MONTREAL - A year ago this weekend, a young fruit vendor in a remote Tunisian town lit himself on fire - and with the same match ignited a revolution across the Middle East and North Africa, and around the world. Mohamed Bouazizi had suffered through police bullying and injustice for years trying to make a living to support his family. But when a policewoman on Dec. 17 slapped him across the face for refusing to hand over his scales and produce one more time, it was the last straw.
He pushed his cart over to the municipal government offices, and when he couldn't get a hearing with local authorities, right then and there he doused himself in paint thinner and struck a match.
Bouazizi would never know that this singular act of courage and desperation, leading to his death in a hospital three weeks later, would not only see the policewoman banished, but force an abrupt end to the 23-year dictatorship in Tunisia and the beginning of a revolution that would quickly spread from Morocco to Saudi Arabia as youths armed with Twitter and Facebook and Al Jazeera took to the streets to demand greater freedom and democracy.
(``Arab Spring'' has turned out to be the most tweeted story of 2011.)
Over the following 10 months, three despotic regimes would fall. President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia escaped to Saudi Arabia on Jan. 14, 10 days after Bouazizi's death. Egypt's Hosni Mubarak stepped down Feb. 11 after 30 years in power, and Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi would complete the triumvirate of ousted - in his case, executed - dictators in October, after a protracted and bloody civil war under NATO air cover. Gaddafi ruled for 42 years.
For Rex Brynen, a political-science professor at McGill University in Montreal, these successive revolutions had a ``domino effect,'' encouraging anti-authoritarian struggles throughout the Arabian Peninsula.
``But the Arab Spring has also motivated authoritarian leaders to take their own defensive measures,'' Brynen says, ``whether those be limited reforms, increased public spending, or intensified repression.''
Indeed, the response to common grievances has varied widely, and the dominoes have not all fallen the same way.
In Syria, 5,000 people have been killed in ongoing clashes between protesters and government forces that began in January.
In Bahrain, Saudi troops were called upon to put down demonstrations against the royal family's rule. A Canadian citizen, sentenced to five years in jail for ``illegal gathering,'' is one of about 600 people who have filed complaints of torture since the crackdown.
In Yemen, after 10 months of bloody protest, President Ali Abdullah Saleh - who has run the country for 33 years - agreed in November to transfer power to his vice-president. A week later, another eight protesters died in clashes with security forces.
Back in Tunisia and Egypt, however, popular uprisings have led to free and fair elections with large voter turnouts - the second of three rounds of voting in Egypt ended Thursday.
The question now is whether these fledgling democracies, messy and fragile as they are, can survive the aftermath of the revolution - and the opposing forces of freedom, religion and the military - while grappling with a dark and difficult history.
Democracy is a long process, say observers. Marking an X in the box is only the beginning.
Prior to 2011, the Arab world, with few exceptions, was a democratic desert. Dictators were propped up by the fear that the only alternatives to their corrupt regimes were mullah-led theocracies. If they were toppled, secular constitutions would give way to Sharia law; kleptocrats, like Ben Ali and Mubarak, would be replaced by religious leaders who would promptly ban all things Western.
It was not entirely a lie.
In Tunisia, 37 per cent of voters in October cast their ballots with the Islamist Ennahda party, while the party with the second most votes took eight per cent. On Monday, Moncef Marzouki, a human-rights activist and thorn in the side of Ben Ali, was chosen as president. But the more powerful position of prime minister, responsible for forming an interim government, will go to Ennahda's Hamadi Jebali.
Meanwhile in Egypt, about 46 per cent of voters so far have chosen the moderate Islamist party, the Muslim Brotherhood, with another 20 per cent voting for the Salafist party, Al Nour, which promotes a hard-line interpretation of Islam.
Some Al Nour candidates have suggested they would ban bikinis and mixed-sex beaches, alcohol and pop music, even driving for women, while segregating the sexes in public. And there were suggestions that Pharaonic statues should be covered in wax because they were idolatrous - a nail in the coffin of Egyptian tourism.
Attacks since the revolution on Coptic Christians, who make up between 10 and 20 per cent of the Egyptian population, have not calmed concerns that a democratic vote could paradoxically bring an end to civil rights.
Stephen Grand, an expert on U.S.-Islamic world relations with the Brookings Institute think tank, says no one really knows what to expect from the Islamic parties once they are in government, but not all the signs are bad.
For one, the revolution that led to Mubarak's ouster was non-ideological and non-political, unifying Egyptians of all walks of life and religions (Christians were known to stand guard in Tahrir Square while Muslims prayed; women were a powerful presence.) Egyptians were inspired by their own Mohamed Bouazizi, a 28-year-old named Khaled Said, who, after uncovering a video implicating officers in a drug deal, was dragged out of an Internet cafe and beaten to death.
A day of rage against police brutality and the 29-year state of emergency in Egypt evolved into the Tahrir Square protests.
The Muslim Brotherhood did not join the revolt until Day 5, Grand said, and they ``do not appear keen on swiping the entire punch bowl for themselves.''
