I would like to refer not to the Arab spring but to the revolution of all seasons because we have moved from one season to another and the revolution is still going on. Not only is the change occurring on the horizon and the mosaic is changing in the Middle East. All the commentators, all the participants in Wall Street, in St Paul’s in London and other places are saying that we have learned a lot from Tahrir Square. How to organise and how to get the people together on a platform.
This is the comment I made having returned myself in February from Bahrain having participated in Pearl Square. It is a pity that I was not able to be in Tahrir Square myself. But what I did learn from Bahrain is that when you have a descent of this type and the magnitude to which the people are frustrated and feel disenfranchised with the system everyone comes onto a platform.
As you know the narrative being presented in Bahrain was that it is a Shia-Sunni issue but it is far from this. In Pearl Square there were the poor and the rich, the able and the disabled, people in wheel chairs, women and so on. There were also a lot of Sunnis in Pearl Square without any doubt.
And I suspect the same sort of thing is happening all over the place without any doubt, at St Paul’s in London where I have spent ten to twelve hours over the past four to six weeks. I see a lot of young well educated people and a lot of academics turning up there and giving lectures. So it is not just a revolution as such, it is a movement which is growing globally. In a dictatorship you have one percent who are corrupt and so on but similarly in democracy it is a similar situation with the one percent dominating everywhere.
There is a lot to learn about what is going on and I don’t there is anyone more suitable than our speaker who is a writer, broadcaster and political activist to tell us about it
John Rees: The first thing that I would like to do is to give a bit of context to the revolutions which is something we do not always have the time to do. Then I want to talk about the revolutionary process – how the revolutionary experiences changed in what is shortly their first year, and then a little bit about the political consequences and the challenges both in the revolutions themselves and challenges they have bequeathed to the global anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movement.
So first a little bit about the context. The first thing I want to say is that I think we should see the Arab revolutions as part of the response to the global recession. There is more to it than that and I will come onto other issues but they are in an important sense a response to the global crash in 2007 – 2008. If you simply look at food prices, if you look at the cost of bread in Egypt and Tunisia you see one spike in 2008, the price than falls back and you see a second spike as the revolutions are taking place beginning late in 2010 and going into 2011.
So whatever differences there are in the political processes, whatever differences there are in the political histories, whatever differences there are in the regimes that the revolutions were pitted against, I think they do have in common the fact that part of the initiators was a response to the global economic crisis.
There is also a second global similarity with the West and that is that the dictatorship without exception that the revolutions were pitted against were neoliberal dictatorships. They had absorbed completely and wholly the neo-liberal mantra that has dominated Western political thinking since at least the point where Margaret Thatcher was elected in this country and Ronald Reagan became president of the United States in 1979 and 1980. The whole business of dismantling and privatising state owned assets was as prevalent in this part of the world as it was in America or Britain but with this difference especially in the case of the Ben Ali dictatorship and the Mubarak dictatorship but in other cases as well, this process, because it was a process undertaken by dictatorships immediately enriched a tiny clique at the head of these societies – often the family members of the dictators themselves.
So if we want a brief sketch of the economic background I think the twin polls of a couple of decades of privatisation often overseen by the IMF and World Bank fused with dictatorship and then entering into the world economic crisis in 2008 and 2011 we could do worse to bring these elements together and see the economic dimension of it. That is why when the revolutions took place, irrespective of the immediate thoughts in the minds of those people who went into Tahrir Square and demonstrated and in Tunis and other places were necessarily going to have a logic which was anti-capitalist. It was a practical critique of privatisation, of the excessive inequalities in those societies as well as raising the question of a democratic critique of the dictatorships they were attempting to overthrow.
There is a second sense in which they have commonality with Western movements for change. Again whether or not the people who took action had this in the forefront of their minds or not they were a blow against the Western imperial system. This was necessarily so because Mubarak, Saleh and Ben Ali were the corner stones of Western imperial policy in the Middle East, particularly the Mubarak regime.
