NY Review of Books, February 25, 2021
The Arab Spring at Ten
A decade ago, countries across North Africa and the Middle East erupted
in protests against their autocratic rulers. Five witnesses to those
events tell what happened next
by Aida Alami
Ten years ago, crowds took to the streets in countries across North
Africa and the Middle East, changing the course of history forever. They
wanted to take power away from autocrats and give it back to the people.
These nameless women and men were taking part in a mass wave of protest.
They were unafraid to stand up to oppression. It was an awakening that
was sudden, surprising, and at the same time in sync with a new digital
era in which people were able to connect and organize in unprecedented ways.
It all started in late 2010 when Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian street
vendor, immolated himself in public in protest against a life without
dignity. His sacrifice, speaking of a desperation shared by many,
sparked a revolution—first in Tunisia, and then, over the coming months,
in neighboring countries and across the region.
The protesters aspired and succeeded in ways that had been unimaginable
only months before the uprisings. Most of these countries had won
independence from Western colonizers after World War II, only to find
themselves ruled by corrupt tyrants. The hopes and wishes of ordinary
women and men were never taken into consideration, and these societies
were governed for decades by fear. But all that changed at a rapid pace
in the spring of 2011.
People were elated, as finally they were in control for the first time
in their lives. It was easy to predict that the road ahead would be
tortuous, but in those early days nothing seemed impossible in the fight
against tyranny and oppression. In the span of a few weeks, street
protests ousted dictators in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen, and in
other places, governments scrambled to promise reforms.
Some of that change has endured, with hopes realized. But in many cases,
the euphoria turned to disappointment, and protest gave way to violence,
retrenchment, and new repressive regimes. Now, with the world reeling
from a pandemic that has brought the global economy to its knees, and as
counterrevolutions to the Arab Spring are thriving, the transformational
milestones of 2011 have come to seem distant, almost unreal.
With the exception of Tunisia, perhaps, the peoples of the region are
arguably worse off than they were before the Spring. Syria and Libya, in
particular, seem locked in an endless cycle of armed conflict between
warring factions, increasingly acting as proxies for foreign powers,
that has devastated these countries, creating a humanitarian disaster
and making them both a source of and conduit for a refugee crisis of
historic proportions.
That, in turn, has fanned a bonfire of human rights violations across
the region. The continuing crackdowns in Egypt and elsewhere on those
who led the 2011 uprisings, as well as political instability across the
region, have eroded the rule of law and empowered secret police and
government torturers.
The gruesome assassination of Jamal Khashoggi by agents of the Saudi
government in Turkey in 2018 was, in many ways, the symbolic culmination
of the impunity tyrants across the region now feel in facing down the
enthusiasm and optimism of the 2011 movement. Days after Khashoggi’s
death, The Washington Post published his last column, in which he wrote:
The Arab world was ripe with hope during the spring of 2011.
Journalists, academics and the general population were brimming with
expectations of a bright and free Arab society within their respective
countries. They expected to be emancipated from the hegemony of their
governments and the consistent interventions and censorship of
information. These expectations were quickly shattered; these societies
either fell back to the old status quo or faced even harsher conditions
than before.
In the two years since those words were published, many have similarly
concluded that the Arab Spring largely failed, and that those in the
region who craved freedom and democracy have lost, for now at least. As
a Moroccan journalist who studied in the United States and lived there
for several years before moving back home only months before the first
protests in Tunisia, I have a keen interest in the ways in which
people’s lives intersect with this larger story.
For this project, I spoke to five people of different nationalities from
the Maghreb and Middle East whose experiences and perspectives, I
believe, made them representative of their respective time and place.
All have felt the disappointments acutely but also see the setbacks as
inevitable stages in a much longer process. The change they wanted may
have been postponed, but they have not forgotten what seemed possible in
2011.
TUNISIA
Tunisia is faring relatively well compared with other countries that
were swept by the uprisings. To some observers, Tunisia’s decade-long
democratic transition and consolidation is still fragile, but to others,
it shows that Arab-majority countries can aspire to higher ideals of
freedom and that popular demands for democracy do not necessarily end in
destruction, war, and a return to authoritarianism.
