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tahrir square
Autocrats and Uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa
Spring stirrings and misgivings
May 02, 2019
"Al-Shebab," said my student Jerry early in the fall 2010 semester. "We're calling our small group al-Shebab. It means 'The Youth.'" From his name alone, I wouldn't have guessed his background, but he was proud of his family's Egyptian roots and had convinced his classmates to give their group an Arabic name.
As usually happens when the semester ends and my dozens of students scatter, Jerry and I lost touch. The following April, however, we ran into each other at a rally organized by students at my university to support the Arab Spring. Like many others around the world, I'd watched transfixed as brave unarmed civilians faced down riot police on the bridges leading to Cairo's Tahrir Square. I'd celebrated on February 11, 2011, when the corrupt and authoritarian Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak resigned as the military took control of that country.
Jerry's eyes sparkled when he saw me. "Isn't it amazing?" he shouted. Yes, it was amazing... until it wasn't.
This spring, eight years later, there has been a new set of popular uprisings in northern Africa, from Algeria to Morocco, to Sudan. Let's hope they have more lasting success than Egypt's Arab Spring.
It's All About the Military
The victory over Hosni Mubarak was indeed amazing, perhaps too amazing to last, since the real arbiter of events in Egypt was then, and continues to be, its military. In the parliamentary elections of November 2011, the long-suppressed Muslim Brotherhood took almost half that body'sseats. In June 2012, the Brotherhood's candidate, Mohammed Morsi, became the country's first elected president, winning a runoff race with just under 52% of the vote.
That August, Morsi made the move that would eventually doom him, replacing his defense minister with Lieutenant General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. He also quickly turned in an increasingly autocratic direction, issuing decrees granting himself more power and proposing a new constitution that would do the same (which was approved by more than 60% of the voters in a low-turnout referendum).
By June 2013, many Egyptians were frustrated both with Morsi's increasingly authoritarian rule and the stagnation of the economy. Once again, millions of people gathered in Cairo, this time to call for his removal, at which point the military pushed him out, installing the head of the constitutional court, Adly Mansour, as interim president. Muslim Brotherhood supporters responded with violent attacks, burning police stations and government buildings. The government repression that followed was fierce enough that, in October 2013, the Obama administration suspended the further transfer of U.S. military equipment to Egypt. Eventually, new elections were held and, in May 2014, Morsi's Defense Minister, el-Sisi, won the presidency with a suspicious 96.9% of the vote. By then, the Muslim Brotherhood had been outlawed and would soon be declared a terrorist organization.
In April of this year, el-Sisi, running essentially unopposed, was reelected. Never one to slight an authoritarian ruler, President Trump immediately called to congratulate him and then invited him to the White House to discuss "robust military, economic, and counterterrorism cooperation" between the two countries. A few weeks later, in a "snap referendum," the Egyptian constitution was altered to allow el-Sisi to retain the presidency until at least 2030 -- essentially, that is, for life. That move also cemented the country's military, long its dominant economic power, as its sole political power, too.
Trump Goes A-Wooing in the Middle East and North Africa
From Russia's Vladimir Putin to Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro, the American president who "fell in love" with North Korea's Kim Jong-un has rarely met an autocrat he didn't take to (though his bromance with Kim may finally be souring). So, it's no surprise that el-Sisi's trip to Washington was a success and his country is now on course to remain the second-largest recipient of U.S. aid after Israel. Ninety-four percent of that aid goes to "peace and security" -- in other words, to Egypt's military and police.
Trump is, however, distinctly polyamorous when it comes to Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) autocratic types, as his long-standing love affair with Israel's recently reelected prime minister, Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu, indicates. Given Trump's own history of racism, Bibi's embrace of Israel's 2018 "Nation-State" law undoubtedly only turned up the heat on their relationship. This infamous legislation moves Israel further in the direction of apartheid. It legalizes Jewish-only communities, demotes Arabic from its status as an official language, and states that "the right to exercise national self-determination" in Israel is "unique to the Jewish people."
While the world waits less than breathlessly for Jared Kushner's long-promised Israel-Palestine peace plan, President Trump keeps gift-wrapping pieces of disputed territory and handing them directly to Bibi in his own spontaneous version of an Israel First peace plan. In December 2017 came the announcement of his administration's decision to move the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Trump claimed that "recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital would advance the peace process and make a permanent status agreement between the two sides easier." Maybe he saw this as a move towards peace because it unilaterally took the ultimate status of Jerusalem, one of the pieces in any such plan, off the Israeli-Palestinian playing board.
