Editor's Introduction
“The Failure of Governance in the Arab World” by Simon Tisdall. The Guardian. January 11 2011.
The Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia, the people’s rebellion in Egypt, and the subsequent popular uprisings that are taking place across the Arab world from the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf, remind us, scholars and policy makers alike, that order and stability must be based upon justice to be maintained. The current turmoil in the Arab world is the result of policies that have sought regional stability and regime security in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) at the expense of society and human security.
Human dignity, human rights, and human security—not Islam, hatred of Israel, or resentment against the West—are what is driving the young Arab women and men to the streets of Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria, Jordan, Bahrain, Libya, Yemen, and other Arab states at the dawn of 2011. These young people are calling for a new social contract based on human rights rather than oppression; human security rather than fear; and human dignity rather than humiliation. As Christina Cerna remarks, “The humiliation of not being able to provide for themselves and their families and for not having basic human rights, gave way to anger and frustration.”
While acknowledging the role of social media in helping activists to organize against the oppressive regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, Louis Esparza argues that the primary drivers of the Arab revolutions are the relevant political actors and their grievances and actions. The Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions are not “Twitter revolutions,” as some define them, but revolutions of the people. “Explaining political grievances using phenomena that distract from the actual content of the grievances de-legitimizes political actors. Whether it is Twitter in Tunisia or the printing press at the Battle of Peterloo, what is important is the decision to engage in risk and social disruption in order to achieve a political end.”
Robert Funk and Walter Lotze address the Arab revolutions from Latin American and African perspectives respectively. For Funk, one of the main lessons of US involvement in Latin America and the Arab world is that supporting foreign dictators threatens American national interest in the long term. As he says, “the supposed benefits of supporting anti-democratic strongmen…do not last a very long time, whereas the ill feeling amongst the population and the political fallout can last for many years.”
Whereas most commentators compare the 2011 Arab states to 1989 Eastern European states, Lotze interestingly compares Egypt and Tunisia in 2011 to the Southern part of Africa two decades earlier. He argues that the Northern part of Africa is experiencing what the Southern part went through during the last two decades of the twentieth century. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, it was Southern Africa that was the most unstable, autocratic, and conflict-prone region on the continent. “In a telling reversal of fortunes, it is now the Southern parts of the continent that are most stable and secure, and that display the highest commitment to democratic systems of governance, while the Northern regions of the continent are being shaken at their very foundations.”
These are some of the main insights in our February Roundtable on the Arab revolutions, which highlight the interdependent relations between human rights and human dignity on the one hand, and order and security on the other.
Raslan Ibrahim
Managing Editor HRHW
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
February 2011: The Arab Revolutions and Human Rights
A Little Respect, Please
by Christina Cerna, Organization of American States
“It was not just the humiliation of that one slap that made her son commit suicide. The slap was the culmination, symbolic of all the humiliations and indignities Mohamed and so many others have experienced daily. The humiliation of not being able to provide for themselves and their families and of not having basic human rights gave way to anger and frustration.”
Simon Tisdall suggests that last month, when Mohammed Bouazizi (twenty-six years old), “an unemployed graduate, set himself on fire outside a government building in protest at police harassment,” his act became the “rallying cause for Tunisia’s disaffected legions of unemployed students, impoverished workers, trade unionists, lawyers and human rights activists.” The reaction to his act of self-immolation and death on January 4th led to the flight of President Ben Ali ten days later to Saudi Arabia and to the end of Ali's twenty-three-year rule of Tunisia. Time reported the event as follows: “When Mohamed Bouazizi set himself alight on Dec. 17, 2010, he sparked flames far greater than the ones that would ultimately kill him.” Others seeking to change the world have imitated Bouazizi’s self-immolation in Egypt, Algeria, Mauritania, and Yemen. With the intoxication of revolution at hand, what kind of desperation motivates someone to end his own life in a suicidal act of protest?
The international press has discovered Mohamed’s home town of Sidi Bouzid and journalists have gone to interview his family. We learned that his father died when he was three years old, that his mother remarried, and that her second husband suffers from poor health and does not work, probably because he cannot. Mohamed completed his baccalaureate exam in high school and “didn’t expect to study, because we didn’t have the money,” according to his mother. Although he wasn’t a “college graduate” as originally reported, he completed his high school diploma; and with so many unemployed college graduates in Tunisia, perhaps the media's error was intentional.
