It’s the Arab spring for dictators

It’s the Arab spring for dictators
What has been said following the fall of Aleppo into the hands of the regime ignores the symbolism that goes beyond the battle itself: the fall of a crucial city coinciding with the sixth anniversary of the Arab Spring. This begs the question whether the Arab Spring has turned into the "spring of dictatorships" and who is exactly to blame for the setbacks that Arab revolutions encountered in the past six years.

The short answer is that the international community has failed the Arab uprisings but heavy blame must also fall on the Arab dictatorships, their international allies in the West and elsewhere, and even the "revolutionaries" themselves. How can an Arab Spring be salvaged, widespread extremism and violence be eliminated, and lasting change prevail?

One answer is for the international community to support democratic transition and put shortsighted security approach to stability in the Middle East to rest.

Many observers of Middle East politics underestimated what the authoritarian state and its regimes were willing and capable of doing. The regime in Syria has shocked the world’s conscious by responding with bloody massacres against the Syrian people when they called for change. 

The sixth anniversary of the Arab Spring highlights the failures of the international community to seize the opportunity to encourage democratic change and long-lasting stability in the Arab region. The Obama administration’s obsession with countering terrorism through the use of drones and security solutions failed, and even contributed to transforming the Arab Spring from demands for freedom, justice and development into a “war on terrorism”, inviting radicals and extremists, and regional and international coalitions, into ongoing conflicts.

The United States, UK, Russia, Iran, and the Assad regime all define their role in Syria’s conflict as fighting a “war on terrorism”. So where did the Syrian revolution go? The most utilised slogan when the Arab Spring began was “Ash-shaʻb yurīd isqāṭ an-niẓām" or "the people want to bring down the regime". Today it is – sadly - an almost forgotten slogan in Arab politics. The “war on terrorism” has become a prosperous business, and regime security for survival, and foreign intervention in Syria, both employ "countering terrorism” as their validation.

Russia and Iran justify their military campaigns as fighting terrorism in Syria before the battle reaches their own turfs in Moscow and Tehran, and Assad ultimately wants to be remembered as the leader who fought to save his country from terrorism. The Obama administration, however, has gone beyond Syria to bomb Arab cities in Yemen, Iraq and Libya so America doesn’t have to fight terrorism on the lawns of Washington.

Investing in tyranny, as the international community and especially the West did over many years, thinking they could thereby counter terrorism, has been a fatal mistake. Tyranny created the foundation for despair, extremism and outrage, ills that tyranny produced in the first place and can never remedy.

Six years have passed and the setbacks that the Arab Spring experienced – resulting from tyranny - underlines the validity of the uprisings’ original message - that democratic transformation is the only viable alternative to the madness that the region is witnessing.   

Ibrahim Fraihat (Excerpts from an article published in the Middle East Eye)

التعليقات (0)

    0

    الأكثر قراءة

    💡 أهم المواضيع

    ✨ أهم التصنيفات