[unofficial translation]
Declaration distributed by Gilbert ROGER (France, SOC), Member of the Chamber of Local Authorities on the occasion of the 20th Session of the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities
THE CONGRESS OF LOCAL AND REGIONAL AUTHORITIES SUPPORTS THE ARAB SPRING
Ever since the success of the “Jasmine Revolution” in Tunisia in January 2011, the world has been witnessing an “Arab Spring”. In the name of Freedom, the Tunisians and Egyptians have overthrown their despots, the Libyan dictator is now becoming dangerously unstable and pressure is growing on authoritarian regimes in many other Arab States.
And yet the movement which ousted the Ben Ali dictatorship started off rather like a “bread revolt”: on 17 December 2010, a young graduate set fire to himself because the police smashed up his food stall in a small town some 260 km from Tunis. Mohammed Bouazizi’s gesture provided the latent popular frustration with an emblem, an icon: the incredible symbolical force of his immolation was the scream that triggered the revolt. The Tunisian power system tumbled like a house of cards, with Ben Ali leaving Tunisia on 14 January, after one month of rebellion.
On Friday 11 February, Tahrir (Freedom) Square in Cairo finally merited its name when the Egyptian people obtained the departure of President Hosni Mubarak, the distant heir of Nasser’s 1952 regime who had long forgotten the founder’s pan-Arab, secular and socialistic accents, retaining only predatory paternalism, the omnipotence of the security forces, electoral fraud and corruption. Eighteen days of strikes and demonstrations finally got the better of this Arab giant, the mainstay of American policy in the region.
Since then this wind of freedom has been blowing, accompanied by protests of varying intensity, across Yemen, Jordan, Algeria and even the tiny Emirate of Bahrain, at the gates to the Saudi Kingdom. The movement is also currently bearing away Colonel Gaddafi’s regime, triggering a terrible bloodbath.
The Arab soul is broken by poverty and unemployment, said the Secretary General of the Arab League at the Summit in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, on 19 January last. This sentence epitomises the regional governments’ fear of the Tunisian revolution sweeping away their regimes too. The Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings are destabilising other autocratic Arab governments in the region. The explosion has many other concurrent sources: all these regimes suffer from major deficits of legitimacy, they are all based on an undemocratic vision of society, and they are all, to varying degrees, sustained by corruption and the unjust concentration of power in the hands of one individual or a small group of military officers.
Many western commentators thought that western political and economic interests would be best served by authoritarian and corrupt regimes; they considered, in short, that the Arab world was incompatible with democracy. The idea of a “dictatorship of the lesser evil”, lesser because pro-western and capable of reform one day, the fear of discovering fundamentalists lurking behind the pro-democracy demonstrators, all these certainties have now been blown out of the water, because the protests have taken the form of an “ecumenical” revolt rejecting Islamism and eschewing the traditional party systems.
Demographic developments and the newly emerging middle classes facilitated the affirmation of the modern fact of the Arab person, linked to the world by Internet and the globalised economy. The Tunisians and Egyptians have shaken off the yoke of fatalism. What is being expressed is the de-legitimisation of anything that anyone tries to impose on them from above as a higher power. The old myth of Arab existential fatalism died on 14 January in Tunisia and on 11 February in Tahrir Square in Egypt.
For all these reasons, the heroic uprising of the Tunisian and Egyptian peoples must be held up as an example. The demonstrators have evinced political maturity and provided a model for civil protest such as the world has seldom seen: non-violence, absolute determination, and courage in facing up to government henchmen. The mobilisation quickly became massive, and its hallmark has been peacefulness, despite the violent repression by the law enforcement agencies and those in power, and despite deaths by the hundred, and in Libya, by the thousand. Lastly, we must stress that the movement succeeded as soon as some or all of the army moved over to the people’s side, in Tunisia, Egypt, and, to a lesser extent, in Libya and Bahrain.
We should also highlight the vital role of women in this uprising. They must take their full part in the new governance.
So the victory is not just political but also “moral”: it was the triumph of human dignity. It was the victory of non-violence over terrorism. Barack Obama spoke of “that something in our souls that cries out for freedom”. As the American President said, “the Egyptian people … changed their country, and in doing so changed the world”.
These revolutions, which have initially been victorious, require our support. They are the work of the people themselves, men and women, young and old, workers, farmers, employees and professionals, all united to win back their rights to freedom, dignity and social justice.
By overthrowing their “irremovable” dictators, the Tunisian and Egyptian peoples have turned a page in history and opened a new path for peoples worldwide.
However, we should not treat democracy as “instant coffee”, as Octavio Paz put it. Democratisation is a process, and there is no such thing as instant conversion to democracy. Arab democrats have a hazardous road ahead. Setting up democratic institutions and changing mental attitudes will be a long-drawn-out process. Nevertheless, we have definitely entered a new era. On the day the Arab world celebrated the departure of Ben Ali, fear changed sides.
The Council of Europe, Europe in general, is duty-bound to help the Arab peoples, avoiding paternalism. We must listen to the priorities expressed by the new leaders, in terms of emergency economic aid and the safeguarding of tourism and foreign investment, and also electoral assistance for the transition authorities. Europeans must adopt an appropriate long-term strategic vision similar to that expressed by Barack Obama in his Cairo speech, but also a refined, reactive piloting system. We must accept the upheaval in the southern Mediterranean with hope, though without naivety.
The Congress has a long-standing experience of cooperation with countries in this region. Within the Forum of Euro-Arab Cities, which recently met in Malaga, on 25 and 26 February 2011, the Congress and its Forum partners are committed "as the representatives of authorities that are closest to the people, [...] to build a new model of citizen participation for the best possible development of our region."
As part of the reform process in Morocco, the Congress has contributed to the regionalisation project, at the request of the representative of King Mohammed VI. The European Charter of Local Self-Government is a benchmark text that has now proven itself on the European continent and which could serve as a model for the development of local and regional democracy in countries undergoing democratisation. We need to develop an active solidarity with those countries, without dictating their behaviour but remaining attentive to their needs and demands.
Without cynicism, we must press on with some of the traditional Euro-Mediterranean processes, while prioritising intelligent support for democratisation, with an eye to laying the foundations for “in-depth democracy”.
Bobigny, 20 March 2011
Gilbert ROGER(France, Socialist Party)
Members of the Chamber of Local Authorities