The Permanent Struggle

 “Diaries of an Unfinished Revolution – Voices from Tunis to Damascus,” edited by L. Al-Zubaidi, M. Cassel, 2013

These are revealing first-person accounts of the uprisings in various Arab locations during the so-called 'Arab Spring' – Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Yemen, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Syria. They were, broadly speaking, pro-democratic revolts against various forms of 'elected' authoritarian, dictatorial and theocratic capitalist governments. These activists are intellectuals, students or writers, evenly split between men and women, writing in a personal and literary style. In Tunisia, Yemen and Egypt, leaders were overthrown – yet all retained or gradually reinstalled another repressive government. The overthrow in Libya, with the help of NATO bombing, descended into chaos. The rebellion in Syria was taken over by jihadis. Other rebellions failed to oust anyone.

These rebellions are a foretaste of things to come. They prove the Marxist adage that democratic tasks cannot be achieved by any faction of the bourgeoisie or its state. It also illustrates the fact that any kind of 'revolution,' even a political one, is a continuous process. To be successful it should aim for a social overturn in the ownership and relations of production, not just exchanging one bourgeois politician for another – enchanting as that may seem. Most of these documents were penned in late 2011, so these are snapshots of that time. 

Tunisia – January 2011. A proletarian student activist and leader, Malek Sghiri, organizes students against the dictatorial Tunisian government and participates in fighting and driving out police from his poor home town of Tula. His parents and grand-parents are long-time rebels. He himself is some kind of former Marxist attuned to the Tunisian labor movement. He is arrested in Tunis, locked up and tortured in the Interior Ministry, only to be freed after the corrupt President of Tunisia, Ben Ali, flees the country after the all-country rebellion. He is wary of the success of 'the revolution' because some of Ben Ali's allies and fake revolutionaries still speak loudly. Tunisia has the first election in its history, but Sghiri knows conservative, identitarian and Islamist forces are bent on regaining power. His youth organization calls for the revolution to continue...

Egypt – 2008. A sometime expat from Cairo, Yasmine El Rashidi, returns to a crumbling Cairo, full of unemployment and the veil. The summer of 2010, a broken legal system, violent police, government corruption, increasing crime, inflation soaring and above it all, record heat – up to 50C. The November election saw candidates being disqualified, the press curbed, opposition candidates jailed, and a wave of thugs attacking opponents, with Mubarak's party winning overwhelmingly. An Islamist attack on Christians in Alexandria in January 2011 sparked a national mood against Mubarak and his useless government, uniting disparate elements. She shows that this moment of revolt was in the making for 30 years since Mubarak's ascendancy after Sadat. She describes bits of the 18 days of revolution and bloodshed in and around Tahrir Square, which resulted in Mubarak's resignation.

Libya – 2005 - A boy escapes Gaddafi's Libya, full of roving 'revolutionary' thugs, and lands in London. His name is Mohamed Mesrati. His family applies for asylum and finally gets it after 3 years. He considers his family part of a long line of artists, intellectuals and communists crushed by the regime at various times in its past. He goes to school in England. When the revolt breaks out in February 2011 against the state-nationalist government, he backs it via the internet, creating a FB page and communicating with his contacts in the country. His friends in Tripoli are eventually killed in the fighting. He supports the intervention of NATO jets, but has nothing much to say about what happened to Libya after that point. He does understand that Libya has never had any kind of democracy in its history.

Algeria - 2011 - A literate mother in Algiers, Ghania Mouffok, takes her son to watch demonstrations against the elected authoritarian Bouteflicka, who has held power for 20 years. His cops are the inheritors of the bloody 1954-1962 anti-colonial struggle against France – and are now turned into their opposite. The Robocops turn back the demonstrations in a country she describes as Mad Max – a cross between gasoline and beer. She remembers 500 red berets dead in 1988, dying in urban battle in her Algiers neighborhood – her quartier populaire - against the government. She has no patience for 'allies' like NATO. Other Arabs wait for Algeria to rise against its dictatorial president, but to her Algeria is too ruined, too exhausted, except for the young.

