Wednesday marked the first anniversary of the first day of public unrest in Egypt, which led to former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s ouster 18 days later. A little before Mubarak was toppled, Tunisian autocrat Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, having lost support of the military, fled his country in the wake of mass unrest.
The unrest that began in North Africa quickly spread eastward toward the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula; what has been termed the “Arab Spring” has manifested itself differently in different national contexts.
Stratfor’s position from very early on was that the events sweeping the Middle East did not constitute a chain of revolutions. More importantly, the toppling of Ben Ali and Mubarak did not in either case amount to regime change — and the changes that transpired have not led to democracy, nor will they for some time. A year after the Arab unrest broke out, it is important to step back and take stock of what has happened — and of what has not.
The unrest began in Tunisia. An interim government replaced Ben Ali, and elections took place last October. The country’s Islamist Ennahda movement won the legislative polls, securing 90 out of 217 seats, and proceeded to form a coalition government with the secular parties that won the second and third-highest number of parliamentary seats. Parliament has a year to draft a new charter for the country.
In Egypt, Mubarak handed power over to a military junta. This event meant that the country’s armed forces had to move from ruling from behind the scenes to direct governance (albeit through an interim civilian Cabinet). One year after the unrest began, protests continue. The most important recent event, though, saw two different Islamist movements claim three-quarters of parliamentary seats in elections. Crucial next steps include the formation of a government led by Islamists and the crafting of a new constitution. We will also watch the extent to which military leaders will hand over power to a civilian government.
Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi became the third Arab leader to fall from power, and he lost his life in the process. Shortly after the fall of Mubarak, unrest broke out in Libya. This situation quickly turned into a civil war pitting the regime against armed rebels. In August, the Gadhafi regime fell after rebel forces — aided by NATO air, intelligence and special forces support — took over the capital of Tripoli. Two months later, rebel forces captured the Libyan dictator and killed him. Since then, the very forces that united to battle the old regime have increasingly begun fighting each other and challenging the caretaker government.
Events in Libya have been dramatic, but those in the Arab Persian Gulf island kingdom of Bahrain are far more geopolitically significant. Given the fact that a Sunni monarchy is faced with a public uprising led by the country’s Shia majority — whose political principals are Islamist movements that Iran can exploit — the outcome of Bahraini unrest is exceedingly critical internationally. This importance is why Saudi Arabia deployed its forces (along with those of other Gulf Cooperation Council countries) to Bahrain in March 2011, less than a month after the unrest began, and eventually contained the uprising. Shia unrest has picked up again in Bahrain in recent weeks, however, as well as in the nearby Qatif region of Saudi Arabia.
Bahrain is not the only place where the Saudis have had to deal with unrest. In Yemen, protests erupted against President Ali Abdullah Saleh. Shortly thereafter, key divisions within the Yemeni armed forces took up arms against the Saleh regime. The president survived an assassination attempt in which he was badly wounded, but he was also able to block moves by both political and armed opponents to oust his regime. He is expected to step down as part of a Saudi-brokered deal, but only after ensuring that the regime he presided over will largely remain intact — with his faction maintaining its stake in the Yemeni state.
A completely unique scenario has played out in Syria, where the regime of President Bashar al Assad — aided by Iran and employing a massive crackdown involving the alleged killing of some 5,000 protesters — has weathered a nine-month-old uprising. That said, the regime has not been able to quell the agitation and has begun to face a slowly growing level of armed resistance. However, because of the weakness of the opposition and the unwillingness of outside powers to intervene (despite their desire to weaken Iran), the Syrian regime doesn’t appear likely to fall anytime soon.
What we have seen is unrest that has been limited to a number of countries within the Arab world – and the nature of the unrest has varied with each regime. In fact, the monarchies of the region (save Bahrain) have not seen the kind of uprisings experienced by authoritarian republics. Even in the case of the latter, only Tunisia and Egypt saw quick ousters of incumbent rulers — but no regime change. Libya saw full-scale warfare and regime collapse, while Yemen is seeing its leader exit power through a negotiated deal. In Syria, the regime has survived despite nearly a year of unrest.
Clearly, in none of these cases has the expectation of democratic regime change been achieved. Where there have been elections, political Islamists have emerged as the winners, but they still have a long way to go to achieve some semblance of empowerment. The Arab unrest has indeed begun to unravel the old political orders in the Arab world — but new ones are unlikely to be erected anytime soon, especially since another key dynamic – the rise of Iran and geosectarianism — is complicating the Arab unrest.
“Arab Uprising, One Year Later” republished with the permission of Stratfor, www.stratfor.com
