Learn to Love The Revolution (Time.com)

There's no need to panic.

Revolutions are messy affairs. They don't follow the easy logic of middle-school textbooks. Hostilities in the American Revolution broke out a year before the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution was not ratified until nearly seven years after the decisive battle at Yorktown. In two years starting in 1974, Portugal went from neofascism to army rule to something like a communist putsch and then to liberal democracy, where, happily, it has stayed. (Along the way, events in that little country made the end of white rule in South Africa and Rhodesia inevitable. That's another thing about revolutions: their reverberations often surprise.) The Philippines got rid of Ferdinand Marcos in 1986 but is still groping toward a system of government that is both effective and democratic. (See TIME's photo-essay "Scenes from the Unrest in Libya.")

In the 10 weeks since demonstrations began in Tunisia, the Arab Middle East has been messiness personified. We have seen the relatively swift and peaceful ouster of the regime in Tunisia; an 18-day standoff marked by peaceful mass protests and sporadic regime resistance before the departure of President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt; demonstrations for constitutional reform combatted by deadly force, followed by negotiations in Bahrain; and most recently, the outbreak of violence bordering on civil war in Libya. And this catalog of the Arab world's democratic winter doesn't include the protests elsewhere, against everyone from a classic big man in Yemen to hereditary monarchs in Morocco and Jordan. So what can we learn from the region's revolutions - and those that went before them?

1. Provide, Provide, Provide
The key word for thinking about the Middle East today, says Eugene Rogan, director of the Middle East Center at Oxford University's St. Antony's College, is provision. Faced with the demands of a rapidly growing population of young people increasingly resentful of dynastic rule and increasingly linked to the outside world and one another by technology - and hence (and this is the key point) able to benchmark their situation against those elsewhere - regimes throughout the region have not done enough to provide sufficient jobs, education, housing, dignity. "Failure to provide," says Rogan, "is the most glaring source of tension. That's the constant." (See pictures of the rule of Colonel Gaddafi.)

Just as constant is the baseline demand of the protesters. It is quite simple: in the chant from the streets, Ishaab ureed isqat al-nizam, or "the people want the fall of the regime." But while those seeking reform in the Arab Middle East share much in the way of both grievance and objective, they also have significant differences. A region stretching from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean is not homogeneous. Egypt has more than 80 million people; Bahrain around 1 million. Some nations, like Libya, have abundant oil and gas reserves; others, like Yemen, have little hydrocarbon wealth. (See exclusive photos of the crackdown in Bahrain.)

2. No Two Places Are the Same
No revolution is a perfect analogy for any other. Each nation in the Middle East has been colored in its own way by its history of colonial rule. Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia are francophone; Libya has good relations with Italy, its former colonial master; Jordan was once effectively a British protectorate. Egypt receives enormous quantities of U.S. aid, and the leaders of its armed forces have close ties with their counterparts in the Pentagon. That combination gives U.S. interests a salience in Egypt that they do not have in many other nations in the region.

As the revolutions play out, memories, resentments and social fractures specific to each country will shape their outcome. Egypt, for example, was long the natural leader of the Arab world. Humiliated by its decline in standing (this is a nation that once led the nonaligned movement), many Egyptians would doubtless like to see their country regain its place and revive the sense of cultural and political dynamism that elements within their society demonstrated after World War I and again after Gamal Nasser and his colleagues overturned the monarchy in 1952. In no other Arab nation is the desire to retrieve lost stature likely to be so significant. (Comment on this story.)

Elsewhere, religion may shape what happens next. In Bahrain, the crowds have chanted "Not Sunni, not Shi'ite. Bahraini." But in a nation where a Sunni minority and royal family rule over a much poorer Shi'ite majority, sectarian issues could easily muddle demands for constitutional reform. Syria has its own fractures. The Assad family, which has ruled the country since 1970, is from the small Alawite Islamic sect - this in a Sunni-majority nation whose Islamists remember the way the regime bloodily crushed the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1980s. The government of Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen is threatened by two insurgencies - and the armed members of the local affiliate of al-Qaeda. Sudan is split between a Muslim, Arab north (whose members rule the country) and an African, Christian and oil-rich south that has just voted overwhelmingly to secede. Jordan is home to Palestinians who hail from west of the river and those whose origin is in the deserts to the east.

See TIME's special report "The Middle East in Revolt."

See TIME's photo-essay "Mass Demonstrations in Egypt."

Economic issues, too, will manifest themselves in different ways in different places. A detestation of corruption is a constant throughout the states in the region that have seen disturbances, and for good reason. But it is likely to be a particularly significant driver of change in Libya. This is a nation whose small population, mineral wealth, cultural history and proximity to rich European markets should long ago have made it an economic powerhouse like one of the Gulf states, but instead it has become a kleptocracy run for the benefit of Muammar Gaddafi, his family and their supporters.

3. Patience Is a Virtue
Given the variety of social and economic circumstances in the Arab world and the rapid devolution from smiling faces in Tunisia to the awful violence in Libya, there is a natural temptation to fear the worst: to see years of instability stretching ahead for the region, instability that, as the U.S. learned on Sept. 11, 2001, can seep beyond the Middle East's borders. (See 10 autocrats in trouble.)

The wiser counsel, surely, is patience. During the European revolutions of 1989, it was common to look to the Middle East and wonder why it seemed immune to the democratic wave. But if anything has been abundantly proved in the past month, it is that there is no "Arab exception," no iron rule that specifies that the desires that motivate human society anywhere - a right to choose your rulers, a hope that your children will lead better lives than you, a search for prosperity and happiness - are somehow absent from the Middle East. Why on earth should they be?

That does not mean that the postrevolutionary dispensation in the region will be happy everywhere. Though romantics want revolutions to have charismatic leaders, successful ones channel the revolutionary instinct into habits of effective government through institutions that have a degree of popular legitimacy. (Lucky Poland, to have had both a political organization - Solidarity - and a church hierarchy with such legitimacy in 1989.) Where such institutions do not exist, troubles brew. Russia after 1990 was a country with little organized political opposition and a compromised church and army. Little wonder that oligarchs, criminals and veterans of the Soviet security services rushed to fill the vacuum. (See a brief history of People Power.)

4. Institutions Really Matter
Institutional arrangements are important in the middle East precisely because of the nature of the revolutionary transformation. Organized and brave the young people who have driven change may be, but a crowd in Tahrir Square cannot govern Egypt, nor can a Facebook page or Twitter account - at least not yet. More is needed. Though they may have been hobbled by years of autocracy, Egypt and Tunisia have parliaments, political parties, judges and lawyers, labor unions and a press whose members want to do what free journalists do elsewhere. All of that augurs well for the chance of building systems of governance that are both effective and - just as important - accountable to the people.

The contrast with Libya and Yemen could hardly be more striking. In Gaddafi's madness, Libya has been rendered almost devoid of the appurtenances of state power. (It is officially a Jamahiriya, or "state of the masses.") Yemen has been a unified state only since 1990; poverty-ridden and threatened by regional uprisings, it could face a rocky postrevolutionary trajectory. (See pictures of clashes in Yemen.)

5. Let Them Do It Themselves
Yet even Libya and Yemen have one great thing going for them. When change happens in rough parts of the world, it is easy for those who live in happier lands - such as the U.S. and Europe - to ask condescendingly what they can do to help. And help they surely can - Europe perhaps more than the U.S., since it controls the vital spigots that modulate the flow of people and goods from the Middle East to its most proximate and important market.

But the key thing about the Arab revolution - the reason we can dream that even Libya may turn out fine - is that Arabs are doing it for themselves. This revolution is a regional one, a movement in which each nation's young people have learned tactics, technological fixes and slogans from one another. A local TV channel - al-Jazeera, not the BBC or CNN - has been a principal megaphone. The unplanned system of mutual support that has developed may turn out to have done more to bind the region together than the top-down attempts to create pan-Arabism in the 1950s. This year, says Rogan, "Arabs have been inspired by the example of fellow Arabs. What matters in the Arab world matters to Arabs." For that reason, it matters to us all.

This article originally appeared in the March 7, 2011 issue of TIME.

See the top 10 world news stories of 2010.

See TIME's Pictures of the Week.

View this article on Time.com

Most Popular on Time.com:

View the original article here

Can an Egypt-style Revolution Take Place in Pakistan? (Time.com)

A thrill rushes through Imran Khan's voice at the mere mention of Egypt. The former Pakistani cricket legend-turned-politician is pleased for Hosni Mubarak's former subjects, but he's even more keen for similar scenes to play out in his own country. "I think Pakistan is completely ready for it," Khan, an opposition politician with a growing following among Pakistan's youth, tells TIME. "In fact, it's even more ready than Egypt was." Ever since Cairo's crowds seized the world's attention, many have wondered whether the insurgent spirit will spread from the Arab world to the wider Muslim one, and in particular, to nuclear-armed and militancy-wracked Pakistan. Some, like Khan, are counting on it.
Egypt and Pakistan are different in a few crucial ways, the primary one being that Pakistan's dictator has already departed, though not in an entirely dissimilar fashion. In his final year in power, General Pervez Musharraf was harried by a lawyer-led protest movement that demanded his exit, a return to democracy, and an independent judiciary. The streets were filled with photogenic displays of people power; there was a crackdown on pro-democracy activists; pro-Musharraf supporters were blamed for violence in the capital; the media was muzzled; and Washington fretted over the fate of a long-favored strongman, who cast himself as a bulwark against an Islamist takeover. (See photos of tempers flaring across the Middle East.)
For nearly three years now, Pakistan has had a civilian democracy. Long-established political parties, a lively media, and other political freedoms allow its citizens to dissent in ways that were not possible in Egypt when the protests started. Upcoming elections, scheduled to be held by 2013, will give Pakistanis another opportunity to oust the government. Indeed, Egypt seems to be moving toward today's Pakistan. Though civilian leaders are expected to emerge at the front of a fledgling democracy, major decision-making will likely remain backstage - as in Pakistan - in the hands of a powerful, U.S.-funded army.
But, as Khan points out, the two countries share many afflictions that make Pakistan prime for a new wave of unrest. He says Pakistan's youth, which comprise 70% of the country, are in exactly the same situation as the Arab world: completely discontented. According to a 2009 report by the British Council, only one in 10 of Pakistan's youth, defined as between 18 and 29, have confidence in the government. Half fear that they will not find jobs. Nearly four-fifths believe that the country is headed in the wrong direction. And if anything, Pakistan is even younger than Egypt and other countries engaged in protest this week: The median age in Pakistan is 21. Across the Arab world, it is 22. (See TIME's complete coverage: "The Middle East in Revolt.")
For these youth, Pakistan's current system of government is perceived as denying more than it offers. Prospects for social mobility are slim: Pakistan is ranked below Egypt in the Human Development Index at 125th, with 60% of the nation living on less than $2 a day. Power is seen to be the preserve of a predatory few. Justice and security are elusive. The country's rulers are popularly thought of as venal, inept and distant, and they're widely accused of carving private fortunes out of a treasury to which they contribute scandalously little in tax. Plans to bequeath their political parties to their sons are as grave an affront to many as Mubarak's suspected intention to anoint Gamal his successor. Some 119 suicides, like the one committed by Tunisian vegetable seller Mohammed Bouazizi, took place in Pakistan in 2010.
President Asif Ali Zardari is no Mubarak. It has barely been two years since he assumed power, and his weakness is as emblematic of his leadership as the Egyptian dictator's strength was of his. Where Mubarak brutally silenced his opponents, Zardari's could not be heard more loudly. In Pakistan, real political power lies not in Islamabad, but at the army's headquarters in neighboring Rawalpindi. As in Egypt, the military is careful to shun an overtly political role, but away from the glare of public scrutiny, it quietly manages national security, foreign policy, and elements of the economy. And, also as in Egypt, it evades direct blame for circumstances it helped create.
Nevertheless, any popular upheaval in Pakistan would likely target Zardari, not the military. "Never in our history have we had such levels of corruption and such bad governance," alleges Khan. It's a sweeping claim that has been denied repeatedly by the government and called into question by analysts who, while not doubting the existence of corruption and poor governance under Zardari, doubted whether Khan is right about the relative scale of the problems. But the replacement of a few corrupt ministers as part of a recent cabinet reshuffle has done little to halt the spread of unconfirmed tales of legendary greed within government halls - all of which accumulate in the public imagination. (See the Arab world's lessons about democracy through revolution.)
On the economic front, things don't look likely to improve anytime soon. Pakistan is already struggling to meet requirements for an IMF rescue package, and the government, despite U.S. pressure, has failed to broaden its tax base. To generate revenue, it has resorted to printing bank notes. In the coming weeks, economists foresee hyperinflation, the local currency crashing, and capital being spirited abroad. Khan believes that such conditions will inflame an already hostile public mood, one that is being amplified by the local media. "You can see the whole thing already bubbling under surface," says Khan, referring to a recent strike by airline workers that recently won the dismissal of its managing director.
Still, it is difficult to see disgruntled Pakistanis matching the Egyptians' unity. Some groups have already abortively attempted their own day of rage, to little effect. Unlike the victorious residents of Cairo in Tahrir Square, Pakistanis are riven by deep ethnic, cultural, political and sectarian divides. The middle class in Pakistan is a mere sliver of the population at just 20 million people out of a population of180 million. Social media tools like Facebook and Twitter are only going to animate tiny crowds. Pakistani revolutions also suffer a notorious history of false alarms, and Khan, for one, has a record of raising the level of revolutionary rhetoric, only to see no groundswell of popular anger to back it up.
Khan is correct, however, in pointing out that a vast stock of tinder has gathered. The question is whether a flame will be set to it. Khan suggests that it could be the case of Raymond Davis, a U.S. diplomat awaiting trial who killed two Pakistanis in Lahore last month. President Obama has asked that Davis be released under diplomatic immunity, but Pakistanis have become increasingly united in their rage at his alleged crime. Zardari's government, which is siding with the U.S. and putting pressure on the courts to release Davis, is caught in the crossfire. "This is not an ordinary situation," says Khan. "If he is returned to the US under diplomatic immunity, it might trigger the revolution off." If it does, it is unlikely to be anywhere near as peaceful or as stable as the one the world has just witnessed.
See pictures of Pakistan subcultures.
See pictures of the aftermath of the Pakistan floods.
View this article on Time.com
Most Popular on Time.com:
View the original article here

Yemeni president tries to avert revolution as antigovernment voices grow louder (The Christian Science Monitor)

Sanaa, Yemen – As leaders across the Middle East feel the tremors of Egypt and Tunisia's uprisings, Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh has launched a campaign to stave off revolution in his country.

"Anybody who wants to reach power ... should pass through the ballot boxes, which are the only way, but not chaos, wrong mobilization and irresponsible utterance via media," said President Saleh in a Wednesday night speech to members of his ruling party and constituents from the northern, tribal-dominated Hajjah province.

But the image of Mr. Saleh as the guardian of stability, which he has long tried to maintain in the face of tribal tensions, limited resources, and the Arab world's poorest economy, is showing signs of fracturing.

Countries in the Middle East where the 'winds of change' are blowing

Saleh himself has shown signs of concern, canceling a trip to the US and meeting with tribal leaders in an apparent effort to preempt any shift in their loyalties. And even as pro-government demonstrators make their voices heard in Sanaa's Tahrir Square, the overall tone of the protests has become more explicitly antigovernment.

“Most Yemenis are frustrated with this situation and don’t want it to continue. They need a better government, more so than Tunisian and Egyptians,” says Hafez Albukari, president of the independent Yemen Polling Center. “These people are watching to see the developments – if the regime will make actual reforms or not.”

Hard line against protestersCalls for Saleh to step down have increased since Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak relinquished power five days ago and protests in Sanaa shifted from party-driven political rallies to antigovernment protests. In Taiz, a city just south of Sanaa known for having a relatively educated, yet poor populace, hundreds of young people demanding regime change have been staging a sit-in since last Friday.

While the numbers are still relatively small compared to the mass uprisings that took place in Tunisia and Egypt, protesters have routinely been attacked by pro-government thugs in what some say is a sign of fear that the events in Cairo could be replicated here.

“They are using force in Sanaa and Taiz against people, and this is what ended up toppling the governments in Tunisia and Egypt because it makes the people very angry,” says activist Mohamed Mohsin, who has suffered blows from people he says are plain-clothed police twice in the past week.

“In Egypt they used to say that it is different form Tunisia, and that’s why revolution couldn’t happen," he adds. "And now here they are saying the same thing. It is using force against the people that took these systems down.”

However, Abdelraham Maazab a parliamentarian from the ruling party says that reports of clashes between anti and pro-government in the past week have been inflated in an attempt to create momentum for an Egypt-like uprising.

“These clashes are very limited. If there were actual clashes on the streets of Yemen they would be very big,” says Mr. Maazab, alluding to the common idea that violence in Yemen escalates very quickly. “[The opposition] just wants to step up the problems in Yemen and it will keep doing so until it becomes like the Egypt situation.”

Yemen's Tahrir SquareAlready, thousands of tribesmen from pro-Saleh areas outside the capital have set up a base camp in Sanaa’s main Tahrir Square, which shares the same name as Cairo’s main square where protesters gathered day and night until Mubarak fell.

Each morning they hold political rallies, play patriotic songs loudly on microphones, and march around the square, which is being guarded by police chanting that by their soul and their blood they will support the current regime.

Pro-government men say that their presence in the square – where Yemen’s government announced a book fair is being held – is all part of political participation in any healthy democracy. Antigovernment protesters insist that these men have been paid by officials to stay in Tahrir Square, a claim that derives some support from the fact that police were handing out lunch to the crowds one afternoon.

“In Tahrir they give them 2,000 [Yemeni rials, or $9] a day and give them qat,” says activist Mohsin, referring to the mild narcotic that is wildly popular among Yemeni men.

Omar al-Masnah, a pro-government protester who was standing in front of Sanaa University on Tuesday morning in order to prevent antigovernment protesters from gathering, denied allegations that he was being directed by a higher command to show publicly display his support for the regime.

“I swear this is from my heart," says the business student. "Saleh fixed the problems in Yemen between tribes."

However, Albukari of the Yemen Polling Center says that the support for Saleh that is ostentatiously being displayed around the streets of Sanaa during the past week is not representative of how the majority of Yemenis feel.

Just two days ago, the 70-year-old leader met with tribal leaders from neighboring Amran province who “reiterated their commitment to stand in the way of all preachers of sedition, sabotage, and chaos and to defend the homeland and its stability, unity, and democratic approach,” according to Yemen’s official news agency.

“The president wants to make sure that the tribes surrounding Sanaa are more loyal to the Saleh regime,” says Hafez Albukari, president the Yemen Polling Center, a local independent NGO. Mr. Albukari says Saleh doesn't want any competitors.

Countries in the Middle East where the 'winds of change' are blowing

View the original article here

Yemeni president tries to avert revolution as antigovernment voices grow louder (The Christian Science Monitor)

Sanaa, Yemen – As leaders across the Middle East feel the tremors of Egypt and Tunisia's uprisings, Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh has launched a campaign to stave off revolution in his country.

"Anybody who wants to reach power ... should pass through the ballot boxes, which are the only way, but not chaos, wrong mobilization and irresponsible utterance via media," said President Saleh in a Wednesday night speech to members of his ruling party and constituents from the northern, tribal-dominated Hajjah province.

But the image of Mr. Saleh as the guardian of stability, which he has long tried to maintain in the face of tribal tensions, limited resources, and the Arab world's poorest economy, is showing signs of fracturing.

Countries in the Middle East where the 'winds of change' are blowing

Saleh himself has shown signs of concern, canceling a trip to the US and meeting with tribal leaders in an apparent effort to preempt any shift in their loyalties. And even as pro-government demonstrators make their voices heard in Sanaa's Tahrir Square, the overall tone of the protests has become more explicitly antigovernment.

“Most Yemenis are frustrated with this situation and don’t want it to continue. They need a better government, more so than Tunisian and Egyptians,” says Hafez Albukari, president of the independent Yemen Polling Center. “These people are watching to see the developments – if the regime will make actual reforms or not.”

Hard line against protestersCalls for Saleh to step down have increased since Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak relinquished power five days ago and protests in Sanaa shifted from party-driven political rallies to antigovernment protests. In Taiz, a city just south of Sanaa known for having a relatively educated, yet poor populace, hundreds of young people demanding regime change have been staging a sit-in since last Friday.

While the numbers are still relatively small compared to the mass uprisings that took place in Tunisia and Egypt, protesters have routinely been attacked by pro-government thugs in what some say is a sign of fear that the events in Cairo could be replicated here.

“They are using force in Sanaa and Taiz against people, and this is what ended up toppling the governments in Tunisia and Egypt because it makes the people very angry,” says activist Mohamed Mohsin, who has suffered blows from people he says are plain-clothed police twice in the past week.

“In Egypt they used to say that it is different form Tunisia, and that’s why revolution couldn’t happen," he adds. "And now here they are saying the same thing. It is using force against the people that took these systems down.”

However, Abdelraham Maazab a parliamentarian from the ruling party says that reports of clashes between anti and pro-government in the past week have been inflated in an attempt to create momentum for an Egypt-like uprising.

“These clashes are very limited. If there were actual clashes on the streets of Yemen they would be very big,” says Mr. Maazab, alluding to the common idea that violence in Yemen escalates very quickly. “[The opposition] just wants to step up the problems in Yemen and it will keep doing so until it becomes like the Egypt situation.”

Yemen's Tahrir SquareAlready, thousands of tribesmen from pro-Saleh areas outside the capital have set up a base camp in Sanaa’s main Tahrir Square, which shares the same name as Cairo’s main square where protesters gathered day and night until Mubarak fell.

Each morning they hold political rallies, play patriotic songs loudly on microphones, and march around the square, which is being guarded by police chanting that by their soul and their blood they will support the current regime.

Pro-government men say that their presence in the square – where Yemen’s government announced a book fair is being held – is all part of political participation in any healthy democracy. Antigovernment protesters insist that these men have been paid by officials to stay in Tahrir Square, a claim that derives some support from the fact that police were handing out lunch to the crowds one afternoon.

“In Tahrir they give them 2,000 [Yemeni rials, or $9] a day and give them qat,” says activist Mohsin, referring to the mild narcotic that is wildly popular among Yemeni men.

Omar al-Masnah, a pro-government protester who was standing in front of Sanaa University on Tuesday morning in order to prevent antigovernment protesters from gathering, denied allegations that he was being directed by a higher command to show publicly display his support for the regime.

“I swear this is from my heart," says the business student. "Saleh fixed the problems in Yemen between tribes."

However, Albukari of the Yemen Polling Center says that the support for Saleh that is ostentatiously being displayed around the streets of Sanaa during the past week is not representative of how the majority of Yemenis feel.

Just two days ago, the 70-year-old leader met with tribal leaders from neighboring Amran province who “reiterated their commitment to stand in the way of all preachers of sedition, sabotage, and chaos and to defend the homeland and its stability, unity, and democratic approach,” according to Yemen’s official news agency.

“The president wants to make sure that the tribes surrounding Sanaa are more loyal to the Saleh regime,” says Hafez Albukari, president the Yemen Polling Center, a local independent NGO. Mr. Albukari says Saleh doesn't want any competitors.

Countries in the Middle East where the 'winds of change' are blowing

View the original article here

Songs of the Revolution: A Bahrain Website Mixes Music and Activism (Time.com)

You might want to start brushing up on your Iranian rap. Or Palestinian trance. Jordanian Punk will be important too. And don't forget Bahraini R&B. This is the music of the new revolution sweeping the Middle East. In Tahrir Square Egyptians rocked to a catchy number by rocker Mohammad Munir, who asked, "How can I love you [Egypt] if you don't give that love back?" If you want to know what the anthem of change in Yemen will be, check out mideastunes.com, where the region's revolutionary playlist is ready for download. This is no sugarcoated pop site. The music is about social change, human rights and freedom of expression, and it's manned (rather, womanned) by Esra'a Al Shafei, 24, a Bahraini activist whose social consciousness was raised not by western rock, but by the passioned rhymes of Kurdish Hip-Hop. "My inspiration comes from music," says Shafei, who cut her activist teeth campaigning for the rights of Kurds at the age of 18. "Sure, people like Gandhi give me hope, but what makes me want to go out and make change is people's stories, and that comes through their music."

But Mideasttunes is only a small part of Shafei's campaign for change. She also founded mideastyouth.com, a multi-media web platform that uses tweets, blogs, stories, links, videos and discussion forums to promote tolerance, human rights, freedom of speech and democracy not just in her native Bahrain, but around the Middle East. The site focuses on campaigns for the rights of migrant workers, persecuted religious groups, Kurds, and other minority issues. "These are issues that are not limited to one country, they affect all of us in the Middle East," she says, in rapid-fire English. "I wanted to use the pan-Arab movement to build relations between activists throughout the region." (See pictures of heartbreak in the Middle East.)

It's working. The site has become the go-to place for young Arab activists. It's where people get ideas, and learn about new issues. And, most important, it's where they go for support. As a Bahraini, Shafei has to be cautious about pushing for change in her own country. At least two protesters were killed in an uprising that brought thousands to the capital's central square on Sunday and Tuesday. She has a family to protect, and, as she points out, "If something happens to me, what happens to my work?" Instead she helps activists in other countries, who in turn help her. It's like an online activism co-op. As an example, she is helping activists push for Kurdish rights in Syria, something she couldn't do if she were actually in Syria. "It's a way for us to help each other out," she says. "I tell people to practice caution if you live in those [repressive] countries, and focus on social rights activism elsewhere. It's a way to come together over the things we have in common - a desire for rights and freedoms."

Mideastyouth is about forging connections. It's also about producing content that raises awareness. The site produces cartoons and comics for distribution. A cartoon about the abuse of domestic workers, for example, or an engaging ad for Kurdish rights. The messages are clear, the production values high and the medium engaging. The result, she hopes, is getting people to think, and act. One promotional spot, a jazzy ad done in the style of a tourism commercial about the persecution of the Baha'i' minority in Egypt got thousands of hits within the first few days. "People were talking about it because Muslims were doing it. Even the Baha'is were surprised," says Shafei, explaining that it was the first time a Muslim organization had been formed to fight specifically for Baha'i rights. To her, generating buzz is almost as important as getting the message across. "This is what we do to get traditional media to talk about these issues," she says. "And that is how you get the attention we really want." Of course the Internet is huge in the Middle East, she says. But your average Saudi isn't going to Google human rights. "We can't wait for them to come to us. So we create new ways to find them." Once they connect, "we can find more people wanting to work with the cause." (See pictures of the aftershocks from the Abu Ghraib scandal.)

Shafei focuses on minority rights, she says, "because we cannot have human rights for ourselves if the minorities in our countries don't either." Many rights-based organizations in the Middle East have traditionally been self-centered - for example, women supporting women. That kind of silo mentality is ultimately destructive, says Shafei. It keeps organizations isolated, and it also enables authoritarian regimes to play one group against another. "As a Bahraini woman, yes, I would like my rights," she says. "But in comparison to religious minorities or migrant workers, I have a lot more rights. I'm Muslim, Arab, a member of the mainstream that has more freedom of speech and a more comfortable life. We can't progress as a society if we leave the most vulnerable behind."

The hard work of overthrowing dictators, of course, is better left to locals. "There are plenty of groups working on regime change, so we focus on the people who don't have a voice." That doesn't mean that she turns her back on calls for change - she pumps up the volume. She just launched crowdvoice.org, a user-powered service that tracks voices of protest from around the world through crowdsourcing. "People can use it to collect or view collections of videos, photos, news stories, blogs, tweets and other media sources on current events," she says. "It's used to amplify voices of dissent."

Shafei makes it very clear that her push for democracy and human rights has nothing to do with an American agenda for the Middle East. If anything, she says, the U.S. has demonstrated that its principal value in the region, at least, is self-interest. "The United States continues to support repressive and anti-democratic regimes. The U.S. Government was aware of the injustices in Egypt, but continued supporting Mubarak because of self-interest. No one can argue that Saudi Arabia is the home of human rights or democracy, yet America continues to support the regime." (See a special report on the accued 9/11 plotters.)

The credibility of the U.S. among the young in the Middle East, Shafei says, "is in negative numbers." She says that neither she, nor other members of the Arab youth movement, are against Americans. When you see Arabs burning the flag, "It's not Anti-American, it's anti-American foreign policy hypocrisy."

See TIME's Pictures of the Week.

See the Cartoons of the Week.

View this article on Time.com

Most Popular on Time.com:

View the original article here

Egypt Through the Lens of Iran's 1979 Revolution (Time.com)

Ever since the crowds flooded into Tahrir Square, I've begun talking to the living-room television. "Drop that hand!" I shouted at the raised fist of a pro-Mubarak thug a few days ago. On Friday, watching the fireworks over the skies of Cairo, I enviously mumbled: "How come we didn't do that?"