Next up came the Golan Heights, a slice of territory on Syria's western border, captured by Israel in 1967 during the Six Day War between Israel and Jordan, Syria, and Egypt. In 1981, Israel passed a law annexing the area, an act rejected by the U.N. Security Council, whose resolution stated that "the Israeli decision to impose its laws, jurisdiction, and administration in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights is null and void and without international legal effect." As a permanent member of the Security Council, the United States joined that unanimous vote. Nonetheless, this spring, just before a very close Israeli election, President Trump reversed longstanding policy and announced his recognition of Israel's annexation of the Heights. Happy Birthday, Bibi.
In the days before the election, Netanyahu then doubled down on annexation, proclaiming his intention to make Jewish settlements on the West Bank a permanent part of Israel along with the Golan Heights. In so doing, he'll be fulfilling Ariel Sharon's decades-old boast about Israel's intentions for the Palestinians:
"We'll make a pastrami sandwich out of them. We'll insert a strip of Jewish settlements in between the Palestinians, and then another strip of Jewish settlements right across the West Bank, so that in twenty-five years' time, neither the United Nations nor the United States, nobody, will be able to tear it apart."
Meanwhile, Trump seems to have developed a new crush, this time on a Libyan military figure the New York Timescalls a "would-be strongman": 75-year-old self-styled "Field Marshal" Khalifa Hifter. Based in the eastern part of Libya, where he has been aligned with one of that divided land's several rival governments, Hifter, a former CIA asset, launched an attack on the capital, Tripoli, on April 5th. Though not successful so far, his assault has already caused hundreds of deaths, with more likely to follow.
A Mediterranean port in the northwestern corner of the country, Tripoli houses Libya's internationally recognized government headed by Prime Minister Fayez Sarraj, which doesn't actually do much governing. Ever since the Obama administration and NATO intervened to topple autocrat Muammar al-Gaddafi, power in Libya has been divided among multiple militias, including Hifter's military, and Islamist groups like ISIS.
When the field marshal attacked Tripoli, the initial Trump administration response was swift and negative. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a statement indicating the opposition of "the administration at the highest levels," announcing that"we oppose the military offensive." He urged Hifter to immediately "halt... these military operations." His reaction accorded with that of "most Western governments and the United Nations," which, according to the New York Times, "have also condemned the attack and demanded a retreat."
Hours later, however, President Trump personally called Hifter (as National Security Advisor John Bolton had done earlier) and essentially encouraged him to keep up his assault on Tripoli. According to a White House statement:
"The President recognized Field Marshal Hifter's significant role in fighting terrorism and securing Libya's oil resources, and the two discussed a shared vision for Libya's transition to a stable, democratic political system."
Why is Donald J. Trump supporting a Libyan warlord, even as his move to take Tripoli seems to be failing? Perhaps because Hifter also has the support of Trump's other MENA buddies, Egypt's el-Sisi, the Saudi Arabian government of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman --which only recently executed 37 people (36 beheaded and one crucified), including several who confessed under torture and were minors at the time of their alleged crimes -- and the leaders of the United Arab Emirates. Those Arab powers are betting that Hifter can suppress any Libyan version of the Muslim Brotherhood. And there's one more autocrat backing Hifter, Trump's old flame Vladimir Putin. Indeed, for once Russia and the United States find themselves on the same side in the U.N. Security Council, where they joined to block a resolution demanding a ceasefire and condemning Hifter's military moves. Meanwhile, in a gesture of love for the Saudis, Trump vetoed a resolution passed with rare bipartisan congressional support that would have ended U.S. backing for the Kingdom's brutal war in Yemen.
For all his love of authoritarians, there is, however, one Middle Eastern nation that hasn't won Trump's affections: Iran. In May 2018, he pulled the United States out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPA), an international accord under which Iran had agreed not to develop nuclear weapons. In return, economic sanctions on that country were eased, while it was allowed to resume selling oil on the international market, and regained access to billions of dollars in frozen assets overseas.
The JCPA's other signatories included Russia, France, Great Britain, and China, along with Germany and the European Union. None of them followed Trump's lead. Only recently, his administration has threatened sanctions against any country buying oil from Iran after May 1st, a move mainly affecting China, India, Japan, South Korea, and Turkey. This attempt to economically starve Iran into submission comes even as his administration declared that country's Revolutionary Guards a " foreign terrorist organization." As the hardliners in both lands face off, further escalation becomes increasingly, and dangerously, likely.
