EGYPT
Democracy in Egypt has been at best suspended or at worst abandoned as a result of last week’s decision to bring the presidency of Mohammed Morsi to an end.
The tens of thousands of people who took to the streets and cheered at his ousting will hope the country is back on course to become a prosperous democracy where jobs are plentiful and the country’s leaders do not attempt to impose their version of Islam.
There was intense disappointment that the 2011 overthrow of Hosni Mubarak was followed by economic decline.
Liberal forces that had been at the forefront of the revolution failed to form effective parties and Morsi, a leading figure in the once-persecuted Muslim Brotherhood, won the presidency. He appointed Islamists to nearly half of the country’s governorships and the new constitution – supported in a referendum – gave an explicit role to Sharia.
A key threat is that the Muslim Brotherhood – or many of its supporters – will make common cause with more extreme groups who wish to impose a fiercely authoritarian model of Islam on the state. As Paul Pilar argued in the National Interest shortly before Morsi fell from power, the president was under “at least as much dissatisfaction from Salafists” as from secularists for not doing enough to Islamicise Egypt.
A shift towards violent opposition will only be more likely if the new regime shoots protesters and locks up members of the old government.
If one consequence of this revolutionary coup is that swathes of the population abandon faith in democracy and conclude only the power of the gun can determine Egypt’s destiny, then the generals who deposed the country’s first elected president will be judged harshly by future generations.
POWDER-KEG RATING: 8/10
SYRIA
The Syrian civil war is the defining tragedy of the Arab Spring. Just as elation in Europe at the fall of the Berlin Wall was followed by horror at the slaughter in former Yugoslavia, so there is sorrow Syria is now a place where a government is alleged to use chemical weapons against its foes and rebels bite into the dead flesh of their enemies.
More than 1.7 million refugees have fled the country once held in an iron grip by Bashar al-Assad’s regime. The West has stopped short of arming moderate rebels while Gulf states have funnelled support to groups that welcome radicals into their ranks.
The country has become a chessboard as Russia and Iran prop up the dictatorship while Saudi Arabia and Qatar seek its collapse. Meanwhile, the death toll has nearly hit 100,000, raising the prospect of the number of dead eclipsing the fatalities in Iraq.
A key cause for concern is the absence of an obvious end-point for the conflict. A lasting settlement would have to provide security for the numerous ethnic and religious groups, which including Shia, Sunni and Alawite Muslims, Christians, Assyrians, Armenians and Kurds.
POWDER-KEG RATING: 10/10
IRAN
For many, the only thing more terrifying than Iran acquiring a nuclear bomb is imagining terrorist attacks the country could unleash worldwide in retaliation against a strike on its atomic research sites.
Sanctions are biting hard but Iran is a leading power in the region with immense influence on Syria’s Government and the Hezbollah and Hamas militant groups.
The West is waiting to see whether newly elected president Hassan Rowhani – widely seen as the most moderate of the candidates – will have the clout and the desire to seek a rapprochement. Are elected politicians or a religious elite in control of a country that has clear ambitions to continue its rise as a regional power?
The opposition Green movement are hungry for democracy but Iran may be heading for a new chapter of confrontation with the West if the regime continues to back government forces in Syria and shows new signs of moving towards building a nuclear bomb.
POWDER-KEG RATING: 7/10
LEBANON
Lebanon was torn apart by violence during the 1975–1990 civil war and the country remains a tinderbox. Members of the powerful Hezbollah Shia militia have crossed into Syria to fight on the government side and the threat of slaughter spilling across the border is real, as demonstrated by recent violent incidents.
The government has a form of power-sharing under which the president is a Maronite Christian, the Prime Minister a Sunni Muslim and parliament’s speaker a Shi’a Muslim. There are also roles for the Eastern Orthodox.
But Hezbollah is both a major political player and an independent military force. It came under sustained military attack by Israeli forces in 2006 after abducting soldiers and its evolving relationship with the governments of Syria and Iran is being closely watched.
The arrival of more than 580,000 refugees from Syria has the potential to exploit ethnic divisions and elections have been delayed until November 2014.
