Demands for Dignity And Opportunity In Tunis and Cairo

MOMENTUM SEEMS TO be building for a political evolution in Egypt and around the region, many here say, and calls for change are less and less linked to a particular ideology like Islamism. Instead, analysts and activists say the forces that brought people to the streets in Tunisia and across Egypt this past week are far more fundamental and unifying: concrete demands to end government corruption, institute the rule of law and ease economic suffering.

Tens of thousands of protesters clashed with police in Cairo and other cities across Egypt on Tuesday as antigovernment activists, some of whom said they were inspired by events in Tunisia, sought to transform a national holiday honoring the police into a “day of revolution.” They called for the end of President Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year rule.

Mohammed Ashraf, a 22-year-old law student, said the blood drenching his white sweater was from a police officer. Like other protesters, he echoed the deep-seated frustrations of an enduring, repressive government that drove Tunisians to revolt: rampant corruption, injustice, high unemployment and the simple lack of dignity accorded them by the state.

“Our government is unjust,” Mr. Ashraf said. “I’m not happy. The state is very aggressive with people.”

A young doctor, Wissam Abdulaziz, said she had traveled two hours to join the protest. “I came to change the government,” she said. “I came to change the entire regime.”

Such attitudes were behind the largest street protests ever seen under the Mubarak regime.

“Ideology now has taken a back seat until we can get rid of this nightmare confronting everyone,” said Megahed Melligi, 43, a longtime member of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the most powerful and proscribed opposition movement, which he said he quit three years ago out of frustration. “This nightmare is the ruling party and the current regime. This is everyone’s nightmare.”

In 1979, the Iranian revolution introduced the Muslim world to the force of political Islam, which frightened entrenched leaders, as well as the West. That ideology still has a powerful hold on people across the region, which continues to feed fighters to jihadist movements. But like Arabism and socialism before it, the political Islam of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran and the radicalized ideology of Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden have failed to deliver in practical ways for the millions of people across the Middle East who live in bastions of autocratic rule.

That failure - and now the success of the Tunisians in bringing down their government - appears to be at the heart of a political recalculation among some about how best to effect change in the Arab world. The Tunisians were joined together by anger at oppression and corruption rather than any overarching philosophy.


Frustration with corruption, authoritarian rule and unemployment is rife in the Arab world. A protest over December elections in Egypt. AHMED ALI/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Even before the Tunisian revolution, Egyptian activists from the both sides of the political spectrum had been increasingly pointing not to Iran’s revolution as a model, but to Turkey’s method of governance, where an Islamic party runs a modern, democratic and accountable state.

One of the groups that joined the protests in Egypt this week, the April 6th Youth Movement, emphasizes its absence of ideology in its description on its Web site: “Nothing brings us together except our love for this country and the desire to reform it.” Abdel-Halim Qandil, a leader in another protest movement, called Kifaya, or Enough, said: “People in the West are talking about the religious ‘threat.’ They don’t understand what kind of hell we are in right now. The country is congested and people are unable to confront the regime.”

While Tunisia is a far more secularized society than other Arab states, its citizens’ demands are the same as those being heard in many nations in the region, even those rich in oil wealth like Kuwait. There are many places thick with disillusionment over the failure of formal political parties and organizations, like the Muslim Brotherhood’s political arm in Jordan and the traditional opposition parties in Egypt, which have failed to deliver change.

“This is exactly what the Tunisian case shows us,” said Emad Shahin, an Egyptian scholar at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. “It’s not the age of ideology anymore. This concern about ideology and certain political orientations of Islamism is really over. There are more pressing issues that all the players, including the Islamists, are interested in now and have to deal with.”

This is not to say that organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood have lost influence or followers. Although the group has been outlawed by the state, it has a broad network of social services around Egypt .

But the movement’s leaders are from a generation that focuses foremost on survival, which means avoiding confrontation with the state, political analysts said. That position has alienated some of its younger members.


Riot police in Egypt marched toward protesters during parliamentary elections in November. GORAN TOMASEVIC/REUTERS

“The ones who are there and working without calculating every little thing are the youth,” Mr. Melligi said. “They have nothing to lose. They don’t have headquarters and organizational structures for the government to target.”

Another unexpected element since the events in Tunisia has been the emergence of self-immolation . The revolution in Tunisia started with just such a desperate act - when a young food vendor burned himself to death after the police humiliated him.

The practice has spread across northern Africa and in the Middle East. A man in Saudi Arabia died after self-immolating in the first case of its kind in the country. In Egypt, at least five men have set themselves ablaze .

The first Egyptian to burn himself recently, Abdo Abdel-Moneim Hamadah, was a vendor protesting the denial of state-subsidized bread. A relative said that Mr. Hamadah’s protest was not about bread but dignity, the same intangible that drove Mohamed Bouazizi, the young food vendor from Tunisia, to light himself on fire.

“They spoke to him like he was a beggar,” said the relative, who spoke anonymously .

Mr. Hamadah survived and the government turned over the cheap bread. “He got his rights,” the relative said. That, he said, was all Mr. Hamadah had been seeking.


MICHAEL SLACKMAN
ESSAY