Will Corruption, Cuts and Protest Produce a New Arab Spring?

posted on: Jan 27, 2019

SOURCE: THE GUARDIAN

BY: SIMON TISDALL

Sudan missed out on the Arab spring, but that may be changing. Protests against Omar al-Bashir, the indicted war criminal who has dominated the country for 29 years, are becoming a daily occurrence. Street-level unrest, sparked by rising bread and fuel prices, began last month and spread quickly. But the focus of demonstrators, their ranks swollen by teachers, lawyers and doctors, has switched to Bashir himself. They want him gone.

Bashir’s response has been predictably repressive. And the president may succeed in battering his critics into silence, as in the past. But the causes of the unrest cannot be bludgeoned away: a struggling economy, low investment, high unemployment, corruption, bad governance and a potentially disastrous lack of opportunity for new generations of young people.

In this respect, Sudan has a lot in common with other Arab countries. Recent weeks have seen protests in Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya and Morocco. Once again, the political temperature is rising. Once again, the failure of governments to meet citizens’ aspirations grows critical. The question now is whether a new age of revolt – call it Arab spring #2 – is brewing.

Tunisia, home of the first Arab spring, in 2010, is another case in point. It, too, was rocked by riots last month. And the unrest was once again triggered by a desperate individual, who self-immolated in protest at low living standards and political stasis. Presidential and parliamentary elections later this year could prove another flashpoint.

Talk of democratic renewal in Syria and Yemen is at least premature. Attempts by citizens of these countries to dislodge entrenched regimes led to devastating civil wars. Libya, too, has never regained its balance after the fall of Muammar Gaddafi. In Egypt, the Arab world’s largest country by population, the dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak has been replaced by an even worse one – that of the general-turned-president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi.

Yet despite these tragedies, or perhaps because of them, pressure for change across the Arab world is likely to continue to grow, keeping pace with the growth in populations, inequality and social injustice. Some of this energy will inevitably be misdirected into support for extremist groups that promise radical solutions, such as Islamic State. Some of it will produce increased migration, particularly into southern Europe.

But most of the pressure will be directed at governments ill-equipped to respond – even if they wish to. Last Friday Egypt marked the eighth anniversary of the Tahrir Square revolution that toppled Mubarak. Thanks to Sisi’s shadow, it did so largely in silence. Public spaces are off-limits to protesters. Public media are closely regulated.

Human Rights Watch says tens of thousands of opposition activists, writers and intellectuals, secular leftists and Muslim Brotherhood supporters have been locked up under regulations introduced since 2013, including anti-terrorism laws. Only this month Ahmed Douma, who helped lead the Tahrir protests, was jailed for 15 years for allegedly attacking security forces in 2011.

Last autumn the Sisi regime was criticised by UN human rights experts for its use of anti-terrorism laws to detain women’s rights activists and those campaigning against torture and extrajudicial killings. Yet Sisi has failed to halt terrorist violence in Sinai and against Coptic Christians. Meanwhile, IMF-prescribed austerity measures are increasing poverty. Given these tensions, something must give.

Western governments, too, are repeating the mistakes made before the first Arab spring: backing dictatorships that supposedly suit their interests while ignoring bad behaviour. Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, will be in Cairo this week, hoping to flog fighter jets. Mike Pompeo, the US secretary of state, visited this month and stepped around Egypt’s human rights black hole. And Donald Trump has become apologist-in-chief for a Saudi murder plot in Istanbul, Riyadh’s war crimes in Yemen and abuses such as the persecution of women’s rights activists.

“The problems that brewed in a cauldron of discontent from the early 2000s, sparking the Arab uprisings – a massive youth bulge, high unemployment, low wages, education systems mired in the past, a lack of innovation and absence of freedoms – are still stewing, and getting worse,” said analyst Indira Lakshmanan. “The strongmen haven’t delivered a system to address the underlying problems.”

This will not continue indefinitely. In Egypt, as in Sudan and elsewhere, pressure is building. A second explosion cannot be far off.