Why the violence?
Violence isn’t new to the wave of Tunisian flu that is sweeping through the Arab world, but it seems to be getting worse, hitting Bahrain, Libya and Yemen during more or less the past 24 hours.
Why?
The short answer: this is the regime response to seeing the presidents of Tunisia and Egypt taken down. While some accounts are not clear, it is certain that the violence in Bahrain this morning was initiated by the police, who attacked a peaceful (and mostly sleeping) encampment in Pearl Square unprovoked. Police and allied thugs seem to have been initiating violence in Yemen as well. The accounts of events in Libya are sketchy, but I would bet that there too the police are rioting. Kings and presidents are concluding that Ben Ali’s mistake was to flee without a fight and Mubarak’s was to step down without cracking down.
How should peaceful protesters deal with this development? They are unlikely to beat the police and thugs in a street fight. What they need to do is mass greater numbers, stay particularly attentive at night, befriend the security forces, beef up their connectedness to foreign and domestic journalists, and make sure their own cadres include people from across the social, ethnic, sectarian and other divides. If they can’t do these things, they need to stay away from confrontation until they can.
You can also hope that the Americans will be telling the regimes in Sanaa and Manama that crackdowns of the sort they are pursuing are counterproductive and likely to spawn more violence. But I doubt Washington has all that much sway in either place at the moment, and they surely don’t want one of those regimes to fall without a safety net in place.
President Saleh is no doubt declaring himself indispensable to the war on Al Qaeda, but there really isn’t much time before the “use by” date on that bag of potatoes. One way or another, he is finished within the next few years (if not the next few months). Time to get some sort of safety net in place, preferably a more democratic one with some prospect of holding north and south together by sharing power between them.
Qadhafi is of no concern in Washington–they would just as soon he take his tent to the desert.
But the Khalifa monarchy in Bahrain is a real dilemma for the Americans. You know: 5th fleet vs. the possibility of a Shia (some presume Iranian-dominated) regime. But the question for the Americans (and for the regime) is whether the kind of police riot the monarchy indulged in this morning will make things better or worse. My bet is worse, maybe much worse if it turns what has been a mild-mannered expression of dissent into a sectarian war that the Sunnis are likely to lose. It is not enough for the monarchy to have allowed municipal and legislative elections last fall. And the 5th fleet is more in danger from getting behind the curve than getting out in front of it. Mr. Obama needs to remember what he said about universal rights–they won’t stop at Manama.
Nor should they if they are going to make it all the way to Tehran, where in many respects the violence and crackdown is at its worst. That is the good news: the theocracy is feeling threatened by Tunisian flu. It dreads the fate of Mubarak, as well it should.
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Bosnia anyone?
Yes, there were quite a few of you out there interested in Macedonoia, and then the piece about Bill Montgomery piece about Bill Montgomery grabbed a lot of you interested in Serbia. What about Bosnia? My latest is here. It is a response to a piece by Ted Galen Carpenter advocating partition.
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Wasting your money, Tomislav?
This is inside baseball, but for those of you who might be interested: former U.S. Ambassador William Montgomery’s September 2010 registration with the Justice Department as an agent for Tomislav Nikolic, President of the Serbian Progressive Party.
I would be the last to deny a retired Foreign Service officer whatever income he can find, and 7500 euros a month is not pocket change, but I would also want to know whom he represents when he gives interviews calling for the dissolution of Bosnia. To be fair he was doing this even before the date of his registration, and he is of course entitled to his views, which are contrary to mine.
The partitions Montgomery proposes are sure formulas for re-igniting conflict in the Balkans, with devastating results, including the formation of an Islamic Republic in central Bosnia. Remember Bill? We called that the “non-viable, rump Islamic Republic that would be a platform for Iranian terrorism in Europe.” Hard for me to see how that is in the U.S. or Serbian interest. But there is of course no longer a need for Bill to worry about that. He works for Nikolic.
The bigger problem may be for Nikolic: he is going to have a hard time being welcomed in Washington unless he takes a pro-Europe, One Bosnia line. Associating himself with Bill Montgomery’s advocacy of partition of Bosnia and Kosovo is no way to overcome Nikolic’s past association with the hard-line, anti-European ethnic nationalism of the Serb Radical Party, from which he split in 2008.
What does Montgomery do for Nikolic’s money? He’ll call his old friends at State, the National Security Council and Congress to get appointments. This is something that the head of a party in the Serbian parliament could and should have done by his own secretary, or by the Serbian embassy.
If that doesn’t work, I’ll help him, for free. I am vigorously in favor of Washington hearing from all parts of the political spectrum in Serbia. But it is simply outrageous that people get paid to make appointments in Washington–our public servants should all be told to tell paid agents that appointments can only be made directly, not through intermediaries.
If Nikolic wants to pay Montgomery to write his talking points, that’s fine with me. But they’ll have to say something different from what Montgomery has been saying in public.
