DUBAI – From Egypt to Jordan and Algeria to Yemen, Tunisia’s “Jasmine Revolution” has begun to undermine Arab regimes that have for decades maintained their control through fear, analysts say. “The question is who remains,” not which country is next, said Amr Hamzawy, the research director at the Carnegie Middle East Centre in Beirut, adding that popular protests could affect most Arab states except for Gulf oil monarchies.
“What we are seeing is a regional trend – not only about Tunisia. There are massive demonstrations in Egypt, protests in Algeria, Jordan and Yemen. “There have been some protest activities in the past in a scattered manner, but now there is a regional trend where citizens are taking to the streets to protest for social economic and political rights – it’s not a one-country issue and a one-day phenomenon,” Hamzawy said.
“It’s a dynamic that started in the Arab world,” said Burhan Ghalioun, the director of the Centre d’Etudes sur l’Orient Contemporain in Paris who in 1977 wrote a “Manifesto for Democracy” in the Arab world. “What happened in Tunisia has broken the shackles of fear and showed that it was possible – with surprising speed – to topple a regime, and that it wasn’t as difficult as the people imagined,” Ghalioun said.
Waves of protest in Tunisia inspired by Mohamed Bouazizi’s December 17 self-immolation led to Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fleeing to Saudi Arabia after 23 years in power. Protests that began on Tuesday in Egypt, the biggest there since 1977, are expected to intensify with the return later on Thursday of former International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed Elbaradei, now an opposition leader. The fever has also spread to Yemen, where thousands of people, apparently inspired by events in Tunisia and Egypt, staged a mass protest on Thursday calling on President Ali Abdullah Saleh to quit after being in power since 1978.
And in Jordan, the Islamist opposition has called for protests on Friday and warned it would continue campaigning to force political and economic reform in the kingdom. But Ghalioun said he does not think the protests will be “automatically contagious,” because each country is different. “The process of change (in different countries) will not be the same and will not resemble the others,” he said.
There is one common theme between the various protest movements: they are mostly the work of young people and the middle classes and are being organised via social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Traditional opposition parties have been conspicuous by their absence. “This is an (effect) of what autocratic governments have done to Arab politics in general,” Hamzawy said.
“Opposition parties and movements are weakened. They haven’t been able to reach out to citizens in a systematic manner – they have been isolated,” he said. “Citizens are now acting and reacting – no longer a party organisation, no longer trade unions. Citizens are lobbying and mobilising on the Internet and taking the mobilisation into the real world.”
