The balance sheet of ten years in the Arab Spring: friends and enemies of democracy

Although ten years have passed since the day it began, and in many countries it has been turned into winter through counter-revolutions or attempts have been made to end it, the Arab Spring is an ongoing process. A wind of change that began to blow on 17 December 2010 continues to exert its effect, at places turning into storms and traveling throughout the Islamic world.

Just as it is not possible for this process of change to be completed in every country with a revolution accomplished in a few days, it is also not something that can be destroyed by a counter-coup together with the entire sociological ground that sets it in motion in the background. In fact, through this process one can trace the sociological and political conditions and changes across the whole Arab-Islamic world, and striking observations can also be made about the positions of all international powers and actors by virtue of the attitudes and stances they have adopted toward this process.

As we have said before, the new sensitivities this process has set in motion have also established an unnamed new cold war order encompassing many countries of the world. Today we are experiencing the tensions and conflicts of this cold war order all over the world. In this process, the levels of validity or convertibility within the Islamic world of such discourses as democracy, human rights and freedoms, which since the 19th century have worked with great arrogance as the scouting arm of colonialism over the Islamic world, created great disappointment.

It was seen that the said Western values are conceived by Western countries not to be applied across the whole world but only to be applied in their own countries, and that they have nothing universal about them. For it was Muslim peoples who demanded democracy, human rights, freedom and human dignity in the Arab world, and those who resisted granting them were the dictators who until now had leaned their backs on the West.

When the first waves of the Arab Spring hit the shores, Western public opinion found the sounds they made familiar at first, and welcomed them with joy as a conquest of the Western mentality. After all, there was nothing to be alarmed about; the Arabs, too, were at last discovering Western values and coming to faith. Yet for Arabs who had been living for a century under an inhuman colonialism and despotism, concepts such as bread, freedom, justice and dignity could not have a Western or an Eastern side. Perhaps in this commotion they even found it unnecessary to bring up the subject of colonialism, but they had not forgotten that the lack of these values actually stemmed from the Western colonial administrations under which they lived. Perhaps Western public opinion, put to sleep with the same lies, could not know this either, but it seems Western rulers neither did not know nor had forgotten.

Those who until now, under the headings of "Islam and democracy" and accompanied by questions of "why Islam and democracy do not fit," had been brewing boza on the necks of Muslims were now at a loss as to what to do in the face of the strongest demand for democracy coming from Muslims. Was democracy really a suitable regime for Muslim peoples? Suitable for Muslim peoples, so that Muslims demand it, but what if Islamic countries really were governed by democracy: could we still govern them as easily as before?

This question may seem like a forced attribution to the Western mentality. Yet looking both at their approach to the coup attempts in Turkey and especially at their approach to the coups in Egypt and Libya, it is the question that best sums up the Western point of view on this matter.

Indeed, against the first President in Egyptian history chosen through honest elections, in a bloody, massacre-ridden military coup carried out within a year of his election on the pretext that he had failed, they did not even call it a coup. Despite the massacres the coup-plotters committed, the arbitrary arrests and the torture, they continued their relations with them as if nothing had happened, virtually rewarding the coup-plotters.

France, regarded as the cradle of Western democracy, did not shrink from cooperating with Haftar, who staged a coup against the legitimate administration in Libya, and from becoming a partner in his massacres and crimes against humanity. What they did in Syria we do not even count.

In contrast, they supported, one way or another, all of the coup attempts that FETÖ strung together in Turkey. They remained blind and deaf to the epic of democracy the Turkish people wrote on 15 July. Perhaps without precedent even in Europe, the defense the people put up while defending their democracy with their blood and lives is an epic worthy of being written on the golden pages of the history of democracy in general, but the Europeans chose to ignore it. Not only did they do this; after the failed coup they spread their wings over the fugitive criminals, and did not neglect to give them all their logistical, political and financial support in the war they had opened against Turkey, in fact against democracy.

Thus we can say that the Arab Spring process made one of its most important revolutions by refuting the Western world's claim of universality for its own values, and by ending the moral superiority the West had been maintaining on democracy and human rights.

Thanks to the Arab Spring it was seen very clearly that the real enemies of democracy in the Islamic world are not Muslims or Islamic culture or local forces, but on the contrary the Westerners who consider democracy too much for these countries, and their collaborators in these countries.

If we recall, when the motion to send US soldiers to Iraq was rejected in the Turkish Grand National Assembly on 1 March 2003, articles titled "Do we really want democracy in the Islamic world?" were written in the American press. Yes, perhaps they wanted democracy, especially in Turkey, but not that much, that is, not so much as to say no to the US as well.

If the Arab Spring has done nothing else, it has made this revolution, and of course it has not stopped there; it does not stop.