Middle East: the State of the Revolution Address

In Which Ash Recovers from Dropping the Ball on the Protest Movement, Rounds That Collective Craziness Up and Tries to Achieve Some Sense of Scale of the thing.

So I took a little vacation for a few days and travelled haphazardly around central Ontario, and when I finally came to rest in the fine nation's capital and decided I might need to check my email, I checked the news in the Middle East.

Silly Ash, being MIA during the middle of a burgeoning regional revolution.

Suffice it to say that shit's going down.
Wanna hear about it?
(Note to the Geographically Spooked: If you feel like you've never heard of any of these countries, that's fine--the clickable wonder of wikipedia in each header will help with that. Go do some map-learnin! We live in interesting times!)

Algeria
Protests started early and strong in Algiers, and the 19th's demonstration came up against 30,000 riot cops. They stopped them from marching, but it's unlikely they'll stop protesting. If this is surprising to you, you haven't been paying attention.

Bahrain

Bahrain
Manama's been through a lot in the last few days, largely from police firing into swelling but peaceful crowds. Folks seem to want the monarchy and the attendant government out, and are having a good ol' Tahrir-style love in at Pearl Roundabout to make their point. Shi'ite and Sunni Muslims, usually a little tense around each other in Bahrain, are coming together quite nicely. Apparently nothing builds community like a good old democratic revolution. Oh, and there's a national general strike! Those are fun!

China
Whaaaaat? China?? Apparently so! Under the Great Firewall squeaks the rumours of brewing protests in the now-familiar flavour of Jasmine Revolution. Mmm mmm good. Watch this space, if the news can escape the great google-scramblers of Mao and co.

Djibouti
East Africa has actually been protesting since Jan 28th! Who knew? Tired of Ismail Omar Guelleh for President, demonstrators surrounded a stadium and don't want to go home until they get what they want. Then again, they're being beaten with batons and tear gassed.

Iran

Marraketch in Morocco

Protests in Tehran are being menaced by basiji militia tear gas and batons and a bunch of people detained in Shiraz. However, Iranians are my personal heroes for being the original face of Middle Eastern protest movements, so I've got significant faith that they're not going anywhere. Even though there are 1984-esque stories coming out of the unofficial state media that there are no protests happening anyway. Sure.

Iraq
Oh my god, they want better government services and for someone to handle unemployment--say it ain't so. People in Basra and other large cities took to the streets in the thousands. Also, someone wrote the word "Governor" on a donkey in the middle of a square in Kut. Cheeky.

Jordan
For the last seven weeks, Friday has been "quick!-flood-the-square" day in Jordan, but the demonstrations against the absolute monarchy aren't quite at the same level of cohesion as some of the other places on this illustrious list. They also appear to be getting more violent, slowly. Lame.

Libya
After Four days of crazy, there are loads dead. The Guardian says that "talk of massacres is not exaggerated"--the army keeps firing on protestersin Benghazi. Media's not blacked out, although reports fly that they're trying. You may remember their president from his cablegate-publicized botox and hot nurse: after 42 years in power, Muammar al-Qaddafi's still a big jerk. Protests have spread to Tripoli, and are not slowing down.

Morocco
With the wholesale rejection of "a constitution made for slaves", thousands turn out for peaceful protests in a bunch of Moroccan major cities. Marraketch has apparently degraded into violence, with protesters sacking the police station and government buildings. The state media is covering it, though, which may give credence to the government's insistence that it's much more liberal than the rest of these goons running the Mid East. Protesters still want a new constitution, a change in government, and for the overall smog of corruption to clear though.

Yemen

Yemen
Sanaa's been protesting for 11 days now, and 3,000 students in the streets have pushed President Saleh past his initial concessions ("I swear I won't run after 2013 guys. Unlike the last 30 years, I'm super serious this time.") and into claims he's ready to dialogue. It's actually pretty complicated, though, so AJE breaks it down with the usual insight and grace.




Extra Credit: 
Tunisia

40,000 folks were back on the streets of Tunis again protesting the interim government's persistence, and demanding that the remainders of the regime they overthrew actually leave the seat of power.