We, as in the young Iranians who flooded Tehran's own equivalent of Liberation Square, Azadi, on the same exact day 32 years ago. I was 12 at the time, but the events of that year remain my existential paradox, my life's most cherished trauma. (See "official" photos of Iran from its state news agency.)

The pundits now breezily call Iran's 1979 revolution "Islamic." But at the time, religious and secular, villagers and urbanites, educated and illiterate, all equally angrily, were marching in the streets and demanding the removal of the Shah. Iran's future was as unknowable then as Egypt's future is now.

Comparisons between Iran and Egypt abound and the guessing goes on as to what number Egypt's needle truly points on the Iranian time scale: 1979, or 2009 - the year the Green movement took the streets of Tehran. One of the dozen exuberant wallposts on my facebook page on Friday reads: "Egypt did it in 18 days. Iran will do it in a week!"

Egypt is not Iran. No two histories or nations, no matter how much they have in common, are interchangeable. But movements striving for common democratic goals have consistently exchanged the lessons of their struggles to inform and warn their comrades elsewhere against the pitfalls and to also facilitate a change of their own. The fear that fleeing dictators exude is very potent. (See how democracy can work in the Middle East.)

Today's Egyptian democratic forces ought to heed the errors of their Iranian counterparts from 1979. Above all because those errors were, by and large, not rooted in malice or ignorance but in good intentions. And also because their sinister effects did not reveal themselves until long after the euphoria had ebbed and the crowds had left the squares to resume their lives once again.

The first misstep of the Iranian secular movement came as early as 1978, when they blindly embraced a union with the religious opposition, having been perfectly disarmed by them. When the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini said that he had no political ambitions, and that, once the Shah was gone, his only wish was to hunker down with a Koran at a seminary in Qom, everyone believed him. When he spoke against the violations of human rights in the Shah's prisons, the intellectuals called him their homegrown Gandhi. When he talked of gender equality and women's rights, he was hailed unequivocally as if he'd been the heir to Betty Friedan. Before rising to power, the religious opposition to the Shah, headed by the Ayatollah, told Iranians what they wished to hear and they believed everything they heard.

The few who were smart enough not to believe the Ayatollah made the common mistake smart people often make: they underestimated the intelligence of others. They were confident that they could outmaneuver the Ayatollah. The Western-educated, stylishly-suited secular leaders assumed themselves far too sophisticated to be outwitted by the plainly-dressed provincial clerics.

See photos of the rise and fall of Iran's shah.

They also did not realize that keeping the movement peaceful and nonviolent was detrimental to keeping themselves relevant and credible. Once the army had opened fire and the first victims had fallen, the religious co-opted the movement. The seculars had no substantive plans for retaliation or political comeback in light of a military attack. But the shedding of blood was the cue for the religious to enter the stage and move into the spotlight. When it came to death, the religious had a full lexicon and complete repertoire of rituals to balance the strategic shortcomings of their secular counterparts. After all, death and all of its conceptual by-products, especially martyrdom, had always been the proverbial bread-and-butter of the clergy, the spring of their livelihood. (Comment on this story.)

As time passed, it quickly became clear that the easiest part of the revolution was the very thing that had seemed the hardest all along: the overthrow. Navigating the future was a most daunting task for which individuals who had spent decades dreaming of the Shah's fall had never planned for. With the revolution's victory, the movement, overcome by joy, lost its direction. They became overambitious and gave into globalistic hubris. Freedom for Iranians, employment and education for the youth, or the implementation of civil liberties were no longer enough. Those bÊte noires, evil Uncle Sam and his bastard child, Israel, had to also be uprooted. Once they shifted their focus from domestic issues, they had empowered the religious once again. Within months after the fall of the Shah, Iraq attacked Iran and the Ayatollah dragged the nation into a decade of destruction because, he argued, the quickest way to annihilating the world's two greatest evils was through conquering Baghdad en route to Jerusalem. Tehran, and its residents, did not satisfy the grand agenda. (See more about Tehran's worry over the spread of the recent Middle East protests.)

Iranians allowed themselves to be manipulated. The regime cowed them into making concessions by preying on their fears - of the return of the Shah, or the staging of a coup by his loyalists within the army. Instead of remaining uncompromising on the issues that defined them, they made compromises and bought into piecemeal, gradual, interim promises. Lest monarchy return, women were told to defer their demands for equal rights. Then in 1979 the U.S. embassy in Tehran was seized which the Ayatollah celebrated as a day second only to Feb. 11, the date of his revolution. Of course, he did. The seizure of the American embassy gave the Islamic radicals the ammunition they needed to conduct their assault on the hard-won and fledgling civil liberties in Iran because, the manipulative reasoning went, there was no telling how the angry Americans were going to infiltrate and avenge themselves on the nation.

In the end, the religious proved too smart to be outwitted by the secular. It made no claim to power until it had fully seized it - a quest fueled by bloodshed and extraterritorial ambitions. Let us hope that the new, wired generation of Egypt will remain as vigilant in seeing their victory through as they had been in bringing it about.

Roya Hakakian is the author of Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran (Crown 2004) and the forthcoming Assassins of the Turquoise Palace (Grove/Atlantic Press 2011).

See TIME's most unforgettable images of 2010.

See TIME's special report "The Middle East in Revolt."

View this article on Time.com

Most Popular on Time.com:

View the original article here

Egypt Through the Lens of Iran's 1979 Revolution (Time.com)

Ever since the crowds flooded into Tahrir Square, I've begun talking to the living-room television. "Drop that hand!" I shouted at the raised fist of a pro-Mubarak thug a few days ago. On Friday, watching the fireworks over the skies of Cairo, I enviously mumbled: "How come we didn't do that?"

We, as in the young Iranians who flooded Tehran's own equivalent of Liberation Square, Azadi, on the same exact day 32 years ago. I was 12 at the time, but the events of that year remain my existential paradox, my life's most cherished trauma. (See "official" photos of Iran from its state news agency.)

The pundits now breezily call Iran's 1979 revolution "Islamic." But at the time, religious and secular, villagers and urbanites, educated and illiterate, all equally angrily, were marching in the streets and demanding the removal of the Shah. Iran's future was as unknowable then as Egypt's future is now.

Comparisons between Iran and Egypt abound and the guessing goes on as to what number Egypt's needle truly points on the Iranian time scale: 1979, or 2009 - the year the Green movement took the streets of Tehran. One of the dozen exuberant wallposts on my facebook page on Friday reads: "Egypt did it in 18 days. Iran will do it in a week!"

Egypt is not Iran. No two histories or nations, no matter how much they have in common, are interchangeable. But movements striving for common democratic goals have consistently exchanged the lessons of their struggles to inform and warn their comrades elsewhere against the pitfalls and to also facilitate a change of their own. The fear that fleeing dictators exude is very potent. (See how democracy can work in the Middle East.)

Today's Egyptian democratic forces ought to heed the errors of their Iranian counterparts from 1979. Above all because those errors were, by and large, not rooted in malice or ignorance but in good intentions. And also because their sinister effects did not reveal themselves until long after the euphoria had ebbed and the crowds had left the squares to resume their lives once again.

The first misstep of the Iranian secular movement came as early as 1978, when they blindly embraced a union with the religious opposition, having been perfectly disarmed by them. When the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini said that he had no political ambitions, and that, once the Shah was gone, his only wish was to hunker down with a Koran at a seminary in Qom, everyone believed him. When he spoke against the violations of human rights in the Shah's prisons, the intellectuals called him their homegrown Gandhi. When he talked of gender equality and women's rights, he was hailed unequivocally as if he'd been the heir to Betty Friedan. Before rising to power, the religious opposition to the Shah, headed by the Ayatollah, told Iranians what they wished to hear and they believed everything they heard.

