The Arab Spring Begins

DEC 17 2010 · 12:00

Protesters confront security forces in central Tunis on 14 January 2011, the day President Ben Ali fled, set in motion by Mohamed Bouazizi's self-immolation in Sidi Bouzid. Place: Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia Figures: Mohamed Bouazizi, fruit vendor · Faida Hamdi, municipal inspector · Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, Tunisian President (fell 14 January 2011) · Hosni Mubarak, Egyptian President (fell 11 February 2011) · Bashar al-Assad, Syrian President (held) Sidi Bouzid Mohamed Bouazizi is 26 years old. He sells fruit from a cart on the main street of Sidi Bouzid, a market town of 40,000 in the Tunisian interior, to support his mother and six siblings. On the morning of 17 December 2010 a municipal inspector confiscates his scales for the third time. He goes to the governorate to complain, is refused a meeting, returns to the street in front of the building, douses himself in paint thinner, and sets himself on fire. He dies on 4 January 2011. By then the protests in his name have spread across the country. On 14 January 2011 Ben Ali, in power for twenty-three years, flees to Saudi Arabia. The first Arab autocracy of the satellite-television and social-media era has fallen in under four weeks from a single act of self-immolation by a man whose video reached the diaspora through Facebook before reaching state television at all. The Wave and Its Limits Within months the wave reaches Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria. Mubarak falls in eighteen days. Gaddafi falls after a NATO air campaign authorized under UN Security Council Resolution 1973, the first invocation of the responsibility to protect doctrine for active regime change. Yemen's Saleh is negotiated out. Bahrain's Khalifa survives with Saudi help. Syria's Assad survives by reducing several of his own cities to rubble; the resulting civil war becomes the most consequential of the decade and the proximate cause of the 2015 European refugee crisis. By 2014 only Tunisia has produced a durable democratic transition. The Arab Spring is the first major test of whether networked communications would let civil societies overrun authoritarian Westphalian containers. The answer turns out to be: sometimes the container breaks, more often it adapts; the regimes that survive learn faster than the protesters do. The lesson is absorbed by every authoritarian state with a competent intelligence service, and applied through the rest of the decade. Video: Middle East Eye reconstruction of the December 2010 events in Sidi Bouzid, from the confiscation of Bouazizi's scales to the fall of Ben Ali twenty-eight days later.