Fury and the Arab Spring
The glow of the Arab Spring has turned bitter autumn as various groups — particularly religious extremists — turned to violence to achieve political ends, writes Mohamed El-Said Idris
'We are with the Arab Spring but we are not with this spring of violence, war, destruction and killing. This is turning to winter'
— Patriarch Beshara Al-Rai
Although the revolutionary wave that has swept many Arab countries has not yet received sufficient academic study, it advanced some unique models of mass action. The chief characteristics of these revolutions were that they were grassroots movements, they pushed for democratic change, and they were not prompted or steered by political parties or other intermediate organisations. Rather they were self-driven, without an identifiable leadership or organisational hierarchy, and fuelled by a collective realisation of the gap between the vast majority of the people and ruling regimes that had lost the last shreds of credibility in the people's eyes.
Nevertheless, in spite of the advantages of these unique properties, especially in Egypt and Tunisia where they succeeded in toppling long-entrenched regimes with astounding speed, they eventually turned into a disadvantage and an impediment to the realisation of the revolutions' aims and aspirations. This applied in Egypt and Tunisia after the departure of the old regimes, to Yemen and more so to Syria where the regimes dug in their heels, mobilising their armed forces, and to Libya following a foreign intervention that used overwhelming force to topple the Gaddafi regime. The chief reason for this is that rigidly organised and well-armed Islamist groups took advantage of the circumstances presented by the political vacuums opened, and security deterioration experienced, following the collapse of these regimes. In Tunisia and Egypt, such groups moved to seize control over the state, marginalise other sectors of society and impose their hegemony, which precipitated a renewed wave of anti-regime opposition and another round of violence. In Syria and Yemen, where government intransigence and recourse to military force against the pro-democracy revolution led to mounting strife and warfare, Islamist jihadist militias swept in to take part in the fighting in pursuit of their particular agendas. In the Libyan case, after NATO forces succeeded in ousting the Gaddafi regime, Islamist groups (the Muslim Brotherhood and jihadists) entered into a power struggle against political forces seeking a civil state.
In sum, the democratic breezes that wafted into the region with the Arab Spring receded in the face of opportunism that embroiled popular revolutions in various forms of conflict and armed violence. Yet, one is struck by the fact that Iraq, which had not been part of the revolutionary wave, also experienced an escalation in violence in tandem with the spiralling violence in neighbouring Syria. In like manner, Ankara to the north, fearful that the spirit of the Arab Spring would spread to Turkey and hone in on the ruling Justice and Development Party, pursued policies that it had believed would deflect attention, then finding itself more and more mired in the Syrian crisis the violence of which began to spill over into Anatolia.
How did this happen? What are the deeper sources of this ubiquitous violence?
Numerous studies and comparative analyses have been conducted and many conferences held on the subject of political violence in order to assess its causes and identify possible solutions to restore peace, security and stability. These efforts have given rise to various attempts to define "political violence" as distinct from "criminal violence". Perhaps the most useful definition is that the former is the systematic use of violent means to attain political goals. These goals could be to attain political power, or secure a monopoly over power, or force other political players into making concessions, or meeting certain political demands. Or, if exercised by ruling authorities, the aims might be to cling to power or to resist making concessions to political forces demanding reform. This latter form of violence has been termed "regime violence". Political violence, therefore, is not limited to opposition groups and the possibility that it can also come from ruling authorities compels us to consider the nature of both sides and the history of the confrontation between them.
Regardless of which side practices or initiates it, the flare up of politically motivated violence in a country is the equivalent of the outbreak of war between countries. In both cases, a political crisis has reached its most acute level.
Although the causes of political violence vary from one country to the next, some scholars search for a single or chief cause; others take a more holistic view and see an outbreak in violence as the product of an accumulation of the interaction of diverse factors. There may be social and economic dimensions to political violence, such as economic deprivation, the dissemination of a culture of violence, or sectarian or ethnic tensions in society. Some scholars maintain that political despotism alone breeds violence. Clearly if all such factors exist simultaneously in a given place and if outside parties intervene in favour of one side or the other to advance their own interests the probabilities of violence and the rapidity with which it can intensify and spread increase exponentially.
