The Old Order Is Crumbling

We might think recent political events in Ireland momentous – and in their own small way they are. But if you want genuinely earth-shaking, then look to the Arab world. What has been happening across the north of Africa in recent months has the potential to completely transform the geo political landscape. And the weird thing is that – unless there is something that someone, somewhere, is not telling us – no one, but no one, saw it coming.

President Hosni Mubarak is gone in Egypt. So is Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia. And in Libya Colonel Gaddafi – or Qadhafi, if you prefer– is fighting for his political life. With half the country under rebel control at the time of going to press, the insurgents have gained a vital foothold. But the colonel – unlike some of his counterparts – is not going quietly into the good night. The first response of the Libyan armed forces was to pick protestors off, shooting them ruthlessly in the streets in a kind of Bloody Sunday turned up to 11 scenario. Rather than quelling the uprising, this intensified the growing opposition to the ruling dictatorship. Civil war has since broken out. Right now, it is impossible to predict the outcome but in a country that has boiled over in such a spectacular way, it seems unlikely that the lid can ever be put back on the unrest.
Other Arab tyrannies have begun to feel the heat. There have been protests in Bahrain and Yemen. Saudi Arabia is gearing up for confrontation. Even non-Arabic countries are in shock. Bizarrely, an Irish event in Shanghai organised to coincide with S.Patrick’s Day, has been cancelled, apparently because the authorities fear that a copycat uprising is a distinct possibility there. Whatever about the Chinese, there is a feeling abroad: the Arab people have risen. The questions is: how far will the shock waves travel? And also: what other regimes might be brought down as a result?
The echoes of what happened over 20 years ago in Eastern Europe are obvious. When the Berlin Wall collapsed it precipitated a domino effect, which saw the unravelling of the Soviet bloc, the entire edifice swept away in a wave of democratic protest. The context is very different now in many respects, but the impetus is similar. Every country in the Arab world is unique – but they have certain things in common. For a start, the regimes are more or less brutally oppressive. They also tend to have a very large, youth population. In the wake of the collapse of the global economy – which caused the virtual bankruptcy of Dubai, one of the seven states in the United Arab Emirates – more of these young people are unemployed than ever before, left to a large extent rudderless and without hope.
They have time on their hands. Which of course means that they do the devil’s work. They log-on to the internet. There they find intimations of a world of freedom they might never otherwise have glimpsed. It is like the arrival of British television in Ireland, only far bigger and the changes are happening at a thousand times the pace.
And so when anti-Government demonstrations gathered momentum in Tunisia, the word spread in a way that no oppressive regimes could stifle. There was a new, spontaneous and more immediate form of communication available, via Twitter and Facebook. I had often wondered about the apparent docility of the vast mass of Arab youth on their own turf. Was it that they believed and followed the received cultural and religious wisdom, in the way that Irish people did in the 1950s? That their religion had taught them to accept the will of Allah and that to rebel would be seen as a catastrophic failure to accept the word of the Prophet? Well, it seems that the era of docility may be at an end.
There is widespread anger at the failure of the political elite to provide work and opportunity. There is rage at the disabling extent of the oppression. Who wants to live like this? In certain parts of the Arab world, there is anger too at the restrictive dominance of the religious elite. The disaffection in Egypt is not necessarily the same as that in Yemen or in Libya. But there is a thread in what the protestors are saying which suggests that there is a greater awareness than ever before of the attractions of democracy over autocracy.
Is there a reactionary Islamist undercurrent to what is happening? Could what they have taken to calling the Jasmine Revolution be underpinned by a drive among fundamentalist religious forces to follow the path once forged by the Taliban in Afghanistan? Thankfully, there is little concrete evidence of this. The young men, and in some cases women, who are the forefront of the push against the corrupt dictatorships, reflect a western influence. The are among the better educated. They have turned to the internet for their inspiration. They are certainly not backward and inward-looking.
But so much remains only half understood. Who procured the guns being used by the rebels in Libya and how? What external forces might have been behind the popular uprising in any and all of these countries? Is the real target here the undermining of authority in Iran? And if so, is there any possibility that it might come to pass in that way?
If a new wave of authoritarian Islamist regimes were to result from the overthrow of the existing corrupt dictatorships in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya then there would be nothing to celebrate. But if a properly representative democratic form of government with votes for all adults and a parliament free to enact laws is the result, in one or more of the countries currently going through a period of turmoil, then that would indeed be a very significant watershed in contemporary history.
In the long run, militant Islamism will only cease to be a threat to those who live in Muslim-dominated countries if it can be defeated by the Arabic people. Now it seems that this is not entirely outside the bounds of possibility. But that its defeat is in the interests of all right thinking people, anywhere and everywhere in the world, is not in doubt. We have seen, in the recent execution in Pakistan of Salmaan Taseer and the campaigning Christian Shahbaz Bhatti, the complete obliviousness of the Pakistani Islamic government to any notion of human rights. And we have also seen, in the absence of any significant protest from other Islamic ruling elites, the extent to which they also care less about freedom of thought or expression.
There is an extent to which this poison has infected thinking in western democracies over the past 20 years – not least in Ireland, which has aped the most ignorant aspects of Islamist ideology with the introduction of a completely ham-fisted and ludicrously discriminatory Blasphemy Law. (By the way, it should be an immediate priority of the incoming administration to rescind this stone-age piece of legislation). As readers will be well aware, I have no time whatsoever for obscurantist Christian cults like Catholicism – but in fairness they are not in the game any longer of threatening to kill people who refuse to accept the existence of their God or their prophet. In contrast, the menace of violence has become such a staple part of the Islamist means of asserting itself, wherever its devotees gather, that even European governments have engaged in a shameful process of appeasement.
That this is wrong is self-evident. But the hope now is that it might just become irrelevant either way. Arabic youth at last have awakened from their slumber. There is hope after all. Long may it continue.