Muslims and Liberals

I WAS BUSY for two days getting ready to celebrate Eid al-Adha at my ancestral home in the Bangladeshi village of Mujahid Khani. And look what I missed.

“President Bashar al-Assad took the oath of office for a fourth term in war-ravaged Syria on Saturday, after officially winning 95.1% of the vote in an election,” the AFP put out the blurb the day before yesterday.

Don’t laugh.

The news agency mentioned that the governments in the United States, Britain, France, Italy and other countries had dismissed the election as a “farce,” which was “neither free nor fair.” I agree.

But look what the dictator said and why he said it.

The elections “have proven the strength of popular legitimacy” of his regime, Assad proclaimed in his inaugural speech.

The Syrian dictator has mercilessly put down a popular uprising that began to rattle his regime 10 years ago. Why the heck does he now need to put on a fake election? Because he knows that he lives in a new world that is roiling from a tsunami of ideas of freedom and human rights in the midst of which governments that aren’t based on “the consent of the governed” look like ugly pariahs. All tyrannical monarchies and dictatorships in the Middle East know this in their bones, and the Arab Spring of 2011-2013 was a thunderous reminder of it.

Well, that Arab revolutionary upheaval was – except in Tunisia – savagely crushed in Syria, Egypt and Bahrain. It unraveled some states such as Libya and Yemen. And the convulsion has spared – for now, it seems – the Arab Gulf, except Bahrain.  But that was, I believe, the revolution’s dry run. No revolution worth its name has matured in one go. The Russian Revolution was brought off in October 1917 after the Duma put down its first outburst in February. The American Revolution began with slavery, raw racism and disenfranchisement of women, and it took two centuries of turmoil, including a civil war, to get near maturity.

The French Revolution of 1789 took a full decade of skirmishes, upheavals and the Reign of Terror to stabilize with the November 1799 Coup of 18 Brumaire, installing Napoleon Bonaparte in power. Abbe Sieyes, who was a principal protagonist of the healing process, was asked how he could help usher in an era of stability in France.

“I survived,” he replied.

Many survivors of the 2011-2013 Arab uprisings are spearheading a new wave of protests against Arab monarchies and dictatorships.  And they are using their experience from the earlier, botched upheavals to guide them. Many of them have led new protests in the streets and squares of Algeria, Morocco, Sudan, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon, demanding an end to corruption, repression and suppression of human rights. Against the more oppressive regimes such as in Egypt and Bahrain, they are using graffiti, anonymous flyers, social media and small protests to put the regimes on notice that the caldrons of their grievances have begun to simmer and could boil over one day.

In Algeria, in 2019, smoldering public outcry against the two-decades-old suffocating autocracy of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika toppled the autocrat. In Sudan protests against the repressive dictator Omar al-Bashir began in 2018 and got him bundled out in a military putsch a year later. The protesters would, of course, have liked it done in a better way.  In Iraq public fury against Prime Minister Adil Abdul Mahdi for widespread corruption, unemployment and Iran’s influence on Iraqi security and political matters began in October 2019 and ended with Mahdi’s resignation at the end of November. Other despotic Arab governments will require more sustained struggles to give in.

Steven Heydemann, an insightful researcher of Arab uprisings, warns that before the forces of tyranny in the Arab world tumble, they would become “darker, more repressive, more sectarian, and even more deeply resistant to democratization than in the past.”

Some of them indeed have. Egyptian tyrant Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi has dumped tens of thousands of actual and suspected political dissidents into prisons to languish in horrendous conditions. Gruesome torture is routinely used against political activists, male and female. In Syria, apart from the bombing and indiscriminate shooting of protesters and innocent Sunni and other on-Alawite people, security agencies and the mukhabarat spy outfit arrested and tortured people with complete impunity. Many of those picked up by them have disappeared without a trace.

Today’s Arab revolutionaries are using tools they reshaped in light of the lessons from the botched Arab Spring. Their protests now are mostly peaceful. The activists are using social media more widely and effectively than street demonstrations. They are adapting their methods to the West’s renewed human rights consciousness of the post-Trump era. In March the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy (BIRD) joined Amnesty International and other international human rights groups to write an impassioned letter to U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken, detailing the “violent suppression” and persecution of dissidents by their monarchy, one of the Arab world’s most remorseless. They reminded Blinken of “President Biden’s recent commitment to bring human rights to the heart of the new administration’s foreign policy in the Middle East” and urged the administration to intercede in the monarchy’s blatant suppression of dissent. Persecuted dissidents in other Arab countries, too, are using the same kind of appeals to Western democracies against abuses by their regimes.

Because of their new and more sophisticated strategies, the 2018-2021 Arab struggles, albeit still in a relatively low gear, have been called by scholars “Arab Spring 2.0.” I am hoping they will have a better outcome.

In the fall of 1991, on a research trip to several Arab countries, I had an illuminating interview with Rami Khuri, the former editor of the Jordan Times newspaper, in Beirut, Lebanon. I asked him why he thought “Arabs have such thick skin against tyranny.”

A Palestinian native, Khuri said patience had been regarded as a “virtue in our culture” for centuries, but that the newer generations were getting excited about Western values of “freedom and the rule of law” and other liberating ideas. “Give them some time,” he added. “The West took centuries to cultivate and absorb” democracy and its institutions.

Thirty years later the new Arab generations look gifted with a much thinner skin for the despotic rule. I expect Arab Spring 2.0 to mark the beginning of the end of authoritarian rule in Arab societies. I just hope that the process would be much shorter than it was for the Americans and more benign than what the French had to endure.

• Mustafa Malik is an international affairs analyst, living in Sylhet, Bangladesh.