sábado, 9 de abril de 2011

The Arab Spring

Many people don’t know what is going on in Libya and in the Middle East and North Africa. The main goal of this article is to clarify and bring the reader closer to the African conflict. Everything started on 18th December 2010 as a revolutionary wave of demonstrations and protests in Tunisia. This revolution is unprecedented because it is the first revolution which has been organised by Facebook and Twitter which were used to raise awareness in the censorship that the people are suffering by the oppressing regimes.

The main methods used by the common people are strikes, demonstrations, marches, rallies etc.

But how did it all begin?

On 18th December a Tunisian man committed suicide burning himself in order to protest against the government and its oppressive policy. Quickly the people went to the streets to complain about the situation in which they were immersed. A few days later the Government was overturned, Ben Ali was removed from the power after 25 years.

But it didn’t finish here. The liberalist revolution expanded to other countries such as Egypt, Libya, Syria, Morocco, Qatar...

The same thing happened in Egypt as in Tunisia, the dictatorship of Hosni Moubarak was toppled in two weeks. All the events occurred in a Cairo’s square called Tahrir. In this place millions of Egyptians concentrated joining forces against the tyrannical forces. A symbolic fact was that the Egyptian Army didn’t shoot at the people so they let the revolution go on.

But nowadays what is causing rivers of ink to flow is the Libyan issue. It all began like Tunisia or Egypt liberal revolutions but Gaddafi, the Lybian dictator ordered his loyal army to kill every opponent of the regime. So as not to cause blood to flow NATO intervened in the conflict with dozens of Europeans and American airplanes and ships.

Today Libya is a chaos but it doesn’t matter, because one of the most important and oldest dictatorships of the world is going to fall soon. However, we will have to wait a few more days to see how everything finishes, but we have to pray that this revolution doesn’t cause a greater war.

So what it all boils down to is that the world is undergoing a significant change, especially in the Arabic mind.