In mid-February, with the ousted and shamed Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak holed up in Sharm al-Sheikh, Saudi Arabian leader, King Abdullah, made the first of two defining calls.
Cairo’s Tahrir Square was still a heaving sea of euphoria, as the aging monarch resolved to write-off US president Barack Obama as a friend that could no longer be trusted.
“The Saudis were stunned by what had just happened in Cairo,” said a western ambassador, who heard first hand the ire of Riyadh at the US knifing of the Egyptian autocrat. “They said that if the US can do that to a friend of 30 years, then no one is safe.
“By early February they decided that with no one giving them cover, they would look after themselves, regardless of what it meant for some relationships.”
To contemplate such a move, even weeks earlier, would have been close to unthinkable for Riyadh, which had enjoyed and prospered from close ties with successive US presidents dating back many decades.
But these were clearly extraordinary times. The four proceeding weeks had seen two entrenched old-guard autocracies fall through a manner that was unprecedented in the Arab world: unrestrained people power.
They had also seen the US make good – albeit reluctantly at first – on a new regional policy, which reversed the 60-year-old formula of stability trumping democracy. When Obama deferred to the millions in Tahrir Square, the ‘new Middle East’ hailed by former US secretary of state Condoleeza Rice five years earlier became an irrefutable reality.
Nothing seemed certain anymore – except that the stirrings of revolution would soon take hold elsewhere. Every country, from Morocco to Yemen, was a Tunisia or Egypt in the making. Societies that had deferred to their leaders for decades suddenly saw less reason to fear them.
The jolt of confidence was electrifying. “All of a sudden we had momentum to an issue that we had been pushing for years,” said Alaa Hussein, an emergency ward doctor in Bahrain’s Salmaniya Medical Centre in March. “Self-determination was all Bahraini Shias had wanted for all my lifetime, and here was the chance to seize it.”
SAUDI MOVE
Within days, the Saudis had played their hand, formulating a plan for an invasion of Bahrain (couched as a protection force along with forces from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states), which was unambiguously aimed at stopping the Arab Spring dead in its tracks.
It was a seminal moment in what has since become a remarkable nine months. And there were times when the Saudi intervention seemed likely to achieve its ends.
“The Saudi troop push into Bahrain was a potent event,” says a senior British official. “The Saudis played the sectarian card and made it all about ancient rivalries – them and the Iranians. They needed the narrative to move away from little people making legitimate demands. To them it had to be more sinister.”
Bahrain worked hard to convince critics of its security crackdown that the tens of thousands of Shia demonstrators who poured onto the streets of Manama were pawns in an Iranian conspiracy.
The island state’s Crown Prince acknowledged that many of the demonstrators did have reasonable demands; they were after all denied access to many areas of the establishment, which was dominated by an old-guard Sunni elite and a smattering of imported residents – almost exclusively Sunni.
But to the rest of the monarchy and to the Saudis, whose Shia minority (around 12% of the population) live in the east of the country that borders Bahrain, the street protests were little more than a subversive plot that had to be crushed quickly, no matter the cost.
As Saudi forces gathered near the causeway separating the Sunni Arab world power house and the tiny kingdom, powerful currents were stirring elsewhere.
Yemenis, long the poor cousins of the Arabian Peninsula, had found their voice and were raging at the autocrat who had ruled them for three directionless decades, Ali Abullah Saleh.
They took to the streets in ever-increasing numbers, at times among torrents of bullets from rooftop snipers, in scenes that emboldened a people who for so long had been told that only unaccountable strongmen could shape their destinies.
After Tunisia, and Egypt, that narrative had been proved a folly. There was, after all this time, a price to pay for decades of decay, torpor and theft. People were rapidly realizing that they had a say in their futures and a right to choose who represented them.
LIBYAN SURPRISE
Protestors then took to the streets in Jordan and Kuwait. But stirrings there simmered as quickly as they started. Then came Libya.
In the guessing game at the time of where an uprising would next take hold, Libya was hardly a short-priced favourite. Colonel Gaddafi’s Great Socialist People’s Jamahiriya was as uncompromising a police state as they get. Only Saddam’s Iraq or Hafez al-Assad’s Syria could rival it for brutality and ruthless control.
So when a demonstration started outside the justice building in Benghazi to mark the detention of several lawyers, the response was predictable. Gaddafi sent one of his sons, Saadi, to find out what the people of Benghazi wanted. He also dispatched a military unit to the waterfront area where the protests were taking place. They set up machine gun positions, which on February 17 opened fire.
“We were lawyers looking for human rights,” says Salma Begaigis at the time. “It was a rights protest as much as a political protest, but this time the people decided not to stop.”
Within three days, Benghazi’s military bases were under attack by the city’s furious residents.
The heavy weapons of Gaddafi’s forces didn’t deter the thousands who swarmed to state buildings and institutions, burning and looting them as regime men fled for Tripoli. This was hardly a peaceful protest. It was a rage of the dispossessed, which unambiguously said that the tyranny of the past four decades had been broken.
“From then the people were never going back to their homes,” says Begaigis. “We had to make it work.”
SYRIA
And by that point, a cast of other regional and global players had a vested interest in the uprisings. None more so than Syria. As old guards crumbled in Tunisia and Egypt, Syrian leader Bashar Al-Assad was trying to safeguard his regime with a series of pre-emptive, but largely cosmetic, changes he thought he could sell as reforms.
