- Sputnik International
World
Get the latest news from around the world, live coverage, off-beat stories, features and analysis.

Five Years After Arab Spring, Instability Remains

© AFP 2023 / KHALED DESOUKIEgyptian protesters gesture as they clash with riot police at Cairo's landmark Tahrir Square on November 19, 2011, as Egyptian police fired rubber bullets and tear gas to break up a sit-in among whose organisers were people injured during the Arab Spring which overthrew veteran president Hosni Mubarak
Egyptian protesters gesture as they clash with riot police at Cairo's landmark Tahrir Square on November 19, 2011, as Egyptian police fired rubber bullets and tear gas to break up a sit-in among whose organisers were people injured during the Arab Spring which overthrew veteran president Hosni Mubarak - Sputnik International
Subscribe
Five years after Arab Spring demonstrations and protests led to the toppling of rulers throughout the Middle East and North Africa, one expert said the uprisings were "an open invitation to destabilization."

Monday marks the fifth anniversary of the start of an uprising that ousted Egypt's longtime autocrat Hosni Mubarak.

https://www.spreaker.com/user/radiosputnik/five-years-after-egypts-uprising-the-ara_1

Young Egyptians spearheading the uprising had been encouraged by a revolution a month earlier in nearby Tunisia, Ghada Talhami, a professor at Lake Forest College, in Illinois, said in an interview with Sputnik Radio's "Loud & Clear."

"Everybody assumed that the Mubarak regime was there to stay forever," she said. "And all of a sudden, young people were really empowered – or they felt they were empowered by numbers and by their availability for action."

But rather than creating freedom and democracy, Talhami said, the Arab Spring has had "disastrous" consequences in Egypt and beyond, saying the Arab world made the mistake of favoring stability over democracy.

The Arab Spring, she said, was an "open invitation to destabilization."

Ali al-Ahmed, director of the Institute of Gulf Affairs, claimed that many Arab people had for decades been suppressed by despotic governments. The uprisings in Tunisia in 2010 inspired Arabs throughout the region to recapture their dignity, he said.

Pro-government protesters chant slogans while holding the national flag during the fifth anniversary of the uprising that ended 30-year reign of Hosni Mubarak in Cairo, Egypt, January 25, 2016 - Sputnik International
Africa
Five Years On: Where is Egypt Today After Its Arab Spring?

According to Ahmed, the major obstacle to realizing the goals of the Arab Spring was outside groups that stepped in after the revolutions began, providing financing and other support to ensure that "the results of the Arab Spring served their own end."

The desires of the young activists who led the Arab Spring cannot be realized by governments currently in place throughout the Arab world, he said.

Sukant Chandan, director of the Malcolm X Movement, said the Arab Spring was the biggest "catastrophe" to impact Arab people in half a century or longer – one that has been followed by "disaster upon disaster."

The destruction of Libya, he noted, would not have occurred without the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, the latter of which is now fighting Daesh extremists.

Newsfeed
0
To participate in the discussion
log in or register
loader
Chats
Заголовок открываемого материала