The press informs us that Mohamed was ten years old when he became the main provider for the family, selling fresh produce in the local market. He worked full-time in order to help his five younger siblings stay in school (an older brother moved away). He would take his wooden cart to the market and load it with fruit and vegetables, and then he would walk it more than two kilometers to the local souk. Another version of the facts says that he would sell the food on the roadside to earn five dollars a day.
At the souk he was harassed on almost a daily basis by the police, who would confiscate his scales and produce for running a stall without a permit. Six months ago the police fined him US$280, the equivalent of two months' earnings. On December 17th, a policewoman confronted him on the way to the market and tried to take his scales from him, but he refused to hand them over. The woman slapped him and, with the help of her colleagues, forced him to the ground. The officers took away his fruit and vegetables and his scale.
Publicly humiliated, he went to the local municipality building and demanded to meet with an official. He was told that it would not be possible; the official was in a meeting. Another version says that it was a female worker who slapped him at the town’s municipal offices when he went to complain about not being allowed to work. The only constant is that a woman slapped him. With no one willing to hear his grievances, he doused himself with fuel, returned to the street outside the building, and set himself on fire. For Mohamed’s mother, her son’s suicide was motivated not by poverty, but by humiliation. His mother reportedly said: “We are poor people in Sidi Bouzid. We don’t have money but we have our dignity, and his dignity was taken away with that slap and those wrong words.”
It was not just the humiliation of that one slap that made her son commit suicide. The slap was the culmination, symbolic of all the humiliations and indignities Mohamed and so many others have experienced daily. The humiliation of not being able to provide for themselves and their families and of not having basic human rights gave way to anger and frustration. As Mohamed’s mother knew, the attack on his dignity—the slap—was the spark that ignited his personal rage.
Tunisia under President Ben Ali officially took pride in its rising middle class, but failed to provide a mechanism whereby those in extreme poverty could find employment or benefit from some kind of social insurance. In addition, the non-responsiveness of a corrupt administration to the grievances of its people fueled the violent challenge to its authority.
What gave momentum to the uprising was the fact that Mohamed was well-known and popular because he would give free fruit and vegetables to very poor families. Why is it that the poor always have something to give away, whereas the Ben Ali clan, now accused of massive theft of Tunisian wealth, tried to flee the country with gold ingots?
Amr Moussa, the Secretary-General of the Arab League, warned of more Tunisia-style revolutions should their policies remained unchanged: “The Arab soul is broken by poverty, unemployment and general recession.” The Arab citizen has been driven to “a state of unprecedented anger and frustration” In response, Arab leaders committed to a proposed $2 billion program to boost the economies in the region. With thousands demonstrating over the economic situation in Egypt (not to mention Jordan, Oman, Libya, and Yemen) and calling for the ouster of their government, only time will tell whether reform programs will pacify the protesters.
The author of this Roundtable article, Ms. Christina M. Cerna, is a staff member in the General Secretariat of the Organization of American States' Secretariat for the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. The opinions expressed in this note are the sole responsibility of the author in the author's personal capacity and are not to be interpreted as official positions of, and are not to be attributed to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the General Secretariat of the Organization of American States, or the Organization of American States.
Christina Cerna - B.A., New York University; M.A., Fulbright Scholar, Ludwig-Maximilian Universitat; J.D., Dean's Fellow, American University; LL.M., Columbia University. Ms. Cerna is Principal Human Rights Specialist at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) at the headquarters of the Organization of American States (OAS) in Washington, D.C.. She has been with the OAS since January 1979 and is currently in charge of certain special cases and systematizing the IACHR’s jurisprudence. She taught international human rights law as an Adjunct for the law schools at George Washington University, Penn State University and, since 2005, at Georgetown University.
Abeyance and Spontaneity in Tunisia
by Louis Edgar Esparza, University of Denver, Josef Korbel School of International Studies
“Although the precipitating event is rarely predictable, these kinds of events are almost never random…Tunisia and Egypt are not the exceptions, but rather, illustrate the rule: step on your people and one day they will step on you.”
On August 16, 1819, tens of thousands of workers gathered in what is now St. Peter’s Square in Manchester to demand suffrage. Entire families, parishes, and townships assembled, fueled by increasing commodity prices and political disenfranchisement. They had spread the word from town to town, and from church to church, that this previously banned meeting was indeed to occur. It was the culmination of months of agitation on the part of common people to achieve economic and political reform. The government responded violently to the challenge of its authority, as governments so often do, leading to a score of deaths and hundreds of injuries. Survivors of the Peterloo Massacre, as it was later called, would have to wait another dozen years of intensified government repression before their original demands were ultimately met.
