What Happened to Arab Spring?

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
 
Five years after the Arab Spring raised so many hopes for a new dawn in the Middle East, Libya, Syria and Yemen have descended into chaos and civil war.

Syria has become the battleground for proxy wars involving Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and even Russia and the United States. President Bashar al-Assad hangs on to power while at least 250,000 Syrians have been killed and millions more have fled the country.

Pro-democracy protests had erupted in March 2011 in the southern city of Deraa after the arrest and torture of some teenagers who painted revolutionary slogans on a school wall.

This triggered nationwide protests demanding Assad’s resignation. The government’s use of force to crush the dissent led to armed rebellion. Fighting had reached the capital, Damascus, and the city of Aleppo, by 2012.

The war acquired sectarian overtones, pitting the country’s Sunni Muslim majority against the president’s Shia Alawite sect.

Today, Sunni Islamic State fighters have taken control of huge swathes of territory across northern and eastern Syria, establishing a “capital” in Raqqa. Meanwhile, attempts by outside parties, including Moscow and Washington, to broker an end to the war have so far failed to stem the violence.

U.N.-hosted peace talks now underway in Geneva envision a ceasefire followed by an 18-month timetable for a political transition in Syria, including the drafting of a new constitution and elections.

But most opposition groups have refused to attend until their demands are met, including an end to Russian and Syrian bombardment of regions controlled by them.

Elsewhere, Libya and Yemen have imploded, their central states replaced in whole or part by warring militias, some backed by foreign powers, some flying the flags of al-Qaeda or the Islamic State.

The demise of Libya’s quixotic but ruthless dictator, Moammar Gadhafi in October 2011, left a political vacuum in the country that has been filled by rival militias, Islamist followers pledging allegiance to the Islamic State, and rival governments.

Two administrations have been competing for control of Libya since mid-2014: the internationally recognised government based in Tobruk in the east, and the unofficial Government of National Salvation based in the capital, Tripoli. Each has its own parliament and a host of militias fighting on its behalf.

The creation of a unity government, the culmination of a year-long process of UN-sponsored negotiations between representatives of the rival administrations, was announced on Dec. 17, but it has now fallen afoul of quarrels between the two camps.

The Islamic State’s followers have created their own base in Sirte, Gadhafi’s former home, and several other towns. They have carried out a number of strikes against the country’s oil infrastructure.

Yemen, too, goes from bad to worse. The nine-month war between Yemen’s Houthi rebels, who belong to the Zaidi Shia sect and are backed by Iran, and the government of President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, supported by a Saudi-led military coalition that has been conducting an aerial campaign against the rebels since March, shows no signs of abating.

The conflict has left some 6,000 people dead in what was already the Arab world’s poorest state.

Hadi had assumed the presidency on Feb. 27, 2012, replacing the autocratic Ali Abdullah Saleh, who had ruled the country since 1990 (and had previously served as president of North Yemen for 12 years). Saleh was forced out after months of massive nationwide protests.

Pledging to support efforts to rebuild the country reeling from months of violence, Hadi however soon found himself running a failed state that shows little sign of recovery.

The old order embodied by the secular dictators has been shattered. As the state system splinters in the Middle East, the instability in the region will be chronic.

The big winner in all of this has been Iran, which has taken advantage of the turmoil in the Arab world to strengthen its alliances with Shiites in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen.