Arab Spring Libyan Winter Read online

  Arab Spring, Libyan Winter

  Vijay Prashad

  AK Press Publishing & Distribution

  Oakland | Baltimore | Edinburgh

  April 2012

  Dedication.

  “He who has not lived in the years before the revolution cannot know what the

  sweetness of living is.”

  —Talleyrand, via Bertolucci, Prima della

  Rivoluzione, 1964.

  This book is for Brinda Karat.

  “Those shattered mirrors once were

  The smiling eyes of children

  Now are star-lit

  This city’s nights are bright.”

  —Faiz, ek nagma karbala-e Beirut ke liye, 1982.

  And for Anthony Shadid (1968–2012).

  Most humane of reporters.

  Openings.

  Revolutions have no specified timetable. Karl Marx used the image of the Mole to stand in for Revolutions to explain their hard-working yet unreliable nature. The Mole spends its time making tunnels underground, and then, when you least expect it, breaks the surface for a breath of air. “Well burrowed, Old Mole,” Marx wrote; the breaking free to the surface is the spectacular part of the Revolution, but it is the burrowing, the preparing, that is the most important part. The least prepared Mole is the easiest to defeat because it has not groomed its subterranean space effectively enough. Such is true of the Revolution: if it has not taken the grievances of the people and produced organizations capable of withstanding the counter-revolution—if it has not harnessed these grievances to the discipline of revolutionary force—then it is easily defeated. It is the burrowing that is essential, not simply the emergence onto the surface of history.

  A process of preparation has been long afoot in West Asia and North Africa, all at a different tempo. In Tunisia and Egypt there have been many constitutional challenges to the one-party state, by which I mean challenges within the bounds of the constitution: protests and attempts to forge independent political platforms, including through the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, as well as attempts to found a new human rights sensibility (for example, in the campaigns of people like Ayman Nour). All of this is prologue, the work of building movements and a new vision for their societies. Much the same process was underway in Bahrain, via political parties like al-Wefaq, mainly, but also in the human rights redoubts, such as the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights and in the secular outposts that linger in the shadows of a theocratic state.

  Libya was not fated for an easy Arab Spring. As Aijaz Ahmad once put it, “every country gets the fascism it deserves.” In that spirit, every country gets the rebellion it deserves. Libya did not deliver the uplifting narrative of Tunisia or Egypt. It faced a complex situation, with a leader who could speak with the rhetoric of his own 1969 revolution but whose state had moved a long way towards the opposite of what he promised. Working-class protests in the industrial suburbs of Tripoli conjoined with political Islamist unrest in the eastern part of the country. These were the rumbles from below. They were harnessed by human rights lawyers from Benghazi and by neoliberal “reformers,” who were disheartened by the pace of change in the Qaddafi regime. It was this latter, these neoliberal “reformers” who were able to set the pace of the Libyan revolt. Such people were not central to the revolts in Egypt and Tunisia, where the people, as a mass, stood up and were fortunate that the military stood down.

  The Atlantic powers, led by the United States, France and Britain, saw the pillars of their regional stability wear thin by the developments in Tunisia and Egypt as well as Bahrain and Yemen. Libya provided a unique opportunity. The Atlantic states did not intervene on the side of the people in any of the other struggles. Rather they stood by their old pillars of stability, concrete and trowels in hand. As the University of Tehran scholar Yaghoob Javadi put it, the Atlantic states preferred “regime rehabilitation” to regime change. With Libya, things were different. Even though Qaddafi had given his regime over to the Atlantic states as an ally in the War on Terror and as a provider of oil, the erratic nature of his decision-making and the blocked transit to a full neoliberal dispensation inside the country earned him few friends in the Atlantic capitals. The Gulf Arab emirs hated Qaddafi for his frequent outbursts against them (most recently at a summit in Doha, Qatar, in 2006 when Qaddafi said that the Saudi monarch was “made by Britain and protected by the US,” embarrassing the emir of Qatar and angering the Saudis). Personal animosity plays a role when it comes to absolute monarchs, whose whims are not to be discounted. But the turn against Libya was not about whim alone. Interests in oil and in political stability played their part.

  The Atlantic powers made a deal with the Saudis and the Gulf Arab states that allowed the latter to silence dissent on the Arabian Peninsula (Bahrain and Yemen), if they would deliver the Arab League, and thus the United Nations, for a NATO-led intervention in Libya. The spotlight shone on Qatar, which did the leadership work for the Gulf Arabs. Its emir could remarkably draw the shine from the Arab Spring, dent its republicanism and fashion himself as a rebel in Libya, not in Doha. The oil is a central issue with Libya, but so too was its political significance. That the Atlantic states and their Gulf Arab partners decided to intervene in Libya and not in Bahrain or Yemen, and certainly not in Syria, tells us something. It is what this something is that I will unravel in this brief book.

  No revolt or revolution is capable of being rendered mute by the attempt of a clique to seize control of it. Tendencies to a better future continue and thrive. The Libyan revolt was certainly hijacked by the neoliberal “reformers,” but the people of Libya have not surrendered the wider aspirations that motivated them to risk everything in this battle. Tensions remain in the country. Qaddafi has been killed, his son Saif al-Islam is in custody, and much of the formal regime has collapsed. The neoliberal reformers remain in the shadows, running the Central Bank and the oil ministry. But they have to contend with the fighters who are not willing to transfer authority over to the reformers. The fighters comprise equal parts of Islamists and amateurs, with their roots as much in their cities of origin as in the global ummah. They have their own agendas. This book will appear at the anniversary of the start of the Libyan revolt. It is too early to tell how things will pan out. This book does not risk more than a few general remarks. Arab Spring, Libyan Winter is less about predicting the future and more about showing us how the Atlantic powers insinuated themselves into the Arab Spring, to attempt to create a Libyan Winter to the advantage of their national interests, the interest of the multinational oil firms and the neoliberal reformers within Libya.

  Part I: Arab Spring.

  I. Bread

  When the unwashed began to assert themselves in France, the royalty scoffed at them. What they wanted was bread, whose price skyrocketed in 1774–75. Taking to the streets in remarkable numbers, the people demanded fair prices for bread, their main staple. In reaction to la guerre des farines, the flour war, Marie Antoinette proposed that the poor “eat cake.” After the Revolution removed the monarchy and its élèves from the thrones of power, the new government hastened to subsidize bread. Hunger broke the back of fear. It is the lesson for the ages.

  It was a lesson for North Africa in late 2010. In the last two quarters of 2010, the IMF Food Price Index rose by thirty percent. Grain prices soared by sixty percent. Protestors in Tunisia came onto the streets in December with baguettes raised in the air. In Egypt, protestors took to the streets in January chanting, “They are eating pigeon and chicken, and we are eating beans all the time.” Hunger and inequality drove the protests. Their governments hastened to up their subsidies, but it was too little, too late.

  The question of bread reveals a great deal about the delinque
nt states in Egypt and Tunisia. The Nasserite state in Egypt well understood the importance of a bread subsidy, and it encouraged the domestic production of wheat for the bread needs of the citizenry. When Anwar Sadat came to power in the 1970s, he gradually cut off the bread subsidy, what the Tunisian intellectual Larbi Sadiki calls a “democracy of bread” (dimuqratiyyat al-khubz). This was part of the wave of “reforms” in North Africa against the economic policies that favored national development. In Egypt, these “reforms” were part of the phase of infitah, the openness of Egyptian society to the Atlantic world’s economic needs. Sadat opened a correspondence with the IMF: the Law of the New Economic Measures (1974) was the opening gambit, sealed in a Letter of Intent to the IMF (May 1976) and a second Letter of Intent (June 1978). Robust national development went by the wayside. More important was the will of the IMF and the international bond markets. Nationalization and subsidies ended, and free enterprise zones were created by February 1974. Sadat wanted a “blood transfusion” for the Egyptian economy, and so the Atlantic banks began to draw pints of blood from the ailing Egyptian working-class and peasantry. The “democracy of bread” was a casualty of the new thinking. In 1977, the Egyptian people rose up in a “bread intifada,” with additional targets being the nightclubs and liquor stores, symbols of the “openness.” The regime’s guns killed 160, and shut down the protests. Lessons were hastily learned. Subsidies returned.

  The new regimes tried to maintain the subsidies along with the new “openness.” There was to be no subsidy to the small farmer, the fellahin of the Nile’s fertile plains. Instead, the Egyptian regime, for instance, relied upon US Agency for International Development assistance that amounted to $4.6 billion over the next three decades. This money was used to buy the massive output of the industrial farms in the United States. Wheat came into the country, but at the expense of the restive peasantry, now increasingly under-employed. In 2010, Egypt was the leading importer of wheat in the world. Egypt relied upon its rent income for survival (remittances from payment for privatization, among others). The ruling clique diverted a substantial part of the rent into the coffers of the Swiss banks. Democracy did not live within this economy. The tyrant here was the ruling clique but not operating alone. It had close collaborators in the IMF, the World Bank, the Banks, the bond markets and the multinational corporations.

  Oil did not flow liberally under the sands of Tunisia and Egypt, but it did in the rest of the Arab world, from Libya to the Arabian Peninsula. It has long been a question of the Arab Revolution that opened in the 1950s: When will the economies of the Arab region be able to sustain their populations rather than fatten the financial houses of the Atlantic world, and offer massive trust funds for the dictators and monarchs? Cursed with oil, the Arab world has seen little economic diversification and almost no attempt to use the oil wealth to engender balanced social development for the people. Instead, the oil money sloshed North, to provide credit for overheated consumers in the United States and to provide the banks with the vast funds that are otherwise not garnered by populations that have stopped saving (in the United States wages have been stagnant since 1973 but cultural expectations for lifestyle have not declined, which means that the credit provided by the petro-dollars artificially closed the gap between empty coffers and lavish dreams). The oil money also went toward the real estate boom in the Gulf, and the baccarat tables and escort services of Monaco (the Las Vegas of Europe, which has another decrepit monarch, Albert II, at its head). It did not flow into the pockets of the Arab Street.

  The contradictions of the neoliberal security state in Egypt were plainly exhausted by 2008, when the “bread intifada” returned in force (protests in much smaller scale were seen across the Arab world, from Morocco to Syria). The pressure was such that lines for bread increased, and by March 2008 about a dozen people died in scuffles or from exhaustion, waiting on bread. Hosni Mubarak, the heir to Sadat’s policies, sent in the army to quell protests over these “bread martyrs.” On April 6, 2008, a mass protest in al-Mahalla al-Kubra went from the issue of bread to unemployment and onward to the normal excesses of the security state. Mahalla is no backwater. In 2006, twenty-four thousand workers went on strike in the textile mills of this industrial town not more than a few hours drive north of Cairo. They were the backbone of the 2008 events.

  US Ambassador Francis Ricciardone arrived in Cairo in 2007. This Turkish speaker and veteran of the Foreign Service was confounded by the “paranoia of the Egyptian dictatorship” (cable sent on May 14, 2007). A year later, Ricciardone sent his assessment of Mahalla and of the tremors underfoot to his superiors at the State Department in Foggy Bottom: “Although not on the scale of the 1977 or 1986 riots, Mahalla is significant. The violent protests demonstrated that it is possible to tear down a poster of Mubarak and stomp on it, to shout obscene anti-regime slogans, to burn a minibus and hurl rocks at riot police. These are unfamiliar images that lower-income Egyptians thrill to. In Mahalla, a new organic opposition force bubbled to the surface, defying current political labels, and apparently not affiliated with the MB [Muslim Brotherhood]. This may require the government to change its script” (cable sent on April 16, 2008). The government did not change its script. This new opposition, strengthened by factory workers and students, the unemployed and the embittered, would take the name of April 6—and eventually find themselves in Tahrir Square by January 2011.

