The toppling of Ben Ali in Tunisia in the wake of mass protests and bloody street clashes is likely to signify a major transformation in the future of politics and geopolitics for the major countries of the Middle East and North Africa. The Tunisian experience triggered the escalation of unprecedented protests in Egypt against the Mubarak regime. The question is: ‘Will events in Tunisia and Egypt have a domino effect throughout the Arab world?’

The potential fall of Hosni Mubarak is serious stuff. Egypt is “the most populous country in the Arab world,” viewed by the United States, Britain and the West as “a strategic pivot” and a “a vital ally” in the ‘War on Terror’. No wonder then that activists across the world are holding their breath in anticipation that one of the world’s most notorious dictators, and one of the West’s most favored client-regimes, might be overthrown.

What is happening in Tunisia and Egypt is only a manifestation of a deeper convergence of fundamental structural crises, which are truly global in scale. The eruption of social and political unrest has followed the impact of deepening economic turbulence across the region, due to the inflationary impact of rocketing fuel and food prices. As of mid-January, even before Ben Ali had fled Tunis, riots were breaking out in Algeria, Morocco, Yemen, and Jordan. The key grievances? Rampant unemployment, unaffordable food and consumer goods, endemic poverty, lack of basic services, and political repression.

Global food crisis

In many of these countries, certainly in both Tunisia and Egypt, tensions have simmered for years. The trigger, it seems, came in the form of food shortages caused by the record high global prices reported by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in December 2010. The return of high food prices two to three years after the 2008 global food crisis should not be a surprise. For most of the preceding decade, world grain consumption exceeded production—correlating with agricultural land productivity declining almost by half from 1990–2007, compared with 1950–1990.

This year, global food supply chains were again “stretched to the limit” following poor harvests in Canada, Russia and Ukraine; hotter, drier weather in South America cutting soybean production; flooding in Australia, wiping out its wheat crops; not to mention the colder, stormier, snowier winters experienced in the northern hemisphere, damaging harvests.

So much of the current supply shortages have been inflicted by increasingly erratic weather events and natural disasters, which climate scientists have long warned are symptomatic of anthropogenic global warming. Droughts exacerbated by global warming in key food-basket regions have already led to a 10–20 percent drop in rice yields over the last decade. By mid-century, world crop yields could fall as much as 20–40 percent due to climate change alone.

But climate change is likely to do more than generate droughts in some regions. It is also linked to the prospect of colder weather in the eastern United States, east Asia, and northern Europe—as the rate of Arctic summer sea ice is accelerating, leading to intensifying warming, the change in atmospheric pressure pushes cold Arctic air to the south. Similarly, even the floods in Australia could be linked to climate change. Scientists agree they were caused by a particularly strong El Niño/La Niña oscillation in the Tropical Pacific ocean-atmospheric system. But Michael McPhaden, co-author of a recent scientific study on the issue, suggests that recently stronger El Niño events are “plausibly the result of global warming.”

The global food situation has been compounded by the over-dependence of industrial agriculture on fossil fuels, consuming ten calories of fossil fuel energy for every one calorie of food energy produced. The problem is that global conventional oil production has most likely already peaked, having been on an undulating plateau since 2005—and forecast to steadily and inexorably decline, leading to higher prices. Although oil prices dropped after the 2008 crash due to recession, the resuscitation of economic activity has pushed up demand, leading fuel prices to creep back up to $95 a barrel.

The fuel price hikes, combining with the predatory activities of financial speculators trying to rake in profits by investing in the commodity markets, have underpinned worldwide inflation. Just as in 2008, the worst effected have been the poorer populations of the South. Thus, the eruption of political unrest in Egypt and elsewhere cannot be fully understood without acknowledging the context of accelerating ecological, energy and economic crises—inherently interconnected problems which are symptomatic of an Empire in overstretch, a global political economy in breach of the natural limits of its environment.

Post-peak Egypt

Indeed, Egypt is particularly vulnerable. Its oil production peaked in 1996, and since then has declined by around 26 percent. Since the 1960s, Egypt has moved from complete food self-sufficiency to excessive dependence on imports, subsidized by oil revenues. But as Egypt’s oil revenues have steadily declined due to increasing domestic consumption of steadily declining oil, so have food subsidies, leading to surging food prices. Simultaneously, Egypt’s debt levels are horrendous—about 80.5 percent of its GDP, far higher than most other countries in the region. Inequality is also high, intensifying over the last decade in the wake of neoliberal ‘structural adjustment’ reforms—widely implemented throughout the region since the 1980s with debilitating effects, including contraction of social welfare, reduction of wages, and lack of infrastructure investment. Consequently, today forty percent of Egyptians live below the UN poverty line of less than £2 a day.

Due to such vulnerabilities, Egypt, as with many of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries, now lies on the fault lines of the convergence of global ecological, energy and economic crises—and thus, on the frontlines of deepening global system failure. The Empire is uncrumbling. The guarded official statements put out by the Obama administration only illustrate the disingenuous impotence of the U.S. position.

While Vice President Joe Biden insisted that Mubarak is not a dictator, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Obama lamely condemned “violence” and voiced moral support for the right to protest. The slightly muted response is understandable. For the last 30 years, the United States has supported Mubarak’s brutal reign with economic and military assistance—currently providing $1.3 billion a year in Foreign Military Financing (FMF).

The U.S. Congressional Research Service reports that additionally:

Egypt benefits from certain aid provisions that are available to only a few other countries. Since 2000, Egypt’s FMF funds have been deposited in an interest bearing account in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and have remained there until they are obligated... Egypt is allowed to set aside FMF funds for current year payments only, rather than set aside the full amount needed to meet the full cost of multi-year purchases. Cash flow financing allows Egypt to negotiate major arms purchases with U.S. defense suppliers.

The United States also happens to be Egypt’s largest bilateral trading partner. It is “one of the largest single markets worldwide for American wheat and corn and is a significant importer of other agricultural commodities, machinery, and equipment.” The United States is also the second largest foreign investor in the country, “primarily in the oil and gas sector.”

