Winter comes after Arab spring
Yesterday it was reported that the former leader of Libya, Muammar Gaddafi, had died during the assault on the city of Sirte. This was preceded by an uprising in Libya, as well as in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and other countries. Some experts believe the West has decided to undertake the democratization of the Arab world. This year the idiom "Arab spring" was introduced to the lexicon of politicians, political analysts and journalists. So by analogy to «the Prague spring» were dubbed the movements of the peoples of the region demanding that leaders incapable of cardinal democratic reforms for the sake of all levels of the population should leave politics. Since late 2010 events in "the big" Middle East have been appearing on the newspaper headlines and TV screens continuously.
Before Gaddafi's death, Alexander Ignatenko, the president of the Institute of Religion and Policy and a member of the council for interaction with religious associations under the president of the Russian Federation, gvehis point of view to the RIA Novosti news agency:
To begin with, the Arab Spring will end in the Middle East when the Arab winter comes to change it. At the moment there is all the evidence that this winter is coming. And it is approaching in the form of a spiritual alliance of the Sunni monarchic regimes. The main vector of the Arab spring is democratization. No matter what people say, except for a number of Arab countries where monarchical regimes are still in power, this means moving in the direction of a republic. Therefore, Arab monarchies are the driving force of advanced counter-revolutionary movement in the Arab world. They oppose republicanism, which has different forms, ranging from the liberal, American and French, to Islamized Turkish. And in this situation, they are first of all fighting against the ghost of the Iranian Islamic Revolution, which involves a religious-political and territorial expansion of Shiism and the entry of Iran into the Arab world in the form of a growing Shiite crescent. A spiritual alliance, similar to the one that was initiated in 1815 by Tsar Alexander I for the purpose of mutual support of the Christian monarchs, and which was subsequently joined by all the monarchs of continental Europe except for the Sultan and the Pope, is being formed in the Middle East at the moment. This contemporary spiritual union of the Arab world of the early twenty-first century is being formed on the basis of a closed regional organization called the Cooperation Council of the Arab States of the Gulf, which consists, I remind you, just of the Sunni monarchs. I am talking about Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Saudi Arabia. I shall call it the Arab Council for brevity in the future, so as not to break my tongue with the abbreviation CCASG. At the moment as we are here, the Arab Council, which had previously been considered a closed organization, i.e. one which will not accept any other state or regional organization which is not included in the zone of the Arabian or Persian Gulf, is accepting two new states, two new members. These are Jordan and Morocco. Thus, the Arab Council will expand and include, and actually already includes eight states, six old and two new members, as you've heard, I have them listed. In my opinion, the purpose of the updated, extended Arab Council is precisely to counter the revolutions which are taking place in the Arab world, and I would even call it an anticipatory counter-revolution. This anticipatory counter-revolution is carried out by two means. Firstly, through the economic and financial assistance and support, which is provided by the Arab Council members. And we know that after the events in Bahrain, the Arab Council has allocated large sums of money for Bahrain and Oman, members of the alliance. Jordan and Morocco are being offered sufficient economic aid and support. I am talking about interest-free loans, and this is just elementary economic assistance, in the hope that it will be possible to carry out social and economic reforms in these countries, which will shoot down the wave of protests. The second method, which is also used to suppress revolutionary movements, is military intervention by some members of the Alliance in the affairs of other members of the alliance. A model for this method is Bahrain, which after the events that can be considered a kind of a Shiite revolution, or a Shiite uprising… By the way, it is not yet over, trials are taking place, and many people are being sentenced to up to 15 years of imprisonment for their participation in these events in Bahrain. So, when there were these events, you know that the troops, the so-called "armor of the peninsula," were brought to Bahrain, and the uprising was crushed with the help of Saudi and Emirati armies. There is another way of implementing counterrevolutions, or advanced counterrevolutions, as we have formulated it, and here is the example of Libya. Libya and the Libyan crisis is now considered by commentators, researchers and experts as a war, led against the Libyan people or against Colonel Gaddafi according to different interpretations, by the West and particularly by NATO, or more precisely – by certain NATO member-states. But I would like to draw your kind attention to the following: the Arab Council has initiated the crisis in Libya. If we recall recent events, we recall here that the first, the main initiator of the no-fly zone over Libya, was the Arab Council. I am reminding you that when we speak about the Arab Council, we mean the Cooperation Council of the Arab States of the Gulf. And they were the ones who demanded establishing the no-fly zone. This requirement was addressed to the League of Arab States, and the League of Arab States redirected it to the United Nations and the Security Council, which adopted the decision. And this whole mess started in Libya – and here I would like to address the non-specialists in the Arab world, for their information, - it started under very interesting flags. These were the banners of the Libyan kingdom, which had previously been destroyed by Colonel Gaddafi, marking the creation of the so-called Libyan Jamahiriya later in the 1970s. And this war can be regarded as a war for the restoration of a monarchy - by the way, a Sunni monarchy in Libya, as I want to specially emphasize. And by the way, when watching television or reading newspapers, one understands that all the events indicate that the question of the form of the state regime in Libya is not solved yet. It is quite possible that a part of Libya or the whole territory of Libya will end up as a monarchy. Different countries of the Arab Council play a very important role… At the very beginning of all these events, when everyone believed that the events would be like an avalanche similar to the events in Tunisia or, perhaps, in Egypt, that Gaddafi will not last as long as he has stretched it out, an heir of the sinusitis chair, Assinusi Muhammad, appeared and announced his readiness to return to Libya, restore the rights of his dynasty, and that he was long-awaited by the Libyan people. I would like to specifically talk briefly about Syria. Currently, a competition is taking place between Saudi Arabia and Iran regarding Syria. The revolution "against Assad", and I am using it in big quotation marks, just for clarity, can be regarded as a Sunni revolution, or if you want – as a counter-revolution - because it is hard to say where a revolution ends and a counter-revolution begins, and we are all the time talking about an advanced counter-revolution against the Shiites, Alawites, against Iranian influence and Iranian penetration, which is so much talked about in the Arab Sunni environment. I want to draw your attention to the fact that I am not saying that it is there. The fact is that the issues that we, as well as our Arab brothers, are concerned with are sometimes just illusions. Very good journalists have demonstrated the use of these illusions in the Libyan crisis. There were even some staged photos, and so on and so forth. A lot is said about Iranian infiltration and about the atomic bomb which soon will be built by Iran, and policies are implemented based on it. The same can be said about Yemen and Egypt, because the same line, the one we have outlined, can be seen there as well. For example, Yemen, which is not a member of the Arab Council, was holding talks about joining the union in 2005, as you well know. In Yemen, there is a clear desire to remove the Shiite President Saleh from power.
He is an extremely clever politician, skilled in the best sense of this word, and he plays on the contradiction between Saudi Arabia and Iran. The opposition is very heterogeneous there. If it was purely Sunni or purely Shiite, perhaps things would be easier, but there, as you well know, there are Sunni and Shiite members in the opposition. Importantly, the Shiites demonstrated their capabilities in the expedition into the territory of Saudi Arabia, I mean the Hussite movement. They showed their strength, as they, simply put, inflicted a serious defeat on the army of the kingdom. I would like to end this with the following: at the moment various ties, particularly military and political, are increasing between the Arab countries, primarily Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. I do not rule out that it is pursuing the aim of taking Iran into its grasp.
