Ten years ago, crowds gathered in Cairo’s Tahrir Square to demand the expulsion of Egypt’s American-backed strongman, President Hosni Mubarak. In Washington, President Barack Obama made a fateful decision calling on him to leave power.
Opposition from other Arab potentates was swift, Obama recalled in his recent memoirs.
Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, the de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates – a small country with an outsized army built on American weapons and training – told the president he no longer saw the United States as a reliable partner.
It was a “warning,” wrote Mr. Obama, that “the old order had no intention of yielding power without a fight.”
Ten years later, the clashes between that ancient order and the 2011 Middle East popular uprisings, which became known as the Arab Spring, left much of the region in smoldering ruins.
Wars in Libya and Yemen have reduced those countries to the shattered mosaics of competing militias. Autocrats cling to power in Egypt, Syria and Bahrain, sniffing out all hints of opposition. Hailed as the only success of the uprising, Tunisia is struggling to reap the benefits of democracy as the founder of the economy.
Hopes for a new era of freedom and democracy emerging across the region have been largely shattered. The United States turned out to be an unreliable ally. And other powers that intervened vigorously to stamp out the uprisings and bend the region to their will – Iran, Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates – have only grown more powerful.
“People now know very well that no one is going to help them, that they have to help themselves, and that the countries they used to look forward to for change are part of the problem,” said Amr Darrag, who served as minister in the democratically elected government that Egypt ruled for barely a year before being overthrown by the military in 2013. “The forces against change in our region are many and they have many common interests that have allowed them to rally against any kind of positive change.”
The greatest hope of intellectuals in Washington and the region is that the Arab Spring has at least given people a taste of the possibility of democracy. And if the underlying inequality and oppression that led to the uprisings has only gotten worse, the uprisings are likely to return, as has happened recently in Sudan, Algeria, Lebanon and Iraq.
The spark that ignited the Arab Spring was a fruit seller in a poor Tunisian town who simply couldn’t take it after the police hit him and confiscated his electronic scale. He set himself on fire, and his death crystallized frustrations with rulers across the region, who ruled by force, enriched their cronies, and left the masses in poverty, corruption and bad governance.
After Tunisian protesters forced the country’s longtime autocrat, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, into exile, demonstrations erupted in Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria. At the beginning of 2012, three other heads of state had been deposed, but the dizzying sense of popular power would not last.
Elections in Egypt empowered the Muslim Muslim Brotherhood until the military intervened to overthrow President Mohamed Morsi and take power for itself.
In Libya, the United States and the Allied countries bombed Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces and supported the rebels. But the opposition failed to unite, in part because regional rivals supported competing factions, and the country remains divided.
In Bahrain, Saudi tanks helped quell a Shia Muslim majority uprising against the Sunni monarchy.
In Yemen, an old strongman left power but then joined rebels who took over the capital, started a civil war and a bombing campaign by a Saudi-led coalition that sparked a horrifying humanitarian crisis.
Syria in many ways represents the worst-case scenario: an uprising that turned into a civil war that devastated entire cities, opened the door to the Islamic State and other jihadists, fleeing millions of refugees abroad, and inviting the intervention of a range of international powers. After all, President Bashar al-Assad remains in power.
“Everything has gotten worse since the Arab Spring,” said Mohamed Saleh, a Syrian writer from Homs. “What has changed is that there are more foreign troops controlling Syria. Syria has been devastated and more divided. “
Those who took part in the uprisings remember them with a mix of bitterness and nostalgia, citing several reasons for their failure: inconsistent support from the West, intervention of other powers and the inability of protesters to transition into politics, challenging deep-seated elites and repair schisms. in their societies.
“We were not mature enough, we did not know what conflict was, what democracy was, what was political,” said Bashar Eltalhi, who provided technical support to the Libyan rebels and the first transitional government and now works as a conflict analyst. “We thought we should just get rid of the bogeyman, but we didn’t know the bogeyman had spread his magic in all of us.”
Many accused the United States of not doing enough to support the uprisings for fear of harming their own interests.
In Egypt, the Obama administration refused to call the 2013 military takeover a coup, preferring to secure relations with the Egyptian military, even after shooting hundreds of anti-coup protesters. In Libya, Western involvement waned after the death of Mr. el-Qaddafi, contributing to the collapse of the planned political transition. In Syria, the United States has shifted its focus from supporting the opposition to fighting the Islamic State to, under President Trump, withdrawing most of its troops.
Other powers, often closer to the region and less concerned with democracy, rushed to fill the vacuum.
Saudi Arabia and the Emirates supported the monarchy in Bahrain and funded the Egyptian government, kicking off a more blatantly interventionist approach.
“We’ve come a long way since the 1970s, when we were the little duckling who needed America’s protection and America’s permission,” said Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a political scientist from the Emirates. “There is a certain level of trust, which has led us to be more regionally assertive and independent of America and other powers.”
Former US officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said they were stunned in 2014 when the Emirates bombed the Libyan capital of Tripoli with US weapons and equipment, violating terms of sale and violating US policy. But when the United States complained, the emirates pushed back, angry that the United States did not support their chosen strongman, one official said.
A National Security Council spokeswoman declined to comment.
Saudi Arabia and the Emirates gave little information to US officials before launching a military campaign in Yemen in 2015 and have since provided financial support and expanded influence over the Jordanian king and Sudan’s new government.
In Syria, Iran has flew in militiamen to reinforce Mr al-Assad’s forces, Russia sent its army to bomb rebel strongholds, and Turkey has turned parts of the north of the country into a de facto protectorate. The most active talks about the country’s future are now taking place in those three countries, with the West sitting on the sidelines and the destruction chasing Syrians.
But many Arab Spring veterans argue that now that so much of the insurgency’s affairs are still open, pro-democracy movements will return.
“Anyone who says the Arab Spring is dead doesn’t know the history of the people’s struggles,” said Tawakkul Karman, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011 for her role in the Yemen uprising. “The dreams of our people have not died and will not die.”
The region’s population is exceptionally young; most of its governments have failed to ensure economic security; and an entire generation remembers the thrill of taking to the streets and jumping on photos of dictators.
In recent years, Arab Spring-style movements against corruption and bad governance have driven out old autocrats in Algeria and Sudan. Similar protests have shocked Iraq and Lebanon, but in the absence of a single despot to direct their wrath to, they have failed to change their complex sectarian political systems.
In the long run, low oil prices and growing population could leave the Gulf states with less money for foreign intervention, and veteran revolutionaries could pass on the lessons of their failures to younger activists.
Tarek el-Menshawy, 39, who owns an auto repair shop in Cairo, looks back on the protests of ten years ago as the best days of his life. He sadly recalls breaking into tears when he and thousands of others finally overcome the police cordons and reached Tahrir Square.
The revolution may have failed, he said, but it has nevertheless accomplished something powerful.
“The younger generations have seen what has happened,” he said. ‘It’s like a shark when they smell blood. Freedom is like that. We smelled it once so we will keep trying. “
His friend, Ahmed Radwan, 33, said that if an uprising broke out against the current government, he would be happy to protest again. But he is convinced that another uprising would be pointless.
“We don’t have the tools,” he said. “They are much stronger.”
Ben Hubbard reported from Beirut, Lebanon, and David D. Kirkpatrick from New York. Vivian Yee reported from Cairo and Hwaida Saad from Beirut.