Wasting your money, Tomislav?
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Oldtime revolutionary lore
As Tunisian flu has now spread from Egypt to Iran, Bahrain and Yemen, with a touch also in Algeria and now Libya, it might be wise to review what an old hand views as a few crucial points (I first sat down in front of the bayonet-armed and gas-masked Maryland National Guard in 1964 and got teargassed by the U.S. Army at Fort Dix in 1968, so I am claiming some seniority here). I was also an early and strong supporter of the Serb uprising that forced Slobodan Milosevic out.
One key point is nonviolent discipline, not because of the moral requirement but because it will make the demonstrations more effective. Another is clarity–and simplicity–of objectives.
Why is nonviolence important? Because you want the security forces to hesitate to crack down–they won’t hesitate if you are throwing rocks at them–they’ll fight back, and by definition they have greater firepower. Only if the security forces hesitate to crack down is autocracy in trouble, because it rules by fear. No crackdown, no fear, no autocrat.
The problem is that the security forces often use violence first, or maybe it will be the thugs allied with the regime (the basij in Iran, the club-wielders in Sanaa). The use of these people is already a good sign: it means the regime has doubts about the willingness of the regular security forces to do the dirty deed. The trouble of course is that the thugs can cause a lot of damage.
They will hesitate to use violence only if confronted with a great mass of disciplined people. Going out in groups of twenty to do pitched battle with thugs is no way to make a revolution–it only gets your head cracked. People often suffer the most harm when there were few demonstrators, and at night.
That is another reason for keeping things nonviolent–many people won’t come out for a riot. The attack on camels and horses in Cairo was a turning point: Egyptians were disgusted by a blatant attack on large numbers of ordinary, peaceful people. Had it looked as if the attack had been provoked by violent demonstrators, the effect would have been much less salutary from the protesters’ perspective.
What about objectives? Clarity and simplicity are important. The protesters in Egypt were clearly aiming ultimately for democracy, but the crowds rallied around the call for Mubarak to step down.
Now that he has, there are emerging differences among the many factions that united in the demonstrations–that is only natural. Some will think a constitutional route to democracy is best, others a non-constitutional route. Some will want higher wages, better treatment for workers, rights for minorities–only by suppressing for the moment these differences and focusing on a common objective can a motley crew be forged into a powerful mass movement. There will be time enough after the goal is reached for the protesters to fall out with each other and sow confusion by going their own ways.
Keeping people together, across secular/sectarian and religious or ethnic divides, sends a very powerful message and rallies more people to the cause.
One last note: Obama’s soft approach is the right one. Hillary Clinton’s more strident advocacy is not a good idea.
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Haste makes waste
David Makovsky in USA Today wisely councils the Egyptians to take their time in building democratic institutions and not focus excessively on elections. The quick response: the constitutional amendments will be done in 10 days, referendum on them within two months, elections within six.
I imagine someone in the Army is saying this is the way to be responsive to the protestors, but it is also a formula for mistakes, including mistakes made with some malice aforethought. The process is as important as the outcome. Despite the American precedent of writing a constitution behind closed doors in Philadelphia, long experience suggests that fragile, conflicted and formerly autocratic societies–and Egypt should be considered one–need time to decide on how power is to be distributed, which is what a constitution does. They also need the participation of a broad segment of the population, because otherwise it will look like a power grab (and may well be one).
There is in any event a need for time to develop the institutions of a free society: most of the media, courts, political parties, trade associations, NGOs and labor unions existing today in Egypt are heavily conditioned by the former regime. It will be some time before they are reformed, or new ones created. Context counts. As Makovsky says,
This means going beyond the obvious of lifting the existing emergency law and amending the Egyptian Constitution. It also requires an independent judiciary, a free press, minority rights, and a security apparatus that maintains the monopoly on the use of force. These institutions provide the opportunity for the creation of a civic culture where parties can negotiate their demands in a peaceful framework. Otherwise, the hope for democracy can be easily thwarted.
It is of course problematic to move slowly when the mainstays of the revolution are apparently pressing for fast action. But more than anything else, the quick action needed now is a new government, an early demand of the protesters that has not been fulfilled. The one currently in place, appointed in his desperate last days by then President Mubarak, will do everything it can to block accountability for the regime’s past behavior and tilt the scales of the future towards their continuation in power. It is no surprise that the military would not be replacing its friends in the government quickly, but that makes it all the more urgent.
Of course all these issues should be left up to the Egyptians to decide–I am not suggesting that the Americans or anyone else can do this for them. But there is a lot of experience out there to suggest that haste makes waste, especially in matters of constitutional reform.
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My debut on bloggingheads
Recorded Friday with Ussama Makdisi of Rice University, discussing next steps in Egypt, but it can no longer be embedded. Watch it here.
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