World events and the pandemic have dampened any mood of celebration
about the recent tenth anniversary of the ouster of Zine al-Abidine Ben
Ali, who had ruled the country for twenty-three years with extreme
brutality; the fallen dictator died in 2019 in Saudi Arabia, unmourned
and largely forgotten even in his own country.
Today, Tunisians have far more freedom under President Kais Saied’s
government but are still contending with high unemployment amid the
worst economic crisis in the country’s history thanks to the pandemic.
As a result, popular discontent manifests in frequent sit-ins and
demonstrations, often met with harsh repression by the authorities.
I spoke to Amira Yahyaoui, an entrepreneur who shuttles between San
Francisco and Tunisia running Mos, a tech platform for students applying
for financial aid for college. Formerly a prolific blogger, she had been
a leading figure in the pro-democracy resistance to Ben Ali before the
revolution. Her father was a judge who stood up to the dictator and
lived under house arrest when Yahyaoui was a teenager. Her cousin,
Zouhair Yahyaoui, a cyber activist who founded a satirical website
TUNeZINE, was tortured to death by the regime back in 2005. Yahyaoui
herself was arrested and beaten by the police at the age of sixteen.
“I was born into a family that was ready fully to die for the country,”
she told me via Zoom. “I was born into a democratic family inside a
cage, and I couldn’t stand it. I was like, ‘This isn’t possible.’”
She still sees her mission as holding power to account. “For me one of
the benchmarks of success is how uncomfortable this elite is,” she said.
Under Ben Ali, Yahyaoui was eventually exiled; stripped of her
nationality, she found refuge in France. She did not feel particularly
welcome there—then President Sarkozy was close to Ben Ali—and she
attended college using a fake student ID, since she was undocumented.
When the protests in Tunisia started in December 2010, she used her
social media platform to raise awareness of what was happening: numerous
people, including high-ranking army officers and government officials,
sent her videos of the repression, which she then posted online from France.
She built a large following and began to do interviews in the French
media on the situation in Tunisia. She was live on television when she
got a text from an anonymous source (whom she later realized was inside
the army) who told her that Ben Ali had fled for Saudi Arabia on January
14, 2011. That same day, she got her passport back, and the day after
that, she flew home.
Once there, Yahyaoui quickly got involved in the transition to
democracy. In 2012, she founded the independent watchdog group Al
Bawsala (“The Compass” in Arabic) to monitor the work of the Constituent
Assembly, helping establish a culture of transparency in the parliament.
Despite Tunisia’s share of setbacks, Yahyaoui remains optimistic.
“If, the first time I got beaten by the police in Tunisia, I was asked,
‘What is the one power they could give you to change the country?’, I
would say: ‘[The power to] take the fear out of people’s hearts,’” she
said. “I care deeply about the fact that people are no longer afraid and
ended their voluntary servitude. Tunisians own their country today. We
are no longer tenants in someone else’s country.”
She believes that young people today have even more power than she and
others did a decade ago. She awaits a second revolution.
“A democracy is not built in ten years,” she concluded. “I was very
young during the revolution today, less so today. I want who I was ten
years ago to be the one in power [today].”
EGYPT
During the three weeks that led to the last day of Hosni Mubarak’s
thirty-year grip over Egypt, little mattered but the live images
streamed from Tahrir Square in Cairo, notably by the Qatari network Al
Jazeera (among others), of thousands of people determined to stay until
they’d overthrown the American-backed tyrant. Inspired by the success of
street protests in Tunisia, the protesters spent those weeks debating,
chanting, even reading poetry—and everything seemed possible.
Ten years later, the dream of greater freedom of expression and civic
participation has turned into a nightmare for human rights defenders in
Egypt. The fall of an autocrat gave way briefly to a government ruled by
Mohamed Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood, before the takeover by an army
council and the subsequent installation of President Abdel Fattah
el-Sisi, who, though elected, heads a regime that has pursued
increasingly draconian and repressive policies.
