Four Seasons, One Spring: the Arab Revolutions

That the climate of sudden change which the Arab world entered ten years ago was characterized as a spring can be regarded, in the light of what was experienced afterward, as a somewhat hasty naming. Within the atmosphere of that climate, the demands for freedom, bread, justice and dignity that took the whole Arab world under their influence turned into effective social movements, and the toppling one by one of fifty-or-sixty-year dictatorships standing before this effect also evoked a desire for naming.

The Arab Spring conceptualization was in fact first used by Western circles, in reference to the social movements that appeared in Europe in 1848 and were called the "Spring of Nations," and to the pro-democracy movements that developed in Eastern Europe in 1948 and are referred to by names such as the Prague Spring. It later became the name of the roughly three-year process that followed.

THE PEOPLE WERE MADE TO REGRET HAVING ASKED FOR SOMETHING

What happened three years later, you ask? Three years later, beginning in Syria, and in Egypt, Libya and Yemen, where the revolutions were lived with legendary scenes and events, the process of counter-revolutions began. The democratic process the revolution had started was interrupted by coups, in a bloody manner. Totalitarian regimes far worse than before the revolution, or chaotic conditions, were inflicted on the peoples who had made revolutions. The Arab peoples were punished heavily, to be made to regret a thousand times that they had asked for the freedoms, bread and dignity they had longed for over a century. Thus the will of peoples who had set out to determine their own fate was suppressed with all the systematic instruments of repression, and the revolutionary process has been halted for now.

WITH RESPECT TO MAŞALLAH NAR

The Arab Spring, ten years of which have passed since its beginning, has been treated at length, country by country, on a balance-sheet basis, as the subject of the latest issue of Tezkire Magazine.

Issue 75-76, now under the General Publishing Directorship of Yunus Badem and published under the title "Four Seasons, One Spring: The Arab Revolutions," was edited by our dear brother Maşallah Nar, a lecturer in the History Department of Yıldırım Beyazıt University, whom we laid to rest at a young age on 29 October. Maşallah Nar, who had excellent Arabic and a very good capacity for analysis and questioning, as it were tells us how great a loss he is for us through this issue, which he completed and sent to the press just before his death. On this occasion I ask God's mercy for him. May our heads be sound.

Apart from the long editorial introduction Nar wrote, there is also an article of his titled "A Revolution Squeezed Between Two Extremes: Yemen." It addresses Yemen's being stuck in the impasse of a war that also involves different actors in the region, and, along with that, the dimension of the sectarian factor as an important driver determining the course and actors of the revolution. In his study, after offering a short background on Yemen's pre-revolution history, he tries to describe the conditions that prepared the revolutionary process and the shape the revolution took in the process that followed.

THE SPRING WAS FELT DIFFERENTLY IN EVERY COUNTRY

Undoubtedly, although the climate of the Spring took many countries under its influence, each country lived this process with its own conditions, its own specific historical, sociological and political balances. For example, in Egypt the existing Saudi Arabian and UAE investments and the relations of tutelage with a military stratum that controls almost the entire economy were decisive, while in Syria and Yemen the sectarian factor was an important driver determining the course and actors of the revolution. In countries like Libya, tribalism, which shapes the country's sociology, was in the role of the dominant actor. Tunisia, which first triggered the process, is a country that stands out among Arab countries for its high level of education.

Tunisia, despite all efforts, did not bow to counter-revolution plots until recent times. Indeed, in the days immediately after the coup in Egypt, when the footsteps of a coup began to be heard here too under the guise of popular demonstrations, the Tunisian people put on record a very meaningful message: "We exported revolution to the Arab peoples; we have no intention whatsoever of importing a coup in return."

Admittedly, in recent days there is a process, begun and continuing, through the elected President in Tunisia's suspending parliament and gathering all powers in his own hands. Tunisia's being brought down in the name of counter-revolutions has a symbolic importance that is valued in itself. Precisely for this reason, at the point we have reached, the officials of the UAE, who carry out, finance coups and support anti-democratic processes with their conspiratorial skills, are saying, at every turn, that with Tunisia's fall too they have achieved absolute victory in the war they launched against democratic Islamic movements.

WAS THE ARAB SPRING A PROJECT OF ISLAMISM?

That the UAE, which appears to have openly declared war against every kind of democratic or political representation or claim of Islam, and the powers behind it, have identified the Arab Spring process with Islamism is in fact the most important thing we should understand from the whole Spring.

The strange thing is that the Arab Spring was not a project of Islamism, was not a process Islamists set in motion, and was not a revolution in which Islamists were the most important actor. Even so, the relationship between Islamism's being targeted at the same time as the war opened on the Arab Spring is not incomprehensible.

Indeed, if Islamists were not decisive in the Arab Spring, how did they come around and become the primary victims of the process? If this process is not over, where will it continue?

Looking at the other articles in Tezkire Magazine as well, let us continue to seek answers to these questions in the next issue.