Perhaps Biden’s denial of Mubarak’s dictatorial qualities are not that difficult to understand. Since the assassination of President Anwar el-Sadat in 1981, Egypt has officially been in a continuous “state of emergency,” which under a 1958 law permits Mubarak to oversee measures unnervingly similar to the USA Patriot Act—indefinite detention; torture; secret courts; special authority for police interventions; complete absence of privacy; and so on, ad nauseam. Not to mention the fact that inequality in the United States is actually higher than in Egypt.

Friends of the family

Yet ultimately, the U.S. administration cannot absolve itself. Successive State Department Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for Egypt, while still conservative, catalog the litany of routine police-state repression inflicted on the civilian population over the last decade by Mubarak’s security forces. When asked about the shocking findings of the 2009 report, Clinton herself downplayed the implications, describing Mubarak and his wife as “friends of my family.” So it is not that we do not know. It is that we did not care until the terror became so unbearable that it exploded onto the streets of Cairo.

Egypt: Lessons in Democracy
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Egypt is central among a network of repressive Arab regimes which the British and Americans have actively supported since the early twentieth century to sustain control of cheap oil “at all costs,” as Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd noted in 1956, as well as to protect Israel. Declassified British Foreign Office files reviewed by historian Mark Curtis show that the Gulf sheikdoms were largely created by Britain to “retain our influence,” while police and military assistance would help “counter hostile influence and propaganda within the countries themselves”—particularly from “ultra-nationalist maladies.” The real danger, warned the Foreign Office in 1957, was of dictators “losing their authority to reformist or revolutionary movements which might reject the connection with the United Kingdom.”

No wonder then that the chief fear of Western intelligence agencies and corporate risk consultants is not that mass resistance might fail to generate vibrant and viable democracies, but simply the prospect of a regional “contagion” that could destabilize “Saudi oil fields.” Such conventional analyses, of course, entirely miss the point: The American Empire, and the global political economy it has spawned, is unraveling—not because of some far-flung external danger, but under the weight of its own internal contradictions. It is unsustainable—already in overshoot of the earth’s natural systems, exhausting its own resource base, alienating the vast majority of the human and planetary population.

The solution in Tunisia, in Egypt, in the entire Middle East, and beyond, does not lie merely in aspirations for democracy. Hope can only spring from a fundamental re-evaluation of the entire structure of our civilization in its current form. If we do not use the opportunities presented by these crises to push for fundamental structural change, then the “contagion” will engulf us all.

Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is Executive Director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development in London. He is author of A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It (2010) and writer of the forthcoming documentary film, The Crisis of Civilization.

Copyright © 2011 Le Monde diplomatique — distributed by Agence Global

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My heart is bursting from my chest today, tears on my cheeks, my skin covered in waves and waves of goosebumps as my body integrates the beautiful revolution in Egypt.

I am watching Al Jazeera, reading the voices of Egyptians on Twitter, watching and listening as the Egyptian protesters dance and sing and scream and celebrate the success of their revolutionary effort.

In case you don’t know yet, Hosni Mubarak, after 30 years of holding the presidency in Egypt, has been forced out of power by the Egyptian people after 18 days of revolution. And it’s not just him, it’s his entire regime. And it’s not just Egypt, it’s Tunisia, it’s the entire region! And instead of handing power over to the unacceptable vice president he appointed 14 days ago, Mubarak conceded power to the army, which has stated that it will stand with the people and the democratic process in this effort.

There is so much work to come as the people continue to learn how to hold power together. There is so much grief to process for the lives lost in this struggle, the martyrs who sacrificed themselves for something they knew was greater—justice.

And right now, there is this moment of feeling absolutely alive, feeling the absolute best potential of humanity when it rises up against corruption, against oppression, against violence.

If I could do backflips, or be a firework, or transport myself to Tahrir Square, I would.

All I can think is how beautiful it is when people love themselves so much that they cannot continue being compromised, when they must stand up for justice. It is so beautiful I can’t take my eyes off of it.

“I feel so proud to be Egyptian,” one person writes. “I love my people.” This is love, that inner transformation which allows you to be brave and persistent and nonviolent and put others before yourself. This is love, happening at a quantum scale.

And I feel so humbled. I live in the United States, where I constantly hear organizers talking about strategy—how can “we beat them?” I have felt, deeply, that it isn’t about the enemy, it’s about what is within you. Are you willing to step up, to put your voice and body behind your beliefs, to live in a new way? Are you willing to be fearless? Are you willing to see everyone as a potential ally in larger mission for justice?

In Egypt, Something Rare and Remarkable

From Cairo, a first-person account of the way Egyptians supported and protected one another during the historic protests that led to Mubarak's departure.

But I haven’t had enough modern models of love and inner transformation creating tangible large-scale change to draw on. Now, Egypt has given us this gorgeous model. Nonviolent, personal, loving, healing, taking care of each other and their country, and not giving up. Cleaning the streets, inviting the army to stand with the people, setting up recycling centers and medical stations and childcare and creating the society they longed for—that is what revolution can look like.

It is so important to me that this model of love and nonviolence comes to the world from the Arab world, from the very people who have been so internationally maligned and targeted, by my country and others, as “dangerous terrorists.” It is important for us all to grasp that, in fact, Egyptians are the current face of people’s power, of a new democracy, of a love-based transformational movement.

I am celebrating, I am crying and laughing and overjoyed. I am so grateful.

Thank you, Egypt. Thank you so, so much. Your love has changed the world.

Adrienne Maree Brown was the national coordinator of the 2010 US Social Forum in Detroit. She also serves on the board of Allied Media, and is former director of the Ruckus Society, a network of volunteers who support nonviolent community-based direct action.

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Despite the natural subsidence of dramatic demonstrations on the streets of Cairo and other Egyptian cities, as many protesters return to jobs and catch their breath, there is little question that the pro-democracy struggle in Egypt has achieved lasting momentum, barring unexpected repression. As with other kinds of civil struggles, a movement using nonviolent resistance can ebb and flow. There may have to be tactical retreats, times for regrouping or resetting of strategy, or a focus on negotiations with the regime before broader operations that capture the world’s attention resume.