According to Human Rights Watch, Sisi was responsible for the massacre
of more than nine hundred civilians (mostly Morsi supporters) in July
2013. Since then, the crackdown on opponents and dissidents has
broadened, through prison detention, torture, beatings, and even
extrajudicial killings.
Amr Darrag served briefly as minister of planning in President Morsi’s
cabinet, from May to July 2013. He is now living in exile in Istanbul,
where he runs a think tank, the Egyptian Institute for Studies (EIS).
Ten years ago, he was frequently abroad on business trips, so, on the
day Mubarak stepped down, he was watching events unfold on television in
Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates.
“It felt that Mubarak had been there forever,” he told me recently. “I
got my PhD, became a professor, and he was still the president. Even ten
years later, he was still there. It just felt as if he was to be there
forever—and his son was going to take over. It felt hopeless.”
Only a few years before, Darrag said, even a few dozen people protesting
in the streets would have been considered a brave show of dissent. As
the crowds filled Tahrir Square, he texted a friend that “history was
being made.” He managed to get a flight back home on February 13, 2011,
two weeks after the ouster. “It was a marvelous day,” he said.
Darrag, then a businessman, soon got involved in politics. He became the
secretary general of the Constituent Assembly that drafted Egypt’s 2012
constitution, an experience he describes as “six wonderful months.” He
was also one of the founding members of the Freedom and Justice Party,
the Muslim Brotherhood–affiliated Islamist party led by Morsi. He served
in several capacities within the party until the July 2013 coup, after
which he left Egypt and has not been back since.
“Everybody was concentrating on the fact that Mubarak was stepping down
and nobody paid attention to the military,” he told me. “People were
under the impression that the military sided with the people and helped
get rid of Mubarak and refused to face the demonstrators. People thought
that this is a different type of military that we could trust. Their
popularity at the time was very high.”
With hindsight, he feels this was naive and led to a failure to foresee
what would happen next—as well as a widespread assumption that the
military coup would be short-lived and the people would soon be back in
charge. Instead, the military administration backed one of their own,
General Sisi, to form the next civilian government. Darrag had to leave
everything behind, including the business he’d built.
“I love my country. I am still concerned with Egypt and with our cause,”
he said. “These days [of the coup and what followed] were not the best
of my life. I don’t feel the urge to go back and live this kind of
experience again. It doesn’t mean that I am not longing for a different
future for my country.”
Today, Darrag’s take on Egypt’s Arab Spring echoes what I’ve heard from
others—that it was a necessary step, even if it was into the unknown,
and perhaps toward a worse situation. “Many people say, ‘We were better
off without the revolution,’” he said. “But you cannot blame the
victims.” He takes heart from a longer view: “You can never keep
controlling a country only through oppression. That is bound to explode.
People are scared now. But the reasons for them to rise up are one
hundred times higher than in 2011.”
LIBYA
Libya has been engulfed in chaos for much of the last decade.
Assassinations, kidnappings, and bombings have become a tragically
regular part of people’s lives. Foreign interference, proxy wars, and
non-state armed groups have perpetuated the country’s political
instability, depriving millions of Libyans of a share in the potential
prosperity from the country’s vast natural resources, tanking its
economy, and leaving little hope for any near-term solution.
As baleful as that picture is, before 2011 it was hard to imagine
Libya’s future without Muammar Qaddafi. The former army officer had
ruled the country for more than forty years, first as an Arab
nationalist and later in the name of “Islamic socialism,” but
increasingly as an eccentric but ruthless despot.
Qaddafi backed Ben Ali as unrest grew in neighboring Tunisia in early
2011, but this decision backfired when Ben Ali fled the country. Libyans
saw an opportunity to demand change, first taking to the streets in the
eastern city of Benghazi on February 15. Qaddafi responded with
disproportionate force. But far from being intimidated, the
demonstrators escalated their tactics: within weeks, the protest
movement had turned into an armed uprising. In rebel-held areas, a
National Transitional Council formed, which soon received international
military and political support. A French-led coalition acting with a UN
mandate to protect civilians from Qaddafi’s forces launched air raids.
