The Arab Spring: five years on.

[Fenton Lum]

Of course it isn't......or folks on the left would be in prison.....or dead.

Absolutely. The slagging off of the US, and the freedom to do so.

In a stringent Moslem country, you'd have had your hand chopped off. For less.

You're addressing the barbarity of the control mechanisms, not the authoritarianism.

Oh, am I?

Thanks for telling me.

Someone should hon.

So you're one of 'them'.

You're addressing the barbarity of the control mechanisms, not the authoritarianism.

You seem lost hon.

 

[yiostheoy]

Arab Spring was always a misleading phrase, suggesting that what we were seeing was a peaceful transition from authoritarianism to democracy similar to that from communism in Eastern Europe. The misnomer implied an over-simplified view of the political ingredients that produced the protests and uprisings of 2011 and over-optimistic expectations about their outcome.

Five years later it is clear that the result of the uprisings has been calamitous, leading to wars or increased repression in all but one of the six countries where the Arab Spring principally took place. Syria, Libya and Yemen are being torn apart by civil wars that show no sign of ending. In Egypt and Bahrain autocracy is far greater and civil liberties far less than they were prior to 2011. Only in Tunisia, which started off the surge towards radical change, do people have greater rights than they did before.

What went so disastrously wrong? Some failed because the other side was too strong, as in Bahrain where demands for democratic rights by the Shia majority were crushed by the Sunni monarchy. Saudi Arabia sent in troops and Western protests at the repression were feeble. This was in sharp contrast to vocal Western denunciations of Bashar al-Assad’s brutal suppression of the uprising by the Sunni Arab majority in Syria. The Syrian war had social , political and sectarian roots but it was the sectarian element that predominated.

The Arab Spring began in hope, but ended in desolation

Freedom is never easy.

Either the Arabs will fight for their freedom or they will continue as slaves of their own dictators.