Egypt

Once again, AJE makes my week with this feature on the fantabulous women of Tahrir Square. No swimsuit competition, no irrelevant talent component, only the excellence of inspirational and ballsy Arab women, knockin it out the park.

So Egypt Wins....So What?

If you've been within eyeshot of a major media outlet in the last two weeks, you probably have clued in that big things are happening in Egypt. If you've been reading this blog, or basically any news anywhere, you probably have also clued in that a) a peaceful, populist democratic revolution has ousted an authoritarian president that has been seated for 30 years, and b) this is unabashedly awesome.

What you might not totally get is why. And that's completely understandable.
So Why the Hell Is This So Important?
The reasons that the success of the Egyptian revolution has everyone atwitter (haha. ha. Ash you're lame.) can be clumsily classed into the following three categories:
Egypt leads the way.
Being the most populous Arab nation, geopolitically centrally located, and generally containing a little bit of everything important about the region, Egypt tends to lead the way in the Middle East. Things they do tend to set standards and precedents on an international level--and they also tend to trend.
The fact that they just overthrew their US-propped-dictator added such crazy burgeoning momentum to the regime-toppling force released by the Tunisian revolution that protests intensified in Yemen, Jordan, Algeria, and the Gabon. It's resulted in a lot of speculation about whether or not this practice of insisting on responsible government was going to keep up--and which world leaders are in trouble if it does.

Democratic Egypt = Irritating Cracks in US Imperialism

stay classy, New York Post. Derp.

The change of the guard means that the US has less control over the region. The now-deposed Mubarak regime received 1.3billion USD in military aid every year, which tended to buy a lot of party-line-toeing on its participation in the war on Iraq, or their shared border with Gaza and the 30-year peace treaty signed with Israel. The lack of US involvement in this Egyptian democracy business makes Israel and the US very nervous, seeing disrupted trade, islamofascist regimes and the spectre of pesky Iran ruining their perfectly stable, if perfectly brutal, middle-Eastern setup. That setup, it's worth mentioning, includes cosy relationships with many of the aforementioned authoritarian world leaders possibly in trouble for political douchebaggery.

Also, it's problematic that the majority of the Western world was seen hmming and hawing about the protests, being diplomatic and shaking fingers without actually coming to the support of the most popular revolution since at least the 70's. This is a problem for two reasons: 1) the aforementioned 1.3 billion in military aid meant that the power that Mubarak had--and abused--for so long was a direct result of the US giving it to him; and 2) the US has spent trillions of dollars and thousands of lives trying to INSTALL democracy in the middle East, so anything less than an unequivocal joygasm of unqualified support for such an overwhelmingly popular democratic movement seems patently spurious to me.

And finally,
A Peaceful Democratic Revolution Just Happened. And that's kind of a miracle.
In Tahrir Square, a functional, unified community sprang up out of the craziness of sectarian violence and a divided population, because of a shared vision for a better Egypt. Within days, the protesters had clinics, sleeping areas, food and water stations, phone and computer charging access, and media screens broadcasting AJE for anyone who needed them. Twentysomethings spontaneously organized the sexy revolutionary duties of trash pickup every morning. When "pro-Mubarak" thugs stormed the square, they set up checkpoints to screen for weapons and welcome people to the demonstrations. They organized local musician and artist showcases. They organized football tournaments in the square for kids. They held Christian mass in the Square, just as they protected each other during Muslim prayers. They protected foreign journalists from angry police during media crackdowns.

They did all of this without central leadership.

That is the most fundamentally inspirational thing about the Egyptian Revolution to me--the fact that I just watched democracy -happen-, in such an unadulterated, people-first way that Western powers barely recognized it as democracy, springing from the grassroots alone.
This matters because it reaffirms, in the eyes of the entire world, that stuff of this incredible calibre CAN  ACTUALLY STILL HAPPEN.
Egypt reminded me that the struggle against power is neither futile nor unreasonable.
And that is absolutely invaluable.

So that's what.