After months of fighting, the regime was losing. In August, rebels
entered the capital, Tripoli, and took control. On October 20, Qaddafi,
by then a fugitive, was captured in Sirte, tortured, and summarily executed.
Libyans’ celebrations were short-lived, as the country became a
patchwork of territories controlled by various armed militias and
warlords. By 2016, it was clear that the authority of the Tripoli-based
Government of National Accord (GNA) did not extend across the whole
country, and today, Libya remains divided chiefly between two factions,
each supported by competing foreign powers. On one side, the
internationally recognized GNA has backing from Turkey, which has sent
battle-hardened Syrian mercenaries to fight in Libya. On the other side,
forces led by General Khalifa Haftar, who has ruled Eastern Libya for
several years after brutally suppressing Islamist insurgents, get
support from the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Russia, and France.
When Haftar failed to conquer Tripoli last year, after more than twelve
months of fighting, both parties agreed on a cease-fire agreement last
October. So far, that has held. Earlier this month, delegates picked by
the United Nations designated four senior figures to lead an interim
government. After nearly a decade of civil war, many Libyans are weary
and wish for little more than stability and peace.
But that does not capture how Iman Bugaighis views things. A professor
of dentistry, she was also one of the first activists to take up the
anti-Qaddafi cause back in February of 2011.
“Qaddafi became the country and the country became Qaddafi,” is how she
describes the situation at the time. Along with other women, she took
part in a demonstration in front of a courtroom in Benghazi with little
thought for her safety. Although she had grown up in a prominent and
well-to-do family, she felt Libyans had little option but to seize the
chance to finally speak up. “It was a matter of life or death for us,”
she told me. “We didn’t feel like we had any other choice but to
protest. It was about our dignity, about being respected as human beings.”
Her sister Salwa, a lawyer who defended political prisoners, also took
part in the protests. In the weeks that followed, Iman became a
spokesperson for the Libyan revolution, while Salwa helped select
members of the National Transitional Council.
“We had some good times until 2013,” Iman added. “At the time, people
didn’t have the experience. After forty-two years of oppression,
everybody wanted to be on the stage and talk.”
Iman went on to be an advocate for Libyan women at the UN and with the
European Union. But Salwa, who had become an icon of the
postrevolutionary reform movement, started receiving death threats and
left the country for a while. She returned in 2014 in order to cast her
vote in the elections held that year. On June 25, gunmen forced their
way into her home and shot her to death. Her husband was kidnapped and
has never been seen again. Precisely who was responsible for Salwa’s
assassination remains murky.
“It wasn’t my intention to leave at first. I left everything,” Iman
said. “I had just moved to my new place, a villa, only one month before.
I was building it for ten years. I left everything, even my photos are
not with me.” But Salwa’s death was a signal to that her family was not
safe in Libya, and she stayed abroad. Bugaighis now lives with her
daughter in Portugal, where she teaches. The rest of her family lives in
the Emirates, Jordan, and the United States. But she still stays closely
connected to Libya, following events back home on social media and
keeping in touch with people on the ground.
Today, Bugaighis is skeptical about whether a long-term settlement in
Libya is possible without a deal that resolves the conflict between the
competing foreign powers. But as far as the revolution goes, she regrets
nothing.
“I never thought it was not worth it,” Bugaighis told me. “I didn’t want
anything else. You cannot blame people for standing up for their dignity.”
MOROCCO
In February 2011, I was in Tunisia reporting on the aftermath of the
revolution—and paying little attention to events back home in Morocco.
In the North African kingdom, voices of dissent were scarce at the time:
the last large protests I could remember were almost ten years earlier,
when Islamists took to the streets to oppose the reforms of a new family
code, even as counterprotesters marched to support more rights for women.
We Moroccans had collectively become inured to the problems the country
faced, and most people didn’t feel they could make a difference. The
country is also less overtly autocratic than others that experienced
uprisings in 2011. Although Morocco has suffered from the same ills as
other Arab-majority countries, such as high youth unemployment and
corruption, its civil society had long enjoyed some dialogue with the
authorities over demands for greater social justice. To outsiders—and to
many Moroccans—the kingdom is faring better than others in the region:
perceived as politically stable, it has a relatively healthy economy,
functioning institutions, and improving infrastructure.