Assad calculated that to do too much would weaken his authority, but to do too little could have the same effect. So he cut three months off the time conscripts must serve in the military, gave rebates for cooking and heating fuel and pledged to subsidize the cost of computers for teachers.
And then came the unthinkable. The uprising in the southern city of Deraa in March quickly spread to other areas of Syria. The most strategically important state in the region was soon very much in play, and along with it the alliances that have converged to make it such a potent regional power. Assad’s Syria had derived much of its status by casting itself as a conduit for resistance forces – in particular Hezbollah and Hamas.
“Here was a chance to fall wholeheartedly behind the rarest of things in the Arab world,” said a western ambassador in Egypt in late-March. “This was a genuine popular uprising, an event brought on because people could finally see that there was another way, that they were not hapless subjects for evermore, their fates intertwined with the whim of a leader.
“Three hundred thousand kids with smart phones and web access did in a month what governments had only talked of doing for 50 years. It was too good to be true.”
And within days, the diplomat’s assessment was fast becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. By late March, Gaddafi’s ousted army was on its way back east and the nascent rebel leadership was in full retreat. Gaddafi vowed to hunt the rebels down and finish the job within days – a mission that, had he achieved it, would have likely been a death knell to the uprisings elsewhere and could even have wound back the results of Tunisia and Egypt.
The unprecedented surge of people power was being transformed from an unstoppable force to a movement that was in spasms and at risk of fading away.
With Gaddafi on Benghazi’s outskirts, Europe and the US deployed its air forces, but not before being given cover by the Arab League, who turned on Gaddafi despite its initial inclinations.
“Obama would not have sent in the birds unless he had regional cover,” said the western official. “He had been determined from the outset that he would not be seen as a unilateralist. It had to be a collective effort, and he did not want to be in the driver’s seat.”
The Nato-led bombing campaign that followed was at times derided and took longer than expected to make its mark. As jets steadily picked off regime targets across Libya, a popular movement in Syria was gathering steam, and a vengeful regime was doing all it could to derail it.
“The Libyan intervention gave us comfort in some ways,” says a member of a Syrian opposition group, the Local Coordination Committees, in exile in Beirut. “We knew that the jets were not coming to help us, but it was comforting to know that the regime could never really trust that they weren’t.”
From April to September, Assad was willing to call the bluff of the international community, calculating correctly that the situation in Syria was far removed from Libya. Damascus was hugely strategically significant, while Gaddafi’s Libya wasn’t. Assad’s security forces tortured and killed with impunity, as Europe, the UN and the US pleaded impotently for them to stop.
In Libya, plaintive cries for a ceasefire, even murmurs about Gaddafi fleeing to exile, were ignored, and the bombing continued until late-August, when the breakthrough that many had began to doubt finally came.
The scenes of rebels streaming into downtown Tripoli while Gaddafi’s men fled ignominiously south were a jolt that the region needed. The promise of the Arab Spring had led to the acetylene heat of a summer that had steadily unwound some earlier gains. Finally, at the turn of another season, a third regime had fallen.
As the year has rolled on, the bonds to each group have been jeopardized. The link to Hamas is looking particularly shaky because of the Sunni Islamic group’s support for the Egyptian revolution, which has made life difficult in Damascus for Hamas politburo chief Khaled Meshaal.
Soon, Hezbollah’s supply line, which runs straight from Damascus, was imperilled. And so was Iran’s foothold in the Arab world. In a clear acknowledgement of the forces at work in Syria, both Iran and Hezbollah said they were prepared to work with opposition groups.
“They are hedging their bets,” says Wissan Tarif of the rights group Avaaz. “This is a profound moment for them, and Iran is having to show it is pragmatic, that Assad isn’t everything for them.”
By September, the regional phenomenon was potentially no less dramatic or profound than the fall of the Soviet Union 22 years earlier. In many ways, the Arab autocracies were relics of the cold war; Marxist mindsets were still rife in state institutions; and some countries, Libya and Syria among them, remained insular and paranoid, peeking out only occasionally from behind totalitarian walls.
However, the stock take post-Gaddafi remains complex. Egypt and Tunisia are yet to harness the energy and drive of their revolutions for truly transformative change. Yemen, despite Saleh’s extended time out of the country, remains the flat tyre of the uprisings.
And the stirrings of discontent in Algeria, Saudi Arabia and Morocco have been subdued. What to make of the Arab Spring thus far seems very much focused on Bahrain and Syria, two states that have ground down their uprisings through aggressive security operations combined with minimal concessions.
Saudi Arabia has taken comfort from the fact that Washington has had little leverage in Bahrain, where the US Fifth Fleet remains at anchor along with its core interests in the Gulf.
“The Saudis have made it clear that if the US wants to take them on, then they will have no hesitation in looking to China and India for new alliances,” says the western ambassador. “This would be a bigger setback for them than the Arab Spring unwinding. In the end whether this is a success or not is going to come down to domestic expediency, far more than ideology.
“And whether it goes on from here to be as transformative as the end of the Cold War will very much depend not on Libya, which is a sideshow, but on one country only, Syria.”