Democracy Advocates Face Big Challenges

SIDI BOUZID, Tunisia -- Ali Bouazizi, who owns a grocery story at the center of Sidi Bouzid, a remote town in central Tunisia, was ecstatic when protests toppled his nation's dictator in January. These days, he sounds deflated.

"This uprising was for what?" he asked in a recent interview. In Tunisia, he said, "the people who have money and the heritage of the old regime aren't giving up control."

Bouazizi is no ordinary bystander to the revolution. He played a key role in igniting the unrest that has spread through much of the Arab world. In December, his cousin doused himself in gasoline and burned himself to death. Bouazizi posted on Facebook a video of the protest that followed, then alerted satellite-news channel Al Jazeera.

Unrest spread rapidly from there.

But not much has gone the way many original protesters hoped. All across the region, the exuberant "Arab Spring" has morphed into a season of deadly crackdowns, sectarian strife and dimming prospects for democracy -- at least in the form many original protesters envisioned.

That's partly because protesters took to the streets with a variety of motivations and wildly different goals. And, like their forerunners in Eastern Europe after the Soviet Union collapsed, the protesters often have been unprepared to battle the entrenched forces that have long supported the dictators they seek to oust.

In Tunisia and Egypt, where longtime rulers are gone, protest movements are fracturing over the question of what comes next. New political arrangements are coalescing, but they draw heavily from elements of the old regimes. Tunisia may have the best chance of producing a multi-party democracy, but it's far from clear it will be able to solve the deeper social problems that divide the country.

Religious and sectarian tensions, too, have surfaced, stalling movement toward representative government and open societies. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist organizations are gaining influence, but their professed commitment to democracy remains untested. In Bahrain, the protests and government crackdowns have inflamed tensions between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. The island kingdom has blamed Shiite-dominated Iran for much of the unrest and invited in forces from Sunni-dominated Saudi Arabia, raising tensions across the entire Persian Gulf.

"We're in uncharted territory," says Mansoor Jamri, former editor of Al Wasat, Bahrain's independent newspaper, who resigned earlier this month following a controversy about the publication of protest photos. Sunni vigilantes occupied the paper's offices and attacked its printing presses. "Sunnis are not going to the Shiite areas, and vice versa.…There are lines you don't cross now."

Violence in Syria threatens to engulf the last corner of the Middle East relatively untouched by the uprisings. That neighborhood includes Lebanon, Israel and Jordan -- all important to US interests in the region.

None of the uprisings have played out like the young protesters who started them had expected. Finishing a revolution, they're discovering, is harder than starting one.

"We knew that it would take time," says Adel al-Surabi, the 29-year-old leader of a student coalition in Yemen, where the government has cracked down hard. At one point, government supporters fired at protesters from rooftops. "We expected resistance from the government, and we expected attacks," says al-Surabi. "But we never expected snipers."

The changing face of the revolutions is of concern to the US, which has backed the general demands for more democracy. What worries the US is that the shifting demands might undermine its interests in Yemen, whose autocratic president has been an ally in fighting terrorism; in Bahrain, where the US Navy's Fifth Fleet is based; or in Jordan and Egypt, which have worked closely with the US in trying to resolve the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.