Five years ago, Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian street vender with black curls, deep brown eyes, and chin fuzz, refused to pay a seven-dollar bribe, yet again, to a government inspector. For a man who supported his mother, five younger siblings, and an ailing uncle, seven dollars was a full day’s income—on a good day. This was the start of the epic convulsion known as the Arab Spring.
“It’s the same kind of humiliation that takes place every day in many parts of the world—the relentless tyranny of governments that deny their citizens dignity,” President Obama said in a speech about the events some months later. “Only this time something different happened. After local officials refused to hear his complaints, this young man, who had never been particularly active in politics, went to the headquarters of the provincial government, doused himself in fuel, and lit himself on fire.” Bouazizi died two and a half weeks later. Spontaneous protests erupted in sympathy, and soon spread across the region, directed against other autocrats.
Over the next fourteen months, the heads of state in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen—who had ruled for a collective hundred and seventeen years—were ousted. The President of Syria went to war with his own people to survive. “The story of this revolution, and the ones that followed, should not have come as a surprise,” Obama declared.
Five years later, the costs and consequences of the uprisings have stunned the world. “Perhaps we in the international community, and the people on the ground, were naïve and misled by how easy the Tunisians made it seem,” Sarah Leah Whitson, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, told me this week. “The Egyptians, too, got rid of a dictator. But we underestimated the forces against democracy and rights—and the way in which other forces of repression and destruction were able to fill the vacuums that the uprisings created.”
Tunisia is widely considered to have had the most successful transition, but it has also produced the highest number of foreign fighters for the Islamic State—at least three thousand. Extremists have conducted three spectacular acts of terrorism this year. Last month, a suicide bomber killed twelve members of the Presidential Guard, the equivalent of the Secret Service. European tourists were the targets in two earlier attacks, and tourism, the backbone of the economy, has plummeted.
Libya, one of Africa’s richer states, was believed to have enough oil wealth for its small population, of six million, to make the transition to democracy without significant foreign funding. Instead, the country dissolved into civil war among the many new militias produced during the eight-month campaign against Muammar Qaddafi. Two rival governments emerged, vying for power and oil profits. The oil minister of one of them warned in March that, within a year, Libya could verge on bankruptcy and become a “second Somalia.” This weekend, the rival regimes agreed to sign a United Nations-brokered deal to form a unity government, but the militias were not party to the talks, and in the meantime the Islamic State has taken over enough territory to make Libya in effect its first colony.
In Yemen this year, political, sectarian, and tribal tensions broke into a multi-layered conflict shaped by regional rivalries. The United Nations negotiated a seven-day ceasefire that began today and coincides with new peace talks in Switzerland, but it does not account for the Islamic State or Al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula. Both groups have increased their presence in Yemen in recent months.
On December 14th, the State Department cited new reports of Americans kidnapped in Yemen, and warned U.S. citizens there, including aid workers, to take “shelter in a secure location” until they could be evacuated from the country. The threat of their being captured, with no prospect of U.S. assistance, was “severe.” (The American Embassy closed in February.) Meanwhile, some eighty per cent of Yemen’s twenty-six million people are now without access to clean water and are dependent on foreign aid. Their predicament borders on famine.
In Syria, the war between the government and myriad militias—the spin-off of peaceful protests sparked by a handful of kids who wrote anti-government graffiti on the walls of a remote town--has killed more than a quarter of a million people. The conflict has generated the worst humanitarian crisis since the Second World War, with millions of refugees spilling across borders and continents. In the vacuum, the Islamic State last year seized a third of Syrian territory; the capital of its self-declared caliphate is in Raqqa. The destruction in some of the world’s oldest and most historic cities is now estimated to exceed two hundred billion dollars. The International Monetary Fund projected this fall that Syria would need twenty years—assuming three-per-cent growth every year—to get back to the (low) level of income it had before the war started, and only if the war ends now.
With the outlook increasingly bleak, President Obama’s tone has shifted from praising the noble ambitions of the Arab Spring to reassuring the American public about its murderous by-products. “The United States and our armed forces continue to lead the global coalition in our mission to destroy” the Islamic State, he vowed Monday, after a meeting with his national-security team at the Pentagon. He dispatched Defense Secretary Ashton Carter to the Middle East, to mobilize support for the war against ISIS, and Secretary of State John Kerry to Russia, to work on a peace process for Syria. U.S. strategy, Obama said, is moving urgently on four fronts—tracking terrorists; working with Syria and Iraqi forces against ISIS; disrupting the Islamic State’s financing, recruiting, and propaganda; and using diplomacy to end the Syrian civil war.
“We recognize that progress needs to keep coming faster,” the President said, especially in view of the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino.
What seems to have been lost in the past five years is American strategic support for the Arab Spring’s aspirations—and for the innumerable other Bouazizis still struggling for rights and justice and jobs. One of Obama’s boldest decisions, in 2011, was to abandon longstanding U.S. support for Arab despots, personified in President Hosni Mubarak, who ruled Egypt ruthlessly for thirty years. For the first time, Washington opted for the unknowns of potential democracy over the guarantees of autocratic stability in the Arab world.
“There are very few moments in our lives where we have the privilege to witness history taking place. This is one of those moments,” Obama said after Mubarak resigned, in February, 2011, partly at the President’s urging. “The people of Egypt have spoken, their voices have been heard, and Egypt will never be the same.”
Yet today Egypt may actually be worse off than it was under Mubarak. The annual U.S. Human Rights Report this year charged the government of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi with “unlawful killings and torture,” unfair trials, suppression of civil liberties, limited religious freedoms, human trafficking, impunity for security forces, and more. Thousands of peaceful protesters have been arrested; others have simply disappeared. Still, largely for security reasons, Cairo receives one and a half billion dollars a year in U.S. aid, most of it in military assistance. Washington has embraced el-Sisi.
In October, the Islamic State, which has an increasingly active affiliate in Egypt known as the Sinai Province, claimed credit for the downing of a Russian jetliner, killing more than two hundred onboard. Testifying before the House Foreign Affairs Committee last month, Assistant Secretary of State Tom Malinowski warned that Egypt’s growing pattern of arrests, combined with prison conditions and abuse, could sow new cells of radicalization. “This has happened before in Egypt’s history,” he said. “And the danger is especially great now, because the situation reinforces one of the main arguments Daesh”—another name for the Islamic State—“makes to young people who place their faith in democratic politics: that peaceful methods are doomed, that those who rely on them will end up in prison, silenced, forgotten and tortured, whereas those who go to Syria, Iraq, or Sinai to fight and kill are strong and will be victorious. Where terrorists and peaceful political activists are sharing the same jail cells, Daesh has quite literally a captive audience for this message.”
Each local crisis has been complicated by regional players who have intervened to block a new Arab order. “It’s no longer about what Egyptians want. Or what the Syrian people want,” Whitson, of Human Rights Watch, explained. “It’s so much broader and wider—and more complicated than during the French Revolution. Now a revolutionary doesn’t just fight the bureaucrats in the capital but bureaucrats thousands of miles away. There are so many horses in the game who have the resources and power to dictate or sway the outcome. It’s a much more difficult battle.”
Speaking of the idealistic protesters of five years ago, Whitson said, “Sometimes it makes you wonder if they ever had a chance.” Yet she remains sanguine about the future. “The fight is not over,” she told me. “Because it can’t be over. The aspirations that inspired the spark over a seven-dollar bribe are universal, and we know it. As long as governments deny people basic justice and dignity, people will rise up.”
