anger of their people towards those cheeky Israelis, they could deflect it from themselves and continue in their dictatorial ways. And the West (that’s us) had been quite happy with this whole state of affairs. For years the only threat to the leadership of these Arab dictatorships was Islamist organisations like the Muslim Brotherhood, scary and secretive organisations whose secretive scariness was only heightened by the fact that they were (OMG!!) Muslims!! Proper Muslims, not like the secular dictators that we had learned to love. Concerned that a religious takeover of the Middle East, à la Iran, would see the world’s oil supplies dry up and US hegemony come to a grinding halt, we happily supported the dictators while meekly calling for democratic reforms.

 
Onwards to Democracy?
 

While everyone would love it if the Arab world could live under democracy, eat hummus and drink tea all day, democracy is still a long way away. There has yet to be a real revolution in Egypt; so far a military coup has replaced the leadership of the dictatorship. Tunisia is still rocked by protests, Bahrain is being crushed, and Libya bombed. The real revolutions will be the free and fair elections of functioning governments, something that has never happened before in the Arab world, and which still seems a long way away.

 
But we can hope. The Egyptians held a referendum last week to reform their constitution prior to more general elections. And though cruise missiles and bombs continue to drop on Libya, and Saudi soldiers are still sitting in the centre of Bahrain, signs are looking up for the Arab world. Maybe.
 

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“Like” this page to overthrow brutal dictatorship
 

So yay for Facebook and Twitter right? They, like, totally overthrew those dictators. Well, actually no. Social media played a minor role in organising some levels of the revolts (just as newspapers, a new medium at the time, helped organise the 1848 revolutions in Europe). In reality it was Al Jazeera, the Arab satellite news channel, that people turned to to find out what was happening on the streets of Tunis and in Tahrir square. Everyone (literally everyone) watches Al Jazeera in the Middle East, whereas only 17% of Egyptians have access to the internet.With such low access the role that social media has to play in revolutions is still unclear. Using Facebook or Twitter requires a lot of trust that the person you are talking to is real: in 2010 the Sudanese government set up a fake Facebook page for a protest, and then arrested everyone who turned up. The reality is that while social media may have a role to play in the future, for now it is probably best left to organising Hyde Street, and showing everyone how munted your flatmates got at your red card.