The architecture of the Middle East it is not an exaggeration to say, rests on two pillars: you can see this in the scale of arms payments to the countries involved. The biggest recipient of US arms aid is the state of Israel and the second biggest is the state of Egypt under Mubarak. The Israeli state is not simply paid and armed to keep the Palestinians down. It is armed and paid to keep the entire Arab region down. And the Egyptian state was paid not to attack the Israelis while it was doing so.
That is the critical axes of imperialism in the Middle East and other dictators were paid to be part of this to the extent that any revolutionary upheaval which threatened those dictators was by extension threatening Western interests in the area.
So we have an economic and an imperial dimension in which the Arab revolutions have a commonality with the anti-capitalist movements and the anti-war movements that have been sustained in the West on a mass level since the Seattle anti capitalist demonstration in 1999 all the way through the demonstrations against the Afghan and Iraq wars.
Now to say that there are these structural similarities is not to say that the political forces involved in them are aware of them or raise them as problematic questions certainly in the early days. You can take an action and because of the structural environment in which it takes place it has a certain significance without it necessarily being part of a conscious political programme or a conscious political demand on the part of those who initially begin that experience.
I want to move on from talking about the structure of the world into which the Arab revolutions emerged to the process itself. Mohammed Bu Azizi set fire to himself on December 17th so we are a few days short of a year. I think you can divide this experience in terms of its political impact into three phases. The first phase was the explosion of the Tunisian and then the Egyptian revolution and by the standards of the dictatorships that attempts have been made to topple since, the remarkably fast removal of both of them from power.
I would say about this phase that it was characterised by the fact that the speed of the explosion, the determination and scale of the revolutionary experiences made them happen so quickly that the imperial powers simply did not have the time or the ability to intervene in this process. The iconic figure in the West is the one government minister who actually lost her position because she could not change positions fast enough. She was the French foreign minister. She kept on backing Ben Ali and offering police equipment to the regime long after most people who observe revolutions could have told her that the game was up. To be honest Obama’s government did exactly the same thing with Mubarak in Egypt. They kept on backing it, then calling for dialogue when any credible foreign policy gains from this stance had been lost. It allowed the domestic political forces without interruption and without intervention from the West to settle accounts with the regime itself.
I was in Tunisia briefly when there was a second occupation of the square on top of the casbah but what I know most about is Egypt. I was involved in opposition politics for ten years before the Egyptian revolution.
I think it is worth sketching the forces that unseated Mubarak in 18 days and I would say that there were three of them and they were firstly the simple scale of the movement. Millions of people in Tarhir Square. It was a largely untold story in the West things happened in other cities as well. In Suez the state assembly was wiped out and was replaced by some form of lose popular power. Other demonstrations were repeated during those 18 days and they were very important.
On January 28th when the Mubarak party headquarters were burned down and there were attempts to storm to Interior Ministry the demonstrators destroyed the first rank of Mubarek’s security forces. It is from that moment that the popular committees started controlling the streets. An important prop of the regime was destroyed by mass action.
The second period that was important was that in the final two days before Mubarak fell there was a very widespread use of strikes and the formation of independent unions which lent enormous weight to the already existing popular mass mobilisation.
The final thing was that the armed forces began to fusion. I arrived on the 29th and the jets were ordered to strafe the square which they didn’t. From that point we know that there was some fracturing of the armed forces. On the final day the generals went on television and said that they would not fire on the protestors. After that you began to see some middle ranking soldiers in uniform in Tahrir Square.
When I there on the day Mubarak fell someone who recognised me from one of the U tube videos came up to me and said he wanted to tell me that he was a retired staff general. He had the same rank as field marshal Tantawi. He was talking to people in the armed forces and they were not going to open fire.
Later the demonstrators started to move towards the presidential palace and Abdeen palace and I was in the demonstration that moved towards the state tv. When it came to the army barricade it simply destroyed the barricade and filed down between the tanks. The soldiers just watched this happen. I think most of the military hierarchies were attentive towards what was going on among the soldiers. They knew that if on day one they watched the demonstrators walking past the tanks on day two or three they would be joining the demonstrators. That was the mood among some sections of the army.
