In this week’s New Statesman, we publish a special spread on revolt in the Arab world, featuring Tariq Ramadan, Lana Asfour, Mehdi Hasan and Maajid Nawaz.
Maajid Nawaz spent four years in prison in Egypt between 2002 and 2006 for his role as leader of the pan-Islamist Hizb ut-Tahrir. In this week’s New Statesman, Nawaz discusses life in one of Mubarak’s torture centres.
I was “Number 42” in the dungeons of Hosni Mubarak’s torture facilities. Before me were 41 poor souls, taken one by one and electrocuted. Behind me were hundreds more. Wives were stripped and tortured in front of their husbands, children electrocuted in front of their parents. Few returned from the darkness of Cairo’s el-Gihaz and Lazoughly cells . . .
Mubarak’s Egypt perfected the art of torture without leaving a mark. His was a regime that terrorised an entire population into silence. His was a regime that basked in the lavish attention of western leaders while Egyptian Islamists, communists and democrats all lived in fear. Now it’s game over for him and his regime.
The Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan comments on a time of momentous change in the Arab world and asks who will fill the power vacuum being created in the Middle East.
“A barrier has fallen,” writes Ramadan. “Nothing will be the same again. It is quite likely that other countries will follow the lead of Egypt, given its central and symbolic significance.”
Presidents and kings are feeling the pressure of this historical turning point. The unrest has reached Algeria, Yemen and Mauritania. One should also look at Jordan, Syria and even Saudi Arabia. The rulers of all these countries know that if the Egyptian is collapsing, they run the risk of the same destiny.
Egypt could well prove the tipping point for reform and democracy in the Arab world, according to Ramadan.
This state of instability is worrying and at the same time very promising. The Arab world is awakening with dignity and hope. The changes spell hope for true democrats, and trouble for those who would sacrifice democratic principle to their economic and geostrategic calculations.
What will fill the power vacuum is not solely the decision of the populace in the Arab world, however.
Neither the United States nor Europe, not to mention Israel, will easily allow the Egyptian people to make their dream of democracy and freedom come true. The strategic and geopolitical considerations are such that the reform movement will be, and is already, closely monitored by US agencies in co-ordination with the Egyptian army, which has played for time and assumed the crucial role of mediator.
Lana Asfour reports from the epicentre of the Arab revolt, Tunisia.
Whatever Tunisia’s political landscape will look like in six months, it is clear that the hard work is just beginning. Tunisia has to address institutional corruption after years of dictatorship and learn how to exercise democracy in all areas of life.
But the novelty of freedom has still not worn off, according to Asfour.
Back on the tree-lined Habib Bourguiba Avenue [in Tunis], the mood is exuberant. People are proud of what they have achieved and delighted to be able to speak freely without threat of arrest and torture.
It has been a very civilised revolution, she argues:
What is reassuring about this revolution is that there is little desire for vengeance against those who had ties to the RCD. Tunisia, which can boast a highly educated population and equal rights for women, has conducted a very civilised revolution.
Finally, Mehdi Hasan attacks the crude use of revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt in order to justify George Bush’s foreign policy in the region.
Blair and Bush were not interested in Arab freedom and democracy initially, argues Hasan.
Freedom for the Iraqis became the primary justification for the war only after weapons of mass destruction turned out to be a figment of the neoconservative imagination.
It wasn’t that we were opposed to a “freedom agenda” in the Middle East but that we rejected the neocon formula that said democracy could be delivered through the barrel of a gun. We objected to the means, not the ends.
In a 2007 report, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace noted that the Bush administration had friendly relations with more than half of the 45 “non-free” countries in the world. Those included Egypt and Tunisia – the latter is now free from the grip of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali and the former, at the time of writing, is on the brink of liberation from Mubarak’s police. Jordan, Yemen and Saudi Arabia could be next. And the neocons, smug and sanctimonious, can’t take credit for any of these events. Are we all neocons now? Of course not.
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