*image from http://www.stratfor.com

2011/10/12
By Kamarul Idris

“THE Arab Spring is turning to winter,” has become a cliché for the lowered expectations after 10 months of the Middle East’s historic revolts.

The hackneyed line came up again in the BBC’s recent Panora ma pro – gramme on human rights abuses in Deraa in southern Syria. The contest in that country between an unyielding regime and protesters increasingly resorting to arms is beginning to look like civil war.

In Syria and elsewhere, photogenic mass demonstrations are being supplanted by the slow burn of attrition.

While the government of President Bashar Assad has plenty to answer for (at least 2,900 killed since March, according to the United Nations), accounts of citizens and army deserters shooting back at security forces have gone mainstream.

London’s Daily Telegraph, focusing on Rastam about 200km north of Damascus, reported last Wednesday that “over the past few weeks there has been a discernible shift to armed r es is t an ce ”. Five days before, the New York Times, with an incognito correspondent in nearby Homs, Syria’s third city, said “residents speak of a decisive shift in past weeks, as a largely peaceful uprising gives way to a grinding struggle that has made Homs violent, fearful and determined”.

Last month, Mohammed Rahhal, head of the Revolutionary Council of the Syrian Coordination Committees, was quoted as saying that “we made the decision to arm the revolution, which will turn violent very soon, because what we are being subjected to today is a global conspiracy that can only be faced by an armed uprising”.

Such declarations confirm the Assad clique in their belief that the opposition is out to overthrow the state.

They have been this way before.

Bashar’s father Hafez had deployed thousands of troops to suppress a Muslim Brotherhood rebellion in Hama in 1982.

Descent into civil war was what behoved Russia and China to veto a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning Syria last week.

They did not want a repeat of Libya, in which the imposition of a no-fly zone intended to protect civilians quickly escalated into close air support for the foes battling Col Muammar Gaddaf i.

In Libya, the civil war is not over yet, and once it ismay be resumed by another within the National Transitional Council. The naming of a cabinet last week after much delay did nothing to hide the developing faultlines — between political persuasions, tribes, towns and regions. Islamists want to kick out secular exregime elements, including the internationally popular interim leader Mahmoud Jibril.

A repeat of Libya, however, seems to be what the Syrian insurrection is shaping up towards. A similar national council uniting the opposition has been formed. Although it formally forswears foreign intervention, outside help is actively sought. Rumours abound of Gulf countries smuggling guns for the Sunnis and Iran doing the same for pro-regime minorities, giving the Syrian conflict a sectarian dimension.

The few Western reporters who have stolen into the country describe some Syrian cities as resembling Beirut during Lebanon’s 1975-1990 civil war. Vigilante checkpoints have been set up in Homs, according to the New York Times, and inter-denominational tit-for-tat attacks are on the r ise.

Moscow, especially, worries that even the merest dangling of external assistance could worsen tensions and is convinced that its veto stymied a ploy at regime change by stealth. But President Dmitri Medvedev made it clear that he was not cosying up to Assad.

“Russia wants as much as the other countries for Syria to end the bloodshed and demands that the Syrian leadership conduct the necessary refor ms,” Medvedev said on television last Friday.

“Civil war” is also the locution for Yemen. In its October monthly bulletin, the International Crisis Group said “Yemen is on the cusp of fulls cale civil war between security forces loyal to President Ali Abdullah Saleh and troops and militia loyal to his opponents”.

Factional fighting will not stop with the simple expedient of the old dictator’s exit. Even as Saleh announced again on Saturday that he would go soon, vividly gesturing with hands gloved from the injuries sustained in an attempt on his life in June, he could still draw on enormous crowds to cheer him on.

Egypt, the Arab Spring’s grandest flowering, is not wilting into civil war.

Instead, another term has been slipping off impatiently wagging tongues: counter-revolution.

The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), the junta which had usefully showed President Hosni Mubarak the door in February, has not itself shown an equal inclination to renounce power.

“As quite a few commentators have gloomily noted, an Egyptian counterrevolution appears to be in full swing ,” said Steve Negus on Sept 30 in The Arabist, a blog run by freelance journalists.

“SCAF has vowed to step up its use of emergency law and demonstrated a willingness to crack down on street protesters, strikers, critics of the military, non-governmental organisations who receive foreign funding, and anyone else who might trouble their hold over the country.” Still, Negus is optimistic that the gains of Tahrir Square will not be usurped by reactionary generals. The reason for this is fundamental to the onward prospects for the Arab Spring: Egypt, more so Tunisia, has forged an internal, self-propelled momentum for change that is sufficient to overcome the difficulties of transition.

That the Middle East’s makeover has to come from within and cannot be jostled by alien influences is a truism long held by expert observers.

In his 2009 study The Arabs, University of Oxford historian Eugene Rogan rues the raw deals imposed on the region by successive waves of imperialism.

But outsiders cannot be blamed forever.

“If the Arab peoples are to enjoy human rights and accountable government, security and economic growth, they will have to seize the initiative themselves,” he says, some time before the social-media-savvy young Tunisians began their dissent.

“History has shown the limits of reform through foreign intervention —in both the colonial age and in the post-Cold War era. Democracy cannot be imposed without the messenger killing the message.” That lesson should have been learnt in Iraq since its invasion in 2003. As the weather turns on the Arab Spring, it should be recalled to stay the hand of Westerners itching to meddle.

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