Those who were expecting a quick victory are no doubt disappointed, but successful People Power movements of recent decades have usually been protracted struggles. It took nearly a decade between the first strikes in the Gdansk shipyards and the fall of communism in Poland; Chile’s democratic struggle against the Pinochet regime took three years between the first major protests and the regime’s acquiescence to holding the referendum which forced the dictator from power.

Most successful unarmed insurrections against authoritarian regimes take a much shorter time, but they usually take weeks or months rather than days. As of this writing, the Egyptian protests have only been going for two weeks. It took ten weeks of struggle in East Germany during the fall of 1989 before the Berlin Wall came down. It took three months before the first student demonstrations in Mali and the downfall of the Traore dictatorship in 1991. Indeed, the pro-democracy movement in Tunisia which many credit as having inspired the Egyptian uprising took nearly a month, and they are still struggling to ensure that the end of the Ben Ali regime will also lead to real democracy.

Despite the failure of the protests in Egypt thus far to dislodge the hated Mubarak regime or force the president’s resignation, there have been some notable victories.

Millions of Egyptians, in direct defiance of emergency laws banning public demonstrations, have taken part in pro-democracy protests. A remarkable cross-section of Egyptian society was visible in these demonstrations in Cairo and other cities across the country: young and old, Muslim and Christian, men and women, poor and middle class, secular and religious. Despite waves of attacks by plainsclothes police and paid squads of young toughs, clearly unleashed by the regime—and comparable to the notorious Basiji in Iran or Mugabe’s green bombers in Zimbabwe—which the regime hoped would disperse the protesters and cower them into submission, the pro-democracy activists in Tahrir Square have held fast. Moreover, there have been key defections among prominent journalists and intellectuals who were previously willing to parrot the government’s line or keep quiet—for example, the president of the Arab League joined the protests at one point. The movement has also provided cover and legitimacy for opposition political figures who would have otherwise been jailed or ignored.

Equally importantly, the movement has forced the United States and other western governments to end their unconditional support for the regime and press for Mubarak to step down. These shifts illustrate that, despite the longstanding sense of fatalism among Arabs that Washington and London will ignore what happens on the ‘Arab street,’ it has proven itself capable of disrupting expectations in Washington and London.

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Specifically, the demonstrators have forced Mubarak to renounce plans for re-election or to have his son run in his place, making him a lame duck. Their exposure of the ruling party’s corruption has led leading figures to formally resign from the party, including Mubarak and his son. They have forced the government into negotiations with representatives from the opposition.

Above all, events of the past couple of weeks have changed Egyptian society. German anthropologist Samuli Schielke, who was present at the demonstrations, observed that the sense of unity and power experienced by the protesters in Tahrir Square and elsewhere is necessarily transient. Negotiations, party politics, tactical decisions and other processes that will inevitably arise during the course of a democratic transition are going to be messy and not produce the incredible energy of coming together in the popular contestation of public space and saying “no!” However, he observes, “thanks to its utopian nature, it is also indestructible. Once it has been realised, it cannot be wiped out of people’s minds again. It will be an experience that, with different colourings and from different perspectives, will mark an entire generation.”

Similarly, after covering both the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings, British journalist Peter Beaumont emphasized the significance of this shift in attitude: “A threshold of fear has been crossed. For what has happened in both countries is that the structures of a police state have been challenged and found, to the surprise of many, to be weaker than imagined.” He goes on to note that regardless of how soon Mubarak is forced to leave, “a transition of power is already under way”—not as a result of formal negotiations or diplomatic efforts by the United States or the European Union, but from the people effective seizing power for themselves. The bold actions by what were once relatively small bands of activists “have been embraced by a wider population no longer afraid to speak or to assemble.”

For years, the Mubarak regime has offered short-term fixes and various small concessions which have failed to pull up the roots of the country’s problems. A combination of paternalism and repression by the regime had fostered an atmosphere of apathy and cynicism. Now, however, a whole new generation has been empowered and the regime, with its feet to the fire, realizes more significant changes are necessary if they are going to survive. Yet each new concession demonstrates the regime’s relative weakness and the movement’s growing power, thereby emboldening the activists to press forward with their demands for an authentic democratic transition.

The movement will have to think strategically as to how it might be able to achieve victory. A recent article by Maciej Bartkowski and Lester Kurtz compares the Solidarity movement in Poland, which was able to force the Communist regime to negotiate a series of compromises which eventually led to multi-party democratic elections in which the Communists were defeated, with the youthful pro-democracy activists on Tiananmen Square during that same period whose all-or-nothing demands failed to budge the regime and resulted in a massacre and the crushing of the movement. Sometimes a movement will have to be temporarily satisfied with a series of relatively minor concessions, declare a partial victory as a testament of their power and the vulnerability of the regime to pressure, then regroup for another round of public resistance and demands, and continue this process until the government has given away so much they no longer effectively rule. What makes this more feasible in the Egyptian case than perhaps in other movements that have so far been unsuccessful, as in Iran, is that the Egyptian Army has plainly been unwilling to engage in general repression. This seems to have created a viable political space for the movement, where effectively none existed before except through the Internet and organizing out of sight of the authorities.

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It is also important to recognize that successful unarmed insurrections against dictatorships have usually engaged in a multiplicity of tactics other than the mass demonstrations and multi-day sit-ins. For example, the movement could take advantage of the government’s economic vulnerabilities. Already, as a result of the de facto 12-day general strike and other disruptions, including the exodus of foreign tourists and the regime’s decision to shut down the Internet for a period, the country lost well over $3 billion in revenue. The desperate xenophobic campaign by the regime—including Mubarak’s thugs attacking foreign journalists, human rights workers and others—has undoubtedly scared away not only tourists but inhibited business visitors.

Other potential tactics by the opposition, such as periodic work stoppages and slowdowns, one-day general strikes, tax resistance, selective international sanctions targeted at the regime and its supporters, or a boycott of particular industries or institutions controlled by the government, armed forces, ruling party or pro-Mubarak families, would squeeze further the regime’s ability to demonstrate that it has any meaningful control of events going forward.