Spring Stirrings
As we brace for a possible future conflict with Iran (what could possibly go wrong?), it's sometimes easy for those of us who have spent our lives opposing U.S. military actions to forget that Washington isn't, in fact, behind every world event. Other peoples have their own struggles and their own agency -- on display this spring in two MENA countries that have long suffered under corrupt and authoritarian governments: Algeria and Sudan. (And there appear to be stirrings in Morocco, as well.)
Algeria: Every semester I show the students in my Ethics: War, Torture, and Terrorism class The Battle of Algiers. Director Gillo Pontecorvo's classic film depicts the first urban uprising against French colonial power by Algeria's National Liberation Front (FLN), brutally suppressed by France's paratroopers between1954 and 1957. It contains enough war, torture, and terrorism to fuel a semester's worth of conversation. Inevitably, students want to know what happened in Algeria after the French were finally driven out in 1962. "That," I tell them, "is a sad story."
Indeed it is. After leading Algerians to victory over France, the FLN ruled the country for almost two decades, mostly under military control after a 1965 coup. Following popular uprisings in 1988, a new constitution opened political space for other parties, while reducing the army's role in government. The most popular of those parties turned out to be the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), which was devoted to a fundamentalist version of political Islam. When it appeared clear that the FIS would win both local and national elections, the FLN and the military stepped in to prevent it, resulting in a series of coups and an ongoing civil war.
Eventually, a new FLN leader, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, came to power in 1999 and never left. Earlier this year, he announced through intermediaries -- he has not been seen in public since 2014 -- that he would seek a fifth term. Evidently suffering from stomach cancer, he had a stroke in 2013 and has been out of the country much of the time since for medical treatment, most recently in Switzerland.
The latest announcement finally provoked a full-scale popular uprising, led by--and this should sound familiar to readers of this piece--al-shebab, the youth, many of whom had known no other president. ("Youth" is attractive, which is probably why a terror group in Somalia has also taken that name.) In an oil-rich country where a quarter of those under 30 are out of work, the younger generation is fed up with behind-the-scenes military rule, a sick autocrat, and the pervasive corruption that goes with it all. For weeks this spring, Algerians in their millions poured into the streets, demanding that Bouteflika leave office. On April 2nd, facing this massive, determined, non-violent resistance -- and with a push from the military -- he resigned. Seventy-seven-year-old Abdelkader Bensalah, like Bouteflika a veteran of the war of independence, has replaced him until new elections in July.
The protesters haven't, however, let up, arguing that Bouteflika may be gone but the power structure that kept him in office--"le pouvoir"--is still running the government. Perhaps as a sop to the movement, on April 22nd, the police detained five of the country's most powerful businessmen on accusations of corruption. It remains to be seen whether the strength of this new resistance can be converted into a political version of people's power for the long term.
Sudan: Meanwhile in Sudan, weeks of similarly massive popular uprisings have dislodged another autocrat, forcing that country's military to remove President Omar al-Bashir. He is now reportedly in prison, while a search of his home turned up bags containing more than $100 million in cash.
As in Algeria, many of the demonstrators are young and in Sudan a majority of them appear to be women. The most organized among them is a group of doctors, other health workers, and lawyers known as the Sudanese Professionals Association. As in Algeria, the key question is whether this movement will be able to hold out against the power of the military until a genuinely civilian government can be installed.
The original Arab Spring--Tunisia possibly excluded--ended in bloodshed and autocratic or military rule. Still, the youth in parts of the region clearly remain both dissatisfied and hopeful enough to take to the streets to try to bring democracy and clean government to their countries.
An American Spring?
Speaking of aging autocrats, we've got one of our own in Washington, D.C. So where are the American millions in the streets? Where is our American Spring? Admittedly, we were there when he first took office, but two years of constant outrage seem to have worn us down or out. As a whirlwind tour of the MENA region suggests, the death and destruction Donald Trump has had a hand in producing extends far beyond our own borders. And we can add to the list of horrors perhaps the greatest one of all: his apparent determination to hasten the collapse of civilization by pulling the U.S. out of the Paris climate accords and doubling down on fossil fuels.
And then there's the question of our own quaint constitution with its attachment to the rule of law. Now that we have the (redacted) Mueller report, isn't it time for Americans to stand up for democracy and clean government here at home? I can understand Nancy Pelosi's reluctance to begin impeachment proceedings, given the unlikelihood of a conviction by a Republican Senate. But if we don't want to end up like so many other countries, replacing one autocrat with another, we have to find a way to hold the one we now have accountable for his high crimes and misdemeanors.
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The Power of a Transformative City
“The local was where democracy was born; it is now where we will recover it.”
Oct 10, 2017
When Donald Trump announced in June that the US would pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement, it was noticeable that the most effective opposition came not from Congress but from cities and states.