I think that was the tipping point when you have continued mass demonstrations which have destroyed the front rank of the police force, joined by a rising strike wave and when you have the elements of the political leadership and the higher and lower ranks of the army, you think it is starting to fragment that is the point when the army thought either Mubarak goes or we will all go tomorrow. Mubarak went on February 11th. Everything that has happened since is about trying to resolve the paradox that Mubarak regime remains and Tahrir remains. The old order in some of its important features is still there and the demands of 25th January have not been met in the minds of millions and millions of people. That was shown by the mass demonstration a couple of weeks.
The deputy president made a statement saying that they wanted to maintain control of the army and the army budget outside the constitution. It would not be subject to parliamentary control. That blew the façade of the regime.
That contradiction is not resolved. The army’s game is to run a set of elections which will be a façade and which will put in a civilian government but the real control will still be retained by the army. The Egyptian army is not just like any other army. It is not just the guys with guns. It is a very large economic player in its own right. It owns refrigerator factories, bottled water factories, cement factories, chemical factories.
There is a phrase, the military industrial complex which the left tends to overuse. It is an exaggeration when you talk about Britain and Germany but it is not an exaggeration when you talk about Egypt. Egypt is a military industrial complex in a literal sense. This is why the battle is so hard fought. We are not just dealing with another inner ditch of the armed forces. We are dealing with property owners with guns and they are out to retain both their possession of the guns and of the property.
That is a very profound unresolved conflict at the heart of the Egyptian revolution. That process is unfinished in Egypt which is the most important of the revolutionary experience. In Tunisia that process is unfinished.
The second phase of the three phases is that there was never going to be a revolution in that part of the globe where the imperial powers did not intervene. That area is simply too important economically and strategically. It was never going to be the case that the revolutions would move on the way the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions moved on without the intervention of the imperial powers. That happened coincidentally in time but not in cause in Bahrain and Libya.
Those events happened at the same time and they happened with the same political forces in different configurations. The Bahraini revolution was crushed by the Bahraini ruling class and the invasion by the Saudis. It was green lit by a visit of the US Secretary of State for Defence to Bahrain Robert Gates and it is inconceivable that such an event would of happened without the agreement of the Americans. That was simply a police operation that crushed the revolution. Such was the hatred of the Bahraini royal family for the revolution that they simply removed the site of the revolution as well as the people taking part in it.
The Libyan revolution was exactly the same forces. This time the military lead was taken by the British the Americans and the French but they were supported by the Saudis and other Gulf countries like Qatar. The process in this case was colonisation – making the revolution dependent on and supported by the West. It was dependent on them militarily. A revolution is either an organic process or it is not a revolution. Once it becomes dependent on the imperial powers for its victory – and the Libyans were dependent on Western arms – it doesn’t just alter the battle field, it alters the internal composition of the forces as well. Those who are the recipients, those who are the interlocutors of the Western imperial powers gain weight and dominance within the camp of the revolution and those who aren’t are subordinate to it and you can see the end of this process when Nicolas Sarkozy makes speeches saying this person will be acceptable as a member of the Libyan government and this person will not be acceptable. You do not have a revolution which has reappropriated control over its own society from a dictator. At this point you have a dictator that has been defeated by Western arms and a group of people who are dependent on the armourers for their future. And that created those two simultaneous events. The crushing of the Bahraini revolution and the colonisation of the Libyan revolution. This has created a before and after moment in the history of the Arab revolutions. Everything after that point has become more complex because the imperial powers are engaged in intervention in the area and that is nowhere clearer than in the Syrian case where it has been fought out between different elements in opposition to the Assad regime. There may or not be Western intervention. So this process is now complicated.
In my view there is only one politics that makes sense in this case. It is the politics that is just as much opposed to the intervention of the imperial powers as it to the dictators themselves because it is only under these conditions that the most basic and elementary things that the revolutions took to achieve – self determination, control of their own societies can be achieved.
It seems to me that this is most obvious to the Egyptians because there is £1.3 bn every year given to the Egyptian army by the United States and when they are shot by toxic gas in Tahrir Square they hold up the CS canisters with ‘made in the US’ on them. So they understand intuitively, through their own experience that there is a disjunction between Western words and Western deeds in their support for the revolution.