It is critical that, whatever tactics are employed, there needs to be long-range strategic planning, a logical sequencing of tactics, and an awareness that—as in any campaign—one needs to take advantage of one’s strengths and target the opponent’s weaknesses.

The dramatic events of recent weeks have illustrated that for democracy to come to the Arab world, it will come not from foreign intervention or sanctimonious statements from Washington, but from Arab peoples themselves. Even if a government has a monopoly of military force and even if a government has the support of the world's one remaining superpower, it is still ultimately powerless if the people refuse to recognize its legitimacy and withdraw their cooperation from business and life as usual. Mubarak and his enablers have lost their long primacy in Egyptian affairs and it is doubtful that either he or his vice president Omar Suleiman, the notorious former head of military intelligence, will be able to regain it. Supplanting the regime with a legitimate government that emerges from free and fair elections will be no easy task. But the most important steps, the dissolution of the status quo and the empowerment of the people, have already been accomplished.

Stephen Zunes is a professor of politics and chair of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco. He chairs the academic advisory committee for the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict and is the author of Nonviolent Social Movements and Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism, as well as a contributor to openDemocracy, where this article first appeared.

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The influence of the new digital commons in democratic uprisings from Tunisia to Egypt to Bahrain has been chronicled at length in news reports from the Middle East, with Facebook, Twitter and other social media winning praise as dictator-busters.

But the importance of a much older form of commons in these revolts has earned scant attention—the public spaces where citizens rally to voice their discontent, show their power and ultimately articulate a new vision for their homelands. To celebrate their victory over the Mubarak regime, for example, protesters in Cairo jubilantly returned to Tahrir Square, where the revolution was born, to pick up trash.

It’s the same story all over the Middle East. In Libya’s capital city of Tripoli, people express their aspirations and face bloody reprisals in Tripoli’s Green Square and Martyr’s Square. In Bahrain, they boldly march in Pearl Square in the capital city of Manama. In Yemen, protests have taken place in public spaces near the university in Sanaa, which students renamed Tahrir Square. Kept out of the central Revolution Square in Tehran by the repressive government, Iranian dissidents gather in Valiasr Square and Vanak Sqaure.

Last week in Tunisia, the name of the main square in Tunis was changed to honor Mohammad Bouazizi, an unlicensed street vendor whose suicide in December in response to government harassment sparked the revolution that toppled the regime of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali.

The course of recent history was rewritten by events happening in Prague’s Wenceslas Square as dissidents ousted an oppressive regime in December 1989. Those protests were inspired in part by events in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square that seized the world’s imagination earlier that year when democracy activists unsuccessfully challenged the power of China’s dictatorship.

The state capitol in Madison, Wisconsin, where thousands of workers now protest the governor’s fierce attacks on collective bargaining rights, represents another case of a public commons becoming a staging ground for political resistance. The capitol, which sits right in the heart of downtown Madison, was named by Project for Public Spaces as one of the great public spaces of the world. “This is truly the town square that early Americans imagined as the crux of democracy,” the PPS website explains.

The people rallying behind public sector union workers at the Capitol are actually protected by the Wisconsin state constitution, which forbids the legislature from denying public access to the building when it is in session. (State law does permit capitol groundskeepers to clear the building in an emergency, presumably on orders of the governor—but those groundskeepers are also presumably members of the same union the governor wants to crush.)

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This all shows that the exercise of democracy depends upon having a literal commons where people can gather as citizens—a square, Main Street, park, or other public space that is open to all. An alarming trend in American life is the privatization of our public realm. As corporate-run shopping malls replaced downtowns and main streets as the center of action, we lost some of our public voice. You can’t organize a rally, hand out flyers, or circulate a petition in a shopping mall without the permission of the management, which will almost certainly say no because they don’t want to distract shoppers’ attention from the merchandise. That’s why you see few benches or other gathering spots inside malls. The result is that our ability to even discuss the issues of the day (or any other subject) with our fellow citizens is limited.

Of course, public spaces enrich our lives in many ways beyond protests. Local commons become the sites of celebrations, festivals, art events, memorial services, and other expressions of community.

The moment when I first became aware of the importance of public spaces was when the Minnesota Twins won their first ever World Series in 1987. I did not have tickets to the game, but gathered hopefully with thousands of others outside the stadium in Minneapolis to share in the joy of the victory. When the Twins won the game, thousands more poured out of the ballpark into the streets and we all marched to…where? Minneapolis has no downtown square or landmark gathering place so we milled around the streets for a while—an unsatisfying way to celebrate a World Series championship. If it had been the Red Sox, everyone would have headed for the Boston Common (site of protests and public gatherings for three centuries, from a 200-person protest of food shortages in 1713 to a 100,000-strong march against the Vietnam War in 1969). We weren’t so lucky.

I’ve often wondered if this lack of a central commons in Minneapolis and most other American communities somehow inhibits our civic expression. With no place to voice our views as citizens, do we become more passive about what happens to our country and our future? I don’t know the answer, but I imagine Hosni Mubarak wishes he had built a shopping mall in Tahrir Square.

Jay Walljasper adapted this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Jay is a contributing editor of National Geographic Traveler, Senior Fellow at Project for Public Spaces, and co-editor of OnTheCommons.org. Editor of Utne Reader magazine for 15 years, he is the author of All That We Share: A Field Guide to the Commons and The Great Neighborhood Book.

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In Egypt, the relatively short-lived military crackdown by the hated security agencies and pro-regime thugs actually strengthened the opposition, reminding the millions in the streets exactly what they were protesting against. In Libya, the Gaddafi regime seems to have turned that lesson on its head, apparently believing that if their response is violent enough, brutal enough, murderous enough, the opposition will stop. 

So far, it hasn’t worked. With earlier attacks from helicopter gunships and jet bombers, and with reports of machine gun fire in and around Tripoli continuing at least through February 24, the estimates of Libyans killed range from 300 to more than 1,000 people—but the popular resistance has continued unabated.

