It arrived a bit like the big bang, transmitted by CNN and Al Jazeera throughout the television waves to every corner of the globe. The toppling of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali after more then 20 years at the head of Tunisia. During the night of the 14th it seemed as if something had sifted, once and for all. After years and years of uprisings and revolts that hadn't done much to budge the status quo in the region. And yet as Ben Ali's airplane left Tunisian airspace it was sure that something was happening, something we couldn't really grasp yet, but something like a kind of political tectonic plate had sifted and creating a gigantic political earthquake.
Today about 20 days after it's still to near to really grasp what will or what will not happen, but as many other countries in the region turn their backs on the out of date "strongmen", we can start to perceive that something "strangely" new is seeing daylight in the region. But I'm not writing this to relate some facts that everybody reader knows very well. What I want to look into here is what are or maybe the origins of this "new" revolutions springing up all over the Arab world. Back in 2009 Iran was teared apart, was bloody and in bitter chaos. It seemed as if the regime that was in place since 1979 seemed to be more unstable then ever, it seemed that the foundations that once had made the Islamic Republic of Iran one of the worst fears of every conservative republican out there. The elections of 2009 we're false, corruption was the main political force in the election, the religious power of the Islamic Republic try to disintegrate any legitimate opposition. After much bloodshed, the movement died out.
Now why did the uprising in Iran die out and not the uprisings in Tunisia and the on going revolt in Egypt, why did the green revolution die and the jasmine revolution succeed.
The thing is that this wave of revolutions that started in Tunisia and now continues in Egypt, and starts to spring up in Jordan, Yemen and bit all over the Arab world. This revolution is not a revolution that is boxed up in one country, as we have seen it can not be contained to one nation, because unlike what happened in Iran back in 2009 was excursively a Persian revolt. But the departure of Ben Ali whispered in a new age , that is still comprehensible for us occidentals, we who have always believed that our great values could never build stable regimes in these Arab countries that had a too different culture form ours, a culture in which democracy would never thrive. So what has happened since the liberation of the Arab countries since the end of WW1 the "west" has created and maintained a firm gripe on the region. Oil was the main factor that explain why all the imperialistic ambitions had put their eyes firmly on the rich lands of Northern Africa and of the Middle East. First of all the United Kingdom place fictive royal families on the new thrones of Irak and Iran, in Saudi Arabia in Egypt in Jordan. The French protectorates were given independence around the same time but very fast with the support of the United States and of the English and the French the fragile democracies crumbled in to ruins, the monarchic regimes some were toppled by democratic movements and these movements were themselves toppled by reactionary dictators. The Shah took power in Iran backed by the big petrol Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. In Irak, Syria and North Africa the army and new dictators took power with the help of the "west", for sometime Egypt seemed to be the renegade of the region only to become the "west" biggest ally in the region. Since the independence of the Arab countries after WW2 the "west" through military interventions and the toppling of governments and the financing of "thug" dictators and rough states.
The message that resonates form the central squares of Tunis and Cairo is that democracy is not an exclusively occidental value, that the world has changed and that the "great powers" can not take entire peoples hostage.
Now we fear that the so called Islamic groups will take power and like in 1979 create hostile anti-west Islamic states. Let this be said the Islamic revolution of 1979 is in so many ways the fault of the Occident, and now if an Islamic state does rise up form the old regimes of Egypt and Tunisia and maybe other Arab nations, we don't have to look to far to see who's fault it is, it's without any doubt ours.
This revolution sheds a light on the wrongs in the Northern African and Middle Eastern societies, it also sheds a light on our cowardice and our imperialistic ways. The time has come, to see that the new world order is much different form anything we have known in a longtime or maybe even ever before, but we have to get use to the fact that actions have consequences, and that Al-Qaeda and other such organizations didn't just fall of the sky they are our creations. And the best way to fight then is to cut the evil at the root, that means to give freedom and democracy to all the peoples of the Arab world and to promote the values we love so dearly and help the young democrats of the Arab world to really build new and withstanding democratic regimes.
We are all Egyptians now.
Sky