POWDER-KEG RATING: 7/10
JORDAN
One of the striking trends of the Arab Spring was that while dictatorships collapsed monarchies fared much better – and Jordan’s stability has made it a destination for thousands fleeing chaos in Iraq and Syria.
However, Abdullah II knows that swathes of unemployed youth are angry about corruption and want greater say over their lives. Protests are commonplace and there are concerns that the influx of half a million refugees could destabilise the country.
The country sunk into civil war at the start of the 1970s when government forces battled Palestinian militias. The fear that Islamist and sectarian violence could ravage the country may cause people who would otherwise demand democracy to tolerate living under a monarchy for as long as the king can provide security.
POWDER-KEG RATING: 6/10
IRAQ
The trauma of the years of occupation and the sectarian bloodbath that followed will define Iraq for generations. According to Iraq Body Count, up to 121,292 civilians were killed between March 2001 and December 2012 and, in May, 70 people died in a single day when members of the majority Shia community were attacked.
Murder blights this nation. The UN Assistance Mission for Iraq reported 761 deaths last month.
A key source of tension is the conviction among Sunnis that they do not get a fair deal from Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s Government.
There are also regular fears of a confrontation between the semi- autonomous Kurdish region in the north and the government over control of lucrative oil fields.
Iraqi militiamen have reportedly joined the conflict in Syria and nobody would deny the threat of a civil war unless political deadlock ends and rampant corruption is tackled. Nearly 160,000 Syrian refugees are in Iraq and it will be a disaster for the entire region if Sunni-Shia hostilities enter a new chapter of brutality.
POWDER-KEG RATING: 8/10
TURKEY
Turkey is not so much a country at a crossroads as one speeding on a roundabout with different players trying to grab hold of the wheel.
Recent protests have demonstrated the depth of concern that the country’s Islamist prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is unthreading its secularist traditions.
Anti-alcohol legislation riled many but his plan to bulldoze a park and rebuild on the site Ottoman barracks that were synonymous with opposition to liberal reforms was the final straw.
The protests had much in common with those that have led to the overthrow of Egypt’s government. Secularists, liberals and leftists challenged a proudly Muslim regime – but this time the army did not intervene.
Turkey’s recent history is dotted with military coups but the fact that Erdogan has not been overthrown demonstrates how deeply democracy is now embedded. It is less certain whether it will be able to contain the country’s competing forces.
Can the liberal demands of the urban population be reconciled with the aspirations of a newly rich but devout Muslim middle class? Will Turkey, a Nato power, continue to seek EU membership or will it pivot east and vie with Israel and Iran for regional dominance?
Tensions with the Kurdish population are unresolved and close to 400,000 Syrian refugees have arrived in Turkey. If Erdogan can provide democratic leadership in the world’s most volatile region he may earn a position alongside modern Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, as a father of a nation and a champion of progress.
POWDER-KEG RATING: 4/10
ISRAEL
There was a time when securing a peace settlement between Israel and Palestinians living in the occupied territories was seen as the key to lasting peace in the region. But the rise of sectarian conflict between Muslim populations and internal crises in Syria, Iraq and now Egypt mean that the stand-off is now just one of several in the Middle East that has the potential to trigger violence on an epic scale.
Nevertheless, there is a new push by the United States to strike a deal between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, even though Gaza remains in control of Hamas and scepticism about the viability of a two-state solution is high. Israeli politics is defined by domestic issues but the question of what should be done with the settlements built across the West Bank remains one of the most contentious debates.
Concern about the existential threat that a nuclear-armed Iran would pose is real but there are also moments of soul-searching about the future of the state as divisions widen between secular and religious Israelis.
Leading commentator Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in Foreign Affairs: “If Israel were to make permanent its hold over the West Bank, it would either cease to be a democracy (by permanently disenfranchising the Palestinians) or cease to be a ‘Jewish state’ (by granting full citizenship to the Palestinians and thus becoming more like a binational state, one that would stand a chance of quickly devolving into civil war).”
Wales Online