What is different in Libya from the earlier iterations of the Arab world’s great democratic revolution of 2011 is that the anti-regime, pro-democracy side that has succeeded in ousting the regime from major cities and most of eastern Libya, is now seeing huge sectors of the Libyan military defect directly to the opposition. Libyan civil society democracy activists in Benghazi and elsewhere are apparently taking up arms with and alongside the military units now on their side, both to defend their cities and, reportedly, to prepare to help the people of Tripoli and the west, still under Gaddafi’s contested control, finally to overthrow the regime. Libya, unlike Egypt and Tunisia or states where revolutionary upheavals are underway, is moving towards a military confrontation closer to a civil war.

Social, political, demographic, and other conditions in Libya are significantly different than in Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain or elsewhere, so it is not surprising that the progress of the revolution has differed too. The first victories—ousting a dictator in Tunisia and, soon after, the monumental achievement of the Egyptian revolution in getting rid of Mubarak—inspired democratic risings across the Arab world and North Africa, with parallel movements emerging in sub-Saharan Africa as well, in Gabon and elsewhere.

Not only the inspiration but crucially the success of Tunisia and Egypt continue to empower the rest. The regimes and societies differ widely, but the dissatisfaction is similar all over: widening gaps between the wealthy and the poor, rising unemployment and a lack of jobs for huge young populations, and most of all, the demand for dignity, hope, and for people to have a say in determining their own lives and how they are governed.

The Crumbling of the Gaddafi Regime

In Libya the opposition movement has actually seized control of cities, and now of whole sectors of the country, even while the embattled Gaddafi regime remains more or less in control of the capitol. The entire eastern parts of Libya, including the key city of Benghazi as well as numerous other cities and the long border with Egypt, all now appear to be in the hands of the opposition, in many cases reportedly with the military forces joining the protesters rather than fighting them or fleeing.

The takeover of cities by the pro-democracy demonstrators seems now to be moving closer to Tripoli in the western part of the country, with reports from the nearby city of Misurata claiming the protesters, backed by defecting army units, have been in control since February 21. The Financial Times quoted a local worker in Misurata describing how “the people are now organising themselves into committees. Some are managing traffic, others are cleaning up after the fighting and the fires of previous days. There are also people handing out water and milk to the population.” It looks very much like the self-organization of Tahrir Square in Egypt, in the Pearl Roundabout in Bahrain—and very much like the non-violent society-wide mobilization of the first Palestinian intifada of 1987-93.

Misurata is only about 125 miles east of Tripoli—meaning that most of the strategic Mediterranean coast from just east of the capital to the Egyptian border (excepting only the area around Sirte, Gaddafi’s tribal homeland) is now apparently controlled by pro-democracy forces. There are reports of a new local council being established in Benghazi, the first city to be taken over by the opposition. 

The regime itself continues to splinter, with top officials, including the justice minister and the interior minister, being the latest to resign. The interior minister, responsible for internal security, said he now supports what he called the “February 17 Revolution,” and urged the military forces to support the Libyan people’s “legitimate demands.” Libyan diplomats around the world, including the ambassadors to the U.S., Indonesia, Australia, India, Bangladesh, and elsewhere, as well as virtually the entire staff of the Libyan mission to the United Nations, have all resigned in protest of the violence.

Other Regimes React to Stem the Tide

The regimes’ responses have differed. Some are desperately trying to make concessions, even before any protests arise.

• In Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, where opposition forces have only barely shown their presence, emirs and kings have been quick to dole out money ($3,700 per family and free food for 14 months in Kuwait, new social benefits in Saudi Arabia).
  
• In Jordan, the still-popular king has been trying to convince a skeptical public that his decision to sack the cabinet and appoint another appointed prime minister should somehow satisfy them. (It hasn’t.)
  
• The King of Bahrain launched a vicious crack-down on the largely Shi’a protesters demanding an end to the years of discrimination against their majority community, but backed off under international pressure and turned to a series of political and financial incentives to buy new loyalty; many protesters are still demanding the transformation to a constitutional monarchy, but others have now escalated to demand an end to the king’s role altogether.
  
• In Yemen, the president has pledged not to run again in the next election and other meager reforms, but his offer has been insufficient and the regime has continued using force against protesters remaining in the streets.

Meanwhile, in what seems to be an ever-growing list of countries, democracy is rising. New movements demanding democracy are rising in Djibouti, where the U.S. maintains its sole military base on the African continent; in Algeria, a crucial oil-exporting country with its own proud history of independent struggle; in Syria, where the long-standing president has so far vowed only that he will not run again. And of course, many union supporters in Wisconsin claim the Egyptian victory as their own inspiration.

The International Response

With Libya providing huge percentages of the oil and gas imported by powerful European countries—especially Italy—and with the UK working hard the last several years to burnish Libya’s image so that British Petroleum could claim a privileged stake in the Libyan oil industry and General Dynamics UK could sign lucrative weapons contracts, western countries came late and soft to criticize Gaddafi’s violent assault. The United States had not moved as far as most European allies in rehabilitating the Gaddafi regime after an initial embrace following Tripoli’s agreement to dismantle its nuclear programs in 2003, but still moved too slowly to fully condemn the regime.

Only on February 23 did President Obama explicitly condemn the violence, and called the bloodshed “outrageous” and “unacceptable.” He said “these actions violate international norms and every standard of common decency. This violence must stop.”

Obama spoke clearly of the importance of international action, and praised the statement released by the Security Council the day before. That UN statement included some important issues, including a condemnation of the violence, a call on the Libyan government to abide by human rights and international humanitarian law and to allow medical, humanitarian, and human rights workers in to the country, and a reference to the need for accountability for perpetrators of the violence.

But the statement was merely a Security Council press release, which lacks the power of enforcement of an actual resolution, and falls even below the status of the formal “presidential statement” which indicates Council unanimity. There was no decision, for example, to freeze all assets of Gaddafi and his family, to impose an immediate end on all weapons sales and a halt any weapons or security goods currently in the pipeline to Libya, or to refer the Libyan regime’s violence to the International Criminal Court for immediate investigation and prosecution.