It is clear to the Bahrainis because they know where the repression came from, who backed it and who agreed with it. It is clear also to Yemenis because they know who backs Salah and when there was an assassination attempt they know where he went to be patched up before he was sent back to the Yemen. So in these cases it is very clear where the dividing line between revolution and counter revolution lies.
To describe who is on which side of this line I would say that the Western powers are largely on the side of the counter revolution. Their most important local emissary is the Saudi regime and there are elements of the local ruling classes who want to stabilise the situation. Those who are still fighting are the ones who reject Western intervention and are still fighting the succession dictators in Yemen.
There is a third element in the situation which it would be quite wrong not to talk about and that is the impact of the Arab revolutions on the politics of the Palestinian movement because just as there could never be a revolution in this part of the world which did not involve the imperial powers there could never be a revolution in this part of the world which did not raise the question of the Palestinians.
Obviously there has been an impact of the Arab revolutions on the Palestinian movement, the 15th March Movement because of the change in Egyptian foreign policy, the moves towards Palestinian unity which whatever we think of them is never good for the imperial powers.
But there is also a sense in which the Arab revolutions have not just had an impact on the politics of the Palestinians. They have an impact on the isolation of the state of Israel. The state of Israel is now more internationally isolated then at any time I can remember. One part of the stability of the Middle East and the continuing role of Israel was the accord first signed by Sadat with Egypt. I am not saying that any future government, even one that was dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood would junk it but it is quite clear that under the Scaf government there is a harder attitude towards the state of Israel from the Arab street then there was before.
It is also clear because Turkey would like to be the Western bridgehead into the Arab revolution the price being Erdogan cheered in Cairo or in Tunis and a more hostile attitude towards the state of Israel.
So this bring us to an Israeli state which is not necessarily less belligerent because weakness and not just strength can produce belligerence. Israel is more isolated than it is before and that cannot but be a good thing.
Finally both the situation with Israel and the situation in Syria feeds into a problem which does not have as its point of origin, which does not exist in its initial register inside the terms of reference of the Arab revolutions and that is the question of Iran.
From a Western point of view the difficulty of Iran stems from a catastrophic failure in Iraq. What they wanted out of Iraq was a stable pro Western, pro business base for operations in the Middle East. Whatever you think happened there that is not what they have got today. That is to do with the resistance of the Iraqi people and the global anti war movement. They haven’t got in.
What the failure in Iraq did was to strengthen Iran as a regional power. So the foreign policy bequeathed to the Americans by the failure in Iraq is the need to deal with growing Iranian power and in their minds Iran is linked to Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas etc.
Both they and the Israelis would like to deal with this militarily but they can’t. Not that they won’t. I know there is a time element in which they might move to that but in a sense the Arab revolutions are preserving the peace with Iran at the moment. But if the find an opportunity, and it could emerge in hours or days or weeks as they found one in the case of Libya which can be sold to domestic populations there they will do it.
My three conclusions from this are that we have three very elementary duties. We have an elementary duty of solidarity with everyone who is fighting dictatorship and is against dictatorship and is for change in the Middle East.
Now there is the newly important duty of solidarity with the Palestinian people. And we also have a duty as political activists in this country because there is something we can do that no Egyptian in Tahrir and no Palestinian in the Gaza Strip can do. That is we have the duty to oppose the imperial designs of our government. We are here and they are here. It is our business here in London to make sure that David Cameron and his allies, Sarkozy, Merkel and Barack Obama stay off the back of the Arab revolutions. Keeping them off the back of the Arab revolutions is the best chance that the Arab revolutions have of victory and the best chance that we all have of peace.
*John Rees is writer, broadcaster and political activist. He author of ‘Imperialism and Resistance’ (Routledge, 2006) and most recently ‘The People Demand: a short history of the Arab revolutions’ (with Joseph Daher). He participated in the Egyptian revolution in January and February 2011. He is a co-founder of the Stop the War Coalition and a member of the editorial board of Counterfire.