Also spurred by government recalcitrance, the people of Tunisia set off a fire that is spreading across the Arab world. Diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks illustrate the extent of the corruption in Ben Ali’s government, describing the former president as “sclerotic.” The documents also claim that “willingness to engage with ordinary citizens” is “an uncommon trait” in Tunisia amongst political leaders.
The media has been euphoric, even giddy, about the role of social networking sites. The Internet has been a strong medium that has helped spread information about developments in real-time. Social media is an additional institution through which activists stay connected. Social media websites have changed the location in which decisions are to be made. Peterloo rebels made their decisions in actual rooms, a physical space, in small and large batches of people. Tunisians did too, but relied heavily on Internet communications.
Nevertheless, the medium is not the message. Explaining political grievances using phenomena that distract from the actual content of the grievances de-legitimizes political actors. Whether it is Twitter in Tunisia or the printing press at the Battle of Peterloo, what is important is the decision to engage in risk and social disruption in order to achieve a political end. Governments and other authorities are already leveraging Internet tools to catch up with activists. Eventually, they will. Governments quickly learned that making it difficult for activists to physically meet, or making the meetings unproductive through spying and the insertion of an agente provocatore, were sometimes effective. Physical space is a worn battleground that both activists and governments have used to their advantage. The rules of battle on the Internet are still being written. Government attempts to “shut off” the Internet or to censor material have been only partially effective and will be less effective over time. As more citizens join the web, attacks against the Internet itself will have the effect of alienating de facto regimes from even more of its citizens.
The events in Tunisia have also been widely interpreted as being spontaneous in origin. Social movements are often thought to be spontaneous occurrences. There is something romantic about the idea that civic uprisings and their subsequent spread are spontaneous expressions of agency—universal expressions of a people yearning to be free. Nevertheless, events such as these always have social structures that undergird them, even if those social structures remain hidden to outside observers. They remain under the surface when the political environ is unsympathetic, only to be revealed when a precipitating event or other opportunity arises. In this case, Tunisian labor movement organizations, among others, played this role. These types of organizations do not lead, but instead act as a beachhead from which the movement can spread.
Natural disasters, too, reveal already-existing social cleavages by disproportionately affecting society’s most vulnerable. Eric Klinenburg’s devastating analysis of the 1995 Chicago Heat Wave, for instance, shows that ethnic minorities and the poor were the most likely to have perished in the calamity. This supposedly natural event exposed disparities in housing, amenities, and access to resources and information.
Such is the case in environments ripe for social unrest. High commodity prices certainly contributed to the unrest in Tunisia and Egypt, but such stressors reveal already-existing rifts. Societies with lower levels of income inequality that also experienced commodity price increases did not experience such overhauls. Although the precipitating event is rarely predictable, these kinds of events are almost never random. When the political climate is hostile to their message, social movement structures are held in abeyance until, in this case, there is a coming of age of an indomitable youth, economic pressure, and one self-immolation too many. Tunisia and Egypt are not the exceptions, but rather illustrate the rule: step on your people and one day they will step on you.
The Obama administration has been praising these pro-democracy movements. Ever since September 11, 2001, however, it has been difficult for US activists to help support pro-democracy organizations in this region. The US government has made it more difficult to give money to pro-democracy organizations in Northern Africa and the Middle East, even raiding the homes of Minnesotans and Chicagoans trying to do just that. US authorities would do well to stop persecuting US activists trying to help the region and quit tolerating autocrats for short-term political gain.
Louis Edgar Esparza is Lecturer in Human Rights at the University of Denver, Josef Korbel School of International Studies. His work appears in Societies Without Borders, Qualitative Sociology and Sociological Forum. Dr. Esparza is writing a book on grassroots human rights movements in Colombia, where he completed ethnographic fieldwork in 2008. His research has attracted grants and awards from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Latin American Studies Association and Oxfam America.
He's Our Son of a Bitch
by Robert Funk, Institute for Public Affairs of the University of Chile
“It is said that Franklin Delano Roosevelt defended the US tendency to support dictators by remarking, ‘He may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch’. The recent events in Tunisia and Egypt indicate that almost seventy years later, this unfortunate phrase seems to continue to guide US foreign policy.”
It is said that Franklin Delano Roosevelt defended the US tendency to support dictators by remarking, “He may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch.” The recent events in Tunisia and Egypt indicate that almost seventy years later, this unfortunate phrase seems to continue to guide US foreign policy.
