After Arab Spring, a decade of upheaval and lost hopes
CAIPO >> Was it real?
It’s all been erased so completely, so much blood has been shed and destruction wreaked over the past decade. The idea that there was a moment when millions across the Middle East wanted freedom and change so much that they took to the streets seems like romantic nostalgia.
“It was very brief, man. It was so brief,” said Badr Elbendary, an Egyptian activist.
Elbendary was blinded on the third day of his country’s revolt in 2011, when security forces shot him in the face. It happened during a clash that became iconic among Egypt’s “revolutionaries,” when protesters and police battled on a bridge over the Nile in Cairo for hours, ending with the police scattering.
Today, he’s in the United States. He can’t return home. Many of his comrades from the protests languish in prisons in Egypt.
In December 2010, the uprising began in Tunisia and quickly spread from country to country in revolts against longtime authoritarian rulers. It became known as the Arab Spring, but for those who took to the streets, the call was “revolution.”
The uprisings were about more than just removing autocrats. At their heart, they were a mass demand by the public for better governance and economies, rule of law, greater rights and, most of all, a voice in how their countries are run.
For a time after 2011, the surge toward those dreams seemed irreversible. Now they are further than ever. Those who keep the faith are convinced that yearning was real and remains — or is even growing as people across the Arab world struggle with worsening
economies and heavier repression. Eventually, they say, it will emerge again.
“We have lowered our dreams,” said Amani Ballour, a Syrian doctor who ran an underground clinic treating casualties in the opposition enclave of Ghouta outside Damascus un
til it collapsed under a long, brutal siege by Syrian government forces in 2018. She was evacuated with other residents to northwest Syria, and from there she left the country.
“The spirit of the demonstrations may be over for now ... But all those
who suffered from the war, from the regime’s repression, they won’t put up with it,” she said from Germany. “Even in the areas controlled by the regime, there is great frustration and anger building up among the people.”
“Eventually” could be years.
The region is traumatized and exhausted by its most destructive decade of the modern era, perhaps the most destructive in centuries.
Across Syria, Yemen and Iraq, millions have lost their homes in war and struggle to find livelihoods, educate their children or even to feed themselves. Armed factions have proliferated in those countries and Libya, raking in money and recruiting young people who find few other options. Poverty rates have risen around the region, especially with the coronavirus pandemic.
Activists and analysts have had a decade to pore over why it went wrong.