The more detailed picture is also more complicated. By the time he died,
in 1999, King Hassan II had put aside the brutality that had
characterized much of his reign and allowed greater freedom of the press
and more political diversity; that bequeathed a relatively smooth
transition for his heir, the current king, Mohammed VI. He, in turn,
showed some initial willingness to enact reforms, but the regime
gradually reverted to type—censoring journalists, imprisoning
dissidents, and leaving little room for public debate.
Still, when a friend sent me a video of Moroccans calling for
demonstrations to take place on February 20, 2011, I felt a mixture of
emotions—both excitement and fear at the idea that they were brave
enough to march without knowing how the protests would be handled by the
authorities. Their demands were for more justice and equality, along
with new elections, but they stopped short of calling for a regime
change. Some of the protests did meet with a harsh police response, but
overall, the marches went ahead peacefully. The king’s response was
conciliatory, too, pressing ahead with constitutional changes that
promised more power to the parliament, and greater equality and freedom.
Over the following months, the movement gradually subsided.
Ten years later, it is clear that the gains amounted to far less than
had been promised. The king and his advisers still control almost
everything, while hundreds of political prisoners, including many
journalists, fill the prisons. The regime has made it clear that calls
for democracy will result in repression.
The case of the journalist Hajar Raissouni sheds light on the kingdom’s
decision to crack down on dissent. She is the niece of two leading
critical voices in Morocco: Ahmed Raissouni, a prominent Islamist, and
Soulaimane Raissouni, the editor of Akhbar Al Yaoum, one of the only
independent news outlets in Morocco. Soulaimane Raissouni is currently
in jail awaiting trial on rape allegations, making him one of many
journalists accused of serious sex crimes—seen by many human rights
activists as concocted smears to discredit dissidents.
In 2011, Hajar Raissouni was a nineteen-year-old student attending
college in Rabat, the capital, and she joined the protests with
excitement and enthusiasm. The constitutional reforms were seen by many
as cosmetic changes, largely opposed by members of the February 20 movement.
“I was not in the front lines, but I was dreaming of change, and that we
[could] live in a democratic system that respects human rights,
equality, justice, and the law,” Raissouni told me. “February 20
represents to me hope and the flame of resistance in order to fight for
a real reform of the political, economic, social, and human rights system.”
After college, she followed her admired uncle Soulaimane into
journalism, getting a job with him at Akhbar Al Yaoum. When protests
shook northeastern Morocco in 2017, after a fishmonger died as the
police seized his merchandise, she spent months reporting that new wave
of unrest.
“I cannot forget the fear, terror, and anticipation in the eyes of
children in the Al Hoceima region, and also looks of hatred,” Raissouni
recalled. “In every house, you find a detainee. Mothers’ tears and the
feeling of weakness of the fathers made me feel helpless.”
As she was leaving a doctor’s appointment in the summer of 2019, she
herself was arrested. Plainclothes officers arrested her and her fiancé,
Rifaat al-Amin, who has since become her husband. They, and the medical
team Raissouni had just visited, were charged with performing an illegal
abortion, and the couple were additionally charged with having sex
outside of marriage (both are criminal offenses in Morocco). All denied
the charges and maintained that the doctor was treating Raissouni for a
hemorrhage. Raissouni and al-Amin were sentenced to a year in prison,
the doctor received a two-year sentence, and the rest of the medical
staff received suspended sentences.
Raissouni still painfully recalls the three grueling days in custody
before her arraignment, when she was forcibly examined by a doctor,
despite her screams. She was not provided with pads for her bleeding or
a change of clothes, even as blood dripped from her chair to the floor
of the police station.
The case did, however, cause an international outcry, and the couple was
eventually pardoned by the king. But Raissouni sees the episode as
evidence of the regime’s systematically abusive character. “I was only
one episode in a number of episodes of tyranny and authoritarianism that
our country is experiencing,” she told me.
After her release, Raissouni moved to Sudan, her husband’s home country.
