The Arab Spring proved everyone wrong

Lazarus Sauti

The Arab Spring is a revolutionary wave of demonstrations and protests (both non-violent and violent), riots, and civil wars in the Arab world that began on the 18^th of December 2010, according to Wikipedia.

By December 2013, rulers had been forced from power in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. More so, major protests had broken out in Algeria, Morocco and Sudan; and minor protests had occurred in Mauritania, Djibouti and Western Sahara.

“Weapons and Tuareg fighters returning from the Libyan Civil War stoked a simmering conflict in Mali which has been described as ‘fallout’ from the Arab Spring in North Africa, and the sectarian clashes in Lebanon were described as a spillover of violence from the Syrian uprising and hence the regional Arab Spring,” Wikipedia asserts.

Without doubt, the West contributed immensely to the Arab Springs; they wanted to install “who they think was proper and nice for these countries.” Leaders from Western countries also tried to institute their so-called region-wide birth of democracy in most – if not all – affected countries.

However, the outcome proved everyone wrong. According to Michael J Totten, contributing editor for World Affairs, a bi-monthly magazine covering international relations, the Arab Spring proved everyone wrong and showed the world that there is great danger in sudden and forced change.

Only the mostly non-violent removal of President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali from office in Tunis led to free and fair elections in 2011 that brought to power the Islamist party Ennahda, the local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. But Ennahda only won forty-one percent of the vote, with a majority voting for secular parties – hardly a mandate for radical Islam.

“From the very beginning, Tunisia’s liberal and secular opposition resisted Ennahda so effectively that the Islamists had to abandon their push for a religious state and grudgingly accept a secular civil state,” says Totten, adding that “Even that was not enough for the majority; in January 2014, Ennahda, exhausted by the unrelenting onslaught from moderates, liberals, and leftists, resigned from the government. Later that same month, Tunisia adopted one of the most liberal constitutions in the entire Arab world.”

However, Totten believes that many countries involved in the Arab Spring are experiencing wrenching change, of which each country is moving in different and sometimes opposing directions.

Most countries are experiencing problems worse than they faced before the violent breaks.

When Egyptians dumped Hosni Mubarak, Totten says, the majority did not vote for secular candidates in the first elections, as the Tunisians did. “The Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate, Mohamed Morsi, won Egypt’s presidential election with 51 per cent of the vote, a slim majority but a majority all the same.

“Meanwhile, the totalitarian Salafist party – which is more or less the political arm of al-Qaeda – won 24 per cent of the parliamentary vote, meaning that, unlike the Tunisians, a substantial majority of Egyptians went for Islamists of one stripe or another,” he says, adding that “Morsi’s power grabs, his incompetence, his lunatic politics – symbolised by the appointment of a governor associated with a terrorist group that murdered 58 tourists near the city of Luxor in 1997 – were too much for even a nation as conservative and Islamist as Egypt.”

Totten adds: “Millions of people – the overwhelming majority of them fellow Muslims – took to the streets to demand his removal from power, just as they had against Mubarak before him.

“The army took care of the rest. General Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi overthrew Morsi in June of 2013 and immediately declared war against the Muslim Brotherhood. Millions of Egyptians celebrated Sisi’s coup as a revolutionary “correction.”

Further to confirm that the Arab Spring proved everyone wrong; Egypt did not become a democracy. Instead, it is right back where it started. “The Muslim Brotherhood has been outlawed all over again. The new regime and its supporters are no more liberal and democratic than Mubarak’s or Morsi’s.

“In some ways, they are worse. Sisi’s regime reeks of Stalinism these days,” says Totten.

After uprisings in Libya, citizens voted en masse against the local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, suggesting the country might emerge ahead of even Tunisia. Sadly, Libya did not only lose Muammar Gaddafi in the process and after the uprisings but its institutions also collapsed.

This means everything in Libya should be rebuilt from scratch by people whose only experience with politics was Qaddafi’s so-called lunacracy.

Thanks to the uprisings, Libya went from totalitarianism to anarchy, from a country with way too much government to a country that does not have nearly enough.

Accordingly, the one-size-fits-all policy prescription always propagated by Western nations to developing states is wrong as proved by the Arab uprisings; Libya needs state-building and Egypt needs gradual reform. Western powers should, therefore, respect Africa, and not dictate anything to her citizenry.