Around the Arab World in four uprisings

I am sitting in a cafe in the port of Sfax in Tunisia, close to the Libyan border. I have been tramping round the sand-coloured walls of this ancient city, dawdling in Sfax’s aromatic souks and getting lost in its maze of ninth century alleyways, so I am stopping for a drink.

In the cafe there are only two customers, and I am one of them. Above the manager’s head, a television is broadcasting amateur video footage of anti-government protests in Syria. The TV channel is Al Jazeera Arabic – as much a catalyst of history as a recorder of it these past few months – and the shaky camera work, along with the shouting of the Syrian crowd, seem all too familiar.

The pictures protestors are smuggling out of Syria could be interchangeable with the images of defiance we have seen in Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen and Libya. As well, of course, as Tunisia itself, where the Arab world’s revolutionary tide first began to turn.

“It looks like Tunisia back in January,” I tell the cafe manager as the Syrian chants blare overhead. He smiles at the similarity. “We Arabs want democracy and none of us have it,” he replies, his smile quickly giving way to this statement of fact.

It is good to be back in Tunisia. Perhaps covering a breakthrough moment like a revolution is always a special event for a reporter, and Tunisia’s Arab revolt happened to be my first.

On 14 January, I arrived in Tunis on a three-and-a-half-hour flight from London and drove straight from the airport to the main avenue in the centre of the capital. Outside a Stalinist-looking Interior Ministry, thousands of people were demanding that Tunisia’s President resign. Many of them were students and they spoke English. They told me they wanted the same things that I took for granted – freedom of speech, a democracy and not a dictatorship.  I marvelled at my stupidity; given that we were only three-and-a-half-hours flying time from London and a short hop across the Mediterranean from mainland Europe, why should any of this aspiration in the Arab world have come as any surprise?

After about an hour the police dispersed the crowd with teargas (four uprisings later, I have lost count of how many times have I written those words) and we ran for cover into the safety of the backstreets and away from the sound of gunfire. I had no idea I would soon be fleeing teargas in Egypt, Bahrain and Libya as well as in Tunisia repeatedly. (In Egypt protestors offered me Coca Cola to clean out my eyes. In Tunisia it was the juice of half a lemon.)

As we slipped down an alleyway to escape from Tunisian police, a phalanx of protestors hooked their arms in mine or walked in step behind, shouting slogans against the regime. My cameraman and I decided that I should say something which summed up the situation for that night’s TV report. “Either this is the first Arab revolution of the 21st Century,” I intoned as I marched towards the camera, “or it will be brutally suppressed.”

President Ben Ali fled to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia that very night, so it turned out that the first half of my intonation was correct. But in all the revolutions and uprisings since, the calculation has remained the same; would the people win out, or would state brutality stamp out dissent?

In Egypt the army balked at shooting its own people, allowing a revolution to take place which was part popular uprising, and part military coup against President Mubarak. On 28 January, I watched from my hotel balcony in Cairo as the Mubarak party headquarters burned, billowing smoke into my room. And a sight I will never forget – a plume of water fired by police, in a beautiful arc like a rainbow, towards a surging crowd of protestors crossing a bridge over the sunlit river Nile towards Tahrir Square.

Demonstrators in Egypt, as in Tunisia, had shed their fear. They had walked through a barrier of pain, risked everything and come out the other side. The more the police shot and tear gassed them, the more enraged they became.  Social media, along with Al Jazeera’s satellite broadcasts, spread a message of people power which has swept the region in an irresistible wave.

Egypt now awaits elections which will either prove it is capable of multi-party democracy or which could eventually return the country to military rule, if the Generals judge political Islam too much of a threat. In Bahrain, my third uprising, the struggle for democracy has had a religious dimension from the very beginning. The ruling Sunni Royal Family, the Khalifas, has outsourced its brutality to a largely non-indigenous security force to suppress the Shia majority. The official view is that national security is at stake. But it looks to me and to many others as if the Khalifas are stubbornly refusing to forego absolute power because they are not ready for a British-style Constitutional monarchy.

On the night of 18 February, I was in one of the main hospitals in Bahrain’s capital, Manama. I watched a woman quietly weeping at the bedside of her husband who had been shot in the head. He was brain dead and could never recover. Outraged doctors showed me X-rays of other bullets lodged in protestors’ flesh and bones.

The man who drove me to the hospital, and to the funerals of those unarmed Shia demonstrators who had been killed, now says it is too dangerous to leave his home. And the massive sculpture in the Pearl Roundabout, the prize of Bahrain’s democracy movement which jubilantly occupied it, has been dismantled, leaving a barren patch of earth beneath.

In Bahrain – perhaps the most strategically important of all these uprisings – the fear which Bahrainis shed has, in part, returned. America is unwilling to abandon a ruling elite which hosts the US Fifth Fleet. Neighbouring Saudi Arabia will not countenance a Shia revolt which could encourage Shia revolts in Saudi’s eastern provinces and boost the regional influence of Iran – though an alternative view is that Iran’s Ayatollahs have every reason to be as terrified of the democracy movements sweeping across the region as the Saudis are.

The calculation in Bahrain seems to be that violence will push the democratic genie back into the bottle. I don’t believe that will work. I am not sure it will work anywhere now, given the revolutions which have already taken place in Tunisia and Egypt.

Then there is Libya, where the security forces tried to avoid their neighbours’’ fate and did not hesitate to shoot their own people. In Libya the bulk of the oil is in the East, so perhaps it is not surprising that foreign powers have intervened on the East’s behalf, in the name of protecting civilians.

Libya is different from previous uprisings because of the 41-year personality cult of Colonel Gaddafi who has talked of hunting down his enemies like rats; and mainly because army defectors and protestors have morphed into armed rebels, turning this not into a purely civilian-military conflict but into a civil war – though Yemen’s unrest may be heading in a similarly two-sided direction.

In Libya, western powers and Arab states have taken a gamble in the face of vicious state violence they felt they could not afford to ignore. That gamble came too late for the townspeople of Zawiyah near Tripoli, who rose up against Gaddafi only to see their rebellion destroyed by heavy tank shelling. I think often of Zawiyah and of how, like Bahrain’s Pearl roundabout occupation, the joy of those who believed they had liberated it has been cruelly snatched away.

On my third and final visit to Zawiyah, at the invitation of the Gaddafi regime, the graves of rebel fighters in the town square had been bulldozed flat while pro-Gaddafi supporters, apparently bussed in for our cameras, celebrated nearby. Gaddafi may have Zawiyah – and its important oil terminal – now in his control, but the loss of territory and oil revenue further east surely means that the regime’s days are numbered. Numbered yes, though Libya’s “Brother Leader” may have any number of days, months or even years left in his locked-down capital yet.

In Tunisia and Egypt too, the revolutions are far from complete. Toppling a dictator is only the beginning, with many protestors holding so little faith in the surviving institutions of state that they don’t believe their protests should stop with the removal of figureheads.

In the square just across the road from my cafe in Sfax there is a crowd of about a hundred men milling about and passing a megaphone amongst themselves. I ask the cafe manager what they are doing. “All of them have a different idea of whom they want as President,” he says, shrugging his shoulders. Any revolutionary fervour he might have entertained has clearly evaporated.

There were 44 political parties in Tunisia at the last count, and this explosion of political activity is no longer a novelty to those Tunisians more focussed on feeding their families. I ask a man in the crowd what everybody is complaining about. “We have no jobs,” he says “and nobody is in charge. Many Tunisians are fleeing to Europe because the situation is not good.”

Sfax is Tunisia’s commercial capital. Shopkeepers complain about the absence of tourists, and the lack of security because so many of the former president’s once ubiquitous police force have deserted their posts.
And so, as I prepare to return to Libya, the revolutions all around North Africa and the Middle East feel both remarkable and inconclusive. Yet despite these anxious times and the uncertainties ahead, I remain optimistic:  the so called experts in many of these outwardly secure police states who said that the region’s despots were safe have been proved wrong by the chain of recent events.

The predictions of protestors have proved far more accurate. They have taken incredible risks in the name of freedom. And when they say they can do better than the ancient regimes they are trying to overthrow, I am inclined to believe them.