What happened on February 11th, 2011 in Cairo will enter the history books as the victory of the “Nile Revolution” that put an end to an era of repression, lack of freedom and omnipresent fear. On that day the people of Egypt, representing all strata of society achieved something that would have been unthinkable just a short while ago-they ousted the dictator who had been in power for 30 years, who had all conceivable forces of power at his disposal and yet lost the battle with the unrelenting wave of democratic uprising.
The feeling that one gets, when watching the news from Tahrir Square bears striking similarity with the overwhelming joy and jubilation of the people in both East and West Germany, who tore through the infamous Berlin Wall in 1989 and declared to the world that the old world order of suppression of free will had departed forever.
The Berlin Wall epitomized the division between East and West, between communist dictatorships and liberal democracies, between governments that relied on fear to stay in power and ones that obeyed the rule of law. In October of 1989 when watching the Germans destroy the wall that had separated them for so many years the world knew that it was witnessing something that was so profound that our lives would never be the same for the years to come. The “wind of change” had started and its power was about to sweep through and lay waste to those regimes that stood in the way of freedom. What happened next was a fascinating chain of events that brought down all communist regimes in Eastern Europe and even caused the “Evil Empire” of the Soviet Union to disintegrate.
The Revolution on the Nile that followed the democratic upheaval in Tunisia carries a similar aura of an era coming to an end and a new beginning for the whole region of the Middle East. What makes it so prophetic is the fact that an invisible psychological barrier has been crossed. The people of Tunisia and Egypt bravely faced the worst of their fears-the authoritarian regime of dictators whose very names used to cause people to cringe. They learned how powerful they could be when gathered together. One will always wonder if the young Tunisian Mohamed Bouazizi, who set himself on fire in front of a local government building in the city of Sidi Bouzid to protest his treatment by the police, had had any idea how his sacrifice would open the floodgates of democratization in the entire region.
It is almost comical if it wasn’t sad how an array of Middle Eastern governments all bearing shades of an undemocratic rule , are breathlessly coming forward to declare their sudden desire to appease their respective populations. The long term president of Yemen Saleh announced that he would not run for re-election in 2013, the Palestinian Authority decided the time had come to call the long overdue national elections in September, the government of Bahrain started to give out cash to its citizens in hope they wouldn’t dare start openly proclaim their legitimate grievances. Additionally the opposition groups in Algeria are planning an anti government demonstration that has already been banned by the authorities.
It will be a shot in the dark to predict at this time how politics in Egypt will unfold in the near future and what the denouement will be. The stern and somber faces of the interim (for now) rulers Omar Suleiman and the minister of defense Mohamed Tantawi that could be seen during the announcement of the departure of Mubarak certainly do not portray democratic enthusiasts.
The former foreign minister and long term Secretary General of the Arab League, Amr Moussa has the appeal of a professional who could run for president in the future elections. There is also the former head of the International Atomic Agency Mohamed El-Baradei who returned to Egypt in the middle of the uprising in order to be a part of the anti-government movement. His true intentions are still to surface though as he does seem to exude a level of hard to conceal political opportunism. The person who was a true leader of the insurgency in fact was the Google representative in Egypt Wael Ghonim whose tearful address to the world after being released from detention provided the final spark that ignited the Egyptian nation to push forward in its relentless strive for democracy.
Once president Ronald Reagan said in his interview with the Bulgarian National Television in 1990, when the Eastern European nation was preparing for its first free and open elections after communism: “Building a viable democratic society is like planting a tree-you have to support it, nurture it and look after it. Only then it will grow and succeed in its growth”. It would be interesting to dwell a bit more on Ronald Reagan’s metaphor -there is a small nation in the North Sea on the fringes of Europe, Faroe Islands which a lot of people probably don’t even know exists. The climate there is so inhospitable and windy that no trees have ever been able to grow. The people wanted to be able to grow some there for environmental purposes and perhaps just to prove they can. As much as they had tried no trees were able to survive in that climate. Finally they found a species that is native to Southern Patagonia in Argentina that could survive in that environment and after so many years of trying they were able to plant and grow their first ever trees.
The young and fragile process of awakening in Egypt also needs nurturing and support like the tree that Ronald Reagan was referring to. It is next to impossible to know if the Egyptian nation has found the right democratic “tree” that could grow in the arid political climate of the Middle East. What is certain though is that its people managed to break through their own psychological Berlin Wall that straddled the Nile for so many years. They deserve to succeed and we as citizens of the world should help them in the process of planting and growing their first ever democratic society.
No comments:
Post a Comment