[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 11]
[House]
[Pages 16096-16097]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                       SUSTAINING THE ARAB SPRING

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
California (Mr. Schiff) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. SCHIFF. Mr. Speaker, when a Tunisian fruit vendor set himself on 
fire nearly 3 years ago to protest his lack of economic opportunity and 
maltreatment at the hands of local police, his desperate act touched 
off a political revolution that has convulsed the Arab world from the 
Maghreb to the Gulf.
  First in Tunisia and then in Egypt, popular protests toppled long-
serving autocrats while Libyan dictator Muammar Qadhafi was ousted by 
NATO-backed rebels. Elsewhere, from Bahrain to Syria, regimes have 
proven more resilient and, in several cases, willing to use extreme 
levels of violence to maintain their survival.
  So, in the waning months of the third year of what has been dubbed 
the ``Arab Spring,'' the future of a large swath of the global 
community remains uncertain. With Egypt under military control and 
Syria ablaze, it is not surprising that many here in the United States 
and elsewhere in the West view each new development with concern that 
an already volatile region could spiral completely out of control.
  The situation in Syria is undoubtedly grim and Egypt faces a 
prolonged period of instability, but the news is not uniformly bad. In 
Tunisia, the Islamist government, headed by the Enhadda Party, has 
acceded to opposition demands that it hand over power to a caretaker 
government and schedule new elections.
  Tiny Tunisia could again show its larger neighbors that a democratic 
transition--even an extended one of several intermediate steps--is 
possible in a region buffeted by the crosscurrents of religion, 
tribalism, and authoritarianism, and fueled by a huge demographic bulge 
of young people who are better educated and more connected to the world 
than their parents but who lack jobs and hope.
  But even if Tunisia's next government is more reflective of the 
desires of the Tunisian people and is able to attack the problems that 
have retarded the country's progress, the pace of change will be slower 
than many Tunisians will desire. Entrenched interests and institutions 
connected to the ancien regime, what Egyptians have dubbed the ``deep 
state,'' will conspire to stand in the way of a brighter future for 
Tunisia's people and slow the pace of change throughout the region.
  Around the world, but especially here in Washington, the regional 
developments have fostered unease as events on the ground have proven 
less than amenable to external ``management.'' The power of entrenched 
interests was more than offset by the early strength of Islamist 
parties in Tunisia and Egypt, giving rise to the fear of secular 
autocracies being supplanted by theocratically-oriented governments 
that would embrace the principle of ``one man, one vote, one time.''
  This fear of an Islamist takeover has had two main effects in the 
first years of the Arab transition. The first is that it served to 
inhibit the American response for fear of strengthening the Islamists' 
hold or provoking a popular backlash. The other has been to drive a 
wedge between the United States and the Gulf Arab monarchs, who have 
been the most resistant to change and accommodation and understand 
fully the implications for their rule.
  But change will be hard to resist. The same forces that swept aside 
Egypt's Mubarak and Tunisia's Ben Ali are at work throughout the 
region. The United States needs to craft policies that acknowledge the 
centrality of that fact, as well as the reality that this is a process 
that will play itself out over a generation and perhaps longer. We need 
to build mechanisms capable of supporting a transition in the Arab 
world in three dimensions: political, economic, and civil society.
  Next week, I will discuss how the U.S. can help foster these three 
pillars of democratic development in a way that can be sustained 
without requiring an outsized share of our limited resources. In the 
weeks to come, I will be sharing a few more detailed thoughts on the 
struggles going on in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Iran, and elsewhere in 
this critical and dangerous part of the world.
  The yearning for freedom is a universal one, but getting there has 
never been easy. The Egyptians, Syrians, Tunisians, and others have 
taken the first step towards taking their societies back. We must stand 
ready to help, and we must be prepared for a long and uneven journey.

[[Page 16097]]



                          ____________________