379 mayors representing more than 68 million Americans said they would implement the Accord regardless of the head-in-the-sand attitude of the country's president. More significantly, given the weakness of the Paris agreement, more than 40 cities have gone further and committed to 100% renewable energy no later than 2050.
This practical defiance highlights how the city in our globalised world is emerging as a place of resistance, alternatives and solutions to our world's multiple crises.
Cities are privileged places
Cities have a long history as cradles of social transformation, whether it was the urban revolts in Budapest, Stockholm and other European cities in 1848, the municipal victories and participatory budgeting experiments of the Workers Party in Brazil in the late 1980s or the emerging municipalist movement in Spain and other regions more recently. Cities constitute a privileged place to organise collectively and to imagine new ways of living and working together, spaces where bodies and minds interact and where ideas spread quickly and have unparalleled impact.
Cities have a long history of providing privileges to their inhabitants, while extracting wealth from those outside its boundaries.
This is not to over-romanticise them. Cities, as other human constructions, have their own structures of concentrated power, inequality and exclusion. Greek city-states framed ideas of democracy that we still use today, but their societies were based on slavery and patriarchy. Medieval city-states were laboratories of modern liberal democracies and welfare systems based on taxation, but they were also the places where capitalism, colonialism, international finance and unfair trade relations emerged. Cities have a long history of providing privileges to their inhabitants, while extracting wealth from those outside its boundaries.
Nevertheless, cities have noticeably emerged as a critical arena for many recent social struggles from the Arab Spring in Tahrir square, Cairo or the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong. It has happened at time when cities for the first time in history now house more than 54% of the world's population (expected to reach 67% by 2050).
For social movements, the cities are a strategic place to organise, not only practically but also politically. More than two decades of neoliberalism have succeeded in entrenching corporate power within national and international institutions and international legal frameworks - making it ever more difficult terrain for people's movements, who have to defeat powerful interests and appeal to a deliberately disempowered electorate. Cities by contrast offer a more level playing field where people power can still take on and defeat corporate power and thereby prove that political mobilisation can deliver results.
Participation and power
The political theorist, the late Benjamin Barber, argued that cities are capable of reconnecting "participation, which is local, with power, which is central". While nation states used to play that role, he argued they have become too large (and we would add also too captured by corporate capital) to sustain the kind of "bottom-up citizenship, civil society and voluntary community" that is essential to democracy.
Across the world, social movements are actively seizing this potential power, advancing important social demands, whether for dignified work, sustainable food systems, green energy or racial justice. Much of this transformation takes place under the radar, as mainstream largely corporate media continues to focus all its attention on the happenings in the national corridors of power.
Even we were surprised in 2015 when our organisation, the Transnational Institute, decided to look at the number of municipalities who had brought water services back under public control and discovered 235 cases in 37 countries of cities and communities remunicipalising their water. Given the power of transnational water companies like Suez and Veolia - and the grip that the ideology of privatisation has on national and international water policy - this was nothing short of a silent revolution.
A follow-up report earlier this year that broadened its focus to include energy and housing unveiled 835 examples of (re)municipalisation of public services involving more than 1,600 municipalities in 45 countries. TNI researcher, Satoko Kishimoto, says "What is most important about these cases is that they kill once and for all the myth that 'there is no alternative' to neoliberalism. They show that not only is there a clear alternative to privatisation, but that it also has the potential to both improve services and transform society and environment for the better."
An alternative to neoliberalism
In many cases, the experience of resisting corporate capital and defending rights, such as those of access to water or housing, has itself been transformational. It has helped activists reconnect with those alienated by neoliberalism, and also opened up peoples' imaginations to think of new ways of organising work, services and social needs. The energy and dynamism that is released is palpable, captured in documentary films such as Demain (Tomorrow)
The experiences of trying to set up green businesses in Totnes in the UK, for example, eventually led to an international project, Reconomy, that seeks to build local economies that are sustainable, equitable and anchored in wellbeing, rather than tied to economic growth at any cost. An initiative by the New Delhi government to set up hundreds of small free health clinics to do diagnostics and simple treatments has inspired health activists across the world. In Barcelona, the experience of resisting house repossession inspired some activists to fight and win municipal elections based on a participatory platform of policies that include fining banks that speculate on empty homes, creating a new municipal energy company and providing sanctuary to refugees.
Barcelona's new city council is now helping to foster a movement of 'fearless cities' committed to the same principles of participation, openness and social and environmental justice. Their first gathering in Barcelona in June 2017 attracted more than 600 participants representing more than 100 municipalist platforms from around the world.