``It's clearly not what the U.S. government and observers were hoping for,'' said Grand, reached in Doha, Qatar. ``But until they are in power you don't know. One thing we've seen in other Muslim majority countries is that when Islamic parties are forced to compete in the democratic process . . . they tend to moderate. They will focus on the average voter and we know Egyptians care more about dignity, bread and freedom than about religion.''
Others have pointed out that the Brotherhood's popularity also has to do with its 75-year history. Though banned under Mubarak, members of the Muslim Brotherhood ran as independents and took one-fifth of the seats in the People's Assembly in 2005. It's hardly surprising those who stood up to the regime would do well at the polls.
Salam Elmenyawi, an imam and the president of the Muslim Council of Montreal who left Egypt in the 1970s, said people were voting for the Brotherhood not necessarily because they were Muslim, but because they appeared honest and promised good government, when Egyptians had only known violence and corruption.
The same could be said for the Tunisian Ennahda party, said Bochra Manai, 29, who helped organize the Tunisian election in Montreal.
``The Algerian and Iranian experiences were not ideal in terms of civil liberties, but if we want democracy we have to accept that people can vote 40 per cent for an Islamist party,'' said Manai, whose father was an opposition candidate in 1994, later arrested, tortured and exiled. ``Tunisians chose to break with the past.''
What really matters, says Grand, is what happens after the elections, how to set the rules and make new leaders abide by them.
A popular Egyptian joke from pre-revolutionary days goes like this: A man finds Aladdin's lamp, so he rubs the lamp and the genie says, ``Ask what you want, it shall be done.'' The man says, ``I want a private highway from Cairo to Aswan,'' and the genie replies that this is too difficult. So the man retorts, ``What about removing Mubarak from power?'' And the genie replies, ``So how many lanes do you want in your highway?''
That Egyptian protesters - 4.5 million of them - managed to force Mubarak to step down has a lot to do with the military. The same military that had kept Mubarak in power, and initially used tear gas, rubber bullets and then real bullets against protesters, finally refused to fire on them in January. But the military, in Egypt and elsewhere, is proving as much a threat to democracy as a guardian.
Last month, military leaders suggested there would be no presidential elections until 2013, and that any new constitution must leave the military's power - and budget - beyond public scrutiny. Protesters went back to Tahrir Square to demand the transfer of power to civilian rule. The military backtracked, but not before 3,000 people were injured and 41 people killed.
Presidential elections are now set for June 2012, but a new constitution has to be written in the interim that will set out the rules for democracy, including who can run for president, and the contentious role of the military.
``The military remains a big question mark, if not an exclamation mark, in Egypt's transition to democracy,'' said Khaled Fahmy, professor and chair of the American University of Cairo's Department of History, hours before soldiers stormed the Occupy Cabinet camp outside parliament on Thursday that was demanding an immediate return to civilian rule. ``The military is doing everything it can to stop the revolution in its tracks because it has so much to lose if the revolution takes its final course: making the military subject to civilian control and scrutiny, either through parliament or the press.''
The military, which has received $1.3 billion a year in aid to not go to war, accounts for 20 to 30 per cent of the civilian economy.
``That's an enormous amount of money circulating and controlled by an unaccountable agency in a poor country. The army has not yet found a formula to allow it to protect its privileges.''
Ultimately, how the situation develops after elections in Egypt and Tunisia, and whether the dominoes continue to fall in the rest of the Arab world, may depend on the other new players in the political arena, the protesters.
Named Time Magazine's Person of the Year this week, the ``protester'' remains central to keeping any new government and the military in check, says Grand.
For him, the ``second Egyptian revolution'' in late November was as important as the first, because it kept public pressure on the military to advance democratic change.
He compares the situation in North Africa and the Middle East today with the breakup of the former Soviet Union. The countries of the East Bloc all became ``democracies'' on paper - with constitutions and institutions and democratic laws. But today only 13 out of 28 are categorized by Freedom House as ``free'' and eight ``partly free.''
The crucial difference was the engagement of the public in making sure democratic institutions were respected by political leaders, and didn't merely become window dressing for leaders to manipulate.
``The really hopeful thing about the Arab Spring is that it's clear that the public have found their voice and will not stop exercising that voice any time soon,'' Grand said. ``They have found ways to put pressure on leaders to make government more accountable. That's something new in Arab politics, something infectious.''
For those on the ground in Egypt, however, a stable democracy is still a long way off. ``I voted and my whole family voted, we are very proud and relieved that so far it has been peaceful,'' Fahmy said. ``But we have not had politics in 60 years. We haven't set the rules of the game yet, we are still in the process of disagreeing with each other, and we don't even know what is politically correct to say or not, let alone what the rules of elections should be, constitutions and so on. The transformation of the country and the region at large is just mind-boggling.''
Montreal Gazette
csolyom@montrealgazette.com
Read more: www.canada.com/single+mat.../story.html#ixzz1grJXM3x6
Poster Comment:
While it's the figureheads at the top upon whom public wrath is focused it's really the behavior, of "Elbow" and "Dogberry" police along with halfwit, bureaucratic tyrants, to equitably resolve problem situations that is the basic cause of the current world-wide revolution.