The few who were smart enough not to believe the Ayatollah made the common mistake smart people often make: they underestimated the intelligence of others. They were confident that they could outmaneuver the Ayatollah. The Western-educated, stylishly-suited secular leaders assumed themselves far too sophisticated to be outwitted by the plainly-dressed provincial clerics.

See photos of the rise and fall of Iran's shah.

They also did not realize that keeping the movement peaceful and nonviolent was detrimental to keeping themselves relevant and credible. Once the army had opened fire and the first victims had fallen, the religious co-opted the movement. The seculars had no substantive plans for retaliation or political comeback in light of a military attack. But the shedding of blood was the cue for the religious to enter the stage and move into the spotlight. When it came to death, the religious had a full lexicon and complete repertoire of rituals to balance the strategic shortcomings of their secular counterparts. After all, death and all of its conceptual by-products, especially martyrdom, had always been the proverbial bread-and-butter of the clergy, the spring of their livelihood. (Comment on this story.)

As time passed, it quickly became clear that the easiest part of the revolution was the very thing that had seemed the hardest all along: the overthrow. Navigating the future was a most daunting task for which individuals who had spent decades dreaming of the Shah's fall had never planned for. With the revolution's victory, the movement, overcome by joy, lost its direction. They became overambitious and gave into globalistic hubris. Freedom for Iranians, employment and education for the youth, or the implementation of civil liberties were no longer enough. Those bÊte noires, evil Uncle Sam and his bastard child, Israel, had to also be uprooted. Once they shifted their focus from domestic issues, they had empowered the religious once again. Within months after the fall of the Shah, Iraq attacked Iran and the Ayatollah dragged the nation into a decade of destruction because, he argued, the quickest way to annihilating the world's two greatest evils was through conquering Baghdad en route to Jerusalem. Tehran, and its residents, did not satisfy the grand agenda. (See more about Tehran's worry over the spread of the recent Middle East protests.)

Iranians allowed themselves to be manipulated. The regime cowed them into making concessions by preying on their fears - of the return of the Shah, or the staging of a coup by his loyalists within the army. Instead of remaining uncompromising on the issues that defined them, they made compromises and bought into piecemeal, gradual, interim promises. Lest monarchy return, women were told to defer their demands for equal rights. Then in 1979 the U.S. embassy in Tehran was seized which the Ayatollah celebrated as a day second only to Feb. 11, the date of his revolution. Of course, he did. The seizure of the American embassy gave the Islamic radicals the ammunition they needed to conduct their assault on the hard-won and fledgling civil liberties in Iran because, the manipulative reasoning went, there was no telling how the angry Americans were going to infiltrate and avenge themselves on the nation.

In the end, the religious proved too smart to be outwitted by the secular. It made no claim to power until it had fully seized it - a quest fueled by bloodshed and extraterritorial ambitions. Let us hope that the new, wired generation of Egypt will remain as vigilant in seeing their victory through as they had been in bringing it about.

Roya Hakakian is the author of Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran (Crown 2004) and the forthcoming Assassins of the Turquoise Palace (Grove/Atlantic Press 2011).

See TIME's most unforgettable images of 2010.

See TIME's special report "The Middle East in Revolt."

View this article on Time.com

Most Popular on Time.com:

View the original article here

Italy Struggles to Contain the Flood of Tunisians Fleeing Revolution (Time.com)

It's no coincidence that the first boats full of migrants arrived at the tiny southern Italian island of Lampedusa just two days after a revolution overthrew Tunisia's strongman Zine el Abidine Ben Ali. That's about how long it takes for a rickety, overloaded ship to cross that stretch of the Mediterranean Sea.

The arrivals were few at first - small boats of a dozen or so people. But in recent days, as clenched-fist stability in Tunisia gave way to democracy and then near anarchy, the ships became larger, more crowded and more numerous. According to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), some 5,700 Tunisians have landed in Lampedusa since January 16 - 5,000 of them in the last five days - leaving Italian authorities scrambling to accommodate what they describe as an exodus of "biblical proportions." (See pictures of protesters in Tunisia.)

If Sicily is a ball being kicked by the Italian boot, the island of Lampedusa is an earthworm buried deep in the soil beneath. A stretch of largely denuded rock tucked in a corner between Tunisia and Libya, its location has long made it a magnet for North Africans seeking a better life or a claim at political asylum. In 2008, a peak year for migration, some 31,000 illegal migrants reached Lampedusa, mostly from Libya, at a rate of roughly 600 a week - far slower that what has been seen in the past few days.

But in recent years, the arrivals have slowed. In 2009, Italy pressed Libya to join Tunisia in accepting financial assistance in exchange for keeping a close watch on its coastlines, and the boats stopped coming. An immigration center in Lampedusa, completed in 2007, was shuttered just two years later when aggressive patrols on land and at sea successfully blocked migrants from coming. (See a brief history of people power.)

On Sunday, however, the center was opened again - and filled far over capacity. Built to accommodate 800 people, it now houses more than 2,000 migrants, many sleeping two to a bed, on the floor, or outside between the buildings. "It's a humanitarian emergency," says Simona Moscarelli, a program officer with the International Organization for Migration who flew to Lampedusa in response to the crisis. "These people need to eat, they need to be clothed, they need to drink. Every problem of distribution is a logistical nightmare." (Comment on this story.)

The arrivals include at least a dozen women, a handful of minors, and a man in a wheelchair, but the vast majority are working-age men. "There are people who say they're just fleeing poverty," says Federico Fossi, a spokesman at UNHCR. "There are others who say they are fleeing from political insecurity." Some have said they left fearing armed gangs or snipers in the street. A few are expected to petition Italy for asylum or return to Tunisia when the country has stabilized, but the majority of those spoken to by aid workers said they plan to move on to France, where they speak the language and often have friends or relatives. (Read "Why France Is Staying Silent on Tunisia Turmoil.")

For now, a spate of rough weather in the southern Mediterranean seems to have slowed the rate of new arrivals. Very few migrants arrived at Lampedusa on Monday. The question is what will happen when the skies clear. Italy's interior minister Roberto Maroni has compared the collapse of the Tunisian and Egyptian governments to the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the sudden lifting of communist rule in Eastern Europe sparked decades of illegal immigration. And indeed, since the fall of the Tunisian dictator, Rome has struggled to find counterparts in the government in Tunis. On Monday, the Tunisian government rejected an Italian proposal to deploy armed forces to Tunisia to patrol the country's borders, but pledged to do more to halt the exodus pent up by years of autocracy. Dictators may be able to seal their borders with ease. It's another thing altogether for a democracy, never mind an unstable transitional government like the one currently in place in Tunisia. The influx is unlikely to end anytime soon.

Read "Why U.S. Should Cheer Tunisia's Risky Revolution."

Read "After the Overthrow, Tunisians Turn to the Military."

View this article on Time.com

Most Popular on Time.com:

View the original article here

Egypt Through the Lens of Iran's 1979 Revolution (Time.com)

Ever since the crowds flooded into Tahrir Square, I've begun talking to the living-room television. "Drop that hand!" I shouted at the raised fist of a pro-Mubarak thug a few days ago. On Friday, watching the fireworks over the skies of Cairo, I enviously mumbled: "How come we didn't do that?"