The feminization of politics
Municipal activism is also an opportunity to put feminism and the feminization of politics at the forefront. As Laura Roth and Kate Shea Baird have argued "the feminization of politics, beyond its concern for increasing presence of women in decision-making spaces and implementing public policies to promote gender equality, is about changing the way politics is done." In practice, this means leaving aside patterns of our patriarchal society such as competition, dominant leaderships, vertical organizations, egoism and structures that have typically excluded women from politics. It is noticeable how many of the new leaders in the municipalist movement are women.
Perhaps the proximity, scope and nature of the political conflicts at the city level, such as struggles for access to water and housing, rather than monetary policy or military alliances, also provide an arena where non-patriarchal modes of political action are better suited.
Vandana Shiva, philosopher and activist, at Fearless Cities, June 9 - 11, 2017. Flickr/Barcelona En Comu. Some rights reserved.
Transformative Cities Initiative: a unique participatory award
These successful experiences around the remunicipalisation of public services and the rising municipalist movement have inspired TNI to launch the Transformative Cities Initiative. Our goal is to build an atlas of real utopias, make these experiences viral, and to share the learning that comes from implementing these experiments. This month, we are launching a unique participatory award to recognise transformative experiences. In the first year, the focus will be on water, energy and housing. In future years, the initiative will expand its focus to other areas such as migration and solidarity, territorial food governance and drugs harm reduction.
We are encouraging both social movements and cities to use this opportunity to share your story. We plan to bring participants together, to learn from and systematise these experiences, in order to inspire and accelerate the process of transformation in other regions and places. We are giving special attention to experiences from the Global South, whose experiences are not adequately focused on or shared in global debates. We are giving special attention to experiences from the Global South, whose experiences are not adequately focused on or shared in global debates.
At a time when our current political framework offers most people a choice between neoliberal globalisation and authoritarian nationalism, between the global mall and the border wall, it is critical that the real alternatives coming from social movements are fertilized and strengthened.
A strategy that only seeks to resist increasingly authoritarian national governments, defending an ever-shrinking civic space, is demoralising and self-defeating. Similarly a strategy that articulates national and international alternatives that have no chance of realisation is equally disempowering.
Cities offer the chance to break with the dichotomy of despair - they give us a chance to trial out transformative change at a local level, and in so doing providing the building blocks for the global transformation that is so desperately needed. As the Fearless Cities gathering put it, "The local was where democracy was born; it is now where we will recover it."
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Are We Egypt?
Aug 05, 2017
When the world watched Egyptians bravely gather en masse in Tahrir Square in Cairo in January 2011 to Arab Spring Hosni Mubarak out of office, we were mightily impressed and most of us cheered the nonviolent resistance.
The western press lionized the Egyptian military as it seemed to support the uprising and the generals kindly offered to run the country on an interim basis. Sure enough, there was an election eventually, Mohammed Morsi won, and the military handed over power.
For a minute.
Then we saw the military not-so-kindly grab power, ousting the elected Morsi and General Sisi ordered mass arrests and torture of dissident pro-democracy Egyptian activists.
Now, a few short years since the US calmly watched democracy betrayed badly by the Egyptian military, the U.S. press is valorizing the military officers who are starting to snap some discipline into the most chaotic, dysfunctional, investigated White House this senior citizen has ever observed, at least since the months leading up to Richard 'I am not a crook' Nixon's resignation.
Be careful.
Falling all over ourselves in gratitude because a Marine general imposes some order in the executive branch may benefit the racially biased, anti-immigrant, pro-military agenda of the range of rightwing members of Congress, but that new efficiency is not going to result in the policy changes most Americans want nor those which protect the healthy water and air we all need.
From H.R. McMaster (National Security Adviser), to John Kelly (Chief of Staff) to James Mattis (Secretary of Defense) to Joseph Dunford--all generals--Trump is ceding power to those who know how to seize it. Generals now head his staff in the White House.
In short, handing over the keys to the democratic system to the military might seem like a safe path toward stability, but it failed miserably for the Egyptians and even in our disrupted state we should not seek to hitch our lines to the ones who do not practice democracy, who have a mission to control by threat of destruction, and who practice a dominating form of rule, not a democratic form of governance.
None of these generals is a Dwight Eisenhower, all are dedicated to the Trump agenda--ramping up global climate chaos, sowing race hate and violence, targeting refugees and immigrants fleeing from wars we supply arms to wage, rolling back civil rights, being cozy with the likes of autocrats Putin, Duterte, and yes, General al-Sisi, while scorning democratic humane clean energy leaders like Merkel.
Be ye advised.
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