In his speech, President Obama stated he had “asked my administration to prepare the full range of options that we have to respond to this crisis. This includes those actions we may take and those we will coordinate with our allies and partners, or those that we’ll carry out through multilateral institutions.” His careful distinguishing between what the U.S. would insist on doing on its own, as opposed to actions taken with allies or in multilateral venues such as the United Nations, may be an indication why there was no stronger Security Council response. If the Council had decided, for instance, to hold Libyan officials and soldiers directly accountable for alleged war crimes against a civilian population by referring the issue directly to the International Criminal Court, what kind of a precedent would that set, and what other political leaders or soldiers responsible for civilian deaths might face that same method of accountability? If the Council had passed a resolution stating that top officials of all governments and corporations who provided weapons to the Libyan regime should be held accountable for how those weapons are being used, what precedent would that set for the powerful weapons-exporting governments and corporations now arming military forces where human rights violations and war crimes are routine?

The UN Security Council should reconvene now to pass a binding, enforceable resolution. It should demand an immediate halt to the attacks, call for immediate access for international humanitarian and human rights workers, and refer the issue to the International Court of Justice to initiate on an emergency basis a full investigation and prosecution of those responsible, making clear that not only top decision-makers but all soldiers and mercenaries carrying out illegal orders would be held to account. The resolution should require that governments and corporations with ties to the Libyan regime—especially those in Europe and the U.S.—immediately sever all military ties, cancel military contracts, and withdraw any military equipment that may be in the pipeline.

Next Steps for the United States

There has been a growing demand, in the United Statea from powerful neo-conservative war-mongers as well as from some of the most progressive members of Congress, to establish a no-fly zone in Libya. The call has also come from former Libyan officials who have defected from the regime. But at the moment I believe that would be a mistake. There have been no reports of air strikes since February 21; current assaults are relying on heavy weapons on land. While it is certainly possible a desperate Gaddafi could lash out once again by sending his warplanes aloft to attack his own people, it isn’t clear he has loyal pilots left to answer his call. The discussion of a no-fly zone in the Security Council could well become the sole means of responding to the Libyan crisis – even though it would likely have little impact on the actual threats currently facing the Libyan people, especially in and around the capitol, and would be serve as a distraction from other actions that might actually help.

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The political cost of such a decision, given its likely low protection value, must be weighed against the lessons of the 1990s-era no-fly zone established in Iraq by the U.S. and Britain, a unilaterally-imposed no-fly zone which President Bill Clinton and other officials often claimed, mendaciously, was authorized by the United Nations, but which in fact was never mentioned in any Security Council resolution. As documented by the United Nations, enforcement of the no-fly zone in Iraq resulted in the deaths of several hundred Iraqi civilians. It is not clear that any country other than the U.S. could carry out enforcement of a no-fly zone in Libya (there are even questions whether the U.S. military, already stretched in illegitimate wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, could field such an operation, let alone to be prepared to start immediately). But giving a Security Council imprimatur to the U.S. (or NATO, which would still be relying on U.S. air power) to define, impose, determine violations of, and carry out bombing raids in response to those violations of, a Libyan no-fly zone, when it is unlikely to actually protect Libyan civilians but could well result in justifying a much longer-term U.S. intervention than Council members anticipate, does not pass the legitimacy test.

If the fighting in Libya continues or escalates, an accountability-focused UN Security Council resolution authorizing a Blue Helmet contingent of medical, other humanitarian workers, human rights monitors, and investigators from the International Criminal Court, recruited from neighboring countries, sent with armed escort if necessary, would likely be far more useful in providing actual protection to Libyan civilians than imposing a high-profile but likely low-impact and dangerous no-fly zone.

While the Libyan leader escalates his threats, and while the violence may continue for a bit longer, the international standing of the Libyan regime has collapsed. More importantly, the territory, cities, and population still under the regime’s domination are all dwindling rapidly. Gaddafi is losing control. Democracy is gaining.
__________________________

Phyllis Bennis wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Phyllis is a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies and the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. Her books include Challenging Empire: How People, Governments and the UN Defy U.S. Power.

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The civil insurrection in Libya has been far more violent, and forces loyal to the dictator far more violent still, than the recent successful unarmed revolutions against the dictatorships in neighboring Tunisia and Egypt. Still, there are signs of hope and important lessons to be learned in the ongoing struggle against the 42-year regime of Muammar Gaddafi, whose days appear to be numbered.

Gaddafi’s leadership style has always been repressive, impulsive, and unpredictable. Yet his nationalism, anti-imperialism, and professed socialism led many educated Libyans who formed the backbone of the government to stay loyal despite their misgivings, in large part in reaction to what was seen as punitive and hypocritical sanctions imposed by Western nations and the constant threat of renewed U.S. air and missile strikes against the country, as took place back in the 1980s. It was only when the sanctions and the threats of war subsided back in 2004 that there began to be a dramatic increase in resignations and defections by prominent Libyans who had been members and supporters of the government. In short, the U.S.-led efforts to isolate, punish, and threaten the regime likely contributed to Gaddafi’s longevity as dictator. Once relations were normalized and the isolation and threats subsided, Gaddafi was seen less as a strong leader defending his nation against Western imperialism and more as the mercurial and brutal tyrant that he is.

As of this writing, virtually all of the cities in the eastern half of the country and a number of cities elsewhere have been liberated by pro-democracy forces, which launched their rebellion just a few weeks ago and are now clashing with security forces in Tripoli, Libya's capital. In these liberated cities, popular democratic committees have been set up to serve as interim local governments. For example, Benghazi—a city of over a million people—is now being run by a improvised organizing committee of judges, lawyers, and other professionals who have been largely successful at restoring order to the country’s second largest city, dispatching young people to coordinate traffic at intersections and assist in other basic services.

