Stability, terror and oblivion …
Of the democratic wave, which was supposed renew a « nation » of four hundred million Arabs and was announced as an earthquake, only a slight whisper is left today, smothered by religious intolerance and the sound of marching boots. It is fading away, as does the Sirocco in the morning, running out of puff after howling one short night.
Hence the « Arab Springs » continue to have considerable trouble achieving anything and definitely prove those right, who were pessimistic about the thaw from the very beginning…
But the moment is not one for triumph for those few analysts who had anticipated all these misadventures, now overturning the pre-emptive assertions of the mass-media euphoria of the first days of the uprisings.
The « Arab chaos » leaves behind hundreds of thousands of men and women, who now hold out their hands up to the sky and cry out in despair and out of a torn apart world. Military coups, civil conflicts, censorship and summary execution, fanatic massacres and ritual murders have carried away raging warriors in all-out furies across Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Mali and soon in Afghanistan (where the Taliban wait for the right moment to seize power and regret Washington’s decision to prolong the presence of US troops until 2016). In Morocco and Bahrain other miserables howl in prisons where they are tortured to be silent, in the shadow of the shining glaze of absolute monarchies, tolerated by the occident.
Indeed, in the West, the fear of military Islamism is galloping and the governments have put away their enthusiastic speeches about the delight of new beginnings and all these beautiful departures, which formerly justified Libyan intervention.
Everyone is folding back into their trenches and domestic security levels are raised, facing the phenomenon of an exodus of thousands of young Muslims, martyr candidates, heading from all over Europe into Syria, recruited to fight in the holy war. Whilst the Western governments, headed by Washington, had so far withheld support for the revolution in Syria, they have now begun restoring the dictator to his power – recognising it is the safest bet for international security, in view of Sharia fanatics.
The authoritarian regimes of the Arabic world are hence using this time to strengthen themselves; in Qatar; in Egypt, where the army has swept up the debris of an ephemeral revolution and brushed its remains under the carpet. The Egyptians, all or most of them, try to forget the bad dream in their own interest or out of fear and convince themselves that nothing ever happened on Tahrir Square. In Morocco, a popular destination for numerous unconscious European holidaymakers, torture is common practice and has known such an important resurgence recently, that Amnesty International devotes its new campaign to the situation in this country. In Bahrain, where a crazy repression followed the suppression of the local Arab spring – under the closed eyes of the Fifth US fleet, anchored in the port of Manama. It is an incessant repression with kidnappings, disappearances and tortures, daily finding its victims within popular resistance, which stands resolute and refuses to bow its head, wondering how it was possible, that Lewis Hamilton and the Mercedes stable had the indecency of accepting the blood-covered Cup last April…
The Arab world stutters… and the media volatility being as it is, the occidental television channels, the daily newspapers of the West – all have turned away from these lost causes, already out of fashion, and which the commencing holidays will push even further into the back of the deep drawer of closed cases…
