By Omnia Al Desoukie
CAIRO: With protests in Libya, Bahrain, Yemen and even China, it is difficult to tell when the ripple effect created by the Tunisia and Egypt revolutions will ebb.
Inspired by an ideology beyond any religious views, both nations took off in a fight against corruption and poverty, calling for freedom and dignity.
“We had two patterns, one [Tunisia] that hit the possibility, while the other [Egyptian] that confirmed it,” said Shadi Hamid, director of research at the Brookings Doha Center.
It started when Mohamed Bouazizi, a young Tunisian vendor, set himself on fire in protest against the seizure of police of his cart; sparking nationwide protests that resulted in the fleeing of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali to Saudi Arabia.
This momentum would soon travel to Egypt, where an 18-day revolution led to the end of Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year reign.
This was received with celebrations across Egypt, with crowds chanting for the military and praising their efforts in safeguarding people’s aspirations. The Supreme Council of Armed Forces said it will not replace the legitimacy of the people.
“We realized the seriousness of the current situation, we are studying all the necessary procedures and steps to achieve people’s demands and we will declare a statement of the proposed plans,” said the army spokesman on February 11.
Following Mubarak’s ouster, shockwaves were sent all the way to China. Not long after, protests escalated in parts of the Middle East including Libya, Bahrain, Algeria, Yemen and Iran. Supporters of Iran’s green movement marched in Tehran. Protesters in Bahrain seized a roundabout in the kingdom’s capital, and the protesters’ death toll in Libya continues to rise.
“The Egyptian example has already electrified public opinion throughout a region where a similar set of ills — autocracy, corruption, unemployment, the dignity deficit — prevail,” Roger Hardy, a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, wrote to the BBC.
Protests are also marked by the staple chant: “The people demand the fall of the regime,” a slogan copied originally from Tunisia and used in the Egyptian revolution.
In his opinion article in The New York Times, Thomas L. Friedman wrote that what emerged from below in Egypt is “the first pan-Arab movement that is not focused on expelling someone, or excluding someone, but on universal values with the goal of overcoming the backwardness produced by all previous ideologies and leader.”
These events that awed many observers have worried others as to where the Middle East is heading, and namely what Mubarak’s ouster would mean to the future of the peace process and to Egypt’s relationship with US role and the possibility of the emergence of Iran.
Israel and the US
Amid the unrest in Egypt, the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, which Mubarak guarded throughout his rule, came into question.
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has expressed explicitly his fears that the peace treaty with Egypt could unravel after 32 years, with the prospect of an Egyptian government that included the Muslim Brotherhood.
“As long as we had Mubarak, there was no void in our relations with the region,” Zvi Mazel former Ambassador to Egypt told Yediot Aharonot. “Now we’re in big trouble.”
“One of the primary reasons there has been no ‘progress’ on this issue [peace treaty] in the last decades is because of a tremendously asymmetrical balance of power between weak, anti-democratic, unrepresentative Arab states — often dependent on foreign support — and a strong, powerful Israel with the seemingly unlimited support of the United States,” Samer S. Shehata, assistant professor of Arab Politics at Georgetown University, told Daily News Egypt.
Shehata added that if there is change in the Arab world and Arab governments are more representative of their population’s views, they will more effectively negotiate with Israel to produce a solution that is just and fair.
This, he explained, will hopefully increase pressure on Israel and give it an incentive to make the necessary “concessions” that would produce a just and lasting peace in the region.
However, quelling Shehata’s optimist, the US vetoed on February 11 a Security Council resolution condemning all Israeli settlements established in the occupied Palestinian territory since 1967 as illegal.
“The current circumstances in the region are a chance for the US to stand with the Arab society, and provide technical assistance for them [Arabs] to help these countries move into democratic transition,” said Hamid.
He added that the US has played a destructive role in the Middle East, which made the current regimes unpopular as people have witnessed their government prioritizing foreign policies over their people’s will.
An Islamist takeover?
Contrary to US concerns, Islamic ideologies and agendas are almost absent from the uprising in the Middle East. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood kept a low profile, participating only “symbolically” on Jan. 25, the first day of protests.
The fear over the rise of Islamists has been one of the reasons why dictatorships were supported by the US and survived thus far.
The Iranian Revolution in 1979 has been the model used to grow fear over the future of the Muslim majority countries, should their regimes fall. Scenarios of the rise Iran as well as regimes financed by Iran have been suggested.
“I do not think this will lead to increasing influence of Iran because the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt were revolutions for freedom and against authoritarianism,” Shehata said.
“The present Iranian regime is an undemocratic regime that does not represent the will of the people, uses violence against its citizens and severely limits their political freedoms and civil liberties. As we have witnessed in Iran recently, the Green Movement is reinvigorated as a result of the successes in Tunisia and Egypt,” he explained.
Calls for freedom are already echoing throughout the Middle East, however, the dust is yet to settle in Egypt itself.
“The next phase is very important, failure [is plausible] if a democratic transition is stalled, therefore the next elections are important and the coming phase is much more important than the previous phase,” said Hamid.