The first question, then, is what determines whether a son of a bitch is “ours” or not. While in recent years the existential threat has revolved around the issue of terrorism and radical Islamic fundamentalism, for much of the twentieth century those who were considered allies stood shoulder to shoulder with the United States in the struggle against Communism. Cases come to mind in Africa (South Africa), Asia (Vietnam, the Philippines), and the Middle East (Iran), but nowhere was FDR's policy applied more readily or more regularly than in Latin America.
This raises a second question: after a century of supporting unsavory characters in favor of other supposed benefits (anti-Communism, stability, oil, access to canals, etc.), what lessons does the Latin American experience offer?
The benefits are short term; the costs are long-term. Perhaps the most recurrent lesson of US policy in Latin America is that the supposed benefits of supporting anti-democratic strongmen do not last a very long time, whereas the ill feeling amongst the population and the political fallout can last for many years. The most active period of US anti-Communist intervention in Latin America only lasted about thirty years. Yet throughout the region, it is the US support for authoritarian regimes, far more than its not unimportant efforts to support democratic movements in the 1980s, which remains in the public imagination. University students wear t-shirts emblazoned with images of Che Guevara, not Anastasio Somoza. This phenomenon is even more pronounced in the Middle East, where even the aspirational middle class that yearns to pursue postgraduate studies at elite American universities cannot appear to be pro-American because of US association with autocratic regimes and support for Israel.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend. The problem with having allies is that it almost invariably means having (or creating) enemies. In regions like Latin America, even if the dictators were relatively benevolent, it was more than likely that their enemies were pro-democracy activists, and that their friends were some pretty nasty types engaged in arms trafficking, drug smuggling, or worse. In these societies, the US has become known for allying itself to the latter and not the former, a reputation that not only stands in stark contrast to US foreign policy rhetoric, but that lasts for decades (see previous point). Important sectors of the center-left in Chile, for example, continue to be rather circumspect with regards to the United States, while still holding Cuba up to another standard for having stood by so many Chilean exiles.
Our son of a bitch, for better or for worse. How does the US disassociate itself from dictators with which it no longer wishes to be associated? It turns out it is actually rather easy. In the case of Egypt, President Obama decided that a few days of mass demonstrations were sufficient to warrant turning against an ally of thirty years. The problems, however, appear later. What message is being sent to current allies in Afghanistan, Iraq, or even Israel? Is US policy now to support democratic movements no matter their positions vis-a-vis the interests of the United States? If so, and especially after Mubarak's exit, it may be time to talk of an Obama Doctrine.
However, the Reagan administration, presiding over the “third wave” of global democratization, turned against Marcos (Philippines) and Pinochet (Chile) when it decided that it was no longer in US interests to continue supporting them. The great difference between those cases and the current one (and George W. Bush's earlier attempts at “democratizing” the Middle East): the United States had clearly identified new, viable, and democratic partners who enjoyed mass popular support. This included not only the existence of political groups that the United States felt it could at least deal (though not necessarily agree) with. It also implied the existence of a large and well-educated middle sector—academics, businesspeople, unions, teachers, journalists, and even Armed Forces—who after the transition would continue to work for the well being of the country. In cases as different as Venezuela and Iran, these groups fled. The nature of the Egyptian experience, so far, indicates that these middle sectors may stay on and build a new democratic Egypt. The minute that the more radical groups grab hold of the democratizing momentum, however, the middle class will head for Miami and Los Angeles. Good for the American real estate market; bad for the future of the Middle East.
Robert Funk is Deputy Director and Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Institute for Public Affairs of the University of Chile. Dr Funk’s research areas include democratization, left and populist movements in Latin America, and political elites. Recent publications include “Parties, Personalities and the President: The Institutional Challenges of the Bachelet Government”, in The Bachelet Government: Conflict and Consensus in Post-Pinochet Chile, edited by Silvia Borzutzky and Gregory Weeks. From 2006 to 2008, Dr Funk served as president of the Chilean Political Science Association.
Those Pesky Winds of Change...
by Walter Lotze, Norwegian Institute of International Affairs
“Yet while analysts decry the failure of governance in the Arab world, and while countries such as the United States of America, France, and Great Britain self-confidently reinterpret their foreign policies to reassure observers that in fact they were never acting in support of despotic regimes, in Africa many diplomats and analysts are quietly elated. Indeed, many whisper quietly in the corridors of power that the change which commenced in Southern Africa has finally reached the Northern regions of the continent.”
