Sheep magazine Archive 2: issues 10-17

In my own reporting of the uprisings, I attributed
them to increased education and travel by
the Arab communities throughout the Middle
East. While acknowledging the power of social
media and the internet, something deeper was
at work. The Arabs had woken from a deep
sleep. They had refused any longer to be the
“children” of the patriarchal father figure – the
Nassers and the Sadats and the Mubaraks
and the Assads and the Gaddafis and, in
earlier years, the Saddams. They awoke to find
that it was their own governments that were
composed of children, one of whom – Mubarak
– was 83 years old. The Arabs wanted to own
their towns and cities. They wanted to own the
place in which they lived, which comprised
much of the Middle East.
But I think now that I was wrong. In
retrospect, I woefully misunderstood what
these revolutions represented. One clue,
perhaps, lay in the importance of trade union
movements. Where trade unions, with their
transnational socialism and anti-colonial
credentials, were strong – in Egypt and
Tunisia – the revolutionary bloodshed was
far less than in the nations that had either
banned trade unionism altogether – Libya,
for example – or concretised the trade union
movement into the regime, which had long
ago happened in Syria and Yemen. Socialism
crossed borders. Yet even this does not
account for the events of 2011.
What really manifested itself that year, I now
believe, was a much more deeply held Arab
conviction; that the very institutions that we
in the West had built for these people 100
years ago were worthless, that the statehood
which we had later awarded to artificial
nations within equally artificial borders was
meaningless. They were rejecting the whole
construct that we had foisted upon them.
That Egypt regressed back into military
patriarchy – and the subsequent and utterly
predictable Western acqiescence in this
– after a brief period of elected Muslim
Brotherhood government, does not change
this equation. While the revolutions largely
stayed within national boundaries – at least
at the start – the borders began to lose their
meaning.
Hamas in Gaza and the Brotherhood
became one, the Sinai-Gaza frontier
began to crumble. Then the collapse of
Libya rendered Gaddafi’s former borders
open – and thus non-existent. His weapons
– including chemical shells – were sold
to rebels in Egypt and Syria. Tunisia,
which is now supposed to be the darling
of our Western hearts for its adhesion to
“democracy”, is now in danger of implosion
because its own borders with Libya and
Algeria are open to arms transhipments
to Islamist groups. Isis’s grasp of these
frontierless entities means that its own
7
June 2016