We, as in the young Iranians who flooded Tehran's own equivalent of Liberation Square, Azadi, on the same exact day 32 years ago. I was 12 at the time, but the events of that year remain my existential paradox, my life's most cherished trauma. (See "official" photos of Iran from its state news agency.)

The pundits now breezily call Iran's 1979 revolution "Islamic." But at the time, religious and secular, villagers and urbanites, educated and illiterate, all equally angrily, were marching in the streets and demanding the removal of the Shah. Iran's future was as unknowable then as Egypt's future is now.

Comparisons between Iran and Egypt abound and the guessing goes on as to what number Egypt's needle truly points on the Iranian time scale: 1979, or 2009 - the year the Green movement took the streets of Tehran. One of the dozen exuberant wallposts on my facebook page on Friday reads: "Egypt did it in 18 days. Iran will do it in a week!"

Egypt is not Iran. No two histories or nations, no matter how much they have in common, are interchangeable. But movements striving for common democratic goals have consistently exchanged the lessons of their struggles to inform and warn their comrades elsewhere against the pitfalls and to also facilitate a change of their own. The fear that fleeing dictators exude is very potent. (See how democracy can work in the Middle East.)

Today's Egyptian democratic forces ought to heed the errors of their Iranian counterparts from 1979. Above all because those errors were, by and large, not rooted in malice or ignorance but in good intentions. And also because their sinister effects did not reveal themselves until long after the euphoria had ebbed and the crowds had left the squares to resume their lives once again.

The first misstep of the Iranian secular movement came as early as 1978, when they blindly embraced a union with the religious opposition, having been perfectly disarmed by them. When the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini said that he had no political ambitions, and that, once the Shah was gone, his only wish was to hunker down with a Koran at a seminary in Qom, everyone believed him. When he spoke against the violations of human rights in the Shah's prisons, the intellectuals called him their homegrown Gandhi. When he talked of gender equality and women's rights, he was hailed unequivocally as if he'd been the heir to Betty Friedan. Before rising to power, the religious opposition to the Shah, headed by the Ayatollah, told Iranians what they wished to hear and they believed everything they heard.

The few who were smart enough not to believe the Ayatollah made the common mistake smart people often make: they underestimated the intelligence of others. They were confident that they could outmaneuver the Ayatollah. The Western-educated, stylishly-suited secular leaders assumed themselves far too sophisticated to be outwitted by the plainly-dressed provincial clerics.

See photos of the rise and fall of Iran's shah.

They also did not realize that keeping the movement peaceful and nonviolent was detrimental to keeping themselves relevant and credible. Once the army had opened fire and the first victims had fallen, the religious co-opted the movement. The seculars had no substantive plans for retaliation or political comeback in light of a military attack. But the shedding of blood was the cue for the religious to enter the stage and move into the spotlight. When it came to death, the religious had a full lexicon and complete repertoire of rituals to balance the strategic shortcomings of their secular counterparts. After all, death and all of its conceptual by-products, especially martyrdom, had always been the proverbial bread-and-butter of the clergy, the spring of their livelihood. (Comment on this story.)

As time passed, it quickly became clear that the easiest part of the revolution was the very thing that had seemed the hardest all along: the overthrow. Navigating the future was a most daunting task for which individuals who had spent decades dreaming of the Shah's fall had never planned for. With the revolution's victory, the movement, overcome by joy, lost its direction. They became overambitious and gave into globalistic hubris. Freedom for Iranians, employment and education for the youth, or the implementation of civil liberties were no longer enough. Those bÊte noires, evil Uncle Sam and his bastard child, Israel, had to also be uprooted. Once they shifted their focus from domestic issues, they had empowered the religious once again. Within months after the fall of the Shah, Iraq attacked Iran and the Ayatollah dragged the nation into a decade of destruction because, he argued, the quickest way to annihilating the world's two greatest evils was through conquering Baghdad en route to Jerusalem. Tehran, and its residents, did not satisfy the grand agenda. (See more about Tehran's worry over the spread of the recent Middle East protests.)

Iranians allowed themselves to be manipulated. The regime cowed them into making concessions by preying on their fears - of the return of the Shah, or the staging of a coup by his loyalists within the army. Instead of remaining uncompromising on the issues that defined them, they made compromises and bought into piecemeal, gradual, interim promises. Lest monarchy return, women were told to defer their demands for equal rights. Then in 1979 the U.S. embassy in Tehran was seized which the Ayatollah celebrated as a day second only to Feb. 11, the date of his revolution. Of course, he did. The seizure of the American embassy gave the Islamic radicals the ammunition they needed to conduct their assault on the hard-won and fledgling civil liberties in Iran because, the manipulative reasoning went, there was no telling how the angry Americans were going to infiltrate and avenge themselves on the nation.

In the end, the religious proved too smart to be outwitted by the secular. It made no claim to power until it had fully seized it - a quest fueled by bloodshed and extraterritorial ambitions. Let us hope that the new, wired generation of Egypt will remain as vigilant in seeing their victory through as they had been in bringing it about.

Roya Hakakian is the author of Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran (Crown 2004) and the forthcoming Assassins of the Turquoise Palace (Grove/Atlantic Press 2011).

See TIME's most unforgettable images of 2010.

See TIME's special report "The Middle East in Revolt."

View this article on Time.com

Most Popular on Time.com:

View the original article here

Egypt's revolution redefines what's possible in the Arab world (The Christian Science Monitor)