Yemen – 1990 - A young boy, Jamal Jubran, is brought from Eritrea to Sanaa. As a child he experiences violent colorism against his darker skin and language. As a young socialist journalist, he watches the ill-advised 1990 unification between state socialist South Yemen and tribal, rural North Yemen. It turns into a dictatorship of the head of North Yemen, Abdullah Saleh, who jailed, expropriated and abolished Southern civil society. He finished off any remnants of socialism by war in 1994, then dumbing-down Yemeni society into an Islamist dictatorship. Jubran continues to write articles against Saleh and his son. In 2011 students first went into the streets calling for Saleh's overthrow, later joined by young workers and tribalists. Dozens were shot and killed by snipers in 'the Square of Change” and other squares. Saleh was eventually forced out after 9 months of killing by international pressure. However his son and Party still remained in power.

Pearl Square - Bahrain

Bahrain – 2011 - In 1783 the Sunni Al-Khalifa tribe invaded the Bahraini islands and dominated the indigenous Shia. In 1971 Bahrain became independent from Britain, but in 1975 parliament was dissolved. In 2001 the King created an Islamic 'constitutional monarchy.' In February 2011 an uprising took place against the monarchists calling for representative government - first a 'reform' and then the downfall of the regime. Ali Aldairy is a Bahrani intellectual who supported the occupation of Pearl Square against theocratic ethnic sectarianism. As an 'intellectual' he descended from his ivory tower and reported events in person on Twitter©. The regime's police attacked protesters in Pearl Square, killing 7 and injuring many. A few days later police attacked funeral processions with live ammo. Only one paper reported on this and was closed down, while the others claimed it was an Iranian plot. After a period of unrest and then calm, in March Gulf military forces led by Saudi Arabia occupied Bahrain and Pearl Square, followed by severe repression against known rebels.

Saudi Arabia – 2011 – The most cruel and backward theocracy in the Gulf has no general rebellion and Safa Al Ahmad is ashamed. She wants to free political prisoners and allow women to drive, but sect and gender rule in Saudi. In Saudi, youth are taught that to revolt against even an incompetent ruler is against Islam and faith. So she goes to Cairo, Bahrain and Libya. In Libya she finds the conservative 'rebels' in Benghazi are partial to Islam and monarchy... sort of like Saudi. In Saudi, only the eastern Shia have the guts to protest, and they are later arrested, killed, detained or fired, with cities like Qutif militarized. She notes the Saudi Shia sheikhs are far behind their youth. Like other Middle Eastern governments, the Saudis routinely accuse oppositionists of being terrorists, criminals, drug users, gunmen or agents of other countries.

Syria – Early 2011 – Khawla Dunia knows Syrians have been afraid for years. So when demonstrations start in the city of Daraa against the anti-democratic Syrian state, she is surprised. The regime repressed any political party not theirs, including the Left. Daraa was the site of a protest by parents against the detention of children who had scrawled anti-regime sentiments on a wall. Daraa was blockaded and other cities came out in protest. In Damascus nearly every demonstrator hid. Many demonstrators were killed in Douma, Baniyas, Latakia and Homs by police, army or vigilante thugs, the shabiha. Some of these cities she visits to see what is going on. After months of demonstrations in late 2011 armed militias form and an actual civil war starts. Some of the most powerful were Salafist militias secretly aided by the U.S. She has little to say about this later development, as her document is dated in July 2011.

A valuable collection that allows you to peek into the different types of revolutions in these countries. It makes you wonder what will it take to break the stranglehold of repression in the Middle East.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms: “The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution” (Prashad); “Slave States – the Practice of Kafala in the Gulf Arab Region,” “Saudi Arabia Uncovered,” “FGM,” “Lipstick Jihad,” “Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire” “Rojava,” “God is Not Great” (Hitchens); “What is the War on Terror and How to Fight It.”

And I bought it at May Day's used/ cutout book section!

Red Frog

April 10, 2023