Power Systems (5 page)

C
AMBRIDGE
, M
ASSACHUSETTS
(J
ANUARY
17, 2012)

Mohamed Bouazizi, a young street vendor in a small town in Tunisia, in despair burned himself to death.
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That led to what seemed to be a spontaneous uprising in Tunisia and then later in Egypt and other parts of the Arab Middle East.

 

First of all, let's remember that there had been plenty going on beneath the surface. It just hadn't broken through. Take Egypt, the most important country in the region. The January 25 demonstration in Egypt was led by a fairly young, tech-savvy group called the April 6 Movement. Why April 6? The reason is that on April 6, 2008, the Egyptian labor movement, which has been quite militant and active, though suppressed, had planned to organize major strike actions at the most important industrial center in Egypt and broader solidarity actions throughout the country, but it was crushed by force by the security forces of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. So that's a reflection of the significant tradition of worker struggles. Though there isn't much reporting, it does seem that the Egyptian labor movement is continuing to take some pretty interesting steps, even taking over factories in some places.
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In the case of Tunisia, it was indeed this single act that sparked what had been long-standing active protest movements and moved them forward. But that's not so unusual. Let's look at our own history. Take the civil rights movement. There had been plenty of concern and activism about violent repression of blacks in the South, and it took a couple of students sitting in at a lunch counter to really set it off. Small acts can make a big difference when there is a background of concern, understanding, and preliminary activism.

 

Where do you place the rebellions that have been called the “Arab Spring” historically?

 

It's a triple revolt. Partly it's a revolt against Western-backed, U.S.-backed dictators throughout the region. Partly it's an economic revolt against the impact of neoliberal policies of the last several decades. And partly it's a revolt against military occupation, though most discussion of the Arab Spring leaves out two parts of the Middle East and North Africa that are under military occupation: Western Sahara and Palestine.

Actually, the so-called Arab Spring began in November 2010 in Western Sahara. Western Sahara is the last literal African colony. It's under UN jurisdiction and was supposed to be decolonized. In fact, it did move toward decolonization in 1975, but it was immediately invaded by Morocco. Morocco, mostly a French dependency, invaded and started flooding the country with Moroccans to try to overwhelm any possible independence movement. There has been a long nonviolent struggle. In November 2010, there were Arab Spring–style protests, including the creation of a tent city in one of the major cities.
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Moroccan troops immediately came in and smashed it up. Since Morocco is a UN dependency, the Saharawi movement, a Western Sahara indigenous movement, brought a protest to the Security Council, which is responsible for decolonization. France killed it and the United States backed it.
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So that disappeared from history.

Palestine is also under military occupation. Palestinians have made some attempts to try to join the liberation movements in the Arab world, but they were crushed pretty fast. So essentially nothing is happening in the two parts of the Middle East and North African region that are literally under Western-supported foreign occupation: France, in the case of the Western Sahara, with the United States going along, and the United States mainly in the case of Israel's occupation of Palestine.

Apart from the revolt against literal occupation, you have revolts against dictatorships and against neoliberal economics. And both of those fall into a regular pattern. So, as we discussed, Latin America has finally broken free of both political dictatorship and neoliberal policies, which had the same effect in Latin America as they had in the Middle East and North African countries—as well as here and in Europe, under slightly different modalities. They enrich a very small sector of the population while harshly punishing the rest, both in plain economic terms, such as declining real incomes, and in the quality of life, workplace freedom. You can't really impose neoliberal principles without a harsh regime. And there's been a revolt against this.

Another respect in which the revolts are similar—almost identical, in fact—is that the destructive effects of neoliberalism are very highly praised by what's sometimes called the International Monetary Fund (IMF)–World Bank–U.S. Treasury troika. In fact, in the case of Egypt, international financial elites highly praised the Mubarak dictatorship for its amazing economic performance and reforms up to just weeks before the regime crashed.

Similar things are happening in Africa, here, and in Europe. The
indignados
in southern Europe and the Occupy movements here are in a sense similar, even if they are from different worlds. The protests are not against dictatorships but against the shredding of democratic systems and the consequences of the Western version of the neoliberal system, which has had structurally consistent effects for the past thirty years: a very narrow concentration of wealth in a fraction of 1 percent of the population, stagnation for a large part of the rest, deregulation, and repeated financial crises, each one harsher than the last. The most recent financial crisis, apart from what it has done to the general population, has been absolutely devastating for the African American population. Their net worth is now one twentieth that of whites. It's the lowest it's been since statistics were first taken.
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Average African American household net worth is down to just several thousand dollars, essentially nothing, as a result of the crash of the housing market.
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Talk about the role of labor in the Arab Spring.

 

If you look at the countries where there has been some success, Tunisia and Egypt—Tunisia more than Egypt, in fact—they both have a tradition of labor militancy. There is a close correlation between the degree of success in the Arab Spring and the participation of the labor movement. Joel Beinin, a leading scholar of Middle East and North African labor movements, pointed this out.
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He's correct. The Tahrir Square demonstrations really became substantial and significant when the labor movement joined in. In fact, the labor movement has achieved a lot. There are now significant steps toward unification into an independent union. There had been no independent unions before. The press has been freed up. The old regime is still pretty much in place, but there's been some significant progress.

In Tunisia, one part of the population was organized: political Islam. It was repressed and crushed by the dictatorship, but it was organized. They won the parliamentary election and are introducing a moderate version of political Islam.
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Tunisia has a major labor movement as well, which was a central part of the changes there.

