Tag: Jordan
What will Friday prayers bring?
Tomorrow is Friday again, and across the “greater” Middle East there will be prayers and restlessness. The big questions:
- Saudi Arabia: intellectuals have been signing petitions in favor of constitutional monarchy, but the experts are still betting that people will not go the street–it is illegal to demonstrate, and socially disapproved. We’ll see.
- Libya: most of the country is liberated already, but will crowds risk turning out in Tripoli?
- Egypt: Mubarak’s buddy prime minister, Ahmed Shafiq, has stepped down. El Baradei at least is calling this a turning point. Will it open the way for real regime change that the military has been resisting?
- Tunisia: Ben Ali’s buddy prime minister has already stepped down, opening the way for real change, but the country is burdened with refugees from Libya. The Brits are at least trying to relieve that burden.
- Yemen: President Saleh has said he’ll step down in 2013. The political party opposition, buoyed by tribal support, is proposing he do it by the end of this year. Will that be enough to split his opponents and save his tuchas?
- Bahrain: formal opposition parties have presented reform demands in an opening bid for negotiations with the monarchy. Will that split them from the demonstrators?
- Iraq: The violent crackdown last weekend amplified what otherwise might have been relatively quiet demonstrations against corruption and for better services. Has the government learned its lesson?
- Jordan and Syria: little noise, as their king who allows demonstrations and president who doesn’t try to feed a reform half loaf to relatively weak oppositions. Will they succeed?
- Iran: crackdown in full swing with the arrest of Green Movement stars Mir Hossein Mousavi, Mehdi Karroubi and their wives. Ahmedinejad is increasingly dominant and effective against both clerical and lay opponents, inside and outside the regime. Can he keep it up?
I can’t remember a time I looked forward so much to Friday, with anticipation but also with trepidation. The world could be looking very different by Sunday.
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So much to keep track of!
So I thought a quick update on the revolutions of 2011 might be in order:
- Libya: Gaddafi holding on in Tripoli, where his forces indulge in random killings, but most of the rest of the country seems to be in rebel hands. Tribes and a hodge-podge of local authorities seem to be the mainstay of law and order, insofar as it exists. The army is split. Lots of high level defections. The Americans have finally imposed unilateral sanctions freezing assets and banning travel. The UN Security Council is still debating its draft, which may have to lose the referral to the International Criminal Court in order to get past India, China and Russia (none are states parties to the ICC).
- Yemen: Protests have grown dramatically with adherence by some important tribes, President Saleh took the Gaddafi vow to fight to the last drop of blood, and the opposition seems intent on continuing despite Saleh’s vows to leave office in 2013 and not install his son.
- Egypt: Big demonstration yesterday to keep pressure on the military, force out the prime minister, who is Mubarak’s buddy, and end the state of emergency, which the military has promised to do once order is restored.
- Bahrain: Another big demo, but the monarchy clearly committed for the moment to avoiding violence. An important Bahraini Shiite leader returned to the country from exile and was allowed to speak.
- Tunisia: Protesters Friday pressed for faster change. Pro-Ben Ali youth rioted Saturday. Violence in both instances. The good guys should really wear white hats and maintain non-violent discipline, as that will help to distinguish them from the bad guys.
- Iraq: At least eight killed around the country in the first big demonstrations, mainly by undisciplined security forces. The Speaker of Parliament says he supports the demonstrators’ right to protest, Prime Minister Maliki tried to fend off both protests and criticism, and Ayatollah Sistani weighed in on the side of the improved public services and an end to corruption. Sistani is the one really worth listening to, but he hasn’t got a lot of influence in Kurdistan, where violent demonstrations continue.
- Jordan: A big, peaceful demonstration Friday, but big is much smaller (4000) than in other places. The call is still far more for reform than for regime change.
- Iran: The regime still has things “under control,” mistreating its own people even as it praises the rebellions in Arab countries. The video at that link, by the way, demonstrates a lack of discipline on both sides of the confrontation, but the text is useful for understanding why demonstrations in Iran have been less than fully successful.
Overall: lots of ups and downs this week, but it is clear that few real dictators will survive much longer. The question of what will replace them is still an open one, but it is looking more and more as if re-imposing autocracies will be nigh on impossible. The people simply won’t stand for it. More power to them!