There have been resignations of cabinet members and other important aides of Gaddafi, Libyan ambassadors in foreign capitals, and top military officers, many of whom have actively joined the opposition. Pilots have deliberately crashed their planes, flown into exile, or otherwise refused orders to bomb and strafe protesters. Thousands of soldiers have defected or refused to fire on crowds, despite threats of execution. This has forced Gaddafi to rely on African mercenaries, which has only further angered the population against a dictator willing to bring in foreigners to murder his own citizens.

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These serious challenges to Gaddafi’s power comes despite the fact that, compared with the recent successful civil insurrections against dictators in Tunisia and Egypt, the challenges faced by the pro-democracy forces in Libya have been far greater. Under the recently-overthrown dictators, the Egyptian and Tunisian regimes routinely rigged elections and marginalized opposition parties, but at least there were elections and opposition parties. Not in Libya, however. Similarly, Egypt and Tunisia had trade unions, popular organizations, and active civil society groups whose activities were severely restricted and at times brutally suppressed, but at least they existed. Again, not in Libya.

Despite all this, pro-democracy forces are on the offensive, demonstrating that if enough people are willing to risk everything for their freedom, the regime has few options left but brute force—exactly what Gaddafi has been turning to. However, the use of such extraordinary violence usually ends up backfiring in favor of the opposition, which is exactly what appears to be happening in Libya.

Gaddafi joined the Libyan armed forces as a young man, not because of an interest in a military career per se, but because he wanted to become the country’s ruler. In the Middle East in those days, if you weren’t part of a royal family, the key to political power was through the military. What Tunisia and Egypt have demonstrated, however—along with other successful nonviolent civil insurrections from the Philippines to Poland and from Chile to Serbia—is that political power ultimately comes from the acquiescence of the people. And if a people no longer recognize the leader’s authority and refuse to obey the leader’s orders, he will no longer be the leader. This is the kind of power the United States and other Western nations must recognize: for democracy to come to the Middle East, it must come from the people themselves.

Stephen Zunes wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Stephen is a professor of Politics and chair of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco. He chairs the academic advisory committee for the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict and is the author of Nonviolent Social Movements and Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism.

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At 1 in the morning on Saturday, January 29th, I watched from the balcony of my Cairo apartment as a mob of young men with crude weapons smashed and looted the Radio Shack store next door. The building’s guards shot a rifle vainly into the air, the report so close that it rattled my bones. This was the first moment in the unfolding uprising in Egypt when I realized things were deadly serious. Chaos descended; gunshots crackled throughout the night as looters and shop owners clashed all over our neighborhood.

I would learn later that these trouble-makers were most likely paid by the government to sow chaos so the people would demand that Mubarak remain in power and restore calm. It is one of the regime’s tried-and-true tactics (along with pulling the police off the streets at such times, which may explain why they had mysteriously disappeared that night).

The tactic did not work this time, however, and the most amazing thing about the last two weeks in Cairo is that the city’s residents not only did not feed into this chaos, but denied it at every turn. In a city of almost 20 million souls, many of them desperately poor, the vast majority have shown that there’s no need for an iron-fisted strong man or a brutal police force. In the face of chaos, they have proudly governed their own turf, behaving with responsibility, composure, bravery, and kindness.

Take, for example, the citizens who took it upon themselves to direct traffic in the absence of the usual traffic cops, or the group of men on our street who organized to keep watch all night, every night. These committees formed organically throughout Cairo, led by the bowabs, men whose job it is to care for and protect the city’s buildings. In Zamalek, a neighborhood on the island in the middle of the Nile where my husband and I went to stay with friends, the protection committees worked all night in three-hour shifts, guarding make-shift roadblocks at regular intervals and coordinating with each other to keep the streets preternaturally quiet and calm. Those of us who holed up in Zamalek’s apartment buildings owe those men our safety and our sanity.

From the uprising in Egypt (from top): man directing traffic on Zamalek in the absence of police; demonstration with an Egyptian flag; protesters making a human chain to protect outnumbered police; men praying on a bridge during a protest.

Top photo by Mathilde Nørmølle; all others by Aaron Pina.

The protesters themselves have displayed an admirable level of restraint and even generosity toward those they are battling. In an incident during the early days of the protests, a few dozen riot police were separated from their retreating battalion as tens of thousands of protesters streamed across a bridge. When the separated police found themselves surrounded and vastly outnumbered by a mob of demonstrators, some calling for blood, peace-minded protesters stepped between the groups, linking hands to form a human chain. When asked by a journalist why he was protecting the police, one young man in the chain explained that these officers are just poor men doing their jobs. They are Egyptians, too, he said.

That unifying spirit has been on display throughout the events in Egypt. Women in Tahrir Square have reported a notable absence of the sexual harassment they usually face in Cairo’s streets. Children have been present, waving flags and chanting with the best of them. Sectarian schisms seem to be nonexistent. In fact, Christians stood guard while Muslims prayed in Tahrir Square, the Muslims returning the favor the next day.

Those who want to help the protesters in their fight have been volunteering to bring food, water, and medicine, sometimes at grave risk. My friend Rana, a courageous woman who has alternated between protesting and volunteering with several organizations to bring in supplies, was stopped by pro-Mubarak thugs on her way to Tahrir Square with a bag full of first-aid materials on Thursday, February 3rd. Brandishing their swords and guns, the men searched her bag for cameras, money, or weapons and demanded to know whom the supplies were for. Rana lied, telling them she was provisioning pro-Mubarak supporters, and the men let her and the three other volunteers with her pass.

“I lied to live,” Rana told me in an online chat, then added in her charming English: “You can't imagine how scary they was. The man who was with us, he was close to get heart attack.” The youngest among them, a 17-year-old woman, fainted from fright under the impression that the men might rape her. Rana managed to help her off the bridge and into Tahrir Square, where she revived and found her place among the protesters. “Now she call me to say that she will be going to protests every day,” said Rana.

Rana herself has felt from the very start that there is no turning back. Despite her own work grinding to a halt and pressure from colleagues anxious about their livelihoods, she will not stop protesting. “I’m totally different now,” she told me. “It feels different to be in the street and going there carrying your soul and you know that you may die or be hurt for Egypt.”