In the rest of the Middle East and North African region, not much has happened. In the core countries, from the Western point of view—the oil producers, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates—there were small efforts toward joining the demonstrations, but they were very quickly crushed. In Saudi Arabia, the key country, the security presence was so overwhelming that people were afraid to go out in the streets. In Bahrain, which is not a major oil producer but is an important part of this regional system, an uprising was brutally crushed by the Saudi-led invasion, though it still goes on. Complicated things are happening in Yemen, of great concern to Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia appears to be supporting the former dictator. We don't have information from Saudi Arabia—it's a very closed society—but that's what it looks like.

 

What about Libya?

 

In Libya, there was an uprising. Then came, actually, two Western interventions. The first intervention was under the rubric of Security Council Resolution 1973, which called for a no-fly zone, a cease-fire, and protection of civilians. That intervention lasted maybe five minutes. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) powers, meaning the traditional imperial powers—Britain, France, the United States—immediately joined the rebel forces and became their air force. No cease-fire, no protection to civilians. You can argue about whether they were right or wrong to do it, but the fact is they joined a rebellion to overthrow the regime. It had nothing to do with the wording of the UN resolution. Meanwhile, most of the rest of the world was trying hard to prevent a likely humanitarian catastrophe, which in fact took place, particularly at the end, when the imperial triumvirate and the rebel forces attacked the base of Libya's largest tribe, the Warfalla.
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The attack ended up being pretty brutal and apparently has left plenty of resentment. We don't know where that will go.

At the very beginning, most of the world was calling for negotiations, diplomacy, and a cease-fire, which Gadhafi at least formally accepted. Whether it would have worked, we don't know. The African Union (AU) came out with a strong call for negotiations and diplomacy.
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The so-called BRICS—Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa—also called for that.
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Europe was ambivalent. Germany didn't go along.
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Turkey even tried to block the first NATO actions and later on joined in reluctantly.
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Egypt didn't want anything to do with it.
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The AU is particularly interesting. Libya is an African country. The AU came out in the middle of the bombing, reiterating its call for diplomacy and making detailed proposals, in this case about a peacekeeping force.
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They were totally dismissed, of course. You don't listen to Africans. The AU had a pretty interesting explanation of its stand. Essentially they were saying, Africa has been trying to free itself from brutal colonial rule and slavery for years. The way we've been doing it is by establishing the principle of sovereignty in order to protect ourselves from a return of Western colonization. And we have to perceive an attack on an African country over the objections of Africa, without any concern for sovereign rights, as a step toward recolonization that is very threatening to the whole continent.
Frontline
magazine in India had detailed reporting of the AU position.
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I didn't notice a word about it here. Again, you can argue that the intervention was right or wrong, you can debate it as you like. But we might as well face what it is.

 

At the same time as the Obama administration cautioned the various revolutionaries in different countries to “show restraint” and said there was “no place for violence,” the president praised the “unique capabilities” of the United States when it comes to enforcing a no-fly zone over Libya.
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Tariq Ali, in a recent article, calls Libya “another case of selective vigilantism by the West.”
¹⁸

 

First of all, we should be clear that there was no Libyan no-fly zone. UN Resolution 1973 did call for a no-fly zone, but the three traditional imperial countries—Britain, France, and the United States—immediately disregarded the resolution and instantly turned to participation on the side of the rebels. So they were not imposing a no-fly zone over the rebel advances. In fact, they were encouraging them and supporting them. The United States, Britain, and France determined at once to disregard the UN resolution and to proceed to try to help the rebels overthrow the government.

Is it selective? Sure. But it's pretty predictable and very familiar. If there is a dictator who has a lot of oil and is obedient, submissive, and reliable, he's given free rein. The most important example is Saudi Arabia. There, there were supposed to be demonstrations, a “day of rage,” but the government intervened with overwhelming force. Apparently not a single person was willing to appear in Riyadh. Everyone was terrified.
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Bahrain is particularly important in this context. It hosts the U.S. Fifth Fleet, which is by far the most powerful military force in the region, and it's right off the coast of eastern Saudi Arabia. Eastern Saudi Arabia is where most of the country's oil is. Like Bahrain, it's also largely Shiite, while the Saudi Arabian government is Sunni. By some weird accident of history and geography, the concentration of the world's energy resources is in the northern Gulf region, which is mostly Shiite and in a largely Sunni world. It's long been a nightmare for Western planners to consider the possibility that there might be some kind of tacit Shiite alliance, beyond Western control, that could take control of most of the core of the world's energy supplies.

So there was barely a tap on the wrist when Saudi Arabia led a military force into neighboring Bahrain to violently crush the protests there.
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Backed by the Saudis, Bahraini security forces drove the protesters out of Pearl Square, where they had been camping, and even went so far as to destroy the symbol of the country, the pearl statue in the middle of Pearl Square.
²¹
The statue had been appropriated by the demonstrators, so army forces smashed it. They also went into a hospital and drove out a number of patients and staff.
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That was okay. Practically no one commented on it here.

On the other hand, when you have a dictator like Mu'ammar Gadhafi, who has plenty of oil but is unreliable, it makes sense from an imperial point of view to see if you can replace him with someone more pliable and more trustworthy who will do what you want him to do. Therefore, you react differently in Libya.