  In 2010, twenty-first century plagues reduced the Russian wheat harvest to a third. As the journalist Annia Ciezadlo put it, “a combination of factors—droughts, wildfires, ethanol subsidies, and more—converged into a global food crisis.” The epicenter of this was North Africa. World wheat prices rose beyond imagination. Tunisia and Egypt, both importers of wheat, could not maintain the “democracy of bread.” Inequality flourished in Egypt, and neoliberal policies produced an haute bourgeoisie, fanned on by Mubarak’s son Gamal, with more investment in London than in Alexandria. In October 2010, the courts directed the government to raise the minimum wage from $70/month to $207/month. Unbalanced by the rising tide of discontent, Mubarak tried to return to the “democracy of bread.” It was far too late. As the economic belt tightened, the Egyptian population inhaled for a political battle.

  II. Dignity

  On January 4, 2011, Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor in the central Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid, set himself on fire and died. Bouazizi was the breadwinner of his family, and well known in his modest neighborhood for distributing food from his cart to the poor. Harassment by the Tunisian police over his inability to pay their bribes or purchase their permits dogged Bouazizi through his life. This was the mandate of the hard-working informal sector, to be ceaselessly humiliated by the security state for the mere fact of existence. When the dejection got too much for him, he poured gasoline on his body in front of the governor’s office, set himself alight and yelled, “how do you expect me to make a living?”

  An act of immolation in central Tunisia would normally matter very little to the intelligence and diplomatic corps in Washington, London, Paris and elsewhere in the advanced financial world. But Bouazizi’s suicide before the town hall had an electric effect. It galvanized the people of Tunisia against their suave and ruthless leader, Zein el-Abidine Ben Ali, who had been praised by the governments of France and the United States, by the International Monetary Fund and by the bond markets. In 2010, the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report picked Tunisia as the leading country for investment in Africa. Neoliberal policies pleased everyone but the Tunisian working people, who took Bouazizi’s sacrifice as the spark to rise up and send Ben Ali into his Saudi exile.

  Astronomic poverty rates bedevil the region (in Egypt, half the population is under the $2/day poverty level). The infitah “reforms” crushed the social possibilities of the organized working-class and the peasantry, who drifted into the world of informal work. More and more Bouazizis inhabit the streets and the souqs of North Africa. A decline in rent incomes and a reduction in tax rate
s reduced the budgets of the state governments, who then cut subsidies and social services to the people. Less income and less services produced slumlands whose frustrations led in two directions, as the Cairo-based scholars Helmi Sharawy and Azza Khalil noted: “acquiescence or revolt.”

  Revolts of various kinds were the order of the day, since at least 2006. Egyptian society sprouted a series of organizations in addition to the April 6 Movement: March 20 Movement, March 9 Movement for the Independence of Universities, Egyptian Movement for Change (Kefaya), Women for Change (Mesreyat Maa al-Tagheer), the Coordination Committee for the Defense of Worker Rights, Committee for the Defense of Insurance Funds, Centre of Manual Workers of Egypt, Federation of Pensioners, Engineers Against Sequestration, the Mahallah Committee for Workers’ Consciousness, Workers for Change and so on.

  Rural Egypt did not sit passive, waiting for urban Egypt to act. Over the past decade, peasant struggles in Sarando, Bhoot and Kamshish have been commonplace. The latter, Kamshish, is not twenty kilometers from the birthplace of Mubarak (Kafr el-Meselha) and only eight kilometers from that of Sadat (Mit Abu al-Kum). In May 2011, as Tahrir Square remained the focal point of the Arab Spring, the farmers of Kamshish honored the forty-fifth anniversary of the death of Salah Hussein who led the charge against the local landlord al-Fiqi family by founding the Union of Egyptian Farmers. The doctors at the Zazazig Hospital and the lawyers of Port Said and Cairo, as well as the school principals of Minieh inspired other professionals to toss aside their hesitancy for dignity. “In Egypt,” economist Omar Dahi writes in the IDS Bulletin, “some 1.7 million workers took part in over 1,900 strikes between 2004 and 2008, before the financial crisis, when the number of strikes and work stoppages reached into the thousands. The laboring classes were reacting in fury not only to their higher cost of living, but also to the mounting extravagance and conspicuous consumption of the elite.” It was the rate of social inequality and the neoliberal consumerism of the upper ranks that unshackled the people’s hesitancy.