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The magazine “Foreign Policy” published an article in which it spoke about the “crime” of the United States and the Gulf States against democracy in the Arab world.
Foreign policy On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the Arab Spring revolutions, I published an article by journalist Oz Katerji, in which he said that the world had changed on December 17, 2010, forever because of the actions of one man , referring to Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi who burned himself in protest against police harassment This was not justified.
Barely 28 days later, the Tunisian jasmine revolution toppled President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, driven by the justified anger of a people who had seen enough, a reaction not only to desperation and oppression. a 26-year-old street vendor, but to routine humiliation and repression for many decades, the newspaper said.
And next to the translation “Arab 21For the article “Foreign policy”:
One of the recurring questions at the start of the Arab Spring was whether the Arab world was ready for democracy. Today, after 10 years, it’s clear that was still the wrong question. The Arab public has systematically broken decades of silence under repression overnight. The question has always been whether the rest of the world is ready to support them. The answer to this question should be obvious after a decade of bloodshed in the Middle East with the utter indifference of the world powers.
“For generations, dictatorships in the Middle East have grown and become more secure, alongside the mistaken belief of these regimes that their security apparatus can terrorize their people into subjugation forever, but by 2010, these dictatorships will no longer monopolize information. They made it easier to access the Internet, ”she said. In the Middle East, social media, and with it, access to the kinds of platforms of ideas and debates that have been effectively banned, suppressed and criminalized by many of these dictatorships over the previous decades.
Under these new circumstances, the suicide of a young Tunisian in the small town of Sidi Bouzid is no longer a short local story that only enjoys a small marginal space in a government-controlled newspaper, but rather a tragedy that sparked widespread anger and a civil uprising that would lead to the fall of a dictatorship that continued. 23 years in just 28 days.
Tunisians were not alone. As events in Tunisia were being watched, civil protests erupted across the Middle East in a series of uprisings that became known as the Arab Spring. Previously, the Middle East lived for generations in a culture of fear and silence, where light, public criticism from political authorities led to arbitrary arrests, torture and even death. For the first time in many lifetimes, that silence has finally been broken, and now it’s the tyrants who tremble with fear.
After Ben Ali and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen, and in the end, Muammar Gaddafi fell. The uprisings spread to Bahrain and Syria, where the Assad regime had been in power for four decades.
However, the Arab Spring and the political movements that emerged from it were less united around collective democratic goals than they were in rejecting decades of failed governments. The uprising in Syria, for example, began as small regional protests calling for political reforms, not the overthrow of the dictatorship. It was only after the initial appeals were met with overwhelming violence that those appeals finally changed.
But apart from geographic proximity and a shared history of life under the dictatorship, the uprisings in the Middle East had very little in common, apart from the song that spread en masse in the region: “The people want to bring down the system of government”.
That sense of optimism, that palpable sense that democratic freedoms could finally reach people across the Middle East, was so dangerous to the dictatorships and hereditary monarchies that ruled them so much that they spent the next nine years fighting their own people, salting the earth to make sure that democratic movements What terrified them will never take root again.
Hundreds of protesters were killed by security forces in Bahrain and Libya in the first weeks of the uprisings. The Bahrain protests were crushed and the death toll in Libya began to rise steadily, leading to the United Nations Security Council response and the imposition of a no-fly zone imposed by the NATO, which ultimately led to the fall of Gaddafi and his extrajudicial execution by the Libyan rebels in the streets of Sirte. October 20, 2011.
In December 2011, the Assad regime had killed more than 5,000 civilians, many of whom were protesters shot in the streets of Syria or arrested and tortured to death. By 2020, Syria has become the worst war of the 21st century, with the United Nations officially dropping the death toll in 2014 and the latest estimate of over 400,000 dead in April 2016, with the actual number set to rise significantly since. then. now.
There is no way to properly collate the impact of the Arab uprisings into reassuring lessons for the future. While the death toll and damage to infrastructure in Libya has remained far below the bloodshed in Syria, this cannot be considered an achievement. While the Western No-Fly Zone has reduced the suffering of civilians and never aimed at nation-building, civil war, migrant slave markets and deteriorating human rights conditions remain. a shameful legacy for the international community which intervened but failed to follow through.
Things are a little better in other countries, where revolutions have been crushed or have fallen under the weight of national or Islamic counter-revolutions.
In many cases, especially in Syria, the uprising was not crushed from within, but rather from outside, where it did not fall until after the comprehensive military intervention of Iran and Russia.
Syrian revolutionary interests have also been subjected to further instability, polarization and corruption on the part of Qatar and Turkey.
Dictatorships in Egypt, Yemen and Bahrain continue to enjoy the legitimacy and support of the Gulf states, just as the Gulf states continue to provide legitimacy and support to the besieged Libyan warlord Khalifa Haftar in his goal of controlling the country by the powerless government of national agreement supported by Turkey and recognized by the United Nations.
The Gulf States are not the only culprits. The US military junta membership of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi of the US government, which began during the time of former President Obama, even after 1,000 civilians were murdered in the Rabaa Square massacre, has was fully summed up by outgoing President Donald Trump, who called Sissi “my favorite dictator.” At an international summit at the end of last year.
France, which played a crucial role in Haftar’s legitimization on the Libyan side with its Gulf allies, also adopted Sisi’s regime, with French President Emmanuel Macron bestowing the Egyptian dictator with the highest honor last week.
This cycle of conflict is far from over. The ongoing protests and economic hardships in Lebanon and Iraq show that the public appetite for democratic change remains fiercely hot, even after a decade of devastating regional protests, massive displacement and Western indifference.
Iranian regional Shia paramilitary organizations and their brutal technologies continue to escalate tensions, and fundamentalist Sunni non-governmental organizations are finding fertile ground amid the chaos. The economic and socio-political factors that led to the outbreak of the Arab Spring uprisings are much worse than they were in 2011, before the region fully realized the economic impact of the Corona outbreak.
The Arab Spring may be over, but civil uprisings in the Middle East have barely begun. The Middle East now finds itself in a state of fluctuation that Karl Marx described as a permanent revolution, and the aspirations of its peoples are permanently linked but never realized. There is no way for dictatorships to bring the time back to 2011, and there is no willingness on the part of their citizens to accept the status quo that permanently deprives them of their rights. Gunpowder salt is much drier than it’s ever been, and all it needs is the next spark.
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