In the United States, despite our country being born of revolution, it is hard to appreciate the profundity of what the people of Egypt are going through right now. But the amazing way they are banding together to help each other and demand a new government, makes it clear that we are witnessing something rare and remarkable. Hope is in the air. Empowerment breeds respect for oneself and others. As Rana said of this new era dawning in her country, “you feel like you’re reborn again.”

Katherine Gustafson wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Katie is a freelance writer and editor with a background in international nonprofit organizations.

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Together, the unarmed insurrection that overthrew the Ben Ali regime in Tunisia and the ongoing uprising in Egypt have dramatically altered the way many in the West view prospects for democratization in the Middle East. The dramatic events of recent weeks have illustrated that for democracy to come to the Arab world, it will come not from foreign intervention or sanctimonious statements from Washington, but from Arab peoples themselves.

While many observers have acknowledged how unarmed pro-democracy insurrections helped bring democracy to Eastern Europe, Latin America, and parts of Asia and Africa, they had discounted the chances of such movements in the region, despite Tunisia being far from the first.

There has actually been a long history of nonviolent pro-democracy struggle in North Africa and the Middle East. Egypt wrested its independence from Great Britain as a result of a massive nonviolent resistance campaign launched in 1919. In Sudan, military dictators were ousted in nonviolent insurrections in 1964 and 1985, though the democratic experiments that followed were cut short by military coups a few years later. In 1991, in a nonviolent struggle succeeded in ousting the Traore dictatorship in Mali, despite the massacre of hundreds of peaceful protesters by the armed forces. Though it is one of the poorest countries in the world, Mali has been one of the most stable and democratic countries in the region ever since. The recently published book Civilian Jihad: Nonviolent Struggle, Democratization and Governance in the Middle East documents numerous other popular pro-democracy movements throughout the Arab world.

The current struggle in Egypt—the center of Arab media, scholarship, and culture—has enormous ramifications for the region as a whole. The predominantly young secular activists who initiated the struggle reject not only the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak but also conservative Islamist leaders; they have put together a broad coalition of young and old, Muslim and Christian, poor and middle class to challenge a brutal corrupt regime which has held power for nearly thirty years. Like-minded civil society activists are organizing elsewhere. Indeed, 2011 could be to the Arab world what 1989 was to Eastern Europe.

In the early days of the uprisings, top U.S. officials defended the United States’ close ties with the authoritarian leaders of Tunisia and Egypt and, making lukewarm statements about the need for “reform” and urging “both sides” to refrain from violence (despite the far greater violence from state authorities). They refused to back the pro-democracy movements, call for democratic change, or threaten the suspension of U.S. military aid. However, the very day Tunisian dictator Zine el Abidine Ben Ali fled Tunisia, President Obama came out with a strong statement lauding the pro-democracy movement and criticizing the dictator’s oppression. Similarly, in the early days of the Egyptian protests, Obama administration officials made similar calls for “restraint” on “both sides,” speaking only in terms of reform from within Hosni Mubarak’s authoritarian regime. By the fifth day of the demonstrations, however, apparently not wanting to be on the wrong side of history, the Obama administration started speaking in terms of a transition to democratic rule and making it clear that large-scale repression of nonviolent protesters—which would presumably be implemented with U.S.-supplied weaponry—would be unacceptable.

These shifts illustrate that, despite the longstanding sense of fatalism among Arabs that Washington will ultimately impact what happens on the "Arab street," the Arab street has proven itself capable of impacting what happens in Washington.

This change is long overdue. The Obama administration, in rejecting the dangerous neoconservative ideology of its predecessor, had fallen back onto the realpolitik of previous administrations by continuing to support repressive regimes through unconditional arms transfers and other security assistance. Indeed, Obama's understandable skepticism of the neoconservative doctrine of externally mandated, top-down approaches to democratization through "regime change" turned into an excuse for further arming these regimes—which then use these instruments of repression to subjugate popular, indigenous, bottom-up struggles for democratization.

At the same time, there was a subtle, but important, shift in the U.S. government's discourse on human rights when Obama came to office two years ago. The Bush administration pushed a rather superficial structuralist view. It focused, for instance, on elections—which can, in many cases, be easily rigged and manipulated—in order to change certain governments for purposes of expanding U.S. power and influence. Obama has taken more of an agency view of human rights, emphasizing such rights as freedom of expression and the right to protest, recognizing that human rights reform can only come from below and not imposed from above.

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Until now, this had largely been rhetorical. Even now, as of this writing, the United States still needs to take a firmer stance toward Mubarak and the Egyptian military. And, regarding U.S. policy in the region as a whole, the United States needs to stop propping up other Arab dictators and supporting the Israeli occupation through ongoing military assistance.

However, the Obama administration has been reminded of where power actually comes from: Even if a government has a monopoly of military force and even if a government has the support of the world's one remaining superpower, it is still ultimately powerless if the people refuse to recognize its authority. Through general strikes, filling the streets, mass refusal to obey official orders, and other forms of nonviolent resistance, even the most autocratic regime cannot survive.

One cannot help but admire the Egyptians, who—like the Tunisians, Serbians, Filipinos, Poles, and many others before—have faced down the teargas, water cannons, truncheons, and bullets for their freedom. However, as long as the United States remains the world's No.1 supplier of security assistance to repressive governments in the Middle East and elsewhere, the need for massive nonviolent action in support for freedom and democracy may be no greater than here.

Stephen Zunes wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Stephen is a professor of Politics and chair of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco. He chairs the academic advisory committee for the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict and is the author of Nonviolent Social Movements and Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism.

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Much media coverage of the massive uprising that ousted Egypt's longtime president, Hosni Mubarek, has characterized the protests as largely spontaneous. But while the proverbial fire in Egypt was sparked by the success of a pro-democracy uprising in Tunisia—and fed by widespread anger at corruption and economic conditions under the Mubarek regime—activists had been working for years to create the conditions that allowed it to spread and be successful, Al Jazeera reports.

Video courtesy of Al Jazeera.

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