ON Friday, Hosni Mubarak, the former Egyptian strongman whose fall from power was one of the early — though truly pyrrhic — victories of the Arab Spring, went home a free man. Earlier this month, he had already been cleared by a court of involvement in protesters’ deaths in 2011; on Friday, Mr Mubarak was allowed to leave a military hospital where he had been detained and proceed to his private residence. Indeed this ‘rehabilitation’ of the former dictator signifies the fact that despite the hopes and aspirations the mass uprisings across the Arab world had created in 2011, the ancien régime in nearly all states is still very much alive and in charge. Mr Mubarak ruled Egypt with an iron fist for three decades, only to fall in 2011 after thousands of Egyptians took to the streets to call for representative rule. The halcyon days of the Egyptian ‘revolution’ were, however, short-lived as the Muslim Brotherhood-led government of Mohamed Morsi — who was modern Egypt’s first democratically-elected ruler — was sent packing by the military one year after Mr Morsi took oath as president. Since then, the generals have been back in power in Cairo, ruling with a civilian facade, while Egypt’s masses continue to toil under difficult circumstances.

Mr Mubarak’s freedom is not the only reminder that the Arab Spring has failed to usher in a new, peaceful Middle East. Syria is in ruins, as the opposition movement against Bashar al-Assad morphed into a brutal civil war that was soon taken over by extremists such as the militant Islamic State group and the offspring of Al Qaeda. Yemen, where another strongman, Ali Abdullah Saleh, was sent packing, has also descended into a grinding civil war, in which the Saudis intervened militarily to check the Houthi militia, whom Riyadh considers to be a proxy of its archrival Iran. The Saudis’ destructive bombing forays have exacted a high civilian toll in Yemen, and have failed to restore their Yemeni allies to power. Elsewhere in the Arab world, kings, potentates and presidents-for-life continue to lord it over the people, with no chances of representative rule emerging. To make matters worse, extremists have entrenched themselves in large areas of Iraq, Syria, the Sinai and Yemen. Unfortunately, there is very little at present to give hope to the Arab masses: their societies are in disarray, while the international order has also been rocked by the rise of narrow populism.

Published in Dawn, March 26th, 2017