Baghdad – As darkness fell over the winter-chilled Middle East on Friday, television screens lit up living rooms from Tehran to Damascus to Rabat. All eyes were riveted by the spectacle that just weeks ago seemed impossible: the toppling of Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak after nearly 30 years in power.
The collapse in Egypt took just 18 days of bold protest, inspired by the overthrow of Tunisia’s long-standing strongman just weeks before.
For Arabs used to a heavy hand and little hope, Egypt’s revolution has redefined the possible, before their very eyes.
IN PICTURES: Exclusive Monitor photos of Egypt's turmoil
“Everyone is watching this – hundreds of millions of Arabs, Muslims, and who knows who else?” says Shadi Hamid, the director of research at the Brookings Doha Center, speaking from Cairo.
“The Arab world is never going to go back to what it was. We are going to wake up to a new Egypt tomorrow, and we’ll also wake up to a new Arab world,” says Mr. Hamid.
“What has changed is that Arabs know that they can change their own situation without the help of the US, without the help of the international community, they can just go out on the streets and do it on their own – and no one can take that away from them,â€
Across the region, Arabs have watched transformative events unfold day after day, first in Tunisia where a single self-immolation in protest in mid-December sparked weeks of demonstrations and finally regime change.
Then Egyptians began gathering strength on the streets, battled Mr. Mubarak’s security forces, clung on in Tahrir Square in the face of mob attacks, and then simply took over when the regime began losing its ability to control or intimidate the crowds.
“On the psychological and symbolic level, it is a shattering moment,” says Fawaz Gerges, director of the Middle East Centre at the London School of Economics. “Remember that Mubarak was the public face of political authoritarianism in the Arab world. He had built one of the most feared security apparatuses, employing five million personnel.”
The forced exit of Mubarak from the presidential palace has sent shock waves to Arab rulers. “Every village. Every neighborhood. Every Arab regardless of how poor, or alienated or marginalized, [now has] a sense of empowerment, a sense of revival,” says Mr. Gerges. “The psychology of the Arab world has changed.”
'Bellwether for the region'The Arab world was the place where change was once measured in decades, where authoritarian leaders like Saddam Hussein would seize power and hold their populations in abeyance for a generation at a time.
President Obama spoke to that timeline in remarks also broadcast on Egyptian TV and across the Arab world. “Egypt has played a pivotal role in human history for over 6,000 years. But over the last few weeks the wheel of history turned at a blinding pace as the Egyptian people demanded their universal rights," he said.
“[W]e saw a new generation emerge, a generation that uses their own creativity and talent and technology to call for a government that represented their hopes and not their fears,” Mr. Obama said. “A government that is responsive to their boundless aspirations.”
Mubarak was one of those who signified fear, his Pharaonic edifice kept intact by a legion of security forces, paid thugs, and $40 billion in US military aid.
“Tunisia was always seen as an exception, it was too remote, it had its own circumstances,â€
“If this can happen in Egypt, why can’t it happen anywhere else? Egypt was seen as unlikely a month ago: The regime seemed more unified, more ruthless, with a broader base of support,” he adds.
“The regime had the Islamist card at its disposal – it seemed like Egypt would be very challenging. But the Egyptian people pulled it off. And I think now Arabs know that if they bring people out onto the streets, if they have the numbers, they can accomplish amazing things,” Hamid says.
The 'inspirational' moment “Fear and political apathy allowed dictators like Mubarak and others to do whatever they want, not only for life, but even to groom their sons,” says Gerges. “In this sense, the removal of Mubarak is truly one of most inspirational moments in the contemporary history of the Arab world. It will fuel new aspirations and hopes.”
The day Mubarak was toppled from power came precisely 32 years after Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution, which shook the world in its day and still reverberates.
Just as that change was brought into the Arab family room by flickering TV sets, the Egyptian revolution is being broadcast across the region. But this uprising is being relayed not just live on television and radio, it's being spread even farther and faster via Twitter and Facebook.
“Iran is no longer the model; clerics and mullahs are no longer the model, neither is Osama bin Laden or Ayman Zawahiri,” notes Gerges. “The model is millions of young Arabs, calling for open societies, for freedom, for transparent elections, for their voices to be heard…. They have really Arabized democracy, and that is why it is such a powerful thing.”
IN PICTURES: Exclusive Monitor photos of Egypt's turmoil
View the original article here

As Mubarak resigns, Yemenis call for a revolution of their own (The Christian Science Monitor)

Aden, Yemen – As jubilant protesters in Cairo celebrated the ouster of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Yemenis were calling for a revolution of their own.
In the southern port city of Yemen, protesters marched through the district of Mansoura, waving the old flag of South Arabia and chanting, "Revolution, revolution for the south."
Six countries in the Arab world where 'winds of change' are blowing
Just hours before, security forces had fired live ammunition during a protest on the same street, according to eyewitnesses. Hundreds more staged ad hoc demonstrations throughout Aden, as well as in other cities across Yemen's south.
"After Hosni Mubarak, Yemen is going to be next. I know it," said Zahra Saleh, a prominent secession activist watching the scenes in Cairo on TV in a small Aden office.
"Now our revolution has to be stronger," declared Ali Jarallah, a leader in the southern separatist movement sitting with Ms. Saleh on the low cushions of a diwan.
Divergent aims of Yemeni protestersThe Yemeni southern secessionist movement is not calling for political reforms, an end to corruption or even for President Ali Abdullah Saleh to step down, as the political opposition is doing in the capital of Sanaa. They are pushing for the end of what they view is northern Yemeni occupation and the restoration of an independent southern Yemeni state.
Though both derive momentum from the recent revolts in Tunisia and Egypt, the divergent aims of the Yemeni protesters represent another example of how anti-regime factions across the Arab world our shaping revolutionary energy to serve their own agendas.
“What happened in Egypt sent a blink of hope to the [southern] movement,” says Tammam Bashraheel, managing editor of Aden’s officially banned Al Ayyam newspaper.
Exiled southern movement leader and former Vice President Ali Salim Al Beidh said that events in the Arab world, and especially what is happening in Tunisia and Egypt, reflect a new stage in history that can be likened to the end of the cold war. Speaking to local press on Thursday, he compared the southern Yemeni demonstrations to Egypt, where youths have also played a central role.
“The revolution of the south is a revolution of the youth and younger generation,â€
'America supports oppressors'In Sanaa, anti-government protests have focused on pressuring the ruling party to accept political reforms and are carried out in relative peace. However in Yemen’s south, the increased number of demonstrations since Tunisia's uprising have been more violent.
“Demonstrations are allowed to happen in Sanaa without weapons, why do they use weapons on us in the south?” asks secession activist Wagdy Al Shaaby, who had just returned to Aden Friday afternoon from a protest of about 1,000 held in Zinjibar in neighboring Abyan province.
He also criticized the US for supporting its Arab allies, even when they resort to authoritarian measures in the name of stability.
“America is a democracy, but when to comes to the Arab world America supports oppressors," he says. "America protects these countries until they blow up."
Aden governor urges security, stabilityIn one Aden neighborhood, known for being a hotbed of secessionist sentiment, the old South Arabia flag is spray painted on building walls alongside posters of young man killed by security forces. Next to one Khaled Darwish poster was written a warning to the Yemeni government: "We are going to take revenge for you, Darwish."
“If there continues to be no recognition of political rights here, [separatist activity] won’t stop,” says Mr. Bashraheel.
The fractured yet popular southern separatists argue that since unification of north and south Yemen in 1990, and especially after a bloody civil war between the two sides of the country in 1994, there has been a systematic attempt to erase the identity of south Yemen.
They claim that southerners don’t have proper representation in the central government, and that the government takes resources found in southern governorates, namely oil, without investing back in the south’s infrastructure.
Yemen's government accuses separatists of harming national unity and stirring up trouble. On Thursday, Gov. Adnan Al Jafari of Aden told local press “security and stability are the responsibility of everyone.” He added, “We must learn from other countries that have lost their security and stability and use that in positive ways for our country.”
The government has also tried to link secessionists to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the regional terrorist franchise based in Yemen. AQAP, for its part, has sought to play on southerners’ grievances in order to unite the two groups against their common enemy, the Yemeni state. Separatists deny that they have any ties with AQAP, and instead blame the existence of Al Qaeda in Yemen on the Saleh regime.
A fast-closing windowBecause clashes happen far from the eyes of international observers, it difficult to assess whether the perpetual violence in Yemen’s south between security forces and armed factions comes from Al Qaeda or harak, the Arabic name for southern separatists. However, what is certain is that this violence what has worried Western governments that destabilization in this area allows AQAP to move freely.
“The deterioration of the south would lead to instability of the entire countries and will definitely provide space for Al Qaeda to function. The southern separatist movement is not allied to Al Qaeda but the absence of state control gives Al Qaeda space to exist in areas that are controlled by harak,” said independent Yemeni political analyst Abdul-Ghani Al Iryani.
“The lack of unified leadership [in the separatist movement] makes it difficult for the government to reach a deal and therefore Harak will continue until the legitimate aspiration of the people of the south are achieved and that is still within the ability of the central government to provide in the context of unity, but I see that this window is fast closing,” he said.
Six countries in the Arab world where 'winds of change' are blowing
View the original article here