I will never know whether Mohammed Bouazizi would still set himself on fire in Tunisia if someone had shown him the summary newsreel of the five years since his death. His personal despair and the progress he unsuspectingly brought to his country aside, what has transpired in almost the rest of the Arab world since 2011 makes anyone with conscience cringe. States have collapsed, democratic governments have been toppled, wars have erupted, millions uprooted and have become refugees, over two million of them finding peace in Turkey. A religious terrorist outfit called Daesh —we don’t want to acknowledge their silly claim to caliphate by repeating it in English—has come to rule over a stretch of territory carved out of two states. Another ethnical terrorist outfit, the PYD, has jumped opportunistically forward to fight the Daesh and thus seek to legitimise its control of territory in Syria. Foreign powers and fighters came into the fold. A confusion erupted about the concept of national sovereignty as if that meant that a government could legitimately call in foreign troops to carpet-bomb its own civilian populations. A sectarian strife is also up in the air shrouding geopolitical rivalries and dangerous pent-up ambitions across a key hydrocarbon hub.
One of the greatest fallacies of our times, however, is the belief that the eruption of people power was unavoidable. The fact is, the region in question has not been governed well in the last century. Human development reports prepared by the UNDP since 2002 have been showing the consequences of bad governance. Add to it destructive geopolitics, the curse of oil, and lack of a viable regional order and youthful population, not to mention the subversive appeal created by proximity to peace and welfare zones of Europe, including Turkey, and one has a Molotov cocktail. Even radicalisation takes place in such a setting and not in isolation, and most certainly not due to the dictates of the faith. That the statistics showing decline in relation to the rest of the world were abused to justify the Iraq invasion or that they are cited too often should not change the fact of the matter.
Perhaps the Syrian implosion may have been avoided. There was a time when there was no foreign meddling and a Syrian political solution could have been found. Hell broke loose after the government decided to steamroll popular political demands; all of them the democratic world would not hesitate to consider legitimate. This was about the time when India too was experiencing street protests. How absurd it would have been if the government had sent in military aircraft, tanks and missiles, and called in foreign advisers to bomb Bengaluru and Chennai in reaction to crowds supporting Anna Hazare. I would refuse to succumb to relativism and not consider it absurd that the Syrian government bombs its own cities and then claims legitimacy. The Arabs deserve as much as anyone else to be governed well and live in peace and prosperity.
It is equally absurd to think that the governments and established elites threatened by change would not fight back to preserve their lucrative deal. Of course, a democracy fights back within democratic legitimacy and an authoritarian regime fights back in an authoritarian way. Wholesale opposition or even condemnation of change for fear of instability stands in contradiction to the very idea of human progress. That is how history is made and the human civilisation has progressed. As such, whatever the verdict on this phase of the Arab Spring, the next phase is to be expected until the region is governed well and the regional order relates to reality on the ground.
Nonetheless, a cardinal problem that our generation faces—not just in Western Asia—is what David Brooks called “a tone of ugliness creeping across the world”. And, if that means that democracy is in decline and tribalism is on a march, it would not only be the Arab world who would suffer.
I will never know whether Bouazizi would still set himself on fire if he knew what was to come, but more tragedy is under way. May he and all the victims of authoritarianism and tribalism rest in peace.
Burak Akcapar is a Turkish ambassador, professor and author. You can follow him on his twitter handle @akcapar.
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