At 6:30 p.m. on Feb. 15, as thousands of people gathered to protest against their ruler at a busy intersection in Manama, the capital of the small island nation of Bahrain, you could just about hear over the general hubbub the anthem of the young people who have shaken regimes from North Africa to the Arabian Gulf. It wasn't a verse from the Koran. It wasn't a traditional tune from the region. It was rap. A reedy female voice shouted out, several times, the first line of "Rais Lebled," a song written by the Tunisian rapper known as El Général. "Mr. President, your people are dying," the woman sang. Then others joined in. "Mr. President, your people are dying/ People are eating rubbish/ Look at what is happening/ Miseries everywhere, Mr. President/ I talk with no fear/ Although I know I will get only trouble/ I see injustice everywhere."
Bahrain, as it happens, doesn't have a President; it's ruled by a King, Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa. No matter. The protesters in Bahrain knew that "Rais Lebled" was the battle hymn of the Jasmine Revolution that brought down Tunisia's dictator, Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, and that it was then adopted by the demonstrators in Cairo's Tahrir Square who toppled Hosni Mubarak. Now it had come to Bahrain, as rage against poverty and oppression swept the Arab world from west to east. It isn't just songs that are being copied: in a nod to the Egyptians, organizers in several countries have dubbed their demonstrations Days of Rage, and the popular Tunisian chant, "The people want the regime to fall," has been taken up by protesters from Algeria to Yemen.
But the most important things 2011's protests have in common don't come from copying — they come naturally. All of the revolts are led by young men and women, many of whom are novices at political activism. All use modern tools, like social-networking sites on the Internet and texting over mobile phones, to organize and amplify their protests. And all have the same demands: a right to choose and change their leaders, an end to rampant corruption, the opportunity for employment and improvement. "Whether you're in Tunis or in Cairo or in Manama," says Ala'a Shehabi, 30, a Bahraini economics lecturer and political activist, "young Arabs are all on the same wavelength."
In less than two months, this generation has already wrought political change on a scale not seen since the end of the Cold War. The class of 2011 has felled two despots and forced other famously inflexible rulers to make concessions, some dramatic (Yemen's longtime President Ali Abdullah Saleh has promised not to run for re-election) and some desperate (King Hamad has offered every Bahraini household the equivalent of $2,700). And all this was achieved by largely peaceful demonstrations and despite the absence of clear leaders.
There may be more to come. Growing protests in Bahrain and Yemen could lead to greater concessions from their rulers. And the Arab uprising has already given a boost to the flagging Green Revolution in Iran. (That, in turn, has provoked a fierce crackdown by government forces.) There have also been demonstrations in Libya against the regime of "Brother Leader" Muammar Gaddafi. So who are the Middle East's new revolutionaries? Where do they come from, and what do they want?
Getting the Young People Wrong
Even those who have watched this generation come of age in the Middle East struggle to explain its sudden empowerment. "These young people have done more in a few weeks than their parents did in 30 years," says Hassan Nafaa, a political-science professor at Cairo University. "They are the Internet Generation ... or the Facebook Generation ... or just call them the Miracle Generation."
Yet not so long ago, these were the men and women who were being called the lost generation. For years, Middle East experts had described Arab youths as frustrated but feckless: they disliked and distrusted their authoritarian rulers, they keenly felt their limited economic prospects, but they were too politically emasculated to press for change. They were thoroughly intimidated by the Mubaraks and Salehs, together with their ubiquitous, Orwellian spies and secret police; they were disillusioned by the failed attempts at rebellion by their parents' generation. Western observers were not alone in misreading this generation's potential. "If you had said some years ago that my students would be responsible for democratic change in Egypt, I would have laughed," admits Nafaa.
According to the old narrative, the only outlet for youthful dissent lay in Islamic extremism and violence. A much cited 2003 Brookings Institution report on Arab youths warned that they were being raised in an environment of religious radicalism and anti-Americanism. "These values," the report argued, "thus become the formative elements of a new and dispossessed generation, auguring badly for the future."