The recent imprisonment of her uncle Soulaimane and continuous
harassment of her family made it impossible for her to stay in Morocco.
These days, Raissouni still follows events at home and campaigns on
social media for her uncle’s exoneration. But a return to Morocco seems
unthinkable.
“I believe the homeland is where you feel you are free and that you are
safe, and I no longer feel this in Morocco,” she concluded. “It has
become for me a big prison.”
SYRIA
Of all countries that underwent uprisings, Syria certainly has had the
worst outcome. The uprisings began in March 2011 in the southern city of
Daraa, where the arrests and torture of teenagers for spray-painting
anti-Assad graffiti on the wall of a school drove courageous protesters
out into the streets. As the weeks went by, street protests were met
with more torture and violence by President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
His secret police and jailers used horrific methods against an
opposition that had thus far been peaceful. And in an effort to sabotage
the nonviolent pro-democracy movement, he released hundreds of hardline
Islamists from jail—though many would eventually become armed
adversaries of the regime. The international community did little during
the first two years of the Syrian uprising, despite the Assad regime’s
extreme violence and shocking human rights abuses.
In the summer of 2012, I was in Jordan, close to the Syrian border.
Hundreds of refugees were crossing over from Syria. I interviewed
medevaced fighters from the Free Syrian Army, a group that received
limited support early in the war from the international community. There
was still hope then that Assad would be deposed at some point—a hope
that has not been borne out.
Syria’s last decade has been defined by its deadly civil war—the killing
of civilians, the destruction of entire cities, the use of chemical
weapons, the meddling of foreign powers, the rise and fall of the
Islamic State, and the displacement of millions of people. Today, the
country is in shambles, yet Assad still presides.
Over the intervening years, I met countless Syrian refugees, scattered
all over the region in countries like Lebanon, Turkey, and Jordan, and
as far away as France and the United Kingdom. One of those, Najah
al-Bukai, whom I profiled almost three years ago for The New York Times,
is a Syrian artist who now lives near Paris, France. His wife had
succeeded in rescuing him by securing his exit from Syria in 2015—after
he had been arrested three times for his participation in pro-democracy
protests. Al-Bukai was incarcerated in 2012 for a month, and for a
further eleven months in 2014.
From memory, he has produced hundreds of detailed drawings that depict
what he witnessed inside Assad’s jails: the gruesome torture and the
slow death of other prisoners detained along with him in unspeakable
conditions. Art has been his therapy since.
When I first saw his drawings, they reminded me of the haunting work of
the Slovenian artist and Holocaust survivor Zoran Mušič. Whenever I
speak to al-Bukai, I cannot but be humbled by his strength. I recently
reconnected with him to discuss how he views the last decade.
Previously, he’d told me how much he missed the bustling streets of
Damascus compared with the small town where he lived when he first moved
to France. In exile, he cannot stop producing work that records his
terrible experiences, but he has found a sympathetic public for it—he
has upcoming shows in Paris and Nice. He does badly miss his art studio
in Damascus, but going home to Syria is not an option for the
foreseeable future. “I do not imagine returning to live under the
bloodthirsty regime of Assad, where inequality and torture and
corruption eternally reign,” he said. “Assad knows that his regime is
crumbling and he wants to take everybody down with him.”
In that sense, al-Bukai is still hopeful that peace is possible in
Syria—but only when the current regime falls. “The only solution is to
judge Assad at the court of the Hague,” he told me. “The crimes against
humanity committed by the Assad regime have been documented.”
In his view, the continuing conflict and the jihadist groups that remain
the core of the armed opposition to Assad’s reconquest of the country
are the only things propping up the dictator. For al-Bukai, the spirit
of the original 2011 protest movement is still alive. “They [the
so-called realists in the international community] need to stop saying
that these populations can only be governed by dictators,” he added.
“The Arab Spring is a revolution for liberty and outrage.”
After all the suffering his country has endured—and all the suffering he
himself has endured—he has no regrets. “Despite all the high price they
paid, the bloodshed and the refugees,” he said, “these last ten years
allowed people to feel and touch dignity.”
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