The first Arab revolts of the 21st century

Since mid-December, Tunisia was in revolt. There were mass demonstrations, mass strikes and finally riots. By the 14th of January, the news was out: President Benali and his family had fled.
For days after the president's downfall, snipers were on the roofs in Tunis and at least one other coastal city. No one knew who they were exactly or how many they were, but they were fighting those of the troops who still defended the fallen government.
A German newspaper showed pictures of teenagers carting away shopping trolleys of luxury goods with big smiles on their faces to a background of devastation: The villas of president Benali's clan and his family-in-law, the Trabelsi's, were looted and burnt down, every other house in the rich quarters of Tunis being spared.
An apocryphal story of the president's wife -whose family hold the biggest banks and businesses of the country - kept coming up: She was said to have taken out as many goldbars of the National bank as she could carry before flying out of the country. An episode which epitomized her and her clan's avarice.
Political prisoners were freed, whereas those members of the Ben Alis and Trabelsis who could not flee now sit imprisonned.

There were hopes of the events inspiring Arabs beyond the borders of Tunisia and the riots spilling over to other countries.

I am glad it was Egypt that took over from Tunis. Geographically and historically the centre of the Arab world, and also its most populous country, Egypt has many times played a leading role to other Arab nations in modern history, although it has considerably faded in importance in the past decades.
Already industrializing in the 19th century, it was one of the first Arab countries to acquire a working class, which through the inflow of European ideas was rapidly radicalized, ushering in a phase of strikes at the turn of the 20th century. By the 1940s, under the monarchy, Egypt's was among the strongest of Arab Socialist movements of the Arab world. Yet, Nasser and his 'Free Officers' were not sparing in their treatment of the Egyptian communists and likewise dismantled the Egyptian workers movement completely, executing some of its leaders. It was never to recover.
The liberalisation under president Sadat only allowed the social democrat movement Tagammu, which was never again to achieve the political importance that the workers’ movement had attained thirty years earlier.
Yet, the past decade has seen its moments: From 2006 onwards, Egypt saw the largest wave of worker's strikes in recent history. After the economically inspired so-called "Hunger Riots" of 2008 which sent Egyptians onto the streets in masses, these new mass uprisings are for the first time in decades explicitly political.

A couple of friends of friends I met friday night in Paris just came back from Egypt, where they made a radio documentary about political activism in that country. They had not even hoped to ride the tide of current affairs so right on as this!

Florent and Elodie mostly interviewed activists of the "6th of April" movement, which is a pro-democracy movement whose aim it is to bring people onto the streets, without a prescription for after the revolution, their idea being to bring about free elections in a pluralistic democratic system.
Other activists they met still said they belonged to Kefaya! ('Enough'), a platform that united all sorts of dissidents, be they liberalists, secularists or Islamists. Kefaya! originally took shape in 2002 in solidarity with the movement against the wall in Palestine, but today can formally be considered a dead letter, many individual members continuing their activism in their own way however.
Many of the other people they met and interviewed were individual bloggers, the internet being the one space where freedom can blossom to a certain degree. The fact that Facebook and Twitter play important roles in the mobilization of the masses, as they did in Iran and other countries in revolt, is by now a battered cliché of a truth.

According to Florent and Elodie, the turning point for Egyptians certainly was the 14th of January, when, in the late afternoon the slogan "Ben Ali has fled!" resounded on the streets of Tunis, being chanted by the crowds. Within a day the public opinion in Egypt changed from a shared resignation in the face of three decades of oppressive power, to a sense that everything is possible. The movement of the 6th of April suddenly became very active, and the day Florent and Elodie left Egypt, they were busy preparing the 25th of January, Police Day under Mubarak.

During the previous years this public holiday was honoured by thousands of people watching a police parade waving pennants, with a counter-demonstration of not more than a hundred people completely circled in by police and unable to move, typical of any demonstration before this January. As we have seen, this year's Police Day was spectacularly co-opted by more than 10,000 protestors taking to the streets.
Florent's prediction for the following weekend of the 29th/30th of January was one of total repression. Indeed the death toll rose by many dozens that weekend. But there were also moments when the military intervened to protect the protesters from police violence. Have you seen the photographs of people climbing onto the tanks?

In Egypt, like before in Iran, many months of rioting may ensue. By comparison, the positive aspect for Egypt is that the presidential elections take place in September and may well constitute the culminating point of a sustained uprising, and events may be swayed in a positive way. In Iran, as we have seen, the revolt fizzled out after many months at a great human price, with at least 122 deaths and the prisons overflowing with prisoners undergoing torture and rape. In Egypt the human cost has already shown to be of no less tragic proportions (an 'unconfirmed UN report' speaks of 300 victims during the course of the protests thus far), but there is hope for concrete outcomes of this.

Looking at the other "revolutions" (and inverted commas should indeed be used with this term more often) of the past decade does not make me optimistic however. In Georgia and Ukraine, quite frankly, not much has changed at all after the US-backed Orange and Rose 'Revolutions', corruption and cronyism still rule supreme. In Kirgistan, things went so badly out of hand after the 2005 Tulip 'revolution' that another coup d'état followed in 2010.
But: If anything, the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt right now are genuine expressions of the people, and they provide badly needed puffs of fresh air for the citizens of these autocratic regimes.