The auguries were wrong. In reality, Arab youths were a big part of the silent, moderate majority. In virtually every Arab country, more than half the population is less than 30 years old. And like young people everywhere, most of them prefer the freedom that comes with democracy to the straitjacket of political autocracy or rule by religious conservatives. A survey of youths in nine Arab states released in 2010 by the p.r. firm Asda'a Burson-Marsteller showed that they ranked democracy as a greater priority than good civic infrastructure, access to the best education or even fair wages
Granted, these young people may not all have a clear vision of what kind of democracy they want, only that it is accompanied by free and fair elections. But that counts for a generation that has only ever known one ruler, the opportunity to kick one out every four or five years may be democracy's greatest appeal. "I don't care who ends up running this country," says Egyptian student Khaled Kamel, "as long as I have the ability to change them if I don't like them."
A Thousand Sparks
If most foreigners couldn't put the sheer numbers of Arab youths together with their political aspirations to measure their clout, neither did the young Arabs themselves. Jared Cohen, director of the corporate think tank Google Ideas, who until recently worked on online outreach at the U.S. State Department, says young people were the "de facto opposition in many of these countries, but they didn't see their own power."
As always, it needed a thousand little sparks to light the fire of revolt — to reveal to those who thought they were weak how much power they really had. Kamel, a university student from the Nile Delta village of Zawiyat Ghazal, recalls when he fell from a train at a station and a policeman came up to him. "Instead of helping me, he hit me because I was lying there on the platform, which you're not supposed to do," says Kamel. That sort of humiliation at the hands of authority was common-place in Mubarak's Egypt, but Kamel, 20, had an outlet for his frustrations: an ancient Hewlett-Packard PC and an Internet connection. He created a blog and chronicled his anger in sarcastic prose.
Then last summer, another instance of police brutality became the talk of the Egyptian online community: in Alexandria, a young businessman named Khaled Said was beaten to death by cops. A Facebook page entitled "We Are All Khaled Said" was created by an anonymous administrator. Kamel joined the Facebook group and became one of its lead organizers. He got to know the group's administrator online, and the two began an e-mail conversation. It wasn't until Feb. 7 that Kamel finally learned the identity of his correspondent: Wael Ghonim, the Google executive who has become the face of the Egyptian revolution.
Kamel's first sense that his activism could help change the entire system came when he worked with Ghonim and others to plan a day of protests on Jan. 25. While Cairo and Tahrir Square got the most international attention during the uprising, Kamel concentrated on rallying protesters across the country, marching with them in Alexandria and in the nearby town of Damanhur, where fleeing officials set fire to the state security headquarters.
Now Kamel walks through the burned and ransacked building, pointing to cells where security officers brutalized prisoners with dogs and electric prods. He exudes a sense of wonder that his generation put an end to these abuses. "We have forces now," he says. "And we're starting from right now to build Egypt the way we wanted to."
If Said's murder at the hands of the police spurred young Egyptians into action, in Tunisia it was the self-immolation of vegetable vendor Mohammed Bouazizi after he was slapped by a policewoman. In Yemen, activist Tawakul Karman was moved by the plight of 30 families expelled in early 2007 from their village when the land was given to a tribal leader close to President Saleh. The families are known collectively as Ja'ashin, after the name of their village, and Karman, 32, a mother of three, has made them her cause: every Tuesday since 2007, she and scores of others have protested in front of Sana'a University.
Her tenacity has yielded nothing: the government has refused to intervene on the Ja'ashin's behalf. Karman now believes that only Saleh's resignation — he's been in power three years longer than Mubarak was — will allow Yemen to start addressing its problems. Like activists elsewhere, she finds her spirits raised by what's happened in Tunisia and Egypt. The ranks of protesters at Sana'a University have swelled to the thousands. Several protests have been broken up by police or armed supporters of the regime, but Karman is undaunted. "Now there's a race between Yemen and Algeria to see who will be next," she says.
Not all the activist Arab youths are looking for regime change. In Ramallah, the capital of the Palestinian territories, Fadi Quran has set his sights on what are arguably more difficult goals: unification of the warring Palestinian factions of Fatah and Hamas, followed by an end to the Israeli occupation. Quran, 22, a Stanford University grad who runs an alternative-energy start-up, set up a Facebook account calling for a sit-in in front of the Egyptian embassy while Mubarak was clinging to power in Cairo. But he was forced to take it down by the Palestinian Authority's security services and was then questioned for hours. "It truly was obvious they had never had to deal with this type of activism before," he says
Quran and several other Palestinian activists are now planning a wave of demonstrations to demand that Fatah and Hamas reconcile, the better to "fight the occupation in a much more efficient and productive manner." Quran is counting on young Palestinians to brush aside the failed policies of their elders. "They can't find any answers because they're stuck in the box," he says. "But when the youth comes in, they're going to see a new vision, and we're going to achieve the goals of our struggle."