When a police officer slapped a fruit seller by the name of Mohammed Bouazizi in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid, nobody could have anticipated that a revolution had commenced. Bouazizi, a twenty-six-year-old computer science graduate unable to find work, had resorted to selling fruit from a street cart in an attempt to support himself and his seven siblings. Slapped by the police officer and ordered to pack up his goods, Bouazizi himself snapped. He marched to the local governor’s office and demanded an appointment, threatening to set himself alight if the governor did not meet with him. In frustration, on December 17 2010 Bouazizi carried out his threat, and eighteen days later died from his injuries. Millions of young, angry, and despondent Tunisians had found their martyr. Two weeks later, Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, who had ruled Tunisia mafia-style with his extensive family for thirty years, had been toppled.
While analysts rushed to predict that the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia would spread like wildfire to other parts of the Arab world, most anticipated that the regimes in Yemen, Algeria, or Syria would surely be the next to fall. Protests and demonstrations appeared overnight in Libya, Algeria, Sudan, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Yemen. Regimes across the Arab world rushed head over heels to present cuts in food prices, national labor programs, and infrastructure development initiatives. Yet it was too little, too late. In the end, it was the regime in Egypt that would be the next to fall. During the African Union Summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia at the end of January, the Egyptian Foreign Minister quietly reassured his counterparts in other oppressive regimes that while the unrest in Egypt was proving problematic, he was confident that the government would soon gain the upper hand. Two hours later, he had been fired, and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, in power in Egypt for thirty years, was clinging to power by the skin of his teeth.
For weeks now, the media and commentators have rushed to argue that recent events in the world were quite inevitable, given what is labeled a general failure of governance in the Arab world as a whole. Indeed, in Syria, the Assad family has been in power for forty years, the current president having inherited the post from his deceased father. In Libya, the self-styled King of Kings Muammar Gaddafi has been in power for forty-one years, displaying no signs of readiness to hand over the reins of power, while both his sons appear to be grooming themselves to succeed him. In Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh has ruled for thirty-two years, and in Algeria, Abdelaziz Bouteflika has been in power for twelve years and plans to name his younger brother as his eventual successor. Yet while analysts decry the failure of governance in the Arab world, and while countries such as the United States of America, France, and Great Britain self-confidently reinterpret their foreign policies to reassure observers that in fact they were never acting in support of despotic regimes, in Africa many diplomats and analysts are quietly elated. Indeed, many whisper quietly in the corridors of power that the change which commenced in Southern Africa has finally reached the Northern regions of the continent.
In a telling reversal of fortunes, it is now the Southern parts of the continent that are more politically stable and that display the highest commitment to democratic systems of governance, while the Northern regions of the continent are being shaken at their very foundations. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, it was Southern Africa that was the most unstable, autocratic, and conflict-prone region on the continent. Conflicts in Angola, Namibia, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Zaire ensured the region was kept in constant turmoil, and autocratic regimes ruled in many of the countries in the region, where the hosting of free and fair elections with universal participation was quite unheard of. In the Northern regions of the continent however, despite the absence of democratic governance, peace and security were generally assured, and economic growth was rapid. Yet in the space of less than fifteen years, that situation mostly appears to have been reversed.
While Zimbabwe and Madagascar continue to blight the reputation of the Southern African Development Community, and while the development of good governance and democratic systems in Angola and in the Democratic Republic of Congo still have a long way to go, the latter still embroiled in a vicious conflict where atrocious human rights abuses, in particular directed against women and children, appear the order of the day, economic growth in the region has been rapid and generally sustained, and the overall incidence of violent conflict has diminished. Regular elections are held in all countries in the region, even in Zimbabwe, and transitions of power, though mostly from one leader of the ruling party to another, are generally peaceful. While opposition parties generally do not succeed in winning elections, their presence in political life is at least tolerated. In North Africa however, economies are stagnant, inflation is soaring, food prices are rising well above the means of the poor, and masses of youth are unemployed, with little hope of change in the near future. Opposition politics are not tolerated, press freedom is heavily restricted, and human rights are a matter of national reinterpretation as opposed to universal acceptance. With the majority of regimes in the region in power for between twenty and thirty years, angry North Africans have identified clear targets against which to direct their anger. Many leaders in North Africa now surely wish that British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan’s winds of change from the south had not blown north across the continent all that quickly.
Walter Lotze (South African) is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI) in Oslo, Norway. Prior to joining NUPI, Walter worked in the Peace Support Operations Division of the African Union Commission, prior to which he headed the Peacebuilding Division at the African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes (ACCORD), a non-governmental organization working in conflict situations across the African continent. Walter recently completed his PhD in International Relations with the University of St Andrews in Scotland.
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