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The anniversary of the start of the Arab Spring 10 years ago is coming soon, and activists recall their fond memories of breaking the barrier of fear and shouting in the streets for freedom, but the failure of these revolutions to make their dreams come true raises many questions. on its viability and destination.
The spark of the “Arab Spring” started with a match, which the street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi lit with his body after fueling himself in Tunisia, in protest at the detention of his property by local authorities on December 17, 2010 .
His death sparked widespread anger on social media, and the anger quickly spread to the streets, forcing President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who remained in power for 23 years, to flee to Saudi Arabia.
In the same month, protests for freedom broke out in Egypt, Libya and Yemen, and photos and videos – which spread across the region and the world – and slogans mixed with hope, determination and courage embodied a will that seems to put an end to it. which has always been considered an inevitable destiny for the Middle East, which is the rigidity of political life, and I thought Peoples are capable of anything.
The outbreak of popular demonstrations has had mixed results, from disappointing reforms and repressive reactions to devastating civil wars.
However, the flame of the revolutions and their dreams did not diminish. After 8 years, a second wave of uprisings broke out in Sudan, Algeria, Iraq and Lebanon, and the results were astonishing.
The protests at Tahrir Square in Cairo in 2011 became a global icon (Getty Images)Hope and revolution
Lebanese writer Lina Munther believes that something “in the fabric of reality itself” has changed since the outbreak of the revolutions. He says: “I don’t know if there is something more emotionally stimulating or nobler than a people who ask for a single voice for a dignified life.”
“This shows that something similar is possible, that people can rebel against the worst tyrants and that there is enough courage in people who stand their ground and work together to face entire armies,” he added.
Lina says that the night of the fall of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, she wept with joy, so she could not believe the magnitude of the “courage and beauty of the Egyptian people.”
The 30-year-old activist, Majdi al-Libi, says he never regretted demonstrating peacefully until the fall of the late Muammar Gaddafi’s regime.
He added: “At the beginning of the intifada, the overthrow of the regime was not on the table, only demands for freedom, justice and more hope.”
Six months before his assassination at his country’s consulate in Istanbul in October 2018, Saudi writer and dissident Jamal Khashoggi said that the Arab revolutions put an end to the prevailing view that Arabs and democracy do not meet.
The second wave of the Arab Spring in Algeria (Anadolu Agency)Failure and breakdown
However, the expected fruits of the “Arab Spring” did not flourish as people expected. In 2019, American researcher Noah Feldman appeared in a book entitled “The Arab Winter”, criticizing the militarization of revolutions and the rise of religious extremism.
Today, many Egyptians view the political government of Abdel Fattah, which occurred in a coup against the elected president Mohamed Morsi in 2013, as more authoritarian than the Mubarak government, and the disappointment of those who took to the streets and squares. became more bitter.
Egyptian writer Ahdaf Soueif says: “I never imagined that my nephew Alaa Abdel Fattah would be in prison today, or that poverty would reach its highest point, or that Egypt for the first time in its history would become a land whose youth would want to leave. .
In Bahrain, the uprising was violently suppressed with the support of Saudi Arabia, which prevented the transmission of the infection to its soil by distributing huge cash aid to its residents.
The Moroccan authorities also managed to contain the “February 20 Movement” in 2011, with cosmetic reforms.
As for Libya, it continues to suffer conflict until now, and Yemen has descended into a civil war due to external interventions that caused the country to suffer the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, according to the United Nations.
The Syrian tragedy
The Syrian experience is the bitterest, as the regime’s president, Bashar al-Assad, survived thanks to Russia’s direct support for him in 2015, after he nearly fell due to the opposition’s control over most of it. from the country.
Robert Worth says in his book “Anger for the System” that the philosophy of non-violence in demonstrations quickly disappeared on the battlefields of Libya, Syria and Yemen, culminating in the rise of the Islamic State when Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi he declared himself a leader in areas that were larger than Britain and stretched across Iraq. And Syria. “
This was the point of the collapse of the hopes of liberation of the peoples, especially with the intervention of Western countries to eliminate the organization militarily, and thus turn a blind eye in the West to the practices of authoritarian regimes that presented themselves as the last. bulwark against extremism.
A decade after its outbreak, the Syrian revolution has not achieved its goal, as Syria has been devastated and the worst humanitarian disaster since World War II occurred.
Political science student Dahnoun says “Syrians no longer have a word” today, bitterly adding that “external forces decide, Syria is no longer ours.”
The slogans of the Arab Spring are renewed in Lebanon (French)what’s left?
In turn, Ahdaf Soueif believes that it is too early to define the legacy of those revolutions that are still in the process of implementation, and refuses to link the rise of extremism with revolutions, but sees in it “counterrevolutions” that fueled everything type of deprivation and poverty.
With the outbreak of the second wave of demonstrations in Sudan, Algeria, Iraq and Lebanon, activists have ensured that the impact of the Arab Spring continues to exist. For this reason, Professor Arshin Adeeb Moghadam, a professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, says that the main demands of the demonstrations will return “at the first opportunity, as if it were a political tsunami”.
The author of the book “The Arab Revolutions and the Iranian Revolution: Power and Resistance Today” adds that the peoples of the region have set a new standard for the politics and governance they demand, and since then all policies have been measured accordingly. with those demands.
History shows that revolutions usually take long years, that they are often difficult to achieve, however, it is not easy to re-review the changes that occur in the people who participated in or witnessed those revolutions.
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