Doing It for Themselves
The revolution of the young generation in the Middle East is theirs and theirs alone — spokespeople have been specific in dismissing the idea that they have needed outside assistance or have looked much to the outside for inspiration
Even so, their actions have been such that policymakers far from the Middle East now have to react to a new reality, recalibrate policies long based on convenient relationships with despots and build connections with this new source of political strength. That's especially true for the U.S., which many Arab activists regard as the great power that enabled their oppressors. "The U.S. government was aware of the injustices in Egypt but continued supporting Mubarak because of self-interest," says a Bahraini activist who asked that his or her name be withheld. "No one can argue that Saudi Arabia is the home of human rights or democracy, yet America continues to support the regime."
Still, for the Obama Administration, there's good news too. So far, there have been few instances of President Obama being burned in effigy or of the U.S. flag being torched by angry mobs. The State Department insists that it has long been paying attention to the needs and aspirations of young Arabs. "This has been a key demographic for us for quite some time," says a State Department official. Funding for youth outreach has increased significantly in recent years. The U.S. now spends more to support democracy and governance in the Arab world every year than the $250 million it spent in total from 1991 to 2001.
(Read "Joe Klein: How the U.S. Should Support Middle East Reform.")
Many programs are deliberately low-key, in part because an open association with the U.S. can be politically damaging. "It's really been very hard for most people in the Arab world to work directly with the U.S. government," says Ethan Zuckerman, one of the founders of Global Voices, an international network of bloggers and citizen journalists that has hosted regional conferences for Arab bloggers.
As the old order crumbles, the U.S. will want these new relationships to strengthen into lasting bonds. But Arab youths are unlikely to feel the need for U.S. support as acutely as the leaders who came before them. After all, they didn't need U.S. help to get rid of those dictators. "People said it couldn't happen, because the U.S. supported Mubarak, but still he fell," says the Bahraini activist. "Now we know we don't need the U.S. on our side to get what we want. Now we know we can do it for ourselves." Faced with such self-confidence, the Obama Administration must manage the delicate task of maintaining support for regimes in the region while telling Arab leaders, in public and private, to address the turmoil with more urgent reforms — all while trying to increase direct contact with the youths leading the uprisings.
That will not be easy. Foreign policy considerations couldn't be further from the minds of most members of the class of 2011. For young Arabs in Yemen, Libya and Algeria, there are regimes still to topple. The revolution hasn't yet gotten off the ground in Syria and is still in its early days in Bahrain. And in Tunisia and Egypt, the gains from the past two months need to be protected: there are political parties to form, elections to contest. The military council that took over from Mubarak has promised constitutional reforms and elections in six months.
Many of the young men and women who helped make the revolutions happen are keen to hold on to the sense of blissful dawn they have experienced for the first time in their young lives. Ahmed Khalil, scion of a wealthy Egyptian business family and a veteran of Tahrir Square, hasn't returned to work even though his plastics factory reopened several days ago: there are more important things now than making money, he says. Khalil, 29, is part of the "Revolution Friends" Facebook group that is exploring ways to channel the revolution's momentum into a civic-awareness campaign. He has printed leaflets, now being distributed throughout Cairo, calling on his fellow Egyptians to work "for a better Egypt and to protect the victory that you and I achieved with our own hands." (Sample suggestions: "Don't litter, don't blow your car horn for no reason, don't pay bribes, don't allow a police officer to humiliate someone in front of you, don't harass girls on the street, know your rights, stay positive, respect other opinions.")
And what of the revolution's rapper? El Général — his given name is Hamada Ben Amor — is disappointed he missed some of the action: he was jailed for three days during the Jasmine Revolution, and when Egyptian protesters invited him to perform in Tahrir Square, he couldn't go because he has no passport. Instead, he's written a new rap called "Vive Tunisie!" that honors Tunisian protesters and those killed during the uprising. There are shout-outs, too, to other youth movements. "I also speak about the program of freedom in Egypt, Algeria, Libya and Morocco," he says. The youth of the Arab world are not done yet
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