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Simmer until ready
While it is hard to take eyes off Egypt, the rest of the Arab world is simmering. We should make sure nothing boils over while we aren’t watching:
- Syria: “days of rage” demonstrations called for Friday and Saturday. One wag has proposed calling them “days of mild frustration” and President Bashar al Asad has claimed he is in favor of “opening.” My month studying Arabic in Damascus two years ago suggested to me that the population, while more than mildly frustrated, lacks the stomach for anything like what is going on in Cairo. Bashar knows that. Feb 5 update: the days of rage failed.
- Jordan: Ditto Amman, where weekly protests haven’t grown very large and the government is busy increasing food and fuel subsidies and civil service salaries, despite budget problems. The King sacked the Prime Minister this week, but that won’t change much.
- Algeria: President Bouteflika has promised to lift the state of emergency “soon.” Next, planned and banned rally scheduled for February 12, focused on economic and social issues, not politics. Anyway that’s a political year away at this point.
- Libya: Quiet. Qadhafi looked frightened when Tunisia happened, but I guess oil income that makes GDP well over $12,300 per capita provides a lot of simmering time.
- Sudan: scattered, small protests, but the big news in Khartoum is the loss of the relatively Western-oriented, sometimes English-speaking and Christian South. That will shift the center of gravity in Khartoum sharply in the Islamist direction.
- Yemen: demonstrations and a president who promises not to run again in 2013, but this is at least the third time Saleh has made that promise. Revolution is tough to organize when a good part of the population chews qat, but keep an eye on the southern rebellion (the northern one has gone quiescent).
So to my eye nothing else seems ready to boil over yet, but the outcome in Cairo could well heat things up, especially in Syria. Bashar al Assad gives a great interview to the Wall Street Journal, but I doubt he is quite as in tune with his people as he claims.
PS: I really should not have skipped Saudi Arabia, which was treated in a fine NPR piece by Michelle Norris yesterday. No demos, but a lot of people watching and wondering, sometimes out loud.
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Double double toil and trouble
With Tunisia in a kind of constitutionally correct and militarily enforced limbo between dictatorship and the possibility of real democracy, demonstrations and rioting are popping up elsewhere in the Arab World. Qadhafi has been reduced to stuttering regret for the impatience of the Tunisians while two unemployed men reportedly tried to immolate themselves in Algeria.
. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is testing the waters while in Jordan people take to the streets. So what might all this amount to, and what determines the course it takes?
With the obvious exception of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, none of the current protests seems to have a clear political matrix. Some people will tell you that is important–without a clearly defined political leadership and goals, nothing much can come of spontaneous protest over food prices and corruption. I don’t believe that. Political leadership often emerges during the events, not in advance of them, and the lack of clearly defined leadership makes it difficult for repressive regimes to decapitate popular movements.
My own view is that the vital thing to watch is the relationship between protesters and security forces. If the protesters attack the security forces, they will respond with violence and more often than not sufficient force to win the day, even if doing so generates another day of protests. The objective of the protesters needs to be the strategic one of depriving the dictatorship of the security force protection that enables it to stay in place.
The way to achieve this is not to attack the security forces but to try to win them over. Often this will be difficult in the capital, where the best and most loyal of the uniformed and non-uniformed security forces are usually deployed. But somewhere on the periphery, likely in the provinces, there will be security forces with little brief for the regime they ostensibly defend. Non-violent protest is what can win them over: sticking flowers in their gun barrels is the international photojournalists’ image of choice. Ben Ali did not flee because there were so many people in the streets. He fled because someone told him the army would no longer protect him.
That of course leaves Tunisia in the limbo I mentioned at first. Now the effort has to become more politically astute, using the demonstrators to guarantee free and fair elections open to serious competition. This will not be easy, in part because the crowds in the street may not see the relevance of elections to what they went there for in the first place: jobs and food above all. That is where political leadership is needed: to show the connection. Otherwise, demonstrations may lead to a non-democratic political takeover that promises more immediate results.
This is all discussed amply on the website of the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict, or if you prefer your protests with an accent of Serbian experience at Canvasopedia.
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