Scholars have also expressed the potential for political violence within a given society with such terms as "structural violence", which stems from chronic or entrenched socioeconomic and socio-political problems, and "behavioural violence", which emanates from a proclivity towards violence that is informed by psychological and cultural factors. This latter type of violence may be a product of structural violence, as would be the case in societies in which systematic discrimination, oppression and despotism are the hallmarks of a regime that uses violence and repression to perpetuate its rule, safeguard the status quo and quash opposition. To aggravate this dimension of structural violence, recourse to violence by a ruling authority for purposes that conflict with the bases and conditions of its legitimacy undermine its legitimacy and exacerbate the volatility of conditions in a given society. Certainly, state repression through the systematic use of instruments of violence and coercion generates the psychological conditions for counter-violence as individuals are driven to exercise their natural right of self-defence. The more prevalent such psychological conditions are, the greater the chances are that individuals will come together to exercise this right collectively and that this phenomenon will gain momentum and evolve into collective or mass violence.
Political violence can be contained and eventually eliminated where there exist channels for dialogue, mediation and other means to bridge opposing views, reduce animosity and further mutual understanding, and especially where their exists a willingness to explore and promote such channels. Conversely, differences and antagonisms grow, violence increases and losses and misery mount where channels of dialogue are lacking, and all the more so where outside meddlers see it in their interests to obstruct dialogue, drive the conflicting parties further apart, and fuel violence by furnishing moral and material support for one side or the other.
The societies that gave birth to the Arab Spring revolutions have experienced all the above forms of violence. They have been victims of the systematic violence inflicted by dictatorial regimes and their security agencies that practiced their tyranny with impunity in the absence of political parties and other civil society organisations with sufficient clout to check them and promote the logic of dialogue. They have been victims of religious extremist groups which, before the revolutions, unleashed their violence not against existing regimes but against the state and society, and which after the Arab Spring sought to subvert grassroots revolutions and void their calls for freedom, democracy and human dignity of all substance, and then unleashed their violence again, in the name of their "holy" war against "heretic" regimes and in order to promote their long-envisioned project for the revival of the Islamic caliphate.
The countries of the Arab Spring also experienced various forms of foreign intervention to promote the foregoing and to encourage political violence.
Unfortunately, the inability of post-revolution authorities to satisfy the political and economic needs of the broader swath of their citizens worked to aggravate the violence. While the majority of the people withdrew from the conflict, the confrontation between the new rulers and those vying with them for power grew increasingly violent and gruesome. This applies in particular to those countries in which the armies and security agencies of former regimes had severely weakened or collapsed, opening the doors to the proliferation of jihadist and takfiri (fundamentalist) groups and encouraging groups shaped by ethnic and/or sectarian affiliations to assert themselves in the dogfights for power or political gains. These, moreover, were fed by funding and support by foreign agencies whose aim is either to partition these countries or to reduce them to such a level of weakness that they can be easily dominated and controlled from abroad.
The Arab revolutions are in danger. Their gains are jeopardised by proliferating political violence and the chances of reversing the trend have been diminished by the cumulative effects of the mistakes of the new rulers. Developments in Egypt, Yemen, Libya and Tunisia testify to this. In Iraq, the absence of political consensus and the sectarian bias of the ruling regime have aggravated instability. Neighbouring countries continue to tremble from the fear of infection by the winds of an Arab Spring turned autumn when, after the heads of regimes toppled, progress towards the realisation of the aims of the revolutions was stalled or derailed. But more alarming is the spectre of the disintegration and possible partition of states. The spectre is looming large over Libya, which is submerged in a morass of warring militias. It may also loom over Syria if a diplomatic solution fails, especially given the presence of the Islamic state in Iraq and the Levant, the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Al-Nusra Front, and other such groups of Salafist, jihadist